Stoning the Devil

Three Apps

2010-02-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

#1647

She told me I love boy/girl poems, love
scenes in them based on a deep degeneracy
inherited from too much heat around my
genitals, as manifest in tangents I could only
see if I was getting laid. She told me this as
I was getting laid in such a way that any notion

of telling was subsumed in an ass as stately as
a mansion, which I filled with the liquid
cobwebs of my imagination. There was grass
outside being smoked in a car in which another
boy/girl scenario played out in a brunette giving
a fine performance of Bolero in her movements,

and I immediately flashed back to the deep
genitals of my first girlfriend and the way she
used to implore God’s help at certain moments,
who was certainly watching this. That’s it, that’s
the whole spiel I have on boy/girl poems and
why they are hated by the dry dunces who love them.

#1646

A ring of retards, she said to herself,
a ring of retards. It was her turn to
speak, speak she did, but she watched
herself the whole time, thinking how
dumb the whole thing would look to
one of her old friends, in the days when
she (and they) ruled the world, because
the world was so tiny and they could
encompass it. She gets up to piss, and
notices nothing. She’s still gorgeous
and she knows it, that’s that. Yes, I
saw this happen, I was down there
with them. But then, you don’t know
who I am, do you, and does it matter?

#1638

She was eating lunch, I was watching her eat
lunch, I started having all these thoughts about
how people reveal themselves, even just how
they eat their meals but it was such a nice day
and I had a few drinks and I just kind of got
lost in it all, the food was really good but there
was this sense that nothing could really last,
everyone has these great cars and these great
lives but nothing really lasts, and I start to
worry even just about eating lunch like this,
isn’t there something better I should be doing?
Isn’t there something more important than
this? I don’t want to get all existential about
this cause it happens all the time, but I’m telling
you this cause I know you have these feelings
too, and it doesn’t matter how we communicate
as long as the basic gist of things comes through,
in fact I’m kind of eating lunch right now and
kind of having the same feelings, I get depressed
in the afternoons here because everything is so
still and perfect, so even though I have to live in
this perfected state (some people say it’s exalted,
I don’t think it’s exalted, I don’t even know what
exalted means) it just doesn’t work. I guess the
lesson is that we should all skip lunch, I know
it’s completely absurd but it might be better
just to eat breakfast and dinner, but you know,
people in this town have to do certain things
at certain times which is why I treasure this, but
hold on a sec I just got a text from somebody,
do you mind if I call you back, if not today
tomorrow, I really want to hear your thoughts on this?

Apps in Jacket 40, Otoliths

2010-02-19T04:36:00.000-08:00

I realize these posts are becoming slightly redundant, but nonetheless...

I have some Apps up in Jacket 40.

You can read them here.

I also have some Apps up in Mark Young's Otoliths.

You can read them here.

Many thanks to the editors.

Apps in Listenlight, moria, denver syntax

2010-02-17T08:08:00.000-08:00

Several Apps have now come out in Listenlight.

You can read them here.

More Apps are up in moria here.

Also in denver syntax here and here and here.

Many thanks to the editors.

Break for a Week/Two Apps

2010-02-15T03:24:00.000-08:00

I'm still recovering from completing the manuscript Apparition Poems in a big burst. There are still many Apps that need to be published, and are looking for homes. I've decided to take a week's vacation from blogging. I thought as a "quick fix," I'd post two new Apps.

#1645

The father’s gaze (depending which gaze
you happen to be referring to) is panoptic.
It goes in without leaving traces. So if you
have several fathers that leave no traces, &

merely invisible gazes, there is or maybe a
sense in which you have no fathers. I saw
all this happening to me, along with every
thing else, many years ago, before I could

visualize the cell I was in, before I knew
how the walls stank of fresh paint, or saw
that I was getting smeared at any juncture.
But, as I saw this, my father who was my

father turned, spoke down to me in such
a way that I listened. I took what he said,
gazed at my cell, and watched the paint dry
deep into the night before I busted out to

watch the dawn break over the Delaware.

#1627

He says that these have an “aura.”
To the extent that words on a page
can, they do. He said these things,
but then they were up on a site that
has its own aura, the poems become
composites. Whatever, I thought this,
not out loud, these auras only work
in three dimensions, and I’m already
in three dimensions, I’m already art
to begin with. Besides, who cares? I
quickly made a left onto Broad, the
radio was turned off and I opened
the window, it was a cold, breezes
danced around my face, in words.

And you can view more Apps in Pirene's Fountain.

Many thanks to the editors.

Byron and the Byronic Double Pt. 2

2010-02-10T03:26:00.001-08:00

Even as a broken Mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies— and makes
A thousand images of one that was
The same— and still the more, the more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise; and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

The image of the heart as broken-mirror is deceptively simple, and less romantic than its constituent elements might suggest.

The idea of the “silent heart” is not at all consonant with the premises of Romanticism, as they have been passed down into current criticism. Romantic poets, we are told, are caught in traps of sincerity and sincerely represented anguish, rendered for effect with all the trappings of a more innocent literary age. Moreover, it must be noted that Byron here is stating these home truths about affect and relationships in the most objective possible fashion; abstracted away from himself twice (first, because he may be talking about Harold rather than his own “I,” secondly because he speaks in strictly metaphorical terms), cast in a form that resembles the metaphysical conceits of Donne and Marvell, rather than in the trope-forms that modern opinion subscribes to Romantic perspectives. The image of the broken mirror comes to us, in fact, at a great distance from the blankly rendered subjectivity that Romantic poetry often gets taken to task for. Moreover, the multiplication of selves that this frozen image (perhaps its resonance with Keats) presents us is, in a very, perhaps overly obvious way, a level that speaks to what later became known as the Modernist impulse— a fracturing of subjective impulses into “pieces” that become constituent elements of poems chosen for different kinds of resonances, that each work as “images” that clash, jar, or mix to form a harmonious or inharmonious whole.

It may be useful, at this juncture, to look at a stanza that does manifest traces of what is commonly known as the Romantic “I.” It needs to be remembered, however, that Byron’s “I” is here is both doubled (i.e. it may represent Byron or Harold at any point) and fractured (because the subjectivity of this “I,” whether it be Byron or Harold, is presented to the reader as fractured by contradictory impulses, manifested in the coming stanza, as to what constitutes true selfhood, appropriate relationships to outward and inward levels of life). To the extent that a complex entity emerges that, in its amorphousness, has not only traces of Modernist impulses but post-modern impulses (post-modern in the sense of a fractured quality extended infinitely), Byron becomes not only a great artist (assuming that his major status is already granted) but a comprehensive great artist, one with as much prophetic force (albeit expressed in different terms) as William Blake. This stanza works to heighten this impression of comprehensiveness:

And thus I am absorbed, and this is life—
I look upon the peopled desert past,
As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous as the Blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing,
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.

“Acting and suffering,” of course, makes a major re-appearance in Murder in the Cathedral. Rather than being used in an allegorical context, as it is in Eliot’s piece, here action and suffering takes on significance as a median realm between Earth and Heaven. “Clay” as a metaphor for human flesh, and a rather common one; but Byron uses it, here and in Manfred, to great effect. Images of flight abound in Byron’s major pieces, and in fact Goethe himself remarked on the manner his verses have of taking wing. But the doubled effect, that makes an uncertainty of what in Romantic poetry is usually taken to be a certainty (is this Byron or Harold?), elevates this (pun intended) from the sense of blankness or blandness that is often ascribed to Romantic subjectivity by poetry artists attempting to push the envelope.

Heart-Shaped Box

2010-02-09T04:36:00.000-08:00

If David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video is (arguably) the greatest rock video ever made, this video, that accompanies the Nirvana song Heart Shaped Box, has my vote for best original video of the 1990s. The images and basic schemes employed in the video were all devised by Kurt Cobain, and brought to realized form by Anton Corbijn. The meeting of sensibilities worked, and produced a piece that is haunting, disturbing, and as confessional as any single song Cobain wrote during his stint as Nirvana front-man. The main images seem to be: a wooden cross, on which a gaunt old man wearing a Santa Claus hat ties himself; a young girl wearing the regalia of a Ku Klux Klan member, strolling slowly through a field of poppies; the band itself, miming the song; and the band in a hospital room, visiting the self-same gaunt old man, lying on a hospital bed with an intravenous needle stuck in his arm. Minor images include fetuses hanging from trees, a fetus stuck in the old man’s intravenous apparatus, and Dave Grohl holding up a heart-shaped box that reflects light right at the camera.

All these images seem to be tied to what Cobain’s main concerns as a songwriter were in 1993: birth and death, the substance and frailty of bodies, addictions, feelings of fatigue and agedness, innocence being corrupted by bloodshed and impersonal forces. That all of these concerns can more or less be squarely tied to his position as perhaps the biggest rock star in the world at the time is arguable. But the strange, cathartic imagery in both the lyrics of the song and in the video’s imagery cuts deeper than mere rock star angst. It seems to be Cobain’s admission of powerlessness to defeat or even confront the issues that were facing him. Yet, importantly, the song is not solipsistic, it is directed to someone else. Most people have assumed that this someone else is Cobain’s spouse, Courtney Love, but who the muse happens to be doesn’t matter much. This sounds like a last ditch attempt by Cobain to establish a meaningful human connection. The song is not triumphant; in many ways, it feels like Cobain doesn’t succeed. But the Confessional nature of his attempt makes the song riveting in its own right; combined with the potent, perverse imagery in the video, the song enacts its own devastating level of sickness, decay, and helpless downward spiraling. And, together, they make a damn good work of art.

Apparition Poems

2010-02-07T15:00:00.001-08:00

#1596

I was talking to a dude
I knew from school, I
said, “I see the levels
from sleeping with
psychopaths, that’s
how I get them,” levels
were (I meant) places
between souls where
spaces open for metaphor,
“but when I carry them
over to my bed, every
psychopath levels me.”

#1605

This killer wears a tight
black shirt, glasses. There
are noises of digging happening
from the bathroom, she’s in
bed, hands over her mouth,
frozen upset. Then, the mirror
is dug through, his face appears
in a wall with a square cut in it.
The face is there, hovers there,
just sits, it has the promise of
action that kills. This is the
tableau I watch every time
I’m in the bathroom while
she’s in bed. And smile.

#1625

I ask you this here, while I look down on you, as

you look up at me, and the different ups & downs

of us play themselves out, so that if, while being in

this state, we are in and out of each other, all streaks

of blues, grays, blacks can be edited out, and voice-

overs take the place of our raw voices. Voices that

I trust, cherish, but these voices are too crude that

around us cast nets, so that we become crabs in and

out of ourselves, so that I remark to you (you’re on

top now) that things that need to be asked can only

be answered with skin, redness, pinkness, dots, this.

#1626

If it builds, she thinks, I’ll
do this, I’ll get out. Is it that
she’s so stuck she can’t move?
The baby needs looking after,
but, she thinks, so does her
soul, and to the extent that it’s
not being fed, she needs a new
bed somewhere. But the money
isn’t hers, it just isn’t, and she
walks the dog thinking these
thoughts in loops. And this is
where I intercepted her, in this
alley, with the dog, with fallen
traces of one who falls. That I
didn’t acknowledge her speaks
to the places I’ve fallen as well.

You can also find four sets of Apps on PennSound, here, and Apps on PFS Post, here.

Jacket/PennSound Merger

2010-02-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

As a proud, magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, I am excited to hear that, as of the end of this year, Jacket and PennSound, perhaps the two dominant outlets for contemporary, international experimental poetry, are merging at Penn, specifically at the Kelly Writers House. It is a move that makes permanent the work of myself and the many poets who have contributed to these outlets, and consolidates these outlets in a way that will preserve all of our traces into the twenty-first century.

Five Questions

2010-02-04T03:48:00.000-08:00

Is the twenty-first century waking up?

Is this Recession a blessing in disguise: is it effacing all the traces of the twentieth century that need to be destroyed?

Is this to be a better century for poetry than the twentieth, if we admit that much English language poetry of the twentieth century was degenerate?

What are the great narratives of the twenty-first century being born?

Why is the narrative impulse still so compelling?

Byron and the Byronic Double Pt. 1

2010-02-03T05:13:00.001-08:00

I have my own reasons for valorizing the British Romantics. However, I think it’s fair to say that of the major Romantics, the poet most obviously involved in doubling (in its literal, concrete sense) is Lord Byron. Byron created a plethora of doubles; however, three stand out to me as both the most famous and the most representative; Childe Harold, Don Juan, and Manfred. Childe Harold is both the easiest and the most difficult to address; within the confines of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, no screens seem to be thrown up to separate Harold, and a protagonist, represented by “I,” who seems to be Byron himself. Careful, scrutinizing readings of Childe reveal that the markers separating Byron’s protagonist and himself seem to be non-existent. Of the three, this is Byron’s crudest doubling. But Byron is a major poet, and Childe is a major poem, so the doublings do not only occur between Byron and an assumed protagonist that is not him. This passage is the 33rd stanza in Canto the Third:

Even as a broken Mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies— and makes
A thousand images of one that was
The same— and still the more, the more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise; and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

The image of the heart as broken-mirror is deceptively simple, and less romantic than its constituent elements might suggest.

Apps on PFS Post

2010-02-02T06:38:00.001-08:00

I have decided to "go meta" and place some Apps on PFS Post. You can read them here.

There is also a video of me reading the Apps on my page on the site, here, with links.

The levels of Lola

2010-02-02T04:54:00.000-08:00

Talk about “doubles” and “triples”: there are very few poems I know of, and perhaps no rock songs, that play the games that Ray Davies’ does in Lola, a smash single on both sides of the pond in 1970. There’s also no way I can do these lyrics justice in two paragraphs, but I will try. Let’s start (in true Davies-like fashion) from the end and work backwards. The last lines in the song are these: I’m not the world’s most masculine man/ But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man/ and so is Lola. The first level, which everyone knows (and that Davies makes obvious) is that Lola is a transvestite. Okay, that seems simple enough. The ambiguity is all in the relationship the protagonist has to Lola, and what does or doesn’t (or might, or might not) happen between them. That the protagonist is not the world’s most masculine man might or might not imply that he, himself, is gay. On the other hand, he “knows what he is,” which means he may or may not tell us if he’s gay or not. Clearly, a man of any sexual persuasion can be glad to be a man; the levels hit with and so is Lola. Lola can be either one of two things, for either one of two reasons: she can also be a man, or she can be glad the protagonist is a man, and can be glad about either, or both together, or just one. This leads to the most crass question (and the second possible reason for Lola’s gladness), that the song doesn’t answer: did they do it or didn’t they (if, for once, we know what “it” is)?

There are other outrageous bits in the song. Why, for example, is Lola’s voice “dark brown”? It could be because her skin is dusky, or her voice is husky, or both; but the more sinister interpretation is that her voice is (pardon my bluntness) shitty, or somehow has “shit” in it. The bridge offers a vignette that is (comparatively) direct, and hilarious: I pushed her away/ I walked to the door/ I fell to the floor/ I got down on my knees/ well, I looked at her and she at me…. This vignette indicates that, whether consummated or not, his attraction to Lola is (or was initially) a discomfort to him. But we are reminded in the later part of the song that I’d left home just a week before/ and I’d never ever kissed a woman before/ but Lola smiled, and took me by the hand/ and said, dear boy, gonna make you a man. So the protagonist himself doubles again: he was this, when the song happened, he is now this (whatever “this” happens to be). These games go round in circles, and the biggest game at all (for Davies fans) is that the vast majority of people who listen to this song don’t even get what the game is to begin with. Simply, this song, like Waterloo Sunset, is not just a rock masterpiece but an art masterpiece, that some of us hope has a continued life into the new century. Any writer who knows how to effectively “double” or “triple” should have a continued life, and Ray Davies does.

Apps on PennSound!

2010-01-28T03:46:00.000-08:00

Proudly, a recording of me reading from my Apps is now up on PennSound. You can access this recording here.

Two readings coming up: I've been asked by Leonard Gontarek to read at the Green Line Cafe at 45th and Locust on February 23rd.

Also, I'll be doing Amy and Ana's Stain series again on February 26th at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

More soon.

The many levels of Kristen Orser

2010-01-26T04:16:00.000-08:00

Kristen Orser’s Folded Into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm is just out from Greying Ghost Press. It is a chap that, in many ways, extends the multi-leveled, multi-layered approach I noted in Carrie Hunter’s Blog: A Winter Poem. Orser seems interested in “doubling,” in playing word games with phrases that take on multiple, simultaneous meanings. The prolific way that Orser deposits these doubles or triple meaning phrases throughout the chap makes Folded a head-spinning, somewhat mind-blowing experience. Rather than go into a minute analysis, it might be wise just to jump in at the deep end with one of the poems. This one is called Recently, The Fence:

A bit scary to spoon in someone’s mouth,
             the marrow of anyone. We keep

   the birthday party a secret:     Difficult
   to completely look like moon

   when Mother is asking the shape—

   A symbolic posture:     The robin
   is a story of existence.  My lower garments.

             I mean, I haven’t paid attention
             to rhyme recognition.   Which memory was first,

             the chestnut or the blue egg?           Winter

     is half measure. From your ribcage
     to your middle thigh, there’s a kind of radio silence.

              Decidedly unsayable—

                          The mouth opens,
                          has limitation.

The word games here are extremely sensual and extremely intense. The first phrases alone (“A bit scary to spoon in someone’s mouth”) ricochet in several different directions. “Spooning in someone’s mouth” evokes a lover actually giving his/her mate a taste of something; there is also the unlikely image of two lovers spooning in a third person’s mouth. There’s a pun on the more graphic/literal “spooge,” which alters the perspective of the poem drastically. At this point, right in the first line, the reader must choose from a plethora of meanings, or make the tricky decision to engage all the levels at once. My next favorite mind-bending Kristen Orser moment in this poem is “We keep/ the birthday party a secret.” For the informed reader, “birthday party” immediately triples: “birthday party” could be a literal birthday party, or a sexual encounter (as in, two lovers in their birthday suits), or it could even refer to The Birthday Party, the cult-rock band from the early 1980s that introduced Nick Cave to the world. The doublings and triplings in Orser’s chap are not only mind-bending but hilarious. Orser has a unique sensibility, and the chap is magnified, power-wise, with each re-reading. Orser melds the hyper-sexual with the bizarre; I highly recommend this chap to anyone with an interest in sex, or word-games, or both (apart or together).

New Apps

2010-01-24T15:22:00.000-08:00

#1562

“In Your Eyes,” the song goes,
“the resolution of all my fruitless
searches,” only what I see in your

eyes is fruitless, and what Shelley
might have called “luminous green
orbs” look like turbid wastelands,

capable of ruining any day I might
have you nipping at my heels. This
is what I think about her, but don’t

dare say, she’s too young to know
anything about wastelands, I’m an
old scorpion with mud of my own.

#1573

This guy thinks he knows
what’s really real, writes a
book, I do the same thing:
but whoever says this is in
a chain of unreality which
reality will quickly undo: I
know whoever says this is
lost in a maze of illusions,
which must be stymied: it’s
something you only say if
you’re deluded; but then it
means you know you’re in
a maze of delusions, which
is what’s really real: a bitch.

#1574

There you are: towel-headed,
toweled, milling through large
crowds, slightly self-conscious
but convinced of your uppity
superiority— this you is me, I
push through crowds (antique
book stores, solicitous clerks, I
can’t tell if they mean me when
they speak), stumble up stairs,
nobody notices the freakishness
of my appearance, as I am you—
having lived your life, I’m past
your death— cogs cut, dusted.

#1576

Who told poets to be poets?
Nobody tells anyone things
like this anymore— Poetess,
she comes to me with “this,”
it’s all wine and roses for two
nights, but I’m left dizzy— is
this the end of poetry? There’s
a war between poetry & sex, it’s
always sex’s dominance we fight,
she tells me this, but we still make
love. And it’s good & hard. I’m
pure in this, I tell myself. I know
what I’m doing. I do, too, in ways
limited by perspectives, of which
this is half of one. Is it enough?

Apps Inspirations: Carrie Hunter

2010-01-21T04:32:00.000-08:00

Language poets like Ron Silliman often talk of the sentence as a unit of poetic meaning and signification. Historically, it’s been the line that has carried the most weight. For me, as a fan of good poetry as well as a publishing poet, I’m not particularly picky as regards what basic units are employed, as long as certain requirements are fulfilled by the poet or poetess in question: interesting, provocative usage of language (manifested in memorable turns of phrase), sharp images (which I insist, against dissonance, are worthwhile and mandatory for major work), deep affect (also mandatory for major work). Carrie Hunter’s Blog: A Winter Poem fulfills all these requirements. She is putting it out through her own Ypolita Press. It’s a densely written chap that plays effectively with the idea of the sentence as poetic unit. Many different formal and thematic tacks are explored: parataxis, elision of periods, sentence enjambments, meta-poetic fragments, aphorisms a la Barbara Kruger. There are also bits of Stein that flash here and there. This is one my favorite bits:

it is mostly a lover talking to himself about love while simultaneously examining the way he talks to himself about love while simultaneously examining the way one talks to oneself when talking to oneself about love, all of it constructed from literary fragments of lovers talking to themselves about love

There are so many different levels at work in this fragment that it’s difficult to know even where to begin. It’s meta-poetic because everything comes back to the “literary”; yet what “it” is remains mysterious, and the facticity of the mini-protagonist being a “he” in a poem written by a woman adds another layer of intrigue. This is another fascinating bit from the chap:

problems usually pass or get more complicated or morph into other problems or present themselves as not problems only to show up as a real problem when you don’t expect it

This is meta-language, rather than meta-poetic language, but in its own way as compelling and multi-leveled. This, also, is the kind of bit that brings to mind the work that Barbara Kruger was doing in the 1980s. It’s got all the punch of good aphoristic writing, joined with the fragmented Modernist sharpness of Tender Buttons. Hunter’s entire chap is compelling enough to get lost in, and I have already read it several times. Like Tracks, it’s a compelling little gem, and also (frankly) richly deserves a longer review than this one. But I’m highly intrigued with what’s come out of the Bay Area recently, and can’t wait to see what and who Carrie publishes next.

Apps Inspirations: Logan Ryan Smith

2010-01-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

Carrie Hunter’s Ypolita Press has been putting out some impressive chaps lately. A few days ago in the mail I received Carrie’s own excellent Blog: A Winter Poem, and also Logan Ryan Smith’s Tracks. There are many things about Tracks I find striking; the most salient element that jumps out at me in this chap is the melopoeaic level it contains: music built into the language. Logan and Carrie are both San Francisco poets, and of course there’s a rich tradition, going back to the San Francisco Renaissance of the mid twentieth century, of Bay Area poets scribing richly musical texts. Smith’s chap fits squarely into this tradition, and there’s a particular affinity for Robert Duncan’s poems that is manifest here. What is most surprising to me about Tracks is how comfortably and seamlessly Smith fits rhymes (as well as assonances and alliterations) into his lines. A few brief fragments will suffice to demonstrate:

on the tracks
the wheels crush the rat’s head

if you listen
you’ll hear the crack

then Echo says it back
and all the lepers

glimmer, shake, and laugh

This chap seems to have a few thematic constituents: travel/movement, open/empty spaces, states of consciousness and perception attendant on these themes. There is also a subtext of sickness/illness running through the poems. This little fragment conveys all these things, and in a richly resonant voice that could not be as rich or as resonant if rhyme were not employed. This little nugget is just as rich:

At the station
The faces turn stasis
To dust in the places
The faces of lepers
Are facing

Notice how skillfully sharp the enjambment is between the second and third lines, how these lines twist into their own significations with grace but also with a kind of shock or charge. These “shocks” and “charges” are all over Tracks, and confirm for me its status as one of the most startling little gems I’ve come across in some time. While it’s clearly too early to opine that poets are ready to use rhyme extensively again, it’s a positive confirmation for me that I’m not alone in what I’m attempting with the Apps, and that others are finding similar solutions to problems we face as poets in a new, still inchoate century.

Mp3s from Beams

2010-01-15T15:37:00.000-08:00

There is also a page with a podcast of different poems from Beams here.

This page has an mp3 of my Stain Bar reading in Brooklyn in March 2007. The poems read are mostly from Beams.

The e-book Beams received a review from Jeffrey Side in Galatea Resurrects.

The original Blazevox e-book is here.

This is the thesis behind the title series:

The BEAM is a short poem, 8-20 lines. It isn't necessarily impersonal or personal, but it must transcend mere subjectivity. "I" can't be played straight. The BEAM has its' roots in Surrealist and Objectivist poetics. Things needn't be what they are, but they must somehow be "seen" in a clear light. If you write, "she leapt burning through ashes," for instance, we know this isn't literal but it can be seen nonetheless.

The BEAM should be page-centered. A BEAM must not be projective, its' predetermined form must act as a conduit to content rather than vice versa. Centering the poem gives it substantiality, while its' imagery lets it float into the stratosphere. It's like a sonnet with more space, greater airiness.

BEAMs should generally be written in couplets or single lines. A BEAM couplet fulfills the role a beam does in architecture- it builds, structures, supports. Its' central position reinforces the impression of substantiality. Meanwhile, single lines interspersed function as "beams of light." They're pure shots into poetic space, flashes of imagery, insight, gist-phrasing, etc. Light-beams illuminate built-beams, built-beams support and buttress light-beams. Together, they posit the BEAM as a kind of "light-house" or "light-structure." A BEAM should blend concrete with ozone, specifics with abstractions, substantiality with ethereality. It's a form built to be seen.

Apps Inspirations: Anselm Berrigan

2010-01-13T03:09:00.000-08:00

I’ve been tripping out for days on Anselm Berrigan’s Free Cell, out from City Lights Books. The poems are concise, compact, and pungent; more importantly, for me, they are quintessentially American. Berrigan’s voice is, in fact, as representatively American as any I’ve heard in some time; it nails the Zeitgeist of Aughts Urban America with aplomb. The refrain used for the better portion of the book (“Have a Good One”) seems ironic more often than not; though bittersweet nostalgia rears its head here and there, as in this piece—


17 watching Simon’s apartment
        summer of ’90; bought acid
            at Washington Square Park
  
            to peak under Times Square lights.
                 Would all be very different
      now had the shit been real.

For those of us who have lived in NYC (and, unfortunately, been gypped where certain substances are concerned in Washington Square Park), these lines are easy to relate to; but the fact that the nostalgia of the poem is undercut by something that should’ve happened but didn’t (in this context) gives the poem an edge. The connection to my Apps is explicit (though Berrigan beat me to the punch, even to the extent that I published some of these on PFS Post a few years back); though the root of these poems does not seem to be Imagistic but interpersonal (as many of the recent Apps are turning out to be). In any case, its exciting to find a complete book of new poems that knocks me out, and also has a personal resonance and bearing on the work I’m doing.

Monday Apps

2010-01-11T04:07:00.000-08:00

#1620

I’m looking
at the sky, writing
like a man writes
when the sister
lives in an apartment
with a husband
three blocks away,
casts her body over
here to do what
cannot be done
ad infinitum;
and that the evil
I saw in this family
was hers, the scourge
who ruined my life.
That night I had her
in summer’s sweat,
what it should’ve
been, what it was,
the sting of it lingers,
all in the sister, & for
once I don’t dare
bifurcate myself,
they do it for me,
naturally.

#541

Like the lamp by your bed
with no shade and the Stein
books you never read on
your shelf and the sweat
that rolls down the crack
of your ass when we fuck
(the smell of driven slush),

Like the granules these
things are or may be, as I
tell you what it is you like
about me discussing in bits
your bits that form a kind
of trinity hovering above
the places you place plants,

but it is not nor shall ever be
like anything else again, as
there is no simile for the
marks of incredibly bright
weakness around your eyes
as you lounge around in your
panties, two blues, guess which?

#1536

Facebook girls commit
acts of virtual adultery
every day, wanton acts
of exhibitionism, sucks
of minor stars in tiny
firmaments, I’ve got
them (Facebook girls),
in virtual corners in
virtual states of undress
virtually shagging my
arse off— stick it in,
like a screwdriver into
a keyboard, in & out,
in virtual light & heat.

#1533

So much gets involved with
this that isn’t this, that what
this is gets lost, whatever it
is, which no one knows, but
that “I” is in it somewhere
(no one knows where), there
must be a “you” (if it’s art,
as it may or may not be), so
two bases are covered, like
two breasts of a mother
weaning her young, and
whether or not we are made
young by this is another good
question: we may be, maybe.

Incidentally, some more Apps will be coming out in Jacket Magazine in or around March.

Matt Jasper's Evening

2010-01-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

Matt Jasper put out Moth Moon with Blazevox in 2009. The poems brim with over-the-top, kitchen sink humor. However, my favorite moment in the book, a piece called Evening, flits away from humor into darker territory. In its five lines, the poem manages to paint a vivid psychological self-portrait. Like a (radically) compressed Prufrock, we are introduced to a narrator who does not dare disturb the universe, but wants to. Here’s Evening:

On the shore, desire for the stars to fall.

All of them from the sky, darkness

until I look to the ocean floor where slowly,

the stars reassemble.

(I am the one who has drowned)

The T.S. Eliot reference is, of course, overt. What I like about this poem is its subtlety, its ability to make a big statement without degenerating into bathos.

River Man: for Robert Kirby

2010-01-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

Robert Kirby, who did the string arrangements for Nick Drake’s first two albums (Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter), died recently. Kirby met Nick at Cambridge University, where they were both undergraduates. Nick was already a fledgling singer-songwriter; he and Kirby became fast friends. When Nick landed a recording deal in 1969, producer Joe Boyd tried to set Nick and his songs up with another arranger; Nick insisted on using Kirby’s arrangements instead. It was a canny choice; Kirby had a great feel for the subtleties of Nick’s songs, and this particular song, River Man (the second track on Five Leaves Left) attests to it. This song is, in fact, arguably Drake’s masterpiece; the unusual time meter, intricate guitar work, cryptic lyrics, and the way the strings complement these elements, is unmatched in the annals of folk-rock. By this time, Drake had dropped out of Cambridge, and was pursuing a full-time career as a musician; unfortunately, he was ambivalent about live performances, and that meant limited exposure. His exquisite songs have only in the past fifteen years begun to see their due; Drake himself died of an overdose of anti-depressants in his childhood home in 1974.

I discovered Nick Drake roughly nine months after I discovered Big Star. It was the spring of 1996, a time when the rosy glow of alternative-rock ecstasy was only just beginning to fade. Smashing Pumpkins were still putting out singles from their magnum opus; Oasis had another smash on their hands with Morning Glory, even as The Bends began its gradual build up in the States, to give Radiohead an edge over their Brit-Pop competitors. Stumbling on Drake the way I did was like opening the door to a world at once familiar and timeless; songs that had the inevitability of dreams. I would sit in my dorm room (322 Holmes!) and play lead licks over the Way to Blue greatest hit collection; as to figuring out Drake’s tunings (as quirky and individualistic as Joni Mitchell’s), I soon concluded it was pointless. As has happened with Big Star, Drake’s work has seen action in commercials and movies: Volkswagon (I believe it was) used Pink Moon; Wes Anderson used Fly from Bryter Layter in The Royal Tenenbaums. I have yet to see an artful usage of River Man, however; to the extent that it may be Drake’s masterpiece, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before I do.

Apps Inspirations: Nicholas Manning

2010-01-04T04:36:00.001-08:00

I thought it might be interesting to talk about this, to the extent that it doesn’t tilt over into self-fetishization. The Apps that I’ve been writing have, up to this point, a concrete connection to two poets: Susana Gardner and Chris McCabe. I had submitted several poems to Dusie (this was in 2006); Susana had rejected them, objecting to their overtly sexualized tone; she suggested I write poems for her of a more abstract or Imagistic nature; thus, I had the idea for the Apps; soon, many of the first batch came out in Jacket and Dusie. The structure and form of the series was heavily influenced Chris McCabe’s Progress Poems, which I first saw in Great Works, and which later appeared in Chris’s debut from Salt, The Hutton Inquiry. Over the past year the Apps have taken a new turn— erotic and narrative elements have returned, Imagism and abstract poetry are no longer the sole, primary influence. One central recent influence has been two of Nicholas Manning’s recent books— the Ypolita chap Hi Higher Hyperbole and the Otoliths full-length Novaless. In some senses, the poems in these books are derivative— the influence of Language poetry is overwhelming, and there are few outright innovations. Nonetheless, the linguistic gifts that Manning brings to standard Language techniques are extraordinary. To an extent, the sheer verbal proficiency Manning demonstrates reminds me of Tender Buttons-era Gertrude Stein; the attention to melopoeiac nuance, exquisite delicacy, fragmentation of potential meanings from juxtapositions that border on the paratactic. These qualities are especially visible in the fifteenth poem (untitled) from Hi Higher Hyperbole:

here *
at your hairs’ (hot) roots is water-
melon : mou is an ivory hue
of you * this too delicate
pink the rose’s * new
lank layerings : its
loveliness
which so softly shies
its secrets : out…as your openness
to * attentive ardour’s touch * to
squirm in (why) shy senses’
sphere
which we all
know * and * know
-ing find delicious lack
to meaning’s fact…save
in the act : mindless to your self’s
full all * the petals fall and folding
gently inwards sleep : tongues
which to my taste
drip deep

I’ve made a habit of reading Manning’s poems before I work on the Apps. The Apps are turning out to be more narrative— in some ways, more traditional, more connected to Romanticism. Nevertheless, Manning’s verbal acuity helps me to concentrate my energies.

Two Last Apps for 2009

2009-12-31T06:16:00.001-08:00

#1491

To wake up in frost,
ineffectual sun up in
blue sky bruised gray,
is to huddle into these
words, burrow down in
them until you hit a spot
of warmth, like memories
stuck like bark to roots,
of this or that, of she or
her, if this trope is over-
worn so be it, I’ve had
enough of pretending
this crux isn’t one, so
I’ll lean into it, again—

#1080

If I had Neko Case
for one night, I’d
dip her red hair in
red wine, suck it
dry, bathe
her in
honey,
dive
into what’s
pink and blue,
roll out the red carpet.

If I had Neko Case
for one night, I’d
part the Red Sea
to make her
come, come
pangs,
needles,
she’s
stiff from
ecstasy, I’m
freckle-fucked.

If I had Neko Case
I would never
leave my bed
again; I’d lay,
awake to
music,
voices,
ether,
never doubt
Heaven exists
on Earth, between

throats, notes, legs.

The Perfect Sequence?

2009-12-31T05:42:00.001-08:00

Monday was Alex Chilton’s 59th birthday. As such, it seems like an opportune moment to talk about some work I’ve been doing with Sister Lovers. It’s resolutely non-commissioned work, done for my own edification, but nonetheless, a labor of love. Sister Lovers has never, to my knowledge, been definitively sequenced. The version most of us are familiar with is the 1992 Rykodisc CD. There were also a handful of LPs that got released between the initial pressings of Sister Lovers in 1978 and 1992. Modern technology allows us to take audio files and sequence them however we like, as play-lists (in my case, on I-Tunes). I’ve spent some time experimenting with this, and I’ve come up with what I believe is the ideal Sister Lovers sequence. The tinkering wasn’t that severe; four deletions, two tracks juggled; but it makes an enormous difference to how Sister Lovers sounds, and turns something semi-cohesive into a complete, cohesive whole. So, here it is, the Adam Fieled sequence of Sister Lovers:

Kizza Me
Thank You Friends
Big Black Car
Jesus Christ
Femme Fatale
O Dana
Holocaust
Nature Boy
Kangaroo
Stroke It Noel
You Can’t Have Me
Nighttime
Dream Lover
Blue Moon
Take Care

Without wanting to be insistent about it, I’d say that this is as good a sequence for Sister Lovers as any other I’ve seen. There seems to be absolutely no reason for the album to end with anything but Take Care, and Dream Lover and Nature Boy fit seamlessly into the flow of the middle of the album. The subtractions I’ve made may be contentious, but again, please listen to these tracks in this order before you make a judgment. Another, even more fascinating question is this: what about the first two tracks, Kizza Me and Thank You Friends? Do they really fit the mood and the vibe of the rest of the album? It would be possible to make the argument that the Sister Lovers we know and love really begins with Big Black Car, the first song that shows the creepy edges that characterize the rest of the album. I’m on the fence with this. My next task (just for my own edification, as this is), is to make a playlist identical to this, but that takes out the first two tracks, and begins with Big Black Car. That will make it easier for me to ascertain how necessary the first two tracks seem as a constituent part of the album. For now, then, this is my perfect sequence. It would be interesting to know whether others have played around with Sister Lovers this way, and what their findings are.

In poetry news: Jeffrey Side has published the rest of Kelley White’s wonderful Salt Suite series in The Argotist. You can read it here.

P.S. Since having written this, I pursued the idea of listening to Sister Lovers sans the first two tracks, beginning instead with Big Black Car. Even though the first two tracks are significantly less creepy than the rest of the album, I think they work as an essential foil to the creepier tracks that follow. So, for me, the first two tracks remain, but I stand by the four deletions and the two tracks I’ve juggled.

Response to Mairead Byrne: Gendered Subtexts

2009-12-29T08:47:00.000-08:00

Mairead Byrne posted an interesting response to my Argotist article on the Buffalo Poetics List. Mairead desires a “candid definition of terms”; in this case that means “hardness” and “softness,” as I used them in the essay, given more concrete significations. Byrne finds that “gender is the obvious subtext” of the essay. I will say this; their may be a certain phallic thrust to the manner in which I addressed my chosen issues in this essay, but I was not consciously aware of gender (as a subtext or anything else) as I was composing it. Byrne brings up an essay by Anne Carson regarding gender and boundaries; in it, Carson discusses the classical connotations of hardness and softness: men=hard=positive, women=soft=negative, and women having the potentiality to undo the positive hardness of men. However, there seems to be a confusion regarding why Byrne would bring Carson into an encounter with my essay; in the essay, I specifically take poetry teachers (who may be of either sex) to task for excessive hardness, while also lamenting the softness of younger poets. The truth is that, in different contexts, both inappropriate hardness and undue softness are chastised. I do not fall into the fallacy of perpetually equating hardness with superiority; by the end of the essay, I attempt to make clear (and this is explicit) that it is a balance of hardness and softness that is most desirable.

If my essay necessitates a “candid definition of terms,” and candid implies something subjective (as it usually does), it will be necessary to give my own definition of softness and hardness (which I do not, in the essay). The first important statement to make is that my own definitions of hardness and softness have little to do with gender. Gender discrepancies that occur in physical athletics, for example, are difficult to deny; but there is an inherent androgyny affixed to the endeavor of being an artist that makes traditional (perhaps classical, though I have not read the Carson essay) attributions hard to sustain. Art requires qualities that mix these classical attributions of hardness and softness: receptivity and force, passivity and activeness, ability to thrust and ability to withstand. “Hardness,” in the essay, is a complex entity that functions on many levels: courage to rebel and courage to create; ability to stand one’s ground and ability to move; initiatives to innovate and initiatives to diverge off beaten paths. “Softness,” for a large portion of the essay, is dealt with in pejorative terms, but I was addressing a specific context (poetry teachers dealing with students) rather than a general one. By the end of the essay, the desirable aspects of softness (that is left un-gendered) come to light (though they are not explicitly stated): giving praise where praise is due, expressing tenderness as well as rage, being intimate as well as disinterested. The basic idea was simple: to tell, not the truth, but my truth, while encouraging others to the best of my abilities. Nevertheless, I am glad Mairead asked for something a bit more rigorous, and I hope this answers the concerns she raised.

Essay in The Argotist: "On the Necessity of Bad Reviews"

2009-12-28T06:36:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey Side has published a new essay of mine, On the Necessity of Bad Reviews, in The Argotist.

You can read it here.

To Jeffrey, many thanks.

Apps for Winter

2009-12-28T04:04:00.001-08:00

#1649

Oh you guys, you guys are tough.
I came here to write about some
thing, but now that I came, I can’t
come to a decision about what I

came for. What? You said I can’t
do this? You said it’s not possible
because it’s a violation and not a
moving one? It’s true, you guys

are tough. You know I have tried,
at different times, to please you in
little ways, but this one time I had
this student that was giving me head

and she stopped in the middle to tell
me that I had good taste and you had
bad taste, and I’ll admit it, I believed
her. She was your student too, maybe

you’ve seen her around. She’s the one
with the scarves and the jewelry and
the jewels and the courtesy to give the
teachers head who deserve it. Do you?

#1307

She hovers above planet
Earth, making strategies
for safe landings, but not
able to see that she is also
on planet Earth, watched
like a crazed cat, a maze-
rat, or a tied-up mime, I
cannot save someone so
high up or far down, it’s
like a black thread about
to snap, as it strains past
breaking point she reaches
for champagne, to celebrate—
bubbles lunge up to break.

#1341

Secrets whispered behind us
have a cheapness to bind us
to liquors, but may blind us
to possibilities of what deep
secrets are lost in pursuit of
an ultimate drunkenness that
reflects off surfaces like dead
fishes at the bottom of filthy
rivers— what goes up most is
just the imperviousness gained
by walking down streets, tipsy,
which I did as I said this to her,
over the Schuylkill, two fishes.

#1488


liquor store, linoleum
floor, wine she chose 
 was always deep red,
 dark, bitter aftertaste,
 unlike her bare torso,
  which has in it
  all that ever was
  of drunkenness—
to miss someone terribly,
to both still be in love, as
she severs things because
 she thinks she must—
 exquisite torture, it’s
 a different bare torso,
(my own) that’s incarnadine—

Two Books on Issuu!

2009-12-26T07:04:00.000-08:00

Didi Menendez has re-released two of my books on Issuu.

Posit was originally released as a chap by Dusie Press in 2007. The Issuu page for this also includes a podcast of me reading the poems from Posit. You can read/listen to Posit here.

Beams was released as an e-book by Blazevox in 2007. It has since been taught at Wofford College in South Carolina. You can have a look and a listen here. There is also an excellent review of the book done by Jeffrey Side on Galatea Resurrects.

Thanks again to Didi, Susana, Geoffrey, and to everyone that reads my books (whether forced to or not)!

Brian Jones: A Degree Of Murder

2009-12-23T05:37:00.001-08:00

These clips feature music from the soundtrack of A Degree Of Murder, a 1967 film starring Anita Pallenberg. The music was composed, produced, and arranged by Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones. The rest of the soundtrack was, unfortunately, never released, but these few brilliant bits attest to Brian’s mastery both of song-craft and of several different instruments. Let’s hope that at some point someone does bother to release to entire soundtrack.

Chaps: Major and Minor

2009-12-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

As I’ve sorted through my possessions (I’ve done an apartment purge), I’ve realized something interesting that I’d never noticed before: some of the best poetry writing I’ve seen done in the past few years has been in chapbooks. The Bernstein/DuPlessis course I took a few years back was all about “the major and the minor.” Although there’s some pretentiousness to making these designations, it’s pretty widely accepted in poetry circles that chaps are “minor,” while books are “major.” But I find this hard to reconcile with the fact that my “chap basket” that I keep near my bed is always filled with good stuff, and I enjoy perusing these chaps as much as I do going through the books of poets I love. Chaps are portable, cheap, and perfect for poets who write short, compressed serial poetry. Another advantage of chaps is a certain organic quality they can have, when they’re made by hand. Juliet Cook’s chaps (and the soft-bound journals she publishes) all have a kind of funkiness that books can’t, and the way Juliet packages things make them seem like Dickinsonian “fascicles,” rather than products off a conveyor built: pre-made, pre-processed, delivered with clinical precision and not much feeling. I have a Nick Moudry chap called High Noon that looks like it was tied together with a kind of sewn thread; High Noon is a wonderful little poem, and I can’t imagine it taking any other physical form, as delicate and tiny as the chap is. Some cohesive units are just too small to be books— Brooklyn Copeland’s chaps are a good example of this. Again, there’s preciousness (in the non-pejorative sense of the word) to these chaps that I find irreplaceable, and that I cannot designate as “minor.” Is Red Wheelbarrow minor, or the fascicles themselves?

On the other hand, I will admit to having soured slightly on e-chaps. I like what Andrew Lundwall and Lars Palm have done with their e-chap presses— they are both excellent editors— but generally, I’ve been finding e-chaps unsatisfying. There are genuine credibility issues with e-chaps— enough to make me think twice about publishing another one. Publishing in online journals is different; there’s more a sense of healthy limitation. But e-chaps are difficult, because the brevity of the form, combined with the difficulties in reading sustained things on the Net, can be irritating. I find e-books easier to read, because you can prepare yourself for them. The same applies to lengthy articles in journals like Jacket. The thing about chaps is that their substantiality as tactile products balances their small size and the compressed nature of what they contain. E-chaps are small, compressed, and non-tactile. They are also taken out of the context of a journal format. It’s just so easy for poets to knock out ten or fifteen poems and publish them as an e-chap. Poets tend to use e-chaps to publish their secondary work (though this is not always the case, as with Andrew and Lars’ presses, and many Ungovernable releases, including mine, are more like e-books). Then, “quick fix” folks on the fringes of the poetry world make snap judgments about certain poets based on their e-chaps. This has happened to me, and to others I know. So, to use the dread designations, print chaps to me are “major” while, for the most part, e-chaps are “minor,” though perhaps the advent of the Kindle is changing things around.

More New Apps

2009-12-09T01:58:00.000-08:00

#1335

terse as this is, it is
given to us in bits
carelessly shorn
from rocky slopes,
of this I can only
say nothing comes
with things built in,
it’s always sharp edges,
crevices, crags, precipice,
abrupt plunges into “wants,”
what subsists between us
happens in canyons lined
in blue waters where this
slides down to a dense
bottom, I can’t retrieve
you twice in the same
way, it must be terse
because real is terse,
tense because it’s so
frail, pine cones held
in a child’s hand, snapped.

#1330

When the sky brightens slightly
into navy blue, “what’s the use”
says the empty street to parking
lots elevated four stories above.

#1316

Hunters get smitten with their prey,
but to kill is such am amazing rush
who could possibly resist, I’m into
these thoughts because you dazzle
me away from words into your red
pulpy depths, which I resent, but I
can do nothing about, because you
have nails in your cunt and crucifix
in your mouth, when I come I’m a
perfect personal Jesus, but the gash
is all yours, did I mention I love you?

#1313


we can’t stop trying to conceive,
even though our bodies are dead
to each other, and nightly deaths
I took for granted are razors in a
 part of my flesh that
 can never live again—
certain possessions possess us.

New Apps in The Argotist

2009-12-06T02:44:00.000-08:00

Several of my new Apparition Poems have just come out in The Argotist, the excellent online UK journal edited by Jeffrey Side. You can read them here.

It is my hope that these poems capture some of the "visionary deadness" I've noticed in Philly. That's certainly what they're designed to do.

Reading: Jason Bredle's Pain Fantasy.

Getting German, Linguistic

2009-12-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

For anyone that reads this who might speak German: well-known German linguist and Professor Emeritus Dr. Manfred Bierwisch has used some little interviews I did with Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in an abstract for a paper to come, entitled Linguistik, Poetic, Aesthetik. The bibliography includes me, and you can have a look at the abstract here. It's something exciting to be included in, and I'm going to see if I can find a way to have it translated into English.

Blazevox!

2009-12-04T02:20:00.001-08:00

So much good stuff is being published by Blazevox now that it seems to have, not a kind of monopoly, but a status like Subpop did in rock in the late 80s/early 90s. Subpop was the springboard for both Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, and under the leadership of Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman became the foremost independent rock record label in America. It also created Seattle as a rock haven for the world (the Pumpkins happened to be Chicago drop-ins). It’s uncomfortable for me to realize that more than half of the good poetry books I read are coming from one publisher, and even more uncomfortable for me to realize that I’ve already published two books (one e-book and one print) with them. Talking about Jordan’s, Amy’s, and Larissa’s books makes me feel small and clannish. I’ve spent my entire adult life rebelling against the clannishness of groups, and here I am, becoming part of one. But, like it or not, I think the emergence of Blazevox as a major force in experimental poetry may be historically significant, both because of the quality of the material Blazevox is publishing, and because the way it is run is almost entirely digital, though it deals in print. If there are levels on which taking this position is self-serving, I apologize. The hegemony of retail outlets for the purchase of poetry books: dead and buried.

On the other hand, not every poetry world is converging around Blazevox, just as many popular music worlds didn’t converge around Subpop. Around 1990, you wouldn’t have heard many people talking about Subpop at the Grammys, nor would you expect to see many Subpop records in big chain stores like Tower Records. Likewise, if academia gives Blazevox respect, it’s grudging respect, and not tinged with the awe that other poetry institutions elicit. Blazevox is not something I can brag to the chair of my committee about, though on some levels a book is a book and Chimes is all to the good. On many levels, I resent the stiff academic prejudices that dictates that some of what I do matters and some of it doesn’t. It’s a system solely based on appearances and status-symbol names (of journals, presses, and prizes), but that’s just how academia is. Because pretty soon I’m going to be looking for serious academic work, I have to play the game in a straightforward fashion. But I, like many of my peers in experimental poetry, have gotten used to maintaining a bifurcated consciousness. So I (like my friends) play the game, without believing in the game’s reality. What’s funny for me is the prospect that in fifty years Blazevox will be legendary, and the American academic system circa ’09 will seem like total rubbish. Remember: if this were, say, 1872, the American academic system would insist on believing that Longfellow and Whittier were big-shots, while Walt Whitman was a parvenu barely worth acknowledging. Some of us who have seen through status-symbol systems won’t get fooled again. And, where experimental poetry in ’09 is concerned, the kids really are alright.

How much place is there in poetry (and art) for hard-headed practicality? Not much, but the place it has is most relevant for those who use art as an instrument to do other things: get a job, get respect, even (sometimes) get laid. Blazevox is a press run for (and by) aesthetes, people who do art for art’s sake, and this is significant. It means that Blazevox books have a kind of purity to them that books from more “establishment” presses do not. I don’t want to valorize Geoffrey and Blazevox completely; I haven’t liked everything I’ve seen from Blazevox; but there’s enough stellar stuff that I think a general acknowledgment must be made. This also isn’t intended to snub all the other independent publishers I’ve worked with (like Dusie and Otoliths); many of them are very good. But there’s an ascendancy vibe around Blazevox now that I’m excited to be a part of, even if it does inadvertently deposit me into a clique. My only wish for Blazevox is that more UK poets latch onto it as a viable place to publish (both books and poems), and that Blazevox will thereby plant the seeds of an enduring international success.

The Bee Gees: Satan's Henchmen?

2009-11-28T02:11:00.001-08:00

Why Saturday Night Fever, both the movie and the soundtrack album, have held an irresistible fascination for me for my entire life is something I’m only now beginning to understand. When I saw the movie as a child, it “creeped me out” completely; in particular, the scene in which one of the characters falls to his death from the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn gave me nightmares. This was unusual; I’ve always been a fan of horror movies. But, for some reason, that scene was so desperate, so haunting, and so vivid that I still can’t escape chills when I think about it. Looking objectively, as an adult artist, at Saturday Night Fever, I think I understand why the movie gives me so much discomfort. The lives of the characters in the movie are pitiful and pointless, and are thusly more frightening than anything Dario Argento could dream up. Lives lived for nothing, tossed away at the drop the hat, and passions become thin gauze to hide terrible, black spiritual emptiness; that’s why the movie gives me chills. That the movie, as a pop culture phenomenon, seems so innocuous (people think of John Travolta’s ridiculous dance moves, the schmaltz of the soundtrack album, which we’ll get to shortly) is part of the reason it’s so creepy. This is a movie that was a huge popular success, yet everyone in the movie but Travolta has been relegated to near-complete obscurity. Without being unduly romantic and/or fatalistic, I think this has to do with the fact that the vibe of the movie is so horrendous, so chilling, and much more insidious than anyone’s ever come out and said. The spiritual emptiness of this movie isn’t just creepy; it’s evil.

I know the way this post is titled skirts the ridiculous. Yet, I will insist upon this: if you listen to those famous Bee Gees songs from the soundtrack album (Night Fever, You Should Be Dancing, More Than a Woman, How Deep Is Your Love), and you listen intently for the sound of the dreadful spiritual emptiness I’ve been describing, you’ll hear it. Is it jaw-dropping to think that songs which everyone laughs at could actually be, for want of a better word, Satanic? It is. But remember (and this is half tongue-in-cheek); it’s the Devil’s best trick to make you believe he doesn’t exist. Actually, the creepiest song on the album for me is Yvonne Elliman’s If I Can’t Have You. This is the song I associate with the guy-falling-off-a-bridge scene. If you pay attention to the lyrics, they present obsession-bordering-on-psychosis. That, combined with the kitchen-sink production and a few great hooks, makes the song heartbreakingly bleak but completely unaware of its own bleakness. It’s a mean, nasty, brittle little piece of Hell, disguised as an upbeat disco pot-boiler. There’s also a cocaine vibe to the whole album which reeks of the 1970s, and of the fact that coke is often used to disguise awful spiritual emptiness. “Night fever, night fever; we know how to do it,” is the coke ethos in a nut-shell. But that this ethos is infernal is not something the Bee Gees wanted you to know, because on the surface it’s enormously seductive, as evil always is. The album didn’t sell 25 million copies for nothing.

That both the album and the movie are schmaltz, “not-art,” is also interesting. There’s a level on which any work of art that knows itself to be art is wholesome and comforting. The artist is trying, in however bleak a fashion, to do something noble, to create something worthwhile. When garbage is put out just to rake in bucks, you can get levels of creepiness that art doesn’t offer. Crassness, especially the raw crassness of this movie and these songs, is more deeply creepy than the darkest Goya or the most abject moments of Sartre. This stuff wasn’t put out for a noble reason, and its’ darkness is partly that it was meant only to seduce people into spending their money on it, which they did. But the blackness that was captured here was captured by accident, and it’s a specific level of “lowness” which art can’t get to, which only schmaltz can reach. This makes the whole thing even more horrendous, and more fascinating. Are there lots of Tony Maneros in the world? There are, but an artist will always try to show something redemptive, either about Tony, or about the lessons that can be learned from Tony. The movie just throws him out, into a vapid world, where he lives a vapid life in which even the exciting bits are tinged with lust, destruction, death, and carelessness. The Bee Gees songs are laughable specifically because they represent this emptiness so well. But that they lead straight into a grave is not something you find out until the gang hits the Verrazano Bridge.

So, this is conclusive: specifically because it couldn’t care less about anything but money, schmaltz can actually reach levels that art can’t reach. A dark movie, made by dark people, for dark reasons, could still be art; a movie that couldn’t care less about its own darkness can be nothing but schmaltz. If you laugh at the Bee Gees, remember how many people bought this album, and absorbed the vibes this stuff was putting out. Without getting moralistic about it, the whole phenomenon of Saturday Night Fever is terrifying, from back to front, and that everyone thinks its funny only makes it more evil. But I, being an artist, see something redemptive; that this kind of schmaltz can teach us lessons about places we can never get to, can never reach. Would we want to or not is another question.

Four New Apps

2009-11-23T00:42:00.000-08:00

#572

On the bus to fifth
grade, eleven years
old, I couldn’t breathe,
they had to call an
ambulance, put me
on oxygen. My father
arrived, shaking and
crying; “First my mother,
now my son.” I loved
him so much, it didn’t
seem strange that, upon
leaving the hospital,
he returned me to school
in time for math class.

#577

You can only transcribe by dying,
the things you transcribe are dying,

the way you transcribe is dying
by the time you transcribe,

so if you must transcribe,
you must die, or die trying

#1288

Times you get bored
with the process, but

worse are times when
words are little deaths,

wrung out like sheets,
draped over hangers,

out in a damp yard on
a cold autumn day, as

wind rises to pin them
to your hopeless breast.

#1281

You can take for granted
lots of God-awful garbage
in places deemed important
by fools; this goes for every
thing, including poetry. Why?
Because the world runs (has,
will always) on mediocrity, so
safe, so comforting, like a mug
of hot cocoa on a winter’s night,
or a mediocre simile, people want
others to be mediocre, to be fools,
that’s just the way things go, people
are nothing to write home about, or
(if you are writing to God) nothing to
write about at all, the world is no mystery,
all the mystery is in the night sky, looking up.

Reactions to Fame

2009-11-22T03:26:00.000-08:00

What happens to artists that get famous? It’s not a situation I have any direct experience of, but with thousands of documented responses, it isn’t hard to piece together a general picture. Fame is an extreme circumstance, one that makes daily tasks most of us take for granted as “doable” well-nigh impossible. Fame is interesting largely because of its extremity; that it sets famous people so far beyond the pale of normal society and methods of socialization. When creative artists become famous, the phenomenon of fame often becomes a thematic element of/in their work. Where fame is concerned there is also an extensive “casualty list,” and famous people with “self-destruct” buttons are in particular danger. Some of the pitfalls would seem to be these: wanting to stay drunk/high all the time, believing one’s self to be invincible, craving inordinate amounts of love/sex/affection, betraying a weakness for promiscuity, and beginning to believe one’s own hype. On the other hand, it’s presumptuous, as a non-famous person (as, in other words, an outsider), to try to be authoritative about the phenomenon of fame. Fame seems to turn its screws on a case-by-case basis, and to exert its influence unpredictably. I want to take a look at three cases, which vary widely and wildly, to try and generate a kind of spectrum about how artists react to fame. One is tragic, one’s comic, and one is right in the middle.

Few would deny Syd Barrett a place as one of the most unique songwriters in rock history. His songs were quirky, pastoral, whimsical, LSD-trippy, and often employed odd chromatic chord changes. His biggest hit, See Emily Play, begins with Syd dragging a school-ruler down the fret-board of his Fender Telecaster. Syd was also wont to use his Zippo cigarette lighter in lieu of a bottleneck slide. The problem was this: it was the Summer of Love in Swinging London, and Syd (along with Pink Floyd, which then included a “The” beforehand) was getting famous. Syd’s friends kept “dosing” him, sending him on one LSD trip after another, over a period of months. As time progressed, Syd was unable to extricate himself from this negative LSD nexus. He was naïve, barely post-adolescent (21), and extremely good-looking; he began to withdraw behind a frighteningly blank stare. By the end of the year, he could barely stand up, let alone perform. Syd Barrett’s story is the ultimate “too much too soon” cautionary tale. He left behind one masterpiece album (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which takes its title from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows), and a few desultory solo albums recorded after he left the Floyd permanently in 1968. Syd’s inability to navigate the choppy waters of counterculture fame became fodder for songwriter Roger Waters, the group’s de facto leader after Barrett’s departure. Waters effectively turned fame into a metaphor for the human condition, and this resulted in albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, which made Floyd famous in the States.

John Ashbery (in)famously remarked, to be a famous poet is not to be famous. Poetry fame usually consists of coterie fame, “city fame,” bunches of big fishes in small ponds. It makes me think of the Kurt Cobain song Territorial Pissings. Usually, fame in poetry comes with age, and is still held within strictly defined bounds. There is also the little issue of material compensation— in poetry (prizes and grants aside), there is usually none. Think of the most well-known poets of the last fifty years— Creeley, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Sexton, Plath, Lowell, Bukowski. These people either got rich through trust-funds (Lowell), writing novels (Bukowksi), or business savvy (Ginsberg). Poetry book sales are usually not substantial enough to make a difference. Poetry fame is “no-money fame,” which often necessitates academic involvement. I’m on the fence about whether there is any commensurability between media fame as we know it in 2009 and poetry. If there is no genuine media fame in poetry, then there would seem to be nothing to react to on this level. The phenomenon of the Byronic, of the poet-as-mainstream celebrity whose books sell in mass quantities, has not been visible in 200 years. Even the Beats are nowhere near. So, it will be difficult to get a true reaction to fame from a genuine poet until one arises that achieves some semblance of mainstream fame again (fan that I am, I don’t count Patti Smith or Jim Morrison as poets). This is the “in the middle” to Syd Barrett’s tragedy.

Andy Warhol had the brilliant idea that fame was essentially another commodity— it could be manufactured, packaged, and sold. That fame was essentially “business and nothing else” was a truth Warhol put into play in the movies he made with his cadre of Factory superstars. Warhol manipulated the banality of mainstream fame both to send up its ridiculousness and to show that the trick of generating fame was both easily accomplished and easily mastered. The films he made are less remarkable, as works of art, for what’s included than for the motivating ideas behind them. Much of it has to do with the fact that these movies were Warhol’s reaction to his own overwhelming media fame. That you really can’t put your finger on the emotional heart of these movies (assuming there is one, which there may not be), how much the Superstars mean what they say and say what they mean, is beside the point. The media creates Superstars just to have something to sell, and Warhol blatantly did the same thing, and wound up subverting and reinforcing media ethos at the same time. I call Warhol’s movies comic because I think they were meant to be funny; all the subtexts that people see in them would not have been visible (or relevant) to Warhol himself. It was also Warhol’s clever way of deflecting attention away from himself, of using his fame to promote a stable of “talents” who might not be Oscar-worthy, but who could give perceptive viewers a real sense of what New York street-life, party-life, and society-life was like in the 1960s. Warhol was more skillful than almost anyone else at taking his fame and working it. That may be the most intelligent reaction to fame there is.

The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing

2009-11-19T06:32:00.000-08:00

Several of my Apps that originally appeared in Jacket #31 are now to be released in The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, an anthology-cum-textbook being released by Lake Forest College Press and to be distributed by Northwestern University Press. You can buy the anthology here. You can also take a peek at the anthology at the Northwestern University Press website and on Amazon here. Congrats to all involved, and thanks especially to editors Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Steve Tomasula.

Unique, Absurd

2009-11-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes something (that you might or might not call a work of art) has something unique about it, which makes it stand out, even if in some ways it seems like kitsch. That even kitsch can be valuable, is an invaluable lesson to learn; also, that absurd things can be unique. All good works of art have something to offer; but not all of us have the capacity to be artsy all the time. Art is inherently demanding; it forces new truths and new realities on you. Most of us have moods in which art is just too much, and settling for kitsch isn’t such a bad option. But kitsch is like everything else; some of its’ good, some of it isn’t. What defines “good kitsch”? I’d say it would be kitsch that has something about it that “higher” art doesn’t. There’s a certain amount of freedom you get when you aren’t trying to be an artist, when you’re just having fun. That’s where both the “kitsch attraction” and the “kitsch factor” come into play. So, I thought it might be cool to have a look at some good kitsch. I know some people might find it objectionable that I lump Robert Frost (who is, arguably, canonical) in with kitsch, but I feel that much of what has happened “around” Frost involves him being taken for kitsch, and I do feel that his “folkishness” has a kitsch element to it. Similarly, Wonder Boys is not just kitsch, but a serious comedy with kitschy elements.

I was talking to a friend about (and the situation itself is a kitsch cliché) those soul-searching late nights that many of us have, and I found myself (quite inadvertently) quoting Supertramp’s The Logical Song. There are funny things about the song— the sax solo at the end, the bizarre, clunky rhymes that jam up the verses (liberal, cynical, intellectual, criminal), the late 70s “soft-rock” production values and keyboard sounds. But the magic here is all in the bridge; in it, Roger Hodgeson lays down what amounts to a radically bastardized existentialism: “there are nights when all the world’s asleep/ the questions run so deep/ for such a simple man/ please, I know it sounds absurd/ please, tell me who I am?” The presentation of these lines, with the chord changes and the saxes chiming in, is extremely bathetic; but I realized, as I spoke with my friend, that no other song says precisely this. Supertramp are one of those strange bands that contributed a handful of stalwart songs to classic rock radio and then disappeared. The Logical Song, if only for the “existential bridge,” is unique in the classic rock canon, so much so that it really does have its own use value, which cannot be exchanged.

Robert Frost holds an odd place in the pantheon of Modernist poets. At one point, he was tremendously popular among the general populace, and among politicians (President John Kennedy feted him), and he was by no means considered kitsch by everyone. But the folksy, “rootsy” quality of his poems has come to seem (particularly in experimental circles), in many ways, pretty hokey. No interrogations into language, not even the faintest nod to disjuncture or Modernist impulses (collage, discontinuity), lots of overt (and obvious) sentiment. Frost is stigmatized with a certain kind of jingoism, following in the tracks of Thoreau and Emerson. It’s all about American cliché virtues—
individualism, self-determination, and the way men (and it is almost always men) embody these things. But a poem like The Road Not Taken, as hokey/folksy as it is, tells pretty much the truth about what a life in art is like. For all intents and purposes, artists do go down the road less traveled. They choose an unusual path that often offers little material compensation. So the poem works both as a metaphor for an artist’s life and a direct representation of it. Kitsch or not, the poem is generally applicable to many of us. And because it actually applies to us, it (arguably) transcends its status as kitsch as much or more than Supertramp does, and becomes a useful commodity.

Wonder Boys, I think, is something else— genuine art that’s just a little kitschy. But this movie moves me for such a personal reason that I almost feel like it’s pointless to talk about it. It happens to be the only movie I know of that directly addresses creative writing programs in American universities. I have an MFA and an MA in English— how could I not get attached to characters like Grady Tripp and James Leer? It’s like watching a part of my life. And, as hard as it may be to believe, I really do have an MFA story as ridiculous as what happens in this movie. Let’s just say this: it involves a blog. The Michael Chabon book is an excellent work of comic fiction, and so is the movie. But because the story is so comic, with bits of physical comedy thrown in and incredible situations, it’s literary without necessarily being “artsy.” Its’ value to me is specific, and personal. And every MFA program, not just mine, has stories this convoluted and incredible (even though technically this movie concerns undergrads). There are real Grady Tripps and James Leers all over the place, and I’ve known many of them. So for those of us who have done the creative writing in an American university thing, there’s no way around the attraction that this movie holds. It shows us something that we can't see anywhere else.

Art and Madness

2009-11-07T05:28:00.001-08:00

Artists are (sometimes) bonkers. Many of us who are in the game know this, and understand the reality of it. Are psychiatrists bonkers? Judging by what just happened in Texas, probably. How about lawyers and politicians? Probably; the human race often seems pretty bonkers, actually. But in the hierarchy of madness, artists are at least “up there.” I defy any artist worth his or her salt to deny this. Maybe it’s because art is so connected to extremities— of feeling, form, and thought. Maybe it’s because artists are more in touch with the collective unconscious, with impulses and images that float around, waiting to be captured. Maybe it’s the separation from the comforts of mundane life that many of us eschew. In the end, it doesn’t matter that much, because art is funny— once you’re in, it’s very hard to get out. William S. Burroughs forgot to mention that art, like language, is a virus from outer space. But it’s a virus that makes some of our lives worth living, even if the vast majority of human beings get along alright without it. I thought it might be useful to show a few instances in which madness can actually help artists create. The examples I’ve chosen are not people who lost it forever, but rather artists that went through a period of darkness that enabled them to create something extraordinary. As has become customary, the movie segment is different, and has to do with the madness of a specific character and how it makes a movie work. But, within or without, madness it is.

Devoted David Bowie fans can argue endlessly about what his best album is. I’m not going to pull an arsehole move and say THIS is his best album; I’ll simply say that Station to Station, which was released (I believe) the week I was born (2/76), is my favorite. I don’t like it specifically because Bowie almost went mad making it, but, for better or for worse, it does add to the album’s aura. Most serious rock fans know the stories involved— Kabbalah, Los Angeles, cocaine, witches, pentagrams, Aleister Crowley. What’s important is that Bowie integrated these things into the album, without turning it into a comic book, the way that someone like Jimmy Page did. Actually, some things no one (to my knowledge) has even spotted. Like on the CD insert, not only is Bowie doodling the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, he has the planetary attributions filled in as well. There was some serious immersion going on here, occult wise; but it wouldn’t matter, if the quality of the album weren’t also uncanny. Bowie seemed (again, for better or for worse) literally to have channeled and harnessed all these occult energies into viable art, a musical synthesis that put soul, disco, Kraut-rock, Euro, straight rock, funk, and torch songs into a blender and came out with a unique, irreplaceable whole. And, from everything he’s said, went through absolute hell doing it.

T.S. Eliot, also, had an interest in the occult, but was inclined to be patronizing about it. Thus, you get the ditsy tarot card reader in The Waste Land, his most famous poem, and the drowning man, and the man with three staves. How many people know that Eliot composed what became (in Ezra Pound’s judicious hands, and editing this poem could be the most important thing Pound ever did) Waste Land in a sanitarium in Switzerland? The pressures of working at a bank and living with a mentally unstable woman had driven Eliot to the brink. So, he produced roughly forty pages of what he called “rhythmical grumbling” and handed them off to Ez. Many people believe that this collage, so bleak yet so expansive, secular but with non-secular overtones, is the most important poem of the twentieth century. Honestly, where twentieth century poetry is concerned, what doesn’t it dwarf? I feel that even many century XX “classics” are mediocre in comparison. William Carlos Williams, of course, complained that WL put poetry “back in the classroom,” with all its arcane symbolism and recondite references. But that’s a small price to pay (I feel) for the visionary power of the piece as a whole, where the parts add up to more than their sum, and to all the many facets of twentieth century art that this anticipated, up to and including facets of popular music like hip-hop techno (sounds like a stretch, but it isn’t; think “sampling”). And if Eliot hadn’t had a nervous breakdown, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

Madness in a work of art is a little different. Representations of madness, especially in movies, can be very compelling, because almost any sensitive person can identify with madness. Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, seems to represent a specific type of American madness: violent, anti-social, willing to destroy in the name of justice. In some ways, he’s a sophisticated Rambo. The scenes with both Cybil Shepherd and Jodie Foster are painful, as Travis tries to make successful human connections. In the end, all of Travis’s madness (and the actions it leads to) leave us with unsettling questions— does the end of Travis’s actions justify his madness? Do we become complicit with him if we approve of what he’s done? Eliot’s poem is often thought to implicate a secular society, a G-dless world; Travis Bickle seems to implicate a society, not just for being secular, but for being crass, ruthless, mercenary, “scummy,” and completely lacking in innocence. And, of course, the final question that rises from this, and perhaps from the whole movie: is Travis Bickle mad? This is an instance of a filmmaker specifically investigating these issues, and from a point of sanity and comprehension. As such, it makes a neat contrast to the first two bits, in which a felt madness dictated the creation of the work of art. But, consciously or unconsciously, the “mad” elements here are impossible to efface.

Eventualities

2009-11-06T01:59:00.000-08:00

Many good works of art, whether they’re famous in their day or not, exude a kind of “afterglow effect.” They have enough value that isn’t just hitched to one era to continue to shine, and to give pleasure to audiences. Why some good art isn’t big in its own time is an interesting question, with no single answer. Sometimes, it has to do with the personality of the artist. Some artists are just too difficult, too defensive, too ornery to make a name for themselves; some are too shy, too diffident. Whatever the reason, the idea of a “late rise” is by no means unheard of. “Posthumous rises” are not uncommon either, especially in literature, where books take time (from years to decades to centuries) to sink in, and initial receptions don’t matter that much. Popular artists generally put more of a premium on initial receptions than literary artists do, because (often) their livelihood depends on them. Poetry stands at an extreme in this regard— in poetry, initial reception counts for almost literally nothing. The afterglow effect is all-in-all. It doesn’t help that poets so often stand in the way of their own work— bickering, being pointlessly uncompromising, believing the world owes them a living. But all art-forms have stories of artists who for whatever reason couldn’t catch a break during their life-times, but received validation, vindication, and valorization after they died. Here are two exemplary ones, and something a bit different.

Nick Drake made three gorgeous, little-heard albums between 1969 and 1972, and died of an overdose of anti-depressants in 1974. He died feeling himself to be a failure. However, over three decades word of his albums spread, and as of now he’s almost a household word. Drake’s case is comparatively simple— for Nick, there were specific reasons why he couldn’t become famous. He refused to tour, do interviews, or any kind of promotion. He found any kind of social contact whatsoever almost unbearable, and was wont to retreat behind a wall of absolute silence. The miracle isn’t that Nick Drake didn’t make it; it’s that the three albums (Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon) got recorded at all. Nick was extremely lucky to find, in producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby, and even famous accompanists like John Cale, people that could make his visions concrete realities. Nick’s rise began in the late 1990s, when Volkswagon began using his song Pink Moon (title track from the album) in a car commercial, and was consolidated when Fly from Bryter Layter showed up in The Royal Tenenbaums. Nick even got a nod in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. All three of his albums are now respected as popular classics; there have been biographies and movies. He had to get out of the way for this to happen.

It’s become such a commonplace to think of William Blake as a leading Romantic poet that it’s easy to forget that for almost the entire nineteenth century, he was no such thing. Blake is extreme— it took almost a whole century for his work to catch on. It’s also astonishing to go in depth with Romanticism and find that William Wordsworth actually knew of Blake as early as 1812, and approved of him (over Byron). So, what’s with the hundred-year gap? Blake’s multi-media presentations (text/paintings) were prescient, but also made Blake difficult to fit into known frameworks of poetry presentations. In art, it’s not enough for people to know you; people need to know what to do with you. No one knew what to do with Blake for a long time. Blake’s posthumous fortune was tied in to his being very in tune with the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century, rather than the nineteenth. Nietzschean iconoclasm, also initiated in the nineteenth century, began to take hold as an influence in the twentieth (sometimes in benevolent contexts, sometimes in evil ones), and Blake’s iconoclasm, which challenged traditional notions of morality and religiosity, fitted in squarely with this. It made Wordsworth and Coleridge’s parochialism seem stiff, pompous, and outdated in comparison. Blake can even cut it with a po-mo crowd in a way that the other Romantics can’t; his longer texts, their outrageous mythologies and trailblazing irreverence, fits in with the irreverence of post-modernism, in a way that Byron (the next obvious choice) can’t match. Where Romanticism was concerned (and the New Critics somewhat aside), the twentieth century belonged to Blake, even as it dawns on us that the twenty-first century has made things up for grabs again.

This one is more a suspicion than something that’s actually happened: has David Lynch ever had a box-office hit? Certainly not on the level with someone like Spielberg. But I think Lynch’s films will continue to grow and gain in importance as time goes by. It all has to do with Lynch’s unique vision of American, which exposes the seamy underside of the American dream: the places where acquisitiveness becomes perversion, sex becomes transgression, suburbia becomes Hades, and bright facades hide absolute darkness. In Lynch’s films, there is no innocence beneath the surface. Even the quirkiness that is Lynch’s trademark is not the quirkiness you’d see in, say, a Wes Anderson movie; with Lynch quirk has more to do with kinkiness than with lovability or even likability. We watch Nicolas Cage play Sailor Ripley, and as much as we like and enjoy the character, it’s hard to forget that he’s capable of murder. Or with Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont, the coming-of-age that happens is so ridiculously atypical that it’s hard to feel about Jeffrey, at the film’s end, the way we do about the various characters in American Graffiti. It’s almost a kind of Alice in Wonderland, but with so much real violence and perversity thrown in that it’s difficult to have a normal negative or positive response. Once you’ve accepted Lynch’s vision, then you decide if you like it, but acceptance comes first. And it’s this uncompromising edge to Lynch that gives his films their unique power, and one that may translate over a long period of time, so that a cult blossoms into something huge.

Severed Alliances

2009-11-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

Art, like politics, is a realm full of severed alliances. Art-partnerships are very common, because many artists thrive on certain kinds of relationships. We all have people who give us ideas, who inspire things, who make us think things we haven’t thought before. It’s also not uncommon (unfortunately) for artists to use each other. Artists are notoriously amoral (or even immoral) where their work is concerned. Many of us have a drive to create, by any means necessary. That means that if you see someone or something that will help with your work, it’s difficult to avoid wanting to use them. The best art-partnerships involve genuine reciprocity, two sensibilities that genuinely mesh and produce distinct products that each individual would be incapable of producing alone. However, the dark side of this is very striking. When art-partnerships end, all kinds of carnage can result. This is especially true of highly successful collaborations involving large amounts of capital (and not merely cultural capital). Severed alliances can mean broken careers and broken hearts; sometimes, even worse. But it is worth looking at broken alliances because they are key to understanding the humanity of artists, all of whom have a good end in mind (to create) but many of whom are led to bad places by all the contingencies that attend a life in art. No one that’s been through an intense art-alliance can deny the exquisite ecstasy and agony of the process, as creation turns to destruction and back again.

Brian Jones founded the Rolling Stones. He was their original auteur, and the architect of their early sound. He left the group in June 1969, and died four weeks later. Brian’s severance from the Stones is unique in rock history. Brian had enough charisma to generate a feature film (Stoned) and any number of biographies, but his status in the Stones’ history remains misunderstood. At the heart of the mystery lies Brian’s relationship with Keith Richards, the other guitarist and principle songwriter of the band; they started very close, and grew very much apart. In many ways, Brian was outmatched. You can make an argument that, as a guitar player, Keith Richards simply demolished Brian Jones. You can also say that, as a songwriter, Keith demolished Brian. But I (and many others) believe that Brian added something definite to the Stones equation. Brian had a class and an intelligence that the other Stones didn’t. All you have to do is watch an early Stones interview to see that Brian was singularly articulate; Mick Jagger and Keith look (frankly) like louts in comparison. In Swinging London, Brian was easily as popular as Mick was. But it does seem that in many ways, the Stones success was the worst thing that ever happened to Brian. He was a delicate (if oversexed) lad thrown into a cage (the rock biz) with jealous animals, and never recovered.

This must be the first time in history that anyone has compared Brian Jones with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but there are parallels. Coleridge and William Wordsworth started off as best friends, very much partners in crime. Lyrical Ballads was a joint endeavor that initiated British Romanticism. Only, after a certain point, it became quite clear that Coleridge could not keep up with Wordsworth. Wordsworth was more focused, more practical, more materially ambitious, and more prolific. So, as the project evolved, Wordsworth commandeered it away from Coleridge, and the most famous art-partnership in the history of British literature was severed. Unlike Brian Jones, Coleridge did achieve an amount of revenge; when he published his Biographia, he made clear in no uncertain terms that he felt that the ideas that Wordsworth had generated alone (presented in the 1802 Preface) were a bunch of bullshit. Coleridge criticized Wordsworth for attempting to tell the world what the “real language of men” was. At that point, Wordsworth was still struggling to find an audience (a fact that gave Byron massive amusement), and the last thing he needed was for his erstwhile partner to drown him in criticism. Still, it is worth noting that though time effaced the bond between Wordsworth and Coleridge, a few centuries have restored it. Their names are always linked in anthologies, academic texts, and they are often taught (as they were taught to me at Penn) side by side. Just like those early, ageless pictures of the Stones may, in fact, define them for the ages.

From the sublimity of goyim-life to the neurotic: I think it would be an exaggeration to say that Woody Allen made all his best movies with Diane Keaton, but who can argue with Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan? Woody was enumerating, with great precision, the exoticism of the shikse, and Diane Keaton was as “uber-shikse” as you can get. She also had her own kind of neuroticism, which acted as a foil to Woody’s: those tics! These two personified one part of the 1970s Zeitgeist: the emergence of psychoanalytic bourgeois culture. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk about their problems, and doing this was no longer self-indulgence. Woody and Diane were a perfect “therapy couple”: each with their own issues, mostly related to (what else?) sex and death. Woody became a “thinking woman’s sex symbol,” and Diane Keaton a thinking man’s. This severance seems far more amicable than the other two: Woody and Diane are still alive and working today; but their partnership could only produce what it produced, and have the kind of relevance it had, at a certain moment in time. The moment ended, but the movies (as always) remain, and both are assured of a place in cinematic history.

First Time Charms

2009-11-03T02:39:00.000-08:00

It really only happens once in a while: you see or hear something, and your life changes instantly. Some angle, some form of light, some way of being-in-the-world has been released to you, and all the wonder and the joy that goes unnoticed is alive again, and in your face. I’m talking about works of art that you don’t need to sit with, that you don’t have to digest, that don’t “grow on you,” but become a part of you immediately. It hasn’t happened to me in a long time (honestly), but it’s nice to remember these epiphanies because they are so unusual, and because the dust never really settles from them. So, three epiphanies, but I must preface here that when I look at what I’ve chosen, they are uniformly “dark” works of art. These are not “you light up my life” experiences; for whatever reason, the stuff that usually grasps me is tinged with darkness. Perhaps it’s my Scorpio Ascendant. Whatever it is, these three works put a permanent dent in my consciousness, and they are the “darker than darker” that has the power to seduce me over and over again.

I’ve chundered on about Big Star quite a bit here, but the first time I heard them really was an epiphany. It was the summer of 1995: I was living in a dorm room in State College. A friend of mine, who now writes for the New York Times, came up to stay with me for a few days. My diet at the time consisted of sugar cookies (which I filched from the Dining Commons where I worked) and water. I was always a little bit “out there.” Anyway, he came up, and he brought a copy of Sister Lovers/Third with him. We listened to it one night before we went to some party, it was about 90 degrees and the floor was uncarpeted, and the minute I heard Holocaust, I was pitched headlong into my own future. It was everything I ever wanted to hear: otherworldly, Beatles-esque, morbidly depressing but beautifully melodic and intimate. It was, in short, like finding the fifth side of the White Album. It was also like watching Faces of Death or some snuff flick, experiencing Chinese water torture, or seeing blood drip from a wound. What can I say? I’m a Scorpio. I like this stuff. And Sister Lovers became a large section of one of my books and a reference point that will never grow old for me, as long as the White Album still needs a fifth side.

Sometimes I wrestle with the feeling that British Romanticism was the peak of English language poetry in the last 500 years, and that nothing I (or anyone else this century) can do will measure up. Certainly no poet of the last 100 years has ever done to me what John Keats’s Nightingale did the first time I read it. I don’t know if words can adequately convey how there I was when I read this for the first time. I saw the whole thing: flowers, birds, trees, a dark forest, nightfall, and all with stunning immediacy that had no connection to any sentiment you could call “flowery.” It was (and is), in fact, all very muscular, very potent, very present. The funny thing about the situation was how banal the actual circumstances of this reading were. I was working on the third floor of the Barnes and Noble in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, late 2000. It was about 9 pm (only an hour to go!), I was bored shitless (as usual), and I picked up the Keats in a desultory attempt to find something interesting to browse (I was already well into poetry, but for some reason had never given the British Romantics a fair shake). I stood by the poetry shelves and had to snap myself back to reality. But the damage had been done, Keats led to all the others and I’ve never been the same since.

It’s become a rite of passage in American society for young, male, middle-class, suburban adolescents to go through a Jim Morrison phase. I went through mine rather early, but while I did it led me to Apocalypse Now, which remains my favorite movie. For some reason, it made sense even to my 12 year old brain. I knew there was a sense to the madness of Kurtz, I understood that sometimes madness is sense, and it still makes me shiver to what lengths this madness can be taken. That Morrison’s music is actually in the Coppola masterpiece is merely the icing on the cake, let alone that Brando is a pivot point in the movie too. This movie is one of those magical works of art where everything comes together for me, everything works, I don’t have lingering questions or qualms with anything, “everything’s in its right place.” It is also a generally regarded masterpiece, undeniably one of the great movies of the late twentieth century, and the fact that the Doors and the Stones are in it points to the ascendency of rock and roll out of the cultural minor league. If there is one great lesson to be learned from this movie, it’s this: extremity is magnetic, both in people and in works of art. People want to see extremity because it reminds them of sex and death, the extremities everyone touches. This movie is a case in point.

You're Under Arrest...

2009-11-02T03:17:00.000-08:00

Though this is at a tangent to the new positivity I’ve been espousing: we all know the Culture Police. We find them standing behind us in movie lines, serving us coffee, plunking themselves down in the front row at readings. These guys and girls know everything, or think they do. The most important thing they know is this: what we should like and what we should not. The old “what’s in, what’s out” routine, except applied to a few centuries worth of art. I’ve found that the standards of the Culture Police are just too high, and I keep getting arrested. If for every night I spent in Culture Jail I had a dollar, I’d be a rich man. Here’s a good ten-cent academic word: “reified.” When something becomes reified, it becomes hardened into deadness, into immovability. Certain works of art do, in fact, become reified as classics, and then we have no choice but to love them. But there’s a certain value to truth-telling and I thought it might be fun, for once, to “Incarcerate the Culture Police”. This is No Explanations in Reverse: works of art or artists that I’m supposed to like but don’t, and without even having a good reason. All this will happen while the Culture Police are chained in the basement, eating the Doritos I have thrown down to them. For once, I can admit that I find some classics baffling, distasteful, or mediocre. Then I’ll decide whether to take the handcuffs off.

There’s no self-respecting indie rock guy or gal who doesn’t love Talking Heads. They introduced (with a handful of others) post-modernity into rock, disjuncture into lyric writing, and surrealism to MTV. They epitomized a certain kind of cool: urban, artsy, edgy, very New York (like the Velvets before them). The truth is this: I’ve never been moved by a Talking Heads song. I feel like a 17 year old admitting virginity, but that’s the truth. It could be any number of things holding me back: the iciness of David Byrne’s songwriting approach, the condescension towards those less artsy or (G-d forbid) not from New York, the sense that this is all a little too clever, a little too inhuman, at too much of a distance from any kind of relationship to human emotions. Or, maybe I’m just deficient. I served a two week sentence for this a few years back, and had to watch Burnin’ Down the House and Up All Night play endlessly on a battered old TV. Those videos did bring something unique to Middle America, but somehow I feel nothing. A good deal of post-modern poetry has the same kind of effect on me. I admire the technique but it’s just too far away from feeling, and we are what we feel. So, loving Lou and the Velvets will have to be enough, and they can’t throw me in the tank for this twice. No double jeopardy in Culture Land.

Along with T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens is probably the most elegant Modernist poet. His aphorisms pack a mighty punch, he was one step on the road to the experimental poetry I am involved in now, and he has gained incredible literary credibility over the last fifty years. But what is he, really: elegant or incomprehensible? If you look at Stevens closely, it’s easy to see that he often keels over into nonsense. But, of course, with the Culture Police hanging around, you’re not supposed to notice this. The elegance of Williams’ short poems is more enjoyable to me, because they seem less like mind games and more like exquisite vignettes. Stevens’ impenetrable surfaces make you feel like you’re looking at a hunk of ice. The crystalline beauty of his lines does not, for me, redeem all that’s glacial in the poems. Stevens is very much the kind of artist you either get or you don’t. If you’re a mainstreamer, you can admit to disliking Stevens without getting locked up; but a hard-core experimentalist that doesn’t like Stevens? I’ve been charged with apostasy! Now that I’ve actually gone public with this, I’ll expect to be locked in solitary confinement with his Collected until I get it (or say I do).

Citizen Kane is probably the most acclaimed movie of all time. Thus, it’s a huge cultural transgression to either not get it or not like it. Orson Welles is an American cultural demi-god, up there with Jackson Pollock and Walt Whitman. Yet, you can guess what comes next; I saw the movie, found it heavy-handed and joyless. I was depressed without being edified. I didn’t feel any affective connection to Kane. I did appreciate all the levels of allegory at work: America’s national sickness as a country of back-breaking commodity fetishists. Protestant work-ethics, greed, corruption, wealth, celebrity, “no second acts in American lives.” All that jazz came through, but I didn’t see much to enjoy. It was like being fed a meal of string-beans and broccoli. Whenever a work of art is hyped through the roof (especially when it’s been hyped for decades), an impossible situation arises when contexts change, tastes change, audiences change, and the work of art in question can’t mean the same thing. I think that, in its time, CK touched a nerve, connected on a lot of levels, but I think it might be possible that some of those levels are broken down. Or, maybe I’m the one that’s broken down. But you won’t find me asking the Culture Police for a diagnosis…

Consolations

2009-11-01T02:31:00.001-08:00

Much of what I’ve been writing here recently has a negative tinge. It would be a bit much if I didn’t try to break things up once in a while with some positive reflections. I don’t know if this post will inaugurate a “new positivity,” but it is worth looking at the consolations art offers to its practitioners. Every art-form has its own consolations and so every artist has a different set of balances, of weights and measurements to see what’s working and what’s not, as art and life conflate, then separate, and then conflate again. These consolations are the reasons why different artists choose different mediums. Some of us like instant gratification, some like patient exertion. Some like a little bit of both. There are things that I think everyone wants: an audience, respect, acknowledgement, a sense of adventure/discovery, and to be on some kind of cutting edge. But different contexts make different demands and we all have to compromise sometimes too. So, here’s the round-up of the consolations of the different art-forms I’ve been addressing here lately, as they appear to me (up close or from a distance), and as they might encourage or discourage participation.

I’ve been ragging on poetry quite a bit, but I will say this for it: it has the richest history of any art-form I know of, literally thousands of years. There may not be much of an audience for poetry left, but it is assured that there will always be some kind of audience for it. For those who like to live slowly, poetry can offer quite a bit of consolation: poets remain “young” until they hit their forties, and expectations for younger poets (like me) are pretty low. It’s the “silence/slow time” thing about poetry that makes it attractive (though it hinges on avoiding the “public” arenas of poetry), and the fact that obscurity, for an artist, can be a blessing. Obscurity is (sometimes) a guarantee of freedom; no one telling you what to do or when to do it, no one demanding anything, no public with wants and needs all its’ own. Not everyone wants to do the “public artist” bit; the cautious, deliberate artist plodding away in his/her garden is not an unattractive archetype. Plus, the “production costs” with poetry are non-existent. There is no “business business” to attend to (or very little), few material considerations, and all the viciousness doesn’t have to burn or even exist, depending on where you live and who you pay attention to. Poets can keep writing good poetry until they are very old, and the poetry game does not hinge on youth or physical appearances.

The consolations of rock: there is a depth of exchange between great rock bands and their audiences which I don’t think any other art-forms can come close to. For moving people emotionally, really affecting their day-to-day lives, music is the most expedient art-form imaginable. People listen to their favorite songs and albums over and over and over again, in a way that is more fixated and more personal than any other art-form. With music, when it’s good, nothing cuts deeper or reaches more people. Plus, bands that really function as bands can create genuinely responsive communal atmospheres, where other art-forms offer only competitive games and redundant fractiousness. There is also the bonus (which may not last forever) that music (specifically rock) is not yet bound up in academia, so the potentially inhibiting weight of academic thought (at its worst) cannot reach the musicians who forge definite affective connections with their audiences. From fans, successful bands and musicians receive a kind of unconditional love that an artist like me can only imagine. To have a wide public who love you no matter what (thanks, Badfinger) could be construed as a blessing or a curse, but I think the blessings outweigh the curses of the situation. And playing music live is simply much more fun than doing poetry readings, and there’s no way around it. More fun not only for the performers, but for the audience as well.

In 2009, there seems to be no question that movies bring in the biggest numbers. At this point, it’s not even close. So, to reach absolutely the widest possible audience, acting, directing, or writing movies is the way to go. When people choose favorite actors and actresses, it seems to me that some slack is cut; there has never been a great actor or actress who didn’t make at least a few duds. Plus, people who work in movies get to live with the dynamics of group interplay all the time; I imagine that it’s always fascinating, whether it works or it doesn’t. Acting, like poetry, can be done for an entire life-time, especially for actors/actresses who have derived their popularity not just from looks but from talent. And film has its own rich history, and a continuing future that looks more promising than any other art form I can see. The confession remains that I haven’t made yet: I do have a hope that at some point in my career as an artist I can do something with film; anything, from doing a soundtrack, helping with a script, or even acting. It’s not that I’m bored or jaded with what I’m doing; just that I can’t help but wonder what different contexts are actually like from the inside, and hope some day to find out.

Art and the Icarus Syndrome

2009-10-31T02:39:00.000-07:00

Scandals and transgressions are what the media feed on. We all know this, but when it involves the arts, it takes on a different tinge. Why is it that people are so upset when artists fuck up? Why is it a movie or rock star gets splattered across the front page for something that ordinary people (for better or for worse) fall into all the time? Partly it’s because normal people want to see artists fall, and fail. Famous artists often seem to have it all: looks, power, money, talent. These are all things that average people either don’t have, or have little of. So there’s a level of revenge going on. There’s also a level of genuine resentment, even against artists who aren’t that famous, because people associate the arts with freedom, with having a wild, exciting, unpredictable life. This is not necessarily the case either, but preconceptions are difficult to dislodge. Ultimately, it adds up to what I call “The Icarus Syndrome”: we, artists, fly (or are perceived to fly) too close to the sun. We live too hard and too fast. Thus, it is more likely that our wings are going to get burned off. This is a variant of the Live Fast, Die Young theme, except here it involves not death but scandal and transgression. Lots of artists do think they’re above the law. That’s usually the cue for the law to move right in and inflict justice. And this applies to artists across the board.

Sid Vicious was, by all accounts, a very difficult person, and none too bright. It was by pure luck that he wound up in the Sex Pistols, by Machiavellian manipulations. Once he got there, it became obvious quickly that he couldn’t handle it. He hooked up with Nancy Spungeon (raised in Jenkintown, incidentally), and the rest, as they say, is history. He murdered her and eventually killed himself. It was a pathetic spectacle and the media had a field day. There’s another rock scandal much more fascinating— the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont in San Fran in December ’69, at which several people were killed. This concert was freighted with portentous “end of an era” symbolism, but really it boils down to one complex mistake. The Stones had hired the British Hell’s Angel’s to do security at their free concert in July ’69, Hyde Park, London. The British Angels were exemplary. Mick and Keith just assumed the American Angels were also exemplary. They trusted what the San Fran bands told them. Several people paid with their lives; the Stones got out scot free. Trust and idealism, those hallmarks of the 60s, had betrayed the Stones and their audience badly, and you can see it all in the movie Gimme Shelter. How convenient: the Stones got others to be Icarus for them.

Allen Ginsberg’s major scandal, over Howl, actually pushed him more into the limelight than forcing him down. Suddenly, an unknown poet was front-page news, the only time in the last hundred years that’s happened (unless you count songwriter Dylan). The trial ensured that Howl will always remain as a cultural artifact of century XX. Ginsberg and his cronies were, in fact, perhaps the most important precursors to the youth sensibility generated in the 1960s. In any case, the powers that be did Ginsberg a huge favor, and he was famous for the rest of his life. When transgressions and scandals happen within a work of art, it demonstrates a different kind and level of attention. This was visible, also, in what happened to Robert Mapplethorpe. The poor guy got lambasted by Jesse Helms who was trying to take down the NEA, and the whole thing was very tawdry, far more tawdry than what was actually in the photographs. They did the same thing to Andres Serrano for Piss Christ, which many people (including myself) find to be a valuable and striking work of modern art. It’s always the artists versus the bureaucrats and the demagogues, and it’s been this way for a few hundred years. But we all deserve (I think) unlimited freedom.

Both what Woody Allen did and what happened to him as a result remind me very much of what was done to Oscar Wilde in Victorian England. I don’t think Wilde legitimately transgressed; you could make a valid argument that Woody did. But the media’s invasion into Woody’s private life was motivated by plain prurience, and on a level that was painful to watch. The press went nuts noting how Allen lived in this super-sleek, super-protected world of luxury and corruption. This, the master narrative goes, led to his downfall. He’s still with Soon Yi today, and I think that’s worth something. A harder issue to face is one of recovery. Wilde never recovered from his trial; he was out of jail, and dead within three years. Has Woody recovered? He has continued making movies at the rate he always has. Some of them are very good. I would even go so far as to say that Woody is strong enough to have done what so many other scandal-ridden celebs have not been able to do; to fix things so that his name is not merely a password for transgression. It seems to be his work-ethic that has saved him. That might ultimately be the most important thing about transgression and scandal in the arts; if you keep working, and working well, eventually the scandals will be effaced and you’ll just be an artist again, although the process can be long and painstaking.

Demystifications

2009-10-30T02:55:00.000-07:00

It takes a certain amount of gumption to take on the role of “house-cleaner,” where the arts are concerned. If you claim the ability to clean the house, you have to know the house thoroughly. I’ve had my own experiences of different art businesses, but would in no way claim myself qualified to play either house-cleaner or avenging angel. I do feel, however, that it’s productive at certain points to see to what extent demystifications are possible. This post is meant to be a “demystification test,” that cuts two ways. I want to see to what extent I can demystify certain things about these art forms (and the superstructures that issue or emanate from them) while the process itself demystifies me as a commentator. In other words, seeing what’s full of shit in art may help to demonstrate the ways that I’m full of shit. It’s a little project that reeks of the deconstructionist impulse, and if this comes off as a radically simplified attempt get deconstructive, so be it. I will work from the presupposition that each art-form has its own illusions, and that we’d all be better off without them. Not all of us want to live an examined life (G-d knows there are advantages to withholding self-examination), but for those of us who do, the impulse to demystify is always compelling, even if in the process you stumble.

We all know what the standard image of the rock star is: male, young, wild, irresponsible, and devil-may-care. It seems like this image is a carefully crafted illusion. How about the image of the rock star as this: responsible, game-playing, hand-shaking, glad-handing, corporate professional? Think about it; do you think Iggy Pop doesn’t get to his sound-checks on time? Does Jack White snub every record exec that ever gave him a helping hand? Does Conor Oberst refuse many interview requests? The guys and gals that make it are the ones that play the game in the most careful, professional way. I’ve known many rock dudes who are legitimately wild, irresponsible, and devil-may-care, and you know what? You’ll never hear of them, nor will anyone else. If you don’t play the game, the game plays you, and you wind up empty-handed. In their heyday, the Who were (arguably) the biggest, boldest rock band on the planet. They were notorious for trashing hotel rooms, wrecking equipment, starting fights, and generally being louts. But were their gigs regularly cancelled because they couldn’t get their shit together? Of course not; they were louts until they got onstage, and then they became massively professional, and a superior commodity. The idea of rock stars as anything but professionals is the result of a press dying for tales of debauchery. But, in high level music ‘biz contexts, the debauchery seems usually to happen between gigs.

There’s one essential, dirty little secret to po’ biz, that I’ve discovered the hard way: much of the time, writing good poetry doesn’t matter. First of all, who gets to say what “good poetry” is? Every faction has a different definition, and they’re all equally insecure. In this biz in 2009, it’s strength of personality that matters most. In many contexts, it’s either steam-roll or get steam-rolled. The most prominent poets are frequently the shrillest or the biggest bullies (Ashbery being a notable exception). Poetry, supposedly ethereal and ideal, is actually every bit as crass as rock and roll. So, you look around, perpetually startled by the people everyone recommends. You see their work, and wonder, what am I missing here? You realize after a certain point that what you’re missing is that it’s a trick, an in, a con. You can be forgiven mediocrity if you happen to be a good snake-oil salesman. Or if you scare everyone with kamikaze rages so that no one has the guts to confront you (and there are many kamikazes on both sides). I knew at a certain point that I had to get tough or get out, so get tough I did. But it doesn’t change the fact that all the screeching weasels, prima donnas, degenerates, and dead-beats will have accomplished nothing but to perpetuate the image of poetry as an outdated, outmoded, irrelevant art-form, as it is widely perceived to be. And there could be a Dickinson or a Hopkins out there somewhere who blows most of us away, and will lay us in our graves. The steam-rollers may be pushed into the Grand Canyon, as the world will goes on indifferently, as it always has.

It’s become a theme here that I treat film gently, even as I ravage music and poetry. I’m besotted and inexperienced, where film is concerned, and it makes objectivity difficult. None of this would I deny. But I will say this: there’s a common perception in American society that movie stars lead effortless lives. Good images look effortless: think of Marilyn Monroe, standing in the subway, her skirt blown up around her waist. Seems simple, easy, natural: but even I can tell that it isn’t. All you have to do is look at tabloids to see that movie stars attract much closer scrutiny than even rock stars do. Rock stars stay (generally) in the music mags; movie stars are all over the place. Do big-name movie stars deserve 25 million dollars for each film they make? That’s another question. But the process of making movies is grueling; often boring, even soul-destroying, and actors can wind up at the mercy of tyrannical directors and bad scripts. And those are the actors who actually make it; for the majority of actors, it’s bit-parts, commercials, voice-overs, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway (which I actually do know something about), and years of waiting tables and tending bars, always waiting for that elusive moment when all the pieces come together in a big break. In the end, people who get involved in this biz better love the process itself, because there ain’t much room at the top, and how many times you roll the dice doesn’t seem to matter. Make no mistake: actors, everywhere from the very top to the very bottom, do not just ride waves of glory and success. Hit or miss seems to be the name of the game.

Frozen Images

2009-10-29T02:43:00.000-07:00

It’s certainly distasteful, but also hard to argue against: in the arts, dying can be a smart career move. In some ways, stasis for artists is preferable to change: it brings focus and exactitude to what (in long careers) may otherwise become fuzzy and amorphous. That’s why many artists do the same things over and over again. They know who they are, they’ll tell you, which means they have a secret for appearing to know who they are. The secret is, repetition is good for creating and sustaining communities, and bad for creating and sustaining artists. Genuine artists and genuine communities have always made uneasy bedfellows. Death solves this problem in a major way— once an artist is dead, scholars can create communities over their ashes, fan zines can gleefully rehash favorite moments, and everything an artist creates can be given form and function. Death also permanently affixes artists and their oeuvres to particular Zeitgeists— these artists stand for the 60s, these for the 80s, etc. Death is an “iconic enabler,” whereby the things that make artists unique raise them up and hang them as festoons on a cultural ceiling. It’s very possible, in art, to generate “death mystiques,” and that’s what I want to address in this post.

Sylvia Plath represents not only a Zeitgeist but a very particular type of American sensibility— the tortured, too-sensitive suburban female adolescent. That’s why Plath’s work straddles the line between iconicity and cliché— she is overly identified with bookish adolescent girls. Had she not committed suicide, had she produced an extensive body of work, her status could not be as fixed and as recognizable as it is now. The whole edifice of her celebrity rides on the fact that in her best poems (Daddy, Lady Lazarus), Plath seems to “become” her suicidal protagonists; this “seeming” transparency is directly related to the fact of her suicide, a few months after these poems were written. Together, the poems and the suicide form a “Sylvia myth,” that Hollywood has recognized. Plath herself, in her final months, seemed to be on fire with mythologies, both personal and general, and this informed the Ariel poems. Now, she is fixed, immobile; there she stands, the apotheosis of tortured suburbia. But this kind of iconicity is (ultimately) mobile; it will be interesting to see if in twenty years, Plath still fills the same niche she fills now, or if some other charismatic, self-destructive Lady Lazarus will take her place. Her position as cultural artifact is assured; her position as artist is not.

I remember the day, in April 1994, when word came out that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. It was a defining moment for me, and he instantly became my Holden Caulfield, my Catcher in the Rye. He called everyone a phony and was martyred by the commercial realities of a mercenary business. The moment was also interesting in that Cobain had joined the “27 Club,” which started in the Flower Power age with Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and Brian Jones, all of whom died at twenty-seven. Cobain even quoted Neil Young in his suicide note: it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Kurt will never become the caricature that the Jaggers and Townshends have become; he is safe in the role of the post-adolescent who invented alternative rock. The tragedy of the situation is that Cobain was a very gifted songwriter who could’ve actually grown into the stature of a Neil Young, rather than just quoting him. Cobain was far more mainstream famous than Sylvia Plath; his own myth has to do with the unreasonable levels of pressure that are put on celebrities. The truth is that Cobain courted danger from day one, doing outrageous amounts of hard drugs and marrying an extreme exhibitionist. But I won’t pronounce judgment.

The film first choice is obvious but useful: James Dean. This really is where “Live Fast Die Young” started. Oh, and “leave a good-looking corpse.” However, on close inspection the comparison to Cobain and Plath isn’t obvious at all: Dean died accidentally. He wanted to live. Live Fast Die Young is only fair if that’s what your intention is. It’s not clear to me that this was, in fact, Dean’s intention. From what I’ve read, he did live fast, but so did Brando. Brando lucked out and lived; Dean didn’t. But because he was pretty, and because all three major roles he played were rebels and outlaws, Dean got typecast as a “general rebel,” a signifier of youth and alienated angst. This archetype was especially noticeable in the homogenized 1950s. I see Dean’s story as more tragic than Cobain’s and Plath’s, because he wasn’t complicit in it. Everything that’s been made of him was out of roles he played; he didn’t go out of his way to mythologize himself, nor did he spend years whining about how terrible the movie business was. Dean is innocent, as Cobain and Plath are not. I’m not saying specifically that Cobain and Plath engineered their deaths to ensure their own immortality; but I am saying that Dean showed little evidence of self-destructiveness on the level that those two did. He drove a sports car, but he didn’t do massive amounts of heroin or stick his head in an oven. And the three movies he made are excellent. It’s hard to feel robbed when someone who wants to die dies; but when some dies accidentally, that was as gifted as Dean, all the mythologizing that goes on can come to seem like a tragedy, in and of itself. Thankfully, the movies remain.

What to Use

2009-10-28T02:55:00.000-07:00

What are the talents that different kinds of artists need to “make it” in different disciplines? It seems like there’s always a hierarchy of necessities— you need this, you really need this, you kind of need this. With popular art forms, looks count very much. Let’s face it— if Elvis looked like Ned Flanders, he wouldn’t be Elvis. Forms that aren’t based as much around body image (and which some like to flatter themselves are “higher” forms) often require an intellectual image: the cerebral version of a hip-swivel. But all art forms depend on time and context and what got you in the door in 1969 won’t get you in the door in 2009 and what works now won’t work in another forty years. For every art-form at every-time, some talents are expendable, others aren’t. Some things are constant— if you don’t know how to hype, it’s very hard to play the game. You have to be aggressive to make up for the numbers you may or may not have. Actual talent, as has been previously noted, is not always necessary, either to make it or to last. Whole generations get duped into believing that posers are real artists and vice versa. The other big argument is form vs. feeling. There are great artists who don’t have much formal talent, but can put a lot of passion into their work that people respond to. On the other side are the technicians with no feeling but all the formal tricks in the book. I thought it could be interesting to look at how some of these issues are playing out today.

Sometimes I wonder if playing good lead guitar is an outdated skill. The 60s were the great decade of the guitar star (think Hendrix); 70s rock was all guitar bombast; but, Eddie Van Halen and lots of hair metal aside, the 80s saw a decline in guitar relevance. When grunge brought guitars back, it did so in a context that encouraged passion over technical competence. Now, it seems that lead guitar ability isn’t that useful. It certainly didn’t help me in my forays into the music business. All it did was create alienation, because I was surrounded by people who couldn’t do it while I could. There are guys in rock that are cocky because they know four chords; if they know the right people, they might also make it. There are also questions about music and fashion. Madonna proved that dressing provocatively (and dancing) could count for as much as music. When rock is good, all these factors convergence into a harmonious whole: someone like Hendrix, who looked good, played well, and wrote well, too. But these factors don’t converge too often, and the vast majority of rock musicians who make it (though some of them are great songwriters) can’t “play” in a way that demonstrates the kind of technical proficiency jazz musicians have.

Formal knowledge in poetry is sort of a ghost in the machine: some have it, some don’t, but you don’t hear poets talking about it too much. Come to think of it, most poets don’t talk about poetry that much, either. They talk about outward, “business” things: who’s publishing who, who won what prize; or “personal” things: who’s sleeping with whom, who said what to whom at what reading. They also like to claw at those they can’t reach; but serious discourse about form and function in poetry? Unless they’re getting paid by a university to do it, probably not. That’s been my experience. In short: poetry is (on both sides) easily faked. Imitate some successful people, kiss the right tuckuses, and you may get the (no-money, no-fame) prize of poetry notoriety. Ezra Pound (that kid from Cheltenham) used his extensive knowledge of form to club people into submission, and it worked. Did Pound ever write great poetry on a level with Wordsworth or Keats? I’m not convinced. But Pound did know this one great secret: if you shout loud enough long enough, everyone will pay attention to you. My own “shout” is this: I feel that poetic form deserves an ethos of rejuvenation. You can Make It New without Making It Tepid. The New Formalists suck; but who knows? Maybe my generation will create a New New Formalism. And some of us may wind up becoming better poets than Pound in the process.

In movies, it always looks like there’s a fine line between actors who can act and those who can’t. My own proficiency is limited here, and I’m speaking more as an observer than as a participant. Like rock, lots of movie successes hinge on looks. From what I’ve heard, successful movie actors have a kind of “screen magic,” a way of relating to the camera, that constitutes a special relationship. You can say, “the camera loves them.” And it’s often impossible to tell until someone is actually filmed who has the magic and who doesn’t. Since the whole thing is inexplicable (even uncanny), it becomes difficult to place much emphasis on talent, because there are so many stage actors (brilliant ones) who just don’t translate onto the screen. But as I know (personally) so many talented actors and filmmakers who have migrated to the City of Angels, I know that this ‘biz is as difficult to crack as any other in the history of art. The most useful talent for an actress or actor to have (from what I’ve seen) is hustle. Not hype, which involves saying how great you are; hustle is the groundwork just to get your foot in the door. Not everyone that goes to L.A. is prepared for L.A.— I had a friend who moved there two months ago, without a car or the ability to get a car. As Al Pacino said in Carlito’s Way, bad start, Jack. But film is an art that I’ve just recently fallen in love with, and you can’t talk about something or someone you’re in love with objectively. And I know that hustle doesn’t always work because in art nothing’s ever reliable except (for most of us) eventual obscurity. You just keep the fires lit and go on because you want to, and out of curiosity.

Fights

2009-10-27T03:46:00.001-07:00

Most artists are in a precarious position most of the time. Even the ones who have the good fortune to make a lot of money will lose their position if they start to take things for granted. That’s why in art, fights happen as regularly as in any other arena. There’s the fight for legitimacy (and no matter how good you are, someone’s going to say you’re not legitimate), the fight to achieve wider recognition (this is the way in which artists, as Jim Morrison said, are “erotic politicians”), the awful squabbles about aesthetic centrality (in other words, the fight to make your style the most popular and the most respected), prize money, contracts, and that little devil called individual reputation, which keeps most artists from pulling any gutsy moves. It’s all a tightrope act, and it keeps right on going after you kick the bucket. Byron’s work didn’t start to decline in popularity until about eighty years after he died. Now, having been dead for 185 years, he’s making a comeback. Not only does art offer no guarantees and no stable rewards, half the time no one knows what’s going on in the first place. Every little posse tells a different story about the way things have gone, are going, and will continue to go. After a certain point (and this is unfortunate), it’s easy to wind up trusting no one. Emersonian self-reliance is the only thing that saves the day. I thought it would be interesting to go through some of these squabbles, to show (to the best of my abilities) how the game works and who’s playing.

Where American poetry is concerned, the fight is on right now. In this corner, the experimentalists, whether they happen to be conceptual, flarf, post-avant, or lang-po (the four essential branches); this group gets less societal recognition, fewer cash prizes, but the consolation of knowing (and it’s a historical fact) that most work that lasts comes out of an experimental context. In this corner, the mainstreamers; they’ve got societal recognition, cash prizes, print journals, but have a hard time claiming they’re doing anything new (or, often, interesting). The fight happens on blogs (including this one), in print and online journals, and (people being people) behind closed doors like a sonuvabitch. Much of this fight is hidden because the two groups rarely comingle. I did my MFA with the mainstreamers and my MA/PhD with the experimentalists, which puts me in a unique position. It’s exacerbated because the dogmatism on both sides is intense. It’s probably more intense (as I’ve said here) on the experimental side, where I’m situated. So what do I do? I go my own way, do my own thing, and am grateful for the audience I have. I’m not going to be anyone’s foot-soldier, or a poetry bounty hunter like Boba-Fett. And my own dogmatism (and I’ll cop to it) runs like this— a reputation based on being gutless (as most poetry reputations are) is not worth having. Having seen both sides, this is what I’ve gleaned, because the gutlessness on either side runs equally deep, and (to use a little jargon) disjunction and epiphany are equally easy to fake.

The best rock fight of the last twenty years is undoubtedly the Oasis vs. Blur Britpop battle of the mid 1990s. It was a battle of epic proportions that, for some reason, few in the States noticed. Maybe it’s because the battle was so clearly tied to issues of class that were (and are) pertinent to Brits. Oasis, the noble savages, represented the proletariat; Blur, the educated aesthetes, represented the middle and upper classes. Where popularity was concerned, Oasis won hands down. However, with fifteen years hindsight, the battle looks like a tempest in a teacup. While it was happening, Radiohead (who were unceremoniously left out of the Britpop party) were quietly building a massive fan-base in the States. One day, Britpop’s number was up, and Radiohead were at the top of the heap everywhere, including the UK. With everything Radiohead have achieved, they cast a long shadow over Britpop, and the once huge clash of the Titans now looks small. It demonstrates that the Britpop bands all made one critical mistake— not taking US audiences and tastes seriously, not recognizing the key position that US audiences hold in maintaining long-term success. I would hesitate to call Oasis and Blur “also-rans,” but in the States, that’s exactly what they are. And Radiohead are the last band left standing.

There are so many movie fights to choose from (from Fight Club to Raging Bull) that it’s hard even to know where to start; and that’s just fights in movies. Hollywood feuds happen all the time. So, I’ll just go with the last great film fight I saw. It was in Bad Boys, a 1983 film starring Sean Penn as a thug named O’Brien. It fit Penn’s “bad boy” rep at the time, and it’s an excellent performance. There’s something compelling to me about the world this movie shows— a completely macho, physical world, in which demonstrations of physical prowess take the place of books, blogs, articles, etc. Those of us who by profession live in our heads don’t see worlds like this too often. It makes me think of being a kid, and fist fights I got into. I haven’t gotten into a fist-fight since I was fourteen, at Camp Shohola in the Poconos (though I came mighty close once, my senior year of high school). I wonder sometimes if I could fist-fight now. Many male artists dabble in machismo (probably to compensate), and I’m no exception. Anyway, Penn prevails in the last knock-down, drag-out battle, and it ends the film. And I’ll let it end this post, too, and arm myself for the next inevitable round, whenever it comes a-knocking.

No Explanations

2009-10-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

Every good work of art involves an “X Factor,” a goodness (or greatness) that no one can put their finger on. You can call it charisma, magnetism, flair, or vibe; but you never really know what it is or how it functions. That’s why we can’t explain why we like all the things we like. Some things we like “just because.” The parts of our taste for which we have no explanation don’t necessarily involve our “comfort foods”: it’s often easy to say why we find certain things comforting (like me with my Clapton licks). It’s also not the same as what we might call guilty pleasures, things that for whatever reason (usually niche prejudices) we “shouldn’t” like. “No explanation” tastes are simply tastes for which (pardon my tautology) we have no explanations. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few days, and I came up with some things that I like without ostensible reason. It would be over analytical to try to pick things apart and find some “essence,” but I am over analytical so that’s what I’m going to do here. My justification is that I might find a thread running through these things that will yield revelations about my own psychology, where art is concerned. But, for this blog’s sake, I’ll skip the psychology and just go right for the meat of the matter.

Every time I watch a movie with her in it, I’m simply blown away by Natalie Wood. It’s not just that she’s beautiful and sexy; there are always beautiful, sexy actresses in movies; there’s something about her I can’t define, which compels me to keep watching. No one else, from Marilyn Monroe to Scarlett Johansson, has quite this effect on me. If you wanted to place Natalie Wood, you could say she’s the precursor to Katie Holmes: the All-American girl next door. But there’s something haunting about the ways she uses her eyes and her body that makes her image linger in my head. Intelligence and imagination constitute part of her sex appeal, and that’s unusual in Hollywood, especially among leading ladies. She’s smarter and classier than most leading ladies; that must be what it is. But if you watch her in This Property Is Condemned, Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, or Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, you may see that she is unusually capable of acting from the inside out, giving the impression of hidden depths. Or maybe for some reason I’m capable of seeing this in her. This nagging sense of an underlying presence is what makes me interrogate myself about what makes Wood so special. Then I give up and admit that I don’t know.

There are a good number of serious rock fans who like the first Boston album, which came out in 1976, the year I was born. It’s the biggest selling debut album of all time. When I was growing up, it got insane amounts of airplay on classic rock radio, but I didn’t pay much attention. I bought the CD several years back and it’s become integral to my view of rock guitar history. Tom Schulz is at the magical halfway point between Jimmy Page and Billy Corgan, where guitar usage (especially production wise) is concerned. This is corporate rock at its finest; but it is, nevertheless, corporate rock— bland, faceless, manufactured, lacking particularity and character. I know these things, but I keep listening. One big reason is More Than A Feeling, the smash single off the album. It’s an arena rock anthem, with an interesting lyrical conceit: a song about listening to another song and having it make you see something (in this case, a woman named Marianne). It’s a kind of meta-song, that brings us back to Charles Swann and Proust again; strange, but true. When I weigh the ups and downs in my head, it doesn’t seem rational for me to keep listening, but I do.

Anne Sexton, along with Allen Ginsberg, was the first poetry rock star (unless you want to count Byron). To me, she represents a particular kind of blue-blooded reaction to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, wherein suburbs suddenly meant confession, dangerous sexuality, and transgressive rage rather than just blah homogeneity. It was the 1960s, and the pill was new: Eden could be anywhere. Anne’s work has been devalued by experimentalists who find the things hokey that I enjoy: the self-dramatizing, sexuality, directness, and somewhat primitive engagement with forms. This stuff moves me for many of the same reason the Rolling Stones move me: it creates climaxes and crescendos, especially if you listen to Sexton reading her poetry out loud. Yet, as a self-avowed experimentalist, all the confessional levels of her work, unmediated by investigations into language itself and its limitations, seem overcooked and underdone at the same time. So I find myself picking her up and reading her, and I often feel motivated by a mysterious force to do so. It must be that, subconsciously, I recognize that she has something I need. It’s something without a name.

Swann In Us

2009-10-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

How is it that certain works of art get bound in our head to specific spots of time? Why does this song bring back this moment, this poem bring back this feeling? It’s a question everyone has to answer for themselves. In the first volume of Proust’s epic, the character Charles Swann has a bit of music that he hears in the process of courting the woman who becomes his wife. This bit sticks in his head permanently and always has the capability of bringing him back to the tortures and pleasures of courtship. The interesting thing, for those of us who are serious about art, is how few things take on this kind of significance for us. When you read hundreds of books a year (poetry books generally being short or short-ish, certainly in comparison to Proust), hear hundreds of songs, watch hundreds of films, it’s axiomatic that not everything’s going to make an impression. Sometimes, even stuff we love doesn’t bring back any particular memories. But we all have a handful of things (at least) that, for better or for worse, take us right back to the first moment we encountered them. It’s like a form of virtual time-travel. At the risk of being self-indulgent, I thought I’d throw out there some of my Swann-by-proxy moments. As with the “do overs”, I hope some others come out with theirs’ as well.

I spent the summer of 1992 in Pittsburgh, studying drama (acting rather than writing) at Carnegie Mellon (in what was called a “Pre-College” program). Carnegie Mellon is set in a funky neighborhood called Oakland, which is like South Street in Philly, St. Marks Place in NYC, and Wicker Park in Chicago. One of the main attractions of Oakland was a hangout joint called the Beehive. I have no idea if its still there. It was a restaurant, coffeehouse, and movie theater. While I was in Pittsburgh, I formed a band with other drama guys called Elmo and the Zoots. The first week I was there, we went to see Blue Velvet at the Beehive. It isn’t so much the movie I remember (though it is one of my favorite movies), it’s the feeling of being really young and having a new world open up in front of you. You only get to be 16 once; you can never be that open or that vulnerable again. Somehow, when I watch this, just for the duration of the movie I can locate that open, vulnerable space in me. It’s a precious feeling, once the splendor is conclusively out of the grass (pun intended).

When I encountered John Donne for the first time, I was finishing my degree at Penn. It was the spring of 2002, and it was a wet, grey spring. The poem that got me, The Ecstasy, is one of the great love poems of all time; the circumstances I was involved in you can probably guess. What wasn’t predictable is that one night, I was reading the poem out loud, and it created a mind-blowing meta-moment for me. In other words, it took me on a (metaphysical) trip. I felt that I was literally living (and writing) the poem as I read it out loud. I was channeling John Donne. The feeling was so intense that I used to compare this episode to what the protagonist feels in Poe’s House of Usher. The sense of being echoed from a higher level, which in Poe is Gothic and spooky, was there, but beneficent. This is one of the few poems that really has taken out of normal circumstances and realms of reality and into some ekstasis, out-of-body life. Importantly, it did this for both of us. Thus, every time I stumble across the poem I get a flashback sensation.

More “drama”: spring of ’95, State College, Pennsylvania. More rain, this place is called “Happy Valley,” God knows why. There are weeks on end of these intensely moody, chilly days, rain dripping everywhere. This is the moment I fall in love (forever) with Smashing Pumpkins. Why was the music so necessary to me then? Let’s just say I was being tested by certain circumstances. No worse than average 19-year-old troubles, but particularly intense for me because at that time I was more emotionally “charged” than I am now. Everything was life or death all the time, I lived every moment of every day with complete intensity, and Billy Corgan’s songs had all these beautiful riffs and these aching melodies that articulated in a very thorough way everything I felt. They’ve stuck, too; I still listen to the Pumpkins all the time. And I have to say, with all fairness to John Donne and David Lynch, that it’s Corgan’s music, more than anything else in any discipline, that brings me back to a specific place in time. What Donne did for me once, Corgan does for me over and over again. And the spring of 95 is still alive in me, to this day. Too bad Proust died before the Pumpkins.

The Do-Over Project

2009-10-23T04:03:00.000-07:00

All of us who study the arts have works, parts of works, or even entire oeuvres that we’d like to change. Works of art are as imperfect as any other of man’s creations. We’ve all seen something we’ve loved, but that would be just a little bit better if this or that were changed. I thought it might be interesting to throw out some “do-overs” I think about on a regular basis. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, and would hasten to add that my own creative work is as or more flawed than anything I’m about to mention. I’m also doing this because I’m curious what other people’s “do-overs” are, the parts of their favorite pieces that drive them crazy, irritate them, and make them wish that just for a second they could transubstantiate themselves into the artist’s body to prevent the offending fuck ups, jack offs, and wankings. If you’ve got books, records, or films, your own work counts too. I (like many others) have published things I hope never see the light of day again…

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a massive Kurt Cobain fan. Still, one thing about the Nirvana records drives me nuts: why does Kurt never write a third verse? With Teen Spirit being the most obvious exception, almost every Nirvana cut, from Bleach right through to In Utero (which does feature exceptions like Serve the Servants) features two verses, the first of which is repeated twice. C’mon, Kurt, you want to say, you’re the Lennon of your generation; would it be too much to ask to come up with four more decent lines? Pop songs that could have the epic Dylan quality remain mere pop songs. Where lyrics are concerned, there are worse offenders then Kurt. Noel Gallagher is a very, very rich man. Can’t he hire someone to write decent lyrics for him? Every Oasis song ever written has more in common with Doctor Seuss than with Dylan. Gallagher has written great melodies, but after a certain point it’s hard to appreciate them.

I know far less about film than I do about music and poetry, so my film do-overs are tentative and subject to intervention. A few have to do with Kubrick. I’ve wondered (publicly here about a month ago), whether that first hour of 2001 is really necessary. For me, it drags. Where Shining is concerned, I’ve also wondered how the movie would look like if the Scatman Crothers character, Dick Halloran, were allowed to do what he does in the Stephen King book on which the movie is based— save Danny and Wendy, rather than get axed. Halloran’s arrival in the Kubrick movie is effectual in getting Jack’s attention so that Wendy can escape; but it’s a do-over that haunts me when I watch the film. Woody Allen, like Kubrick, is one of my favorite directors; Hannah and Her Sisters is undoubtedly one of his masterpieces; but the cuddly ending has always bothered me, to the extent that I usually turn the movie off before its done playing. There’s some hard-edged stuff in the movie; Michael Caine as Woody-by-way-of-Prince Charles is fantastic; but it gets negated when the ribbons are tied into an immaculate bow. For endings, I’ll take Crimes and Misdemeanors over this.

Here’s the big whammy (for those of you who like Romantic poetry): how about John Keats Grecian Urn ode without the last two stanzas? Not to cow-tip a sacred cow; but I’ve always thought that you can take the last two stanzas out without making much of a difference. The truth/beauty thing got Keats in trouble with Eliot; I’ve never particularly understood “Cold Pastoral”; and I feel the poem can live without the altar, the priest, and the heifer as well. So, poetry nerd’s alert: try reading the first three stanzas of Grecian Urn as though it were a whole poem, and see what you think. Moving into century XX, another sacred cow-tip: Stevens, Emperor of Ice Cream, “let be be finale of seem”…what the hell does that mean? I’m most of the way through a PhD, I have an MA and an MFA and I still don’t know what the fuck Stevens is talking about. Maybe I’m dense, or, as Kurt would say, “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.” In any case, it’s a baffling line in a wonderful poem. Those baffling lines are what separate Stevens fans from non-Stevens fans; you either get them or you don’t. I respect Stevens but I don’t always get him. That (I suppose) makes me a semi-fan. More recently, I like Buk, most of my peers and colleagues do not, but even I think he should’ve thrown away two-thirds of his poems and just published the really sharp ones. Bukowski is as overexposed in poetry as Springsteen is in rock. Who needs another 400 page book with 50 pages of good poetry?

So, that’s it: the “do-over project.” I hope others are willing to share theirs.

To Todd Swift

2009-10-21T04:25:00.001-07:00

When a poet falls seriously ill, it is left to his or her fellow poets to “keep the flame lit.” We could all use better circulation, where our work is concerned, and this is especially true when circumstances conspire against us. Todd Swift has, over a period of several years, become one of my favorite poets. A native Canadian currently residing in London, Swift writes poignant poems that straddle several contradictions: post-modern irony and traditional affect, brazen sexuality and intellectual scrupulousness, formal discipline and free-verse expansiveness. Swift also has an influential blog, Eyewear, which I read regularly. Eyewear, along with Ron Silliman’s blog, has been a prefiguring influence on Stoning the Devil. Swift has a wide variety of cultural influences, from rock music to film to novels, and, even within poetry, exercises a very catholic sensibility. He writes about these interests in a voice neither naïve nor jaded; his engagement is always complete, his candor admirable. Todd has been ill of late, and Simon Gladdish left a comment here reminding me of this. I thought it would be an amiable and apropos gesture to include a portion of a Swift poem in a new post. Luckily, Todd just had two poems come out in Tears in the Fence 50, and I will post some stanzas from one of them, The Fuss and the Bother, here (thanks to David Caddy, ed).


There’s fuss and there’s bother
 There’s the Word and then Light
My sweet Lord, Pro Patri
 Mori and man overboard
There’s catch and catch can
 There’s husband and wife
There’s boyhood then man
 There’s thin then there’s knife


There’s seen and then seeing—
 He’s laying a wreath
For a man underground
 She’s sitting down peeing
There’s music then dance
 There’s dance to the sound
There’s very much mainstream
 Or radio’s black transmission


She’s lost control
 He is working for Chaos
She’s in short supply
 He knows who the boss is
And kicking the can
 There’s that and there’s this
Solid state marital bliss
 There is power and the glory


Then the Casablanca story
 A plane and some fog
A man gone to the dogs
 Heidegger’s saw and a log
A canoe and a lake
 Tom Thompson in chains
A sweet sixteen cake
 Missing in action


Actions not words
 There’s a bird and a wire
Then there’s The Birds
 A bird in her hair
Tippi’s tipping point now
 There is a hairpiece askew
Is there any Justice I ask you?!
 There’s death row in Texas


The grinding of axes
 Then death and high taxes
The evil the axis in theory
 And praxis, Agnew
And Zbigniew, the Old
 And the New— she’s laughing
He’s sad she misses Mum
 He mourns the Dad


There’s set the controls
 For the heart of the sun
Then, yes, set your lasers to stun
 Rain that wets her dark
Hair that glistens
 He never listens
She shouldn’t care
 The Devil makes us do it

Get well, Todd.

Get Yer Ya-Yas Out: Live in Brooklyn

2009-10-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

This video was shot by Amy King on August 1. I was reading for the Stain series that Amy and Ana have going in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I look forward to attending more Stain readings soon. Now my Big Star obsession is public knowledge; the poems I'm reading are sonnets from When You Bit....

THREE SETS OF TEETH

Three sets of teeth: who
can check for cavities?
A three-way circuit: who
will start the striptease?
Three lovers in three ways:
how merrily the dance
begins. We spin, we spin,
we forget our instincts,
anima, the part of teeth
that cuts. We are sluts.
There is an “I” here that
stands for all of us, but
its eyes are shut. Sleep
lulls it to rest, not think. Or speak.

BIG BLACK CAR

Your middle: tongue
(hers), man (me), riding
together, I bitch (middle’s
middle). I tongue man
you, her, spacious, it, of
you, all of us, can’t feel
a nothing, I can’t. Not
of this, of you, of her,
of all of this riding, in
what looks big, black,
has tongue-room. I
can’t feel a thing. I feel
nothing of bigness, black
fur interior her you. Ride.

BACK OF A CAR

Asinine, as is, this ass is:
ass I zip down into zero:
anal, a null, a void, this is.
I’m behind a behind that
sits smoking, rubbing, pink-
tipped, tender, butt, button.
She watches me watching as
I go brown-nose in another.
Only her car-ness, averted by
eyes to a wall, seems happy.
Only she can stomach rubs
of the kind that want plugs.
Sparked tank, here comes
no come, & aggravation.

COCAINE GUMS

I ache: dull, sharp,
in a heap of paper.
All paper: picture,
bright, bold, dark.
I have nailed you
to a piece: black.
I darken touched
things: I’m used.
I write you, you,
you, as if kissed
by a fresh body,
rose-petal bliss.
I drowse: numb
as cocaine gums.

FRAMED

Nailed, two, across— I
have been glimpsing me
from above, as a camera
would, I am a still, this
is a film, this has to be
framed, no, don’t hold,
I can’t, it’s an offstage
arm, both you & you
speak like I’m (so) not
here, I’m celluloid, I’m
varicose, vein-soft, fake-
bloody, cut, I can’t move,
you & you & I minted,
taped, uncensored, dead.

DARK LADY

You’re more of a Dark Lady
than I have ever hoped for,
especially because when you
betray me, it’s with someone
I love: me.
You’re more of
everything, actually, & you’re
also a pain in the ass. That’s
why I haven’t let you off the
hook. I’ll wind up in my own
hands again tonight, sans
metaphors, like your full
moon in my face, but you’ll
never know there’s a man in you.

SPLAT!

What greatness thrust upon
me? Solitary Saturday night
fever, jive talking to myself,
doing lines of Advil, falling
off imaginary bridges: splat!
The familiar trope of falling
endlessly, this is how I stay
alive. All because you are, I
affirm, more than a woman,
but, unfortunately, not just
to me, but to many generally.
I suppose I could blazon you:
rhubarb thighs, persimmon
twat, etc, but not productively,
& what would Travolta say?

DEODERANT REDOLENCE

Rage is senseless, I rage
in a cloud of senselessness
against the confines of a
first layer of rage against
the confines of a region
of loneliness buttressed
by a feeling that deodorant
is an insult against redolence
that I haven’t guts to embrace.
I shower every morning, I
even bathe after I shower,
what this has to do with
anything is beyond me,
except that I like your dirt.

c. Adam Fieled 2008

There is a review of this book, done by Jeffrey Side, in Jacket #37.

It has also been blogged about nicely here and here.

Sex Again

2009-10-18T05:12:00.001-07:00

Certainly conflations of the erotic impulse with aesthetic impulses have been done to death. What I want to know is this: what art most closely replicates what it’s like to have sex? When I look, with an honest eye, through two centuries worth of books, every example I find is a cliché. Molly Bloom’s final monologue in Ulysses; Dylan Thomas’s villanelle; some even find the death of Anna Karenina to be kind of orgasmic. Orgasm is, after all, the “little death.” So I’ll have to look elsewhere, since nouveau experimental poetry tends to be (with some exceptions) bone-dry, and mainstream representations of sex in poetry are about as appetizing as soggy bread. To be frank, I know where I’m going with this but I’m a little scared to get there. Call it cold feet. But here I am, about to step into the déclassé, but incredibly orgasmic universe of those Baby Boomer patriarchs of madness, badness, and knowing danger, the Rolling Stones.

Over the last twenty years, the Stones music has brought me as much unmitigated pleasure as any other work in any discipline. Here’s the reason: the Stones good stuff replicates the sensations associated with sexual intercourse with greater intensity than any other artist this side of Picasso. Almost every great Stones song comes, one way or another. Talk about tension and release: Let’s Spend the Night Together is an incredibly direct sexual statement, released in January 1967, b/w Ruby Tuesday. It was a major hit. But the way the Stones play with dynamics sets the song apart from most Top 40 fare. The song starts off at a brisk, martial pace, and maintains it until 1:39. Then, they pull the kind of wildly inventive move that sets them apart from the not déclassé but also not very compelling works of someone like Cole Porter. The drums drop out, everything drops out except for the voices of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, along with Brian Jones on organ. It is a fourteen second break that would not be out of place in a medieval madrigal. It doesn’t involve a key change, but it does create an incredible tension, and bursts into a spontaneous overflow with the re-entry of Mick’s lead vocal and Charlie’s drums. What had been martial but “in-check” culminates in an incredible crescendo, which goes far beyond what the opening of the song promised. This fourteen second break, and the minute that follows it, are the song “coming.” Lyrically, the song is a blatant sexual invitation; but the music already delivers what the lyrics merely suggest. Brian’s churchy organ even adds a stately air of the non-secular, which seems incongruous but adds depth to the sound, makes it more layered.

The lyrics themselves are wonderful. Not only do they go far beyond standard “moon-in-June” pop music tripe, Jagger restrains himself from objectifying the woman he is propositioning. His stance is libidinous without being macho. He doesn’t talk down to this woman; in fact, he not only directly addresses her individual needs, her autonomy, but promises reciprocity: “I’ll satisfy your every need/ and now I know you’ll satisfy me.” Bluntness is precisely Jagger’s forte as a lyricist, but this is a song that would not have been possible in 1964, three years before it was released. The sexual freedoms of the 1960s engendered a new honesty in popular music lyrics; Dylan was obviously at the helm of the ship, but Jagger was up there too. It’s important to note that all the tension and release stuff here is really not in the Beatles and Dylan like it is in the Stones. Certain Beatles songs climax (Day Tripper and Dear Prudence come to mind, both Lennon songs), but Beatles songs don’t address sexuality in the direct way that the Stones do (Why Don’t We Do It In the Road notwithstanding), and so the climaxes are comparatively Platonic, and don’t invite the orgasmic metaphor. Dylan “comes” even less than the Beatles; he’s more of a mind-fuck. As I was planning this post, I realized that the Stones particular brand of sexualized art is unique to them. Their good stuff, up to and including Exile on Main Street, evinces this orgasmic quality often enough, and distinctively enough, so that it becomes (to me anyway) irreplaceable. And it’s hard for me to think that others don’t feel the same way, and that this kind of popular art, that’s so uniquely powerful, must necessarily be ephemeral.

No Recess...

2009-10-15T05:27:00.001-07:00

Truth be told, how many people read for pleasure anymore? For those of us who write seriously, it's a pertinent question. The second pertinent question is hidden within the first: what exactly is "reading for pleasure"? What counts? What people mostly do on the Net is read (and write). Fortunately or unfortunately, most of what they read is not what could reasonably called "art." I don't flatter myself that this blog is necessarily a work of art, though I'd like it to be. Blogs, web-sites, Wiki entries, sports sites, fan sites for bands, movie stars, movies; that seems to be mostly what people are looking at. If there were more "art texts" on the Net, would people be reading them? It all goes back to something fundamental about Western society, as it exists in 2009; most people learn early that serious reading is done in school. People associate literature with high school, college, and graduate school classrooms. It isn't just that literature is thought of as "school"; the layers of staid veneration with which these texts are treated in the classroom make the vibe much more like "Sunday School." Depending who you ask, this could be considered a problem (and a societal liability) or not. I, personally, wish novels and poems were much more than an "academic religion," indoctrinated into students who soon forget what they've learned.

It would be nice if the Net could engender a new breed of serious reader, capable of appreciation and analysis away from the classroom. Part of the problem (as I see it) is that many professors themselves believe in the religious conflation of literature and academia. Where literature is concerned, is school necessarily a "real" place? Privileging academia, where literature is concerned, is putting the cart before the horse. Writers write to give people enjoyment, not to have their work force-fed to unwilling victims. All art is meant to restore the liveliness to life, not to restore material to a professor who needs fodder for a survey course. But the situation is really chicken or the egg: are people not reading because they're tired of being force-fed, or are they being force-fed because they're unwilling (even unable) to read on their own? The answer, I'm sure, is somewhere in the middle. But academics get so deeply involved in academia that the notion of a Reading Public (not just groveling students) leaves the picture altogether. It also neatly avoids the issue of relevance. If most people don't read literature, it's because they don't find literature relevant to their lives. Once this is registered, all this academic squabbling looks like tempests in a tea-cup. Nonetheless, I don't just let the general public off the hook: I think the decision not to read is a lazy one, and, without back-peddling into sterile pessimism, it seems like a kind of cultural degeneration is going on. Two hundred years ago, there was little to do but read; now, we have more amusements then any one person has time for. Still, I'd argue that for general enrichment, on the greatest number of possible levels, it's hard to beat reading. Maybe people being force-fed literature is not such a bad thing. But I sure would be gratified if that "luxuriant misgrowth," a Reading Public, would declare itself to the world. That way, literature will again become a general pasttime, and not just a pasttime and a shibboleth for academics.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

2009-10-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

It’s a classic match-up; it’s been around since George Eliot put a guy named Ladislaw in an old scholar’s way. Here it is: a bourgeois challenged by an artist. Commerce vs. erudition, capital vs. cultural capital, bucks vs. taste, acquisition vs. creation. I had forgotten about Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but I saw it for the third time last night. The first time I saw it was in London in 1990; not the most obvious choice for a day-tripping fourteen-year-old, but what the hell. I was too young then to understand its complexities or anything about it at all. The second time I saw it, I think I was smashed on something. No memories. So really, I felt last night like I was seeing the movie for the first time. Oh what a movie it is.

What intrigues me most about SLV, watching it as an adult, is the way it affirms that artists have magical powers to affect reality that plain bourgeoisie do not. The James Spader character (Graham Dalton) enacts an aesthetic of total voyeurism, and his art manifests as a privately held collection of sexual curios. As harmless as he seems, he rips apart a marriage, shakes up a family, and gets the girl in the end. Spader is dynamite. The diffidence and passivity of his performance is what draws you in. Also, I wonder whatever happened to Andie MacDowell? Another nuanced performance. Whether or not Spader is heroic or anti-heroic here is open to conjecture. The film is quiet, slow, and deliberate; heroism here doesn’t mean action or thrills. It’s the spirituality of not-doing, not-acting, withholding one’s self. It is the artist-as-saint. And the comparatively vulgar bourgeois (an unctuous Peter Gallagher) just can’t handle it.

I’m happy today because I’ve found a way to incorporate a Depeche Mode reference into my academic work. Has anyone posited Wordsworth as a “personal Jesus” before?

Personality Cults

2009-10-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Another argument, of a different kind: what about artists that initiate personality cults around themselves? This kind of artist develops a distinctive personality, that is consistent across time, and from project to project (whether it be film, album, or book). The appeal of a "personality cult artist" is, specifically, this consistency. With this person, you know both what you want and what you’re going to get. Change and development is less important than maintenance of distinctive, idiosyncratic traits that are peculiar enough to the artist as to be trademarks. One person I think of along these lines is Jack Nicholson. It’s hard for me to say whether or not Nicholson is a great actor (though G-d knows he’s made some brilliant films), because so often, Jack is Jack: a crazed, volatile, sensual, slightly (sometimes blatantly) evil mischief maker, with a face the camera loves. Where Nicholson is concerned, I would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt (for whatever my opinion is worth) and call him a great actor. The Shining is one of my favorite films, and, as much as Stanley Kubrick’s incredible talents as a film-maker are in evidence, could anyone have played Jack Torrance as memorably as Nicholson did? It seems impossible to see anyone but Nicholson in the role. He has such intense magnetism that the whole film seems to gravitate around him (even all of Kubrick’s visual tricks). That magnetism is in Cuckoos Nest, Chinatown, Carnal Knowledge, all the way back to Easy Rider and up to As Good As It Gets. Yet, I would imagine for serious actors/actresses there are issues of range that need to be dealt with, that could complicate the matter. But who could argue with Jack’s "Jack-ness"?

Poetry: how about Frank O’ Hara? Who could deny that, from the major O’Hara poems to the minor ones, Frank is always Frank? He has come to be a signifier for a certain kind of urban cool: his gayness matters less than his archness, his cosmopolitan snobbishness matters less than his happy-go-lucky charm. Those, of course, are my value judgments, but that all four things (gayness, archness, snobbishness, charm) are part of a consistent narrative persona that is developed in his Lunch Poems and in the Collected would seem hard to dispute. Maybe snobbishness, you could argue against: you could say he never sets himself above other people in the poems, embraces Pop culture, and you would be right. I’m talking more about his interest in painting (specifically the Abstract Expressionists, who were very Mod during the years O’Hara was writing), his assumption of cultural currency, capital. So, if we put Frank through the same grinder we put Jack through, what do we come up with? Or, as certain teachers of mine like to query, major or minor? For me, Frank O’Hara is a major poet. He is as authentically himself as any character in American poetry, including Walt Whitman. Ginsberg tried to be representatively Whitmanic: I think O’Hara succeeded where Ginsberg failed. But, of course, the two were friends, and Frank would probably object to being placed in opposition to Ginsberg. Oh well.

Where popular music is concerned, there are a bunch of possibilities: Dylan again, Springsteen again, Madonna, even Michael Jackson. However, I don’t think anyone fits this particular bill more than Morrissey does. Morrissey’s classic stance: precious, literary, self-pitying, ridiculously self-dramatizing (but able to take the piss nonetheless) has barely changed since The Smiths emerged from Manchester in the early 1980s. Morrissey calls out to the bookish adolescent in all of us (or, at least, those of us who were bookish adolescents), the part of us that is forever caught in our own dramas of selfhood (often in relation to a cold, cruel world). As such, Morrissey inspires fanatical devotion in his fans, largely because that persona is so fervently held and maintained by him, so closely guarded. To some, that very sense of fixation is a turn off; Morrissey is the kind of artist that allows no middle response. You either get him or you don’t. But there is one, central persona to get or not get, unlike Bowie or Madonna, who have each developed a plethora of personas. In Morrissey’s case, I am on the fence where issues of greatness (or major/minor) are concerned. If we measure him in the devotion he inspires, he’s certainly great. As an artist, he seems limited to me, narrowly confined to his own terrain. I get him, but I have to be in a certain mood to listen to him. I’ve also found him to be bad luck before dates…not that that’s relevant. So I’ll defer here, and leave Morrissey blank on the scorecard.

Blogs as Priceless Commodities

2009-10-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

Can we, in fact, call blogs "priceless commodities"? Can we call them commodities at all? It requires some juggling. "Commodities" are almost always involved with money, or "capital." The commodity form, as it was handed down (representationally) from Marx, is a kind of ghost: mass-produced, infinitely reproducible, always replaceable. Blogs are a different kind of ghost: you can't touch them, they inhabit a screen, and they are infinitely reproducible only in the sense that their spectral presence manifests wherever and whenever the correct code is placed into digital machinery. Art blogs are not involved with capital, but they are involved with cultural capital. I wrote about this at some length in the spring, but I bring it up for a few reasons: I have changed my mind about Bourdieu (who initiated the term cultural capital), and I have begun to think of blogs (my own and others) in commercialized terms, as though they were commodities.

The criticisms I posited against Bourdieu had their basis in a feeling that Bourdieu's critique of industrial capitalism capitulated too much. It seemed to me, on first encountering Bourdieu's ideas, that terms like cultural capital were an attempt to mirror bourgeois standards of value rather than supplant them. Bourdieu seemed to want to compete directly rather than subvert. I see now that my criticisms were naive: I did not then appreciate the power of the capitalist juggernaut that has dominated Western society time out of mind. Where this is concerned, intellectuals and artists have neither the material skills nor the resources needed to supplant or subvert. Moreover, we have inherited ideologies that are difficult to dislodge. The minute we put our work into any kind of marketplace (including a digital one, as I am doing here), the commercial lexicon becomes natural to us. The acquisition, dissemination, and consolidation of cultural capital is a real process, and (at times) a troubling one. Cultural commodities resist the assignation of fixed values; fluctuations are normative.

On this blog, I (and those that comment) decide what is worth what. There is a kind of Cultural Capital Chain being forged here: I attain cultural capital from acquiring readers, and the more cultural capital I acquire the more I can disseminate (i.e. the more respected/well-known the blog becomes, the more readers will feel they are gaining cultural capital from reading it.) There is genuine reciprocity going on here, and at a more intimate level than almost any other context could create. I am not writing for the New York Times or Harpers; I am writing directly to my audience. The commercial exchange is a direct transmission. It is almost a kind of barter: your hits for my knowledge, impressions, critiques, musings, etc. It's a fair deal. I am selling you a commodity, you respond with an affirmation or "coin" that registers on my hit counter. But, of course, in directly commercial terms, the exchange is negligible, a kind of "ghost exchange": there is nothing material behind it. Blogs (and online journals) are liminal entities, so completely tied up with a Bourdieu-ian model that the original, Marx-derived formulations recede into the distance. If I think about this blog as a commodity, am I right or wrong? Is this post a commercial venture? Who decides if the "coins" you give in return mean anything? For those of us that work seriously on the Net, these things need to be thought through. And Bourdieu needs to be given credit as a seminal theorist for us.

Early Fall Apparition Poems

2009-09-30T03:51:00.001-07:00

I've been sick with a bad head-cold for the past 3-4 days. As such, amidst all the other things I have to do, its been a little tough coming up with ideas for posts here. So I am opting for the easy way out, and posting several new Apps. Hope you like 'em.

#1241

Why does no one tell the truth?
Because the truth is (more often
than not) absurd. No one wants
to look absurd, so no one tells
the truth, which creates even
more absurdity; worlds grow
into self-parody, systems grow
down into gutters, whole epochs
are wasted in perfidy; Cassandra
finally opens her mouth, no one
listens, they want her to star in
a porno, set her up with a stage-
name, she learns not to rant,
visions cloud her eyes, cunt—

#1223

She was seated at a desk,
giving a dramatic speech
(pronounced with acidic
bitterness), glaring at me,
I was punching a telephone,
trying to reach Dominique,
who had given me a phony
number, while two young,
androgynous sprites made
love in a chair, Leonard
joined my committee—

she was seated at a desk,
her voice rose to a pitch I
couldn’t tolerate, but also
it brought me to the verge
of orgasm, because she was
sucking myself out of me,
doing it psychically, when
I woke up, she was updating
her Face about lost sleep—

#1168


The essential philosophical question
 is incredibly stupid—
why is it that things happen? You can
 ask a thousand times,
it won’t matter— nothing does, except
 these things that
keep happening, “around” philosophy.

#1510

Sky of mud, what we
have placed in you is
much more rank than
any rapist ever put in
prone woman— like
a race of rapists, we
have prowled earth in
search of womb-like
comforts, sent vapors
into ether just to get
someplace sans loss
of time, expense; for
us, no defense, death—
as rapists, caged, gored.

New Apps

2009-09-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

#1543

What could be more crass
than a round-trip ticket to
Los Angeles? Nothing but
beds of starlets, flawless in
perfect color harmony but
vomit stains in the toilet, I
don’t know what could be
more crass, in fact I don’t
know anything anymore, I
think the sky is marvelous.

#1134

It is by dint of great labor
that lines heap up on one
another (enjambed or not),

it is by dint of great labor
that they take on the cast,
die, substance that sticks,

it is by dint of great labor
that poets must forget this,
because to stick means not

to stick, it means to loosen
perpetually out of grooves,
let things topple into place,

let shapes manifest slowly,
let life meander, be rolling—

#1145


The Tower of Verse
is a Babel, no one pays
their rent, many leap
from windows to sure
death, many leave, yet
there is a strange sense
of satisfaction given to
those who stay, and it
is merely this—
 clean windows
 allow us to see
 wisps of smoke,
 (grey, red, turbid)
 rise from ashes—

#1103

As a child, I
reached up,
towards my
Mother; as

a man, as I
reach, I am
deep down
in earth, or

I reach out
to find air,
nothing to
mother me,

emptiness,
soot & ash.

Bob's Chicago, Sous Rature, Oranges and Sardines

2009-09-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

Bob Archambeau has written a thought-provoking precis of the Chicago scene on his blog. He name-checks me and my own formulation regarding the Windy City's place in the current trans-American firmament. I call the Chicago group the Chicago Eliotics: they meld formal rigor, grace, and technical invention in a way that (for me) evokes T.S. himself.

I have a poem entitled Zero to One: A Probability Field in the current issue of Sous Rature. It is an old poem, dating back to the spring of 2005, the semester I studied with Anne Waldman. Thanks to Cara Benson for publishing it.

Also, several self-portraits in the new issue of Oranges and Sardines. Thanks, as always, to Didi Menendez.

Death Paintings by Dario Argento

2009-09-05T17:35:00.000-07:00

What would happen if Bonnard decided to paint the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The result might be something like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, a cult classic dating from the mid 1970s. The average horror movie has, as its foundation, two elements: death and the revelation of secrets. Suspiria expands upon this to include two other key elements: space and color. Ultimately, it is Argento’s use of space and color that lifts Suspiria out of the realm of the banal and into the realm of art. The most stunning cinematographic moments in the movie seem to revolve around corpses and death scenes; Argento crafts gorgeous “death paintings” from gore, blood, and lurid lighting. He also repeatedly evokes Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. In short, this movie is a visual feast, and almost every shot has a painterly quality. So much so, actually, that (for me at least) it’s a little hard to take in all at once. The only criticism I have of this gem is that it sags in the middle. But it would be pretty hard to beat either the first or the last fifteen minutes for pure ambience, gorgeousness, tension, and death painting ecstasy.

John Carpenter's The Thing

2009-09-01T17:00:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure why I seem to be going through a horror movie fetish. Is it the horror of dealing with insurance companies? Is horror built into the Zeitgeist of 2009? And will someone please tell me where good horror poetry is being written (besides Philadelphia)? In any case, John Carpenter's The Thing is a classic of the genre. Kurt Russell gives a riveting performance as MacReady, a true hero in a genre that produces few true heroes (unless you want to valorize Jason Vorhees). The story involves courage, reserve, and deep strength; it transcends some of the movie's garish special effects. What I am trying to do now, in the Apps and in the autobiographical books, is to write poems (short and long) that deliver the same frisson. Why can't our poems be more like movies? In 2009, I think it is a question worth looking into.

Rob Ager: Collative Learning

2009-08-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

Rob Ager is a Liverpudlian film critic. His website is called Collative Learning. Though some of the movie-related texts on the site seem far-fetched and crack-pot, I recommend the videos: they are cogent, well-organized, and intriguing.

The Other In All This

2009-08-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

What is preservation and where does it come from? I have given a good deal of thought to this, and a seemingly simply question has (in my judgment) a complex answer. Preservation is essentially a social phenomenon. It happens through a social nexus and a social context— through an Other, or (usually) many Others. Put simply, preservation is the result of people wanting to preserve your work. What motivates this process? Why do certain poets inspire this dedication while others do not? It depends what we may find at the root of dedication (to a poet or to any artist.) The question arises (and it is an uneasy one) whether dedication is more emotional or intellectual, more about feelings or thoughts, or whether it is caught somewhere in between. My own sense is that this kind of (internal, psychological) scaffolding is more affective than intellectual. It is a compelling emotional drive. That is why poetry that demonstrates little affect would seem to have meager chance for continued life over a long period of time— decades, centuries. Why would anyone want to preserve you, if you have no emotional gravitas? Who's going to develop an affective drive to resuscitate you? Of course, there is no affectivity in Kant either. But philosophy engenders a very different horizon of expectations— cognitive complexity is a sine qua non, and affective flatness is desirable. There are moving passages in Kierkegaard, Buber, Sartre, but they usually result from rhetorical flourishes, rather than demonstrated passion (though these two sometimes merge, and it can be hard to tell the difference.) Poetry that is all intellect falls between two stools— it lacks the intellectual rigor of philosophical discourse, and the emotional gravitas that usually attends durable poetry. I think that most poetry which survives for any length of time generates an implicit affective compact between reader and poet (or, to be more deconstructive, reader and text). Those that preserve poetry do so because someone has engendered an emotional attachment in them. Even if, as in Eliot, we are made to feel something because the emotions portrayed are entropic.

When looked at objectively, it seems that it may really only take one person (who acts as a foundation) to effectively preserve the work of a poet. It must be one person working in concert with others, but one is enough. It was Mary Shelley that put Percy’s work in a cohesive form after he died and presented it to the world. She was the best editor he ever had, and his posthumous fame would not have been guaranteed without her intervention. It is also worth noting that this process was facilitated because Mary Shelley was already, herself, a publishing author. Shelley put himself into good hands, and it wound up sealing his reputation. Blake lived his entire life in absolute obscurity— gradually, a coterie began to grow around him as he neared his death. Over a period of 80 years, this coterie developed and Blake’s fame was consolidated. It can also work in reverse— poets like Bob Southey have degenerated from laureates into nonetities. It points out what has always been an Achilles’ heel of the poetry world— a lack of criticism, engendering a “no quality control” situation. Other art forms are mediated by critical interventions— the vast majority of poetry critics (myself included) are poets, and this makes objective analysis (in its “pure” forms) difficult to come by. So, we get an unregulated system that feeds on flim-flam and mediocrity. Garbage gets taken for gold and vice versa. The experimental side of things is not exempt from this syndrome, but I do not wish to belabor the point. To bring it all roundabout, it seems to me that direct (albeit textual) transmission of affect is what (more often than not) creates the dedication that kindles resurrections.

Can poets deliberately cultivate Others? Lord knows, it happens all the time: poets get disciples. The problem that I have noticed is that many disciples are more lured by prestige than by any burning dedication. They like the auratic presence of the successful artist, more than they are dedicated to the works of art. Certain poets, like Eliot, have become victims of their disciples. Many of the Baby Boomers that currently dominate the poetry landscape were educated in the Sixties, when the New Critics ran the academies. The New Critics, a sect of homogenous, often racist and misogynistic formalists, created tremendous resentment among their liberal students, some of whom became poets. Their valorization of Eliot created a kind of metonymic distaste for Eliot that has remained widespread in experimental circles to this day. Oddly, some seem to let Pound off the hook while Eliot (who was arch-conservative but not an out-and-out Fascist) takes it in the face. It is guilt by association. However, I have had the same feeling about Eliot from the beginning— he is durable enough that resuscitation is inevitable. He saw his work as, on some level, an escape from emotion, but atrophied emotions, when represented precisely, still have a substantial impact, and are symptomatic of the historical nexuses of high Modernism— World Wars, fractured consciousness, rejection of commerciality, separation from dominant cultural norms. When all is said and done, I must revert to something I said in the first piece of this series— that there are no guarantees for any of us. I maintain my belief in the preponderance of loners and risk-takers.

Poetry and Preservation

2009-08-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

By a process of mirroring, national discussions of Health Care and insurance have got me thinking about insurance, where the arts are concerned. If you are lucky, you can obtain an insurance plan to ensure that you get adequate medical coverage with reasonable co-pays. With the arts, it is a very different story. We all have ways of insuring ourselves, but most of them will be for naught. What most of us want is to be preserved. We want to have the peace of mind that comes with knowing our work is not evanescent. There is one major problem: there is a large amount of work being preserved through different channels and in different ways, and most of it will prove to be as evanescent as we would like it not to be. Anything that seems secure is not; any seeming solidity is illusory. The more I think about this, the more I become furious from perception. Why dedicate our life to an art which promises no long-term recompense? What is the point squabbling over petty distinctions when most of them will be prescribed moot by “posterity’s brisk way with manuscripts”? It seems to me that I am lost in a milieu that has a tendency towards faddishness and present-mindedness. The essentials, the fundamentals, what one might call the roots of our collective psychology are left more-or-less unexplored. There are 4,200 college libraries in America. Think of all the forgotten books sitting on those shelves: dead matter, inert matter. Yet every author of every book in every one of those 4,200 libraries thought that their work meant something. They were all published, preserved, and still the vast majority of those books are useless rubbish.

This issue makes me think, too, of all the channels of preservation currently operative. The most obvious channel, and the most conservative, is via college library. To a large extent, whether this happens or not depends on who publishes you. If you publish with a big press, especially a University press, you can expect “heavy library coverage.” If you publish a lot with small presses, you can forget it. There is a certain amount of work you can do for yourself, but I do not know anyone that has the time and energy to call 500 libraries to try and pique interest in carrying their books. I certainly do not. Then there are print journals, especially big mainstream ones like APR and Poetry, that widely circulate in libraries, but just being in these journals is not very efficacious in piquing any kind of continued interest. Then, we have the bold, the beautiful, the newfangled: Net preservation. For some reason, non-U.S. online journals are having better luck getting archived than U.S. online journals. There is Jacket, and smaller journals like Australia’s Cordite and UK journals Great Works, Nth Position, The Argotist. Being published in these places is quite as efficacious as being put in a library, which is to say, not particularly efficacious but better than nothing, where preservation is concerned. In the US we have Pennsound, operating out of my alma mater and a wonderful resource, well-funded and potentially as permanent as any other channel. What about blogs? Where blogs are concerned, most of us are really flying blind, so that it is an act of courage to maintain a substantial blog. It makes me think to allegorize the particulars of American poetry history: that independent-minded loners like Whitman and Dickinson overcame establishment folk like Whittier and Longfellow by taking risks and doing things their way. And were rewarded the way poets are usually rewarded for their pains: posthumously.

Flarf Time

2009-08-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

Nada Gordon posted a rebuttal to my comments about flarf here yesterday. I thought it would be useful to respond point by point. Have I engaged in a "prolonged investigation" of flarf? If I thought that flarf merited a prolonged investigation, I would give it one. I have not. No excuses. Nada says that flarf, for her, is "about kicks." Then why bother to spend 1000 words defending it? Why get defensive at the slightest insinuation that flarf is aesthetically insubstantial? As I told Nada in Brooklyn, the whole "I do it for kicks" stance feels like a cop-out to me, so that larger issues can be comfortably avoided. Not that we all need to be so self-serious that we pant and heave over every word, but that wanting to have it both ways (it is serious/ it is a joke) and choosing whichever response happens to be contextually convenient is very slight of hand and the art-equivalent of a card trick. Nada also likes to pat herself on the back for her points that are "even more cogent" than mine; it is wiser to let your readers decide that unless (as seems to be the case) you are merely preaching to the converted. What takes more guts: to be a lone voice speaking against a group or to be in a group whacking each other off, as seems to be the case with these flarf folks? Where the debates about canonicity are concerned, obviously I know that the idea of a central, patriarchal, homogenous canon are considered passe. It is nevertheless my hunch that, even if in fifty years there are a plethora of "mini-canons" (because whether we like it or not, the processes of canon-formation will continue, whenever something poetic is preserved), pride of place will still go to poems and poets that people find memorable. This is obvious stuff, but immersion in theory and ego can make poets dense. Again, Nada includes a condescending gesture in the direction of one William Snodgrass, hinting that his inferiority is manifest and the preservation of his name is a testament to the arbitrary nature of canon formation. But, like it or not, canon formation is not arbitrary, and if there were not a significant number of people who admire Snodgrass, his name would not be preserved. Besides, as I said to Nada in Brooklyn, what would Snodgrass think of you?

Nada makes a useless distinction, I think when she accuses me of naivete for my use of the word "generations." Canons form, she says, betweem two poles: groups who make canons, and individuals who ferret out what has been lost. This happens, specifically, on a generational level. Different generations have different reasons for embracing different poets and different types of poetry. Whether it is a function of groups or individuals, someone is going to decide the fate of our work, and it is not us. That is all I meant to say. And it could take me ten entries to answer what I feel is the most glaring error in Nada's post: "which of the high modernist poems are terribly memorable, beyond the first line or so?" As much as it is a temptation to reel off a list of poems, all I will say is that I would feel hard-pressed to find more memorable poems than early Eliot, especially. It is like criticizing Romantic poetry for not being imaginative enough, or Beat poetry for being too tame. I do not think that it is the GESTURES of these texts that we remember; it is the texts themselves, the way they made sense of a new century, its ruptures, fissures, and discontinuities. GESTURE has to do with CONCEPT, and CONCEPT has been dominating visual arts for far longer than flarf has been around, so that art critics lament how BORING much conceptual work is, and I agree with them. But poetry usually brings up the rear, where the arts are concerned, and so here we are reacting to something old like it is new (while other artists, if they notice us at all, laugh at us). It is also odd that Nada says that she remembers Language texts because she reads them over and over again, not because they are memorable. Why would anyone read something that has no taste, distinctiveness, or personality over and over again at all? I refuse to entertain the notion that good art does not need to be memorable. Period.

I do, in fact, think that poetry has and will continue to develop a "real history." Nada makes the mistake of thinking that by "real" I mean "unitary," and I do not. As with canons and canonicity, authenticity does not negate diversity. There are many histories being written as we speak, including this one. It is simply my feeling that the most durable forms of poetry history will be written around memorable poems that have continued and continuing human interest. It is hard not to make the same art-moves, because forms change, but content does not change that much. Should Keats not have written his Odes because Horace had already written Odes? This is art: inevitably, it will come down to people's opinions. Nick Piombino thinks that I am jealous. I am not. All this came about simply because I read with Nada Gordon and she sat down next to me and we had a conversation. It happens to be my opinion that flarf is flaky. Nada says she is doing it because she likes doing it. Yet she also goes to great lengths to defend it. I stand by my original formulation: it is not for either of us decide what matters and what does not matter. Nada wants to have it both ways: for flarf to matter and not matter at the same time. Whether we like it or not, we are both writing for ourselves and strangers: the strangers decide who is worthy. If Nada could not care less about enduring impact, that is her business. She can be as obsolescent as she wants, and get her kicks. But I would not be surprised if secretly she cares just as much as I do whether her work will last, and her whole stance is a pose. Are the flarf people poseurs? I think you could make a valid argument that they are. We really do not care what we are doing, it is just for fun. In the end, it does not concern me much. I have my own work to do. But it is worth clarifying in public something that I started, so that my position is clear.

On Shelley's Birthday

2009-08-04T05:52:00.001-07:00

Today is Percy Bysshe Shelley's birthday. It seems somewhat appropriate that it is also Barack Obama's. Though a direct comparison between these two men seems a bit of a stretch, there are certain characteristics shared between them. Both Shelley and Obama offer visions of change, of a world refurbished by liberal sentiment, ethos and praxis. With Shelley, the liberal impulse was etherealized, put into delicate poems that referenced Greek mythology and decried the political waste and laissez faire brutality of the Industrial Revolution in England. Obama is an American president, who is attempting to transform the political landscape to conform to a vision of a more equitable America. Jerome McGann saw in Shelley an ideology of hope, that many of his greatest poems were displaced out of present moments into a golden, shining future which was inaccessible to Shelley. An ideology of hope is exactly what delivered Obama the presidency, though the current brass tacks reality demonstrates in no uncertain terms how incommensurate the ideology is with actually moving American political machinery. Just as Shelley felt a keen, stinging sense of isolation, I am beginning to see Obama, also, as an isolated figure. Health insurance and health care is where this seems to be manifested most strikingly. We are, supposedly, the land of the free and the home of the brave, but there is no freedom without health and 50 million people (the population of Philly times 50) remain uninsured. In all the debates, amidst all the rancor, am I the only that has noticed that no one seems to care about the 50 million uninsured people? Everyone is defending their narrow interests, and Obama is left (alone) carrying the 50 million on his back. It is pathetic and disillusioning to watch, especially when you consider how hard Republicans are fighting not to make any real health care reforms and how many of the 50 million happen to be their constituents.

What long-term visions are haunting the poetic unconscious in 2009? This weekend, I was in New York to do a reading in Brooklyn, and I got my first chance to talk in depth to a member of the Flarf Collective. It was a stimulating conversation, but my opinion remains unchanged- I do not think flarf makes for the creation of memorable poems, and I fail to see how it adds to the Duchamp paradigm (of the "ready-made") that was put into place one-hundred years ago. The problem with adopting this stance (as I found out, in the course of this conversation) was that it leads straight into a New Critical abyss. So I will admit that opposing flarf is potentially as risky as supporting it. How retrograde is it to want to produce things that will last? Most manifestations of a post-modern sensibility encourage a sense of ephemerality, transience, "positive obsolescence." Post-modernists often tend to adopt the opinion that any other mode of perception is backwards. But, whether or not this puts me back in the New Critical era theoretically, I really do care if what I write will last. So I cannot find much to admire in flarf, other than the fact that it is relatively new and many people are starting to take notice of it. I will say that nothing is going to turn me into a novelty freak, because this kind of trend-hopping is anathema to the very slow development of real poetry history. It is sad but certain- most real changes in poetry are only visible in retrospect.

I am left with the feeling that there are certain advantages to a non-theoretical approach to poetry- what you might call the just do it ethos. If you write without using theoretical apparatuses to find your bearing, you can write as a mode of "play" and thus find a natural joy in what you are doing again. Healthy spontaneity may result. It also means that you can follow affect wherever it leads, without restraining yourself based on a conceptual standard or letting a computer do your work for you. When emotion becomes stylized, it turns hokey. No one is going to have a problem with raw emotion, if it is presented with savvy and taste. We must wrestle, at some point, with the notion of the trans-historical, where people and poetry are concerned. New Historians believe that subjectivity is unstable, and that very little is trans-historical. However, if literally nothing were trans-historical, there would be no reason to read Shelley anymore, and there are valid reasons to read Shelley. It is not merely his emotion that remains compelling, it is the emotions produced by the textual enactments of his ideology. In other words, how his politics made him feel. This is a key that is important to us, if we want to document 2009 effectively, and it is something that flarf cannot do: to take an honest look at our consciousness, make conscious the ideologies that determine our thoughts and actions, and see what affect lies within this process. This is complex terrain. It also makes our activity a useful adjunct to what Barack Obama is doing; we are giving voice in art to the impulses he is enacting as a political figurehead. We participate with him in trying to change national consciousness. We can do our little part to make America more cohesive, and in so doing we create templates that will bear fruit in years to come.

Jacket 37: Eight Pages on When You Bit...

2009-07-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

You can read an eight-page review of my book When You Bit, written by UK poet Jeffrey Side, in Jacket 37 here.

Many thanks, Jeff.

Larissa Shmailo: In Paran

2009-07-08T05:24:00.000-07:00

Over the last month, I have spent a good deal of time with Larissa Shmailo's In Paran, released by Blazevox this year. I have had a hard time coming up with a workable angle, although I like the book very much. Shmailo incorporates elements of many different strains and styles, but I think the overriding characteristic of the book is its affirmative tone. This does not preclude a tragic element, but the book wraps its tragedies in a gauze of playfulness and whimsy. There are many poems in the book that, if one were being uncharitable, one could call cute; it would be more charitable (and more accurate, as far as I am concerned) to call them charming. Shmailo's extensive use of rhyme and anaphora tie the book in to what is commonly known as spoken word poetry; but this is spoken word with chops, from a poet who has clearly done her homework. Much of the book addresses real-world themes directly- love, aging, poverty, an engagement with different mythologies (often with a sense of them being debunked.) The book is enjoyable for a variety of reasons, but there is a fundamental pleasure that Shmailo takes in language that is impossible to hide and impossible not to be seduced by. Language is found to be redemptive, a means by which the poet can transcend the bounds of material reality. There is not a sense of futility at work, but of triumph. Writing these poems seems to have been palliative for Shmailo, and the joy of a kind of release shines through every line. Because she has the chops to make them stick, the poems not only convey this sense of release but allow us to share it. The book, as a whole, is cathartic, and takes us on a journey where pain is acknowledged but pleasure is never forgotten.

The first poem in the book, Personal, is characteristic:

I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

Tell me

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

which villanelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you'll bite from
which hither you'll welcome

what
makes
me

forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

What I especially like about this poem is the way that edges of maturity show up to redeem what would otherwise be child-like. There is a dark subtext in lines like "unlearn all the learning" and "ignore the guilt-ridden" that let us know in no uncertain terms that this is a voice of experience. Yet all the gravitas is balanced by a kind of delight in rhyme and anaphora, which gives an unmistakable impression of the upbeat. This is the rare kind of poem that can be equally good read on a page and spoken aloud. Shmailo has just the right blend of savvy and smarts to create something accessible enough to work this way. Shmailo's mastery is not the kind that comes easily, and in fact this is a deceptively simple poem. It would be easy to say that the atmosphere of the thing is rather cliched, until you look at the anaphoric bits and realize that not one cliche is included. All the "ions" and "neural nets" are not there by accident; they are the work of an excellent craftsman who knows how to construct something interesting that yet breezes by as naturally and easily as you please. In fact, this is a poem that on a certain level encourages us to take it for granted. You can breeze through it without noticing all the intriguing bits, but it takes time and effort to fully appreciate the care that went into its construction. It cannot be anything but the product of many years of hard work. In poetry, as in everything else, making it look easy is a very difficult trick to pull off. Shmailo does it here. An even more bravura demonstration of this complexity-that-seems-simple is in The No-Net World:

Deep in your heart, you always believed
There was a barrier, a secret shield
Keeping you safe from the street
Secretly, you knew
Your good shoes and your warm lined gloves
Kept you apart, and safe
From the man with the cup in his hand
And the boy with the cardboard sign
And the woman with the bloated legs
And the girl with the begging eyes
From the weathered madwoman railing at God
And the shadows at the ashcan fires
From the need to ask, no choices left:
Mister, can you please...?

What did you, from the cushioned world
Of buffers, alternatives, other ways to turn
Of loans from family friends
Of credit cards and healthy children
Of grocers who smiled because they knew how well you ate:
What did you have in common with the concrete world of need?
Secretly, you knew, so surely you believed
You could never fall so low

Welcome to the no-net world.

Then I got fired one day
I got fired one day
Lost my job and then my house
I got fired one day.

Now your debts mount up like garbage and a layoff's coming soon
And you have to see a doctor and insurance just pays half
And your folks who lent you money just can't help you anymore
And the loans are coming due; still, the force field is there,
In the lining of the gloves, in the good if now used shoes
You will never stand like that goddamned bum
Holding the door at the bank
Too tired to whore or steal
Saying, Please ma'am, please ma'am, please...

Then I got HIV
I got HIV
They found out
I lost my kids
I got HIV

You would never see
Hunger on the face of your child
When she came home from school there would always be
Apples and rice and chicken and beans
Milk and carrots and peas
Now there's two days left till payday and just one last can of corn
And she's home, laughing hungry, hi, I'm home, ma, what's for lunch?

Welcome to the no-net world

Are you hungry? Good:
Ready, set, line-up, let's go:
You can get on line on Monday for the lunch meal that's on Tuesday
and the shelter line's for Thursday but you have to sign up Monday
But you stayed there just last Wednesday so you can't come back till Friday.

And the Food Stamps place is downtown
And the welfare place is uptown
And the Medicaid is westside
And the hospital is eastside
No I can't give you a token
No I can't give you a token
No I can't give you a token
Don't you know you'll only drink?

Hell, yes.

Like a child praying to god
You believed in forever
You thought home and hearth were,
Not for everyone of course,
But surely for you:

Only in the nightmares
Rare unremembered dreams
Did you stand by the door of the bank
Saying
Yes ma'am, God bless you ma'am
Please.

Don't get sick.
Don't let anyone you love get sick.
Don't be mentally ill.
Don't lose your job.
Don't be without money for a second.
Don't make any mistakes.

Welcome to the no-net world.

The essence of this poem to me is how it is simultaneously very now and also very universal. We are in the middle of a Depression in America, and the reality that Shmailo paints, while not pretty, is accurate for a large number of people. There are few things less humane I can think of than the way America deals with its sick and impoverished. Millions of people run around without health insurance, and to live in this day and age without health insurance is very much a no net existence. So I can comfortably call this an American Depression poem, circa 2009. The refrains and repetitions give the poem a jazzy edge, that lightens things up significantly, and reminds me of Auden's Refugee Blues. Yet the poem seems too earnest as a whole for me to call it post-avant. I do not consider this, however, to be a problem, as the earnest quality of the poem makes it more engaging and (let's face it) we don't want creepy all the time. This poem has many things about it that align it, not only with spoken word poetry but with all forms and manners of oral poetry, going back to Whitman and through the Beats, and in fact Shmailo has recorded this. It is incantatory in the best sense of the word, a poem that could knock an audience dead at a reading. Maybe this is because, unlike many spoken word artists, Shmailo sneaks sophistication in the back door- there is an edge here of self-consciousness, a "you" speaking to "you," implying a continuing interior monologue. The "I" is not a typical lyric "I" either, but a generalized I meant to signify characters in the poem, is if this were a kind of Greek chorus. All in all, as with Personal, this is a complex construct that seems simple. It may wind up being one of the signature poems of our era, and I feel that it deserves to be.

Brooklyn Copeland: Longing/Belonging

2009-07-05T04:18:00.000-07:00

The best way to extend the terms of the discourse is to apply them to new works of poets who fit under the post-avant rubric, as they arise. I was thrilled to receive in the mail Longing/Belonging, the new chap from Brooklyn Copeland. It is a collection of ten brief poems that seem to focus on the natural world as a metaphor for a troubled marriage. The edges we see in this collection are what could be called natural edges. A natural edge could be a number of different things, but in this collection natural edges manifest in three ways: as something broken or fractured in nature; as some kind of remnant of life/death processes; or as anything odd or disfigured. Natural edges function here to represent a failed or failing relationship; as a way of expressing frustrated sexuality indirectly; and as a reflection of internal/cognitive discord. A look at some of the particular poems will help to elucidate what I am talking about, where natural edges are concerned. This is the seventh fragment in the piece:

A robin's egg, shocking
blue. Inside, the yoke is green
as snot. The egg did not
fall: it was pushed
from the eaves. Husband,
a nest is no
mere rustic thesis
to nail above
our apartment door.

The exquisite delicacy of these lines is reinforced by assonances and rhymes: robin's/shocking, not/snot, eaves/thesis. The yoke of the egg being likened to snot is, indeed, "shocking," and what gives the fragment its peculiar edge. Once the edge is in place, the dissonance of the situation (and the dissonant affect behind it) becomes clear. Eggs are a symbol of fertility; here, we see a cracked egg. There are overtones of waste and the squandering of natural resources, that seem to have a personal resonance. The "nest" functions on a dual level; it is something seen outwardly by the protagonist, and also something referred to indirectly, in a suggestive way. Whatever the protagonist is living through, it seems that the comfort and safety of a nest is inaccessible to her, something that either her husband is not providing or that she herself is unable to create. This usage of eggs is a prime example of what Eliot calls an objective correlative, a concrete symbol that embodies an inward reality. What is surprising (as always) in Copeland is how deftly she manages to present her objective correlatives, how seamlessly interwoven they are in her constructs. Yet Longing/Belonging is quite laconic, and this is how it ends:

You aren't discouraged by how little
I have to say? Be furious,
instead. Be the winter
sun, the unlit white
flare. My heart's not where
I feel this little
towards you, for you've
shattered me back years.

The final three lines take us to a rather different locale, as we see the protagonist "a happy trauma shivering/ down Peru Street/ on my banana seat." Though this is not overtly stated, it seems like the happiness of the trauma has to do with the protagonist's ability to express herself. Notice that the Other never finds a voice; Copeland either silences him or does not deign to repeat the things he says. In Mary Walker Graham, this has to do with solipsism and self-contained sexuality; there is an element of that here, but there is more affective vulnerability at work with Copeland, a sense that a maintained silence is a way of keeping control (perhaps on/for both sides of the relationship equation.) In any case, the poet's sense of Longing/Belonging has much to do with finding ways to represent the reality of longing and the perceived inability to feel a sense of belonging in marriage. There is a bravery at work here, the courage to tell a certain kind of truth, not only with raw data but with imaginative imagery. "Be the winter sun" sounds less like a threat and more like a sort of resigned encouragement, the protagonist's way of being generous with someone who is not being generous back. The poems ends with a "shattered" protagonist "shivering," but awash in liberation. It is the achievement of Copeland's chap that she shows us this deliverance into liberation happening in so many palpable, "naturally edgy" ways.

Sex and Terror

2009-07-03T05:10:00.000-07:00

I do not necessarily know why we are seeing an outbreak of writing that reflects sex and terror, but that it fits under the rubric I have created seems beyond question. The poems I would like to feature today belong to Boston's Mary Walker Graham. Graham's poems adopt the stance that the protagonist seems either to be a sort of victim, or in the process of self-castigation. Graham veers towards the straight Confessional, but always with an added dimension and depth that places her (to my eyes) squarely within the confines of post-avant. The following is a prose poem, it is entitled A Pit, A Broken Jaw, A Fever:

When I say pit, I'm thinking of a peach's. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings- the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern- an ocean's inside us- a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the flourescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I'll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can't touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever.

This poem practically oozes creepiness. Among the aspects I find most notable: the way that Graham's protagonist self-infantilizes (regarding herself not as a woman but as a "girl"), the imagery that conflates the sexual with the horrific (Vaseline butting against a decapitated head, broken jaws, fevers), and the intimation that what is at the heart of this confrontation is some sort of compulsive relationship. Yet the poem intrigues because, despite its intimations, it never abandons the first person singular. Whomever the "you" happens to be, we never see them, they are never addressed, and the poem contains no "Other." There is solipsism at work, that cuts the implied "you" down to size; the narrator may be involved in an unhealthy relationship, but the primary feeling we get is one of self-loathing and self-disgust. The generalized phrases that are addressed to men serve to illustrate the narrator's alienation from whatever specific man is involved in the situation. There is also an unlikely quality to Graham's metaphors: what exactly could "balloon" imply, in this context? How can it be connected to the "peach" that Graham puts it up against? At one point, Graham creates a metaphoric chain, all meant to represent the same thing: dark peach, night cavern, ocean, balloon. The most obvious interpretation is that the metaphor is meant to signify the female sexual organ. However, the metaphoric chain is distorted, disturbing, and weird. It would seem incongruous that all these signifiers could be referring to the same thing. You have to stretch to allow the metaphoric chain to work, just as Graham stretches to convey what she wants to convey, which is equally brutal and surreal. The following poem, Double, has roughly the same feel:

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away...

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that this poem places itself in a realm on infantile sexuality. Yet that it is written from an adult perspective gives it a kind of double edge. If there is terror here, it is terror of the protagonist's own sexual power. The pleasure for the reader is in trying to understand the different levels of self-evaluation that are going on, and how they tie in to the narrator's sense of herself. As in A Pit, there is a level of sexual solipsism going on that becomes a maze, in and of itself. There is also a level on which the poem exteriorizes its own discomfort through the use of "gross" imagery: box(es) of fish, blades, surgeons. What is the nature of the operation? What necessitates it? The poem is given added depth because it is presented in the second person: not "I" but "you." It takes on the quality of a narrator talking to herself about herself, and makes the poem an exercise in self-consciousness, more so than the first one. I find this compelling because it picks up the tone of Confessional poetry but puts it through a new kind of light filter. What Graham sees as "Double" could be a split between her body and her mind, or between her sexuality and her intellect, or even between herself and an Other. Whatever it is, it has left her in pieces, and the poem seems to be an attempt to put herself back together again. Both of these poems present a consistent persona: a polymorphously perverse girl-woman lost in the never-land of her own body. It would be difficult to get more edgy than that.

Todd Swift: Cafe Alibi

2009-06-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

Todd Swift's Cafe Alibi, released in 2002, makes an almost uncanny fit with the post-avant discourse I have been developing. Swift is a Canadian poet who resides in London. He is important to bring in, for more than one reason. If I am not careful, people will mistake post-avant for an American movement, something indigenous to this country. That, I can say with some authority, it is not. There are many non-American poets mining territory that can rightfully be called post-avant, among them Chris McCabe, David Prater, and Andrew Duncan. Duncan might be called the elder statesman of this group; like John Tranter, Duncan has been pursuing an agenda that is perpetually edgy for quite some time. But all these poets, including Swift, are far too good to be brought in only for being non-American. Cafe Alibi is a book frightening and shocking enough to be in contention (along with Aaron Belz's Bird Hoverer) for a place as the greatest single demonstration of edge that fits into the discourse. Much of the edge in Swift's book has to do with sex- a sense of forbidden fruit that has in it willful perversity and fatalistic dread. Swift's work (here and elsewhere) tends to be formally immaculate; while not a formalist as such, it is clear that Swift takes pleasure in meter and other manifestations of formal discipline. So this is the edgy formalism I have talked about, with a vengeance. The tightness of Swift's constructs adds intensity, rather than taking it away, and adds a claustrophobic ambience that gives the poems their peculiar creepiness. Swift holds a mirror up to poetry's past and shows the moral decay and degeneracy that has crept into our lives, and form aids him in conveying this. Without form, the poems would lose their concentrated energy, become diffuse, and creepiness dissipate into banality.

One of the most remarkable (and remarkably creepy) poems in Cafe Alibi demonstrates this perfectly. It is called After School, and a tinge of Nabokov is quite apparent:

She bends at the foolproof coil,
her bicycle locked around STOP,
handles curved down, a ram's horns
butting clear space, left out alone
to notice, but not take. I learn

her routine by rote, can recite
times and places: when she is late,
or safe at home. All this the result
of her orange reflector, visible
in the failing light. It has become

my signal, floating like a firefly
in confusion on a country lane.
Its property to warn is better known
than how it will also attract.
Time to follow my girl again.

No line in this poem contains more than ten syllables, and most stay in the 7-10 syllable range. This creates an interesting discrepancy between a narrator who seems to be out of control and a poem that is super-controlled, both syntactically and metrically. The overall feeling is of something being hidden, something subterranean that is not being acknowledged. It reminds me of Van Morrison's Cyprus Avenue from Astral Weeks. Van's protagonist is drunk, exultant; Swift's protagonist is sly, superficially calm. Neither shows any remorse, but Swift's seems to be more deadly; in Cyprus Avenue, the protagonist is watching a young girl from inside his car. He does not follow her anywhere. Swift's narrator is preparing to actively stalk his girl, to invade her space without her knowing it. The first detail of Swift's poem, that the girl is "bending," has clear and potent sexual overtones. The last line of the poem asserts possession; this is not merely "a girl", it is "my girl." Edges could not be more prominent; the affect that is hidden shows up sideways, and the narrator's unrepentant degeneracy demands a reaction. Unlike the vast majority of poems, we are not (I assume) meant to identify with the protagonist; he confronts us, we react. This is the edge of the transgressive, and it forces us to look at the transgressive edge we all carry around somewhere. As such, because it forces a confrontation in a blatant way, and because it does so in the context of a masterfully constructed poem (formally air-tight), I call this great. Formal perfection gives the poem solid roots; thematic daring makes the poem resolutely modern. The edges between these elements make the poem as tense as taut wire.

This poem, Couplets, also plays with transgression, but in a more ambiguous (and intriguing) way:

O, the salt, the terror, her skin: her vulva,
my tongue, our behavior.

This in a small room, second floor, of a
house where all looked well.

No marks where her fingers had been,
only a stealing gentleness,

that I cannot comprehend.
The regret, confusion, hatred, desire, is like

a bone that will not mend.
All beds are her bed, all lovers have her smell,

her curious girl's mischief.
This is the desert mouth- a slow going forward

that is simply not stopping,
for what that will bring. O, how I curled in her,

my penis embarrassed in
unwanted plenty, rich in all the wet, holding loss,

the soft tutorial of her vagina,
the arrest of her sweat, that scent which stains all

the bodies since. I live in two
minds on this: one sadly furious; the other depleted

endlessly, as if all memory
poured out of that moment, into nullity. Never

to be so close, no, never,
not in this skin-tight, careful, awkward, tender,

polar expedition to forgiving, longing for her.
How do we survive forever?

It is very noticeable that this poem is full of unanswered questions. We do not learn the basic story of the situation being alluded to- clearly what has happened is not "well," has "terror" in it (and not a little pity), involves what seems to be a boy and a "curious girl" having sex. Why this situation should be a horror story remains unclear. The poem forces us, as readers, to generate our own version of the story, and the edge here is in what is left out. Swift gets great mileage here out of raw language, the kinds of words that are found in poems only infrequently- penis, vagina, vulva. There is something almost clinical about the use of these words that is (again) quite creepy. In a sense, the protagonist's infatuation with the "curious girl" that has seduced him is even more Nabokov-ian than the situation presented in After School. This has not only forbidden fruit but an edge of longing in it, that adds dimension and depth that After School does not have. There is even a sense that something incestuous might be at work; not necessarily literal incest, but the co-mingling of two young lovers that are somehow related, in a way that makes their behavior transgressive. This takes us straight from Lolita to Ada or Ardor. But, it is worth noting that poetry (as usual) has been slow to catch up with the things Nabokov was doing fifty years ago. Not that Swift's poems do not feel contemporary- they do- but that poets should have begun writing these sorts of poems long before they have. A situation that is artificial (a story we have to piece together for ourselves), yet dripping (pun intended) with affect- this is multi-leveled attack at its best, and Belz is the only American poet I can think of mining similar territory. Post-avant, certainly, and I hope Todd will accept the classification, where this book is concerned.

Cafe Alibi is, in fact, brimming over with poems of this caliber. This is a book that puts sex at the center, as it should be with post-avant. As a species, our primary physical edge is sexual, so it stands to reason that an art based on edge should be rooted in overt sexuality, tinged with artifice, imagination, and affect. Art that tries to be sexy seldom works; what is sexy is what gets under our skin. That is why, to me, Cat Power will always be sexier than Madonna; her songs get under my skin, and stay there. I have never been touched by a Madonna song in my life, and sex is touch. Usually, sex-in-poetry gets corrupted by a Confessional approach that is too nose-on-the-face to get under anyone's skin. Post-avant will not accept the merely Confessional; better to sketch something suggestive, as Swift has, and let edges develop around it, rather than filling in all the blanks for us beforehand. Cafe Alibi is representative of a sensibility that has its roots in a polyglot approach to poetry- immersion in film, music, as well as verse. As such, it is as potent a representative of this discourse as anything I have touched on so far. Though Swift is a poet with great range, and he has other achievements, it is this book that (for me) epitomizes a sensibility that can lead poetry forward into a new era, and efface all the obvious tropes and approaches that have been done to death. It is also proof that I am not alone in pursuing a sensibility drenched in edge, and that poets the world over are finding themselves drawn to the same things.

Artaud and "Profound Anarchy"

2009-06-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

The spirit of profound anarchy...is at the root of all poetry.

Poetry is anarchic to the degree that it brings into play all the relationships of object to object and of form to signification. It is anarchic also to the degree that its occurrence is the consequence of a disorder that draws us closer to chaos.

To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make the language express what it does not ordinarily express: to make use of it in a new, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibility for producing physical shock; to divide and distribute it actively in space; to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as well as really to manifest something; to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast origins; and finally, to consider language as the form of INCANTATION.

It is readily visible here that some parts of Artaud's formulations fit post-avant better than others. How much in common does edge have with anarchy? Artaud does not give examples here of what would constitute a resolutely anarchic language. It would seem that, because post-avant (as I have formulated it) has a strong narrative sense, the kind of anarchy that Artaud is naming would be inadmissable. On the other hand, poems with edges can impart the feeling of anarchy, rather than the anarchic state itself. That is part of post-avant: creating affect out of semblances of anarchy and/or chaos. The irony, and it is one that Artaud does not address, is that to create this kind of affect takes tremendous formal discipline. You cannot waste any words, make any false or half-assed moves, put anything out that does not add to the effect. This, to me, is one of Artaud's Achilles' heels: he does not offer examples (at least where poetry is concerned), so that we are left to piece together and reconstruct our version of what Artaud is talking about. One thing that would be hard to argue with is that Artaud wants words to transmit a certain vision of reality, rather than any artifice or self-absorption.

This is what I referred to earlier: a certain way of making art through authenticity, which in this case means channeling and accessing the primeval chaos that lies beneath all language. Language serves something deeper, rather than being an end in itself. Where post-avant is concerned, this depth flows from a commitment to expressing every kind of edge that human beings experience: psychological (and Artaud happens to hate psychology, which is another stumbling block), emotional, metaphysical, sexual, and all the other ones. Physical shock, as Artaud describes it, is an apt description of what post-avant poetry should produce (in its ideal form, which many poets are still working towards.) Incantation, however, is problematic, in the sense that it aligns poetry with music, and language that merely "chimes," that is merely musical, can never suffice for post-avant. Although, who knows, perhaps someone will write a great anaphoric poem like Song of Myself (only part anaphoric, I know) in the post-avant mode, and show us how it can be accomplished. I do not see any reason why it could not happen. All it takes is a commitment to edge and to affixing it to poetry's long history; ambition, in other words. How ambitious is post-avant?

Here's another interesting Artaud bit:

We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of texts and WRITTEN poetry. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us, deadens our responses, and prevents us from making contact with that underlying power, call it thought-energy, the life force, the determinism of change, lunar menses, or anything you like. Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text.

Artaud wanted to get beyond language, and to do it through theater; poetry (of course) does not have the option of getting beyond language. Nonetheless, these are useful insights, because it shows what post-avant has in common with its parent movements: a hankering for something "deeper than language." It is also useful to think of post-avant as an irreverent movement, that acknowledges lineage without being willing to sacrifice any of its edges. Post-avant, and post-avant poets, should be polyglot. I want post-avant to be in that prized second category: a movement that succeeds via authenticity. I do not want to cast aspersions on other movements, but there is a potential for a new mode of humanism in post-avant, and the opportunity is too good to waste. We cannot be the ideal artists that Artaud would have wanted; we rely too much on what Artuad wants to get rid of. However, that Artaud associated affect, chaos, anarchy, and physical shock with his Theater of Cruelty is a good sign. There is genuine overlap. The idea that post-avant could manifest a Poetics of Cruelty is not too far-fetched. The point Artaud was trying to make is that what is cruel is what is real, and post-avant is trying to assert precisely the same point.

"Darkness is Brighter"

2009-06-26T05:48:00.000-07:00

It seems eerily appropriate to blog about this the day after Michael Jackson has died. There was certainly a sense of darkness around Jackson, although it had more to do (from what I have seen) with his life than with his art. But, looking back at the Thriller-era videos, it is astonishing just how outrageously talented Jackson was, and how much talent wound up being squandered. There is also, for me, the silver lining of a new understanding- I understand Beat It, for example, more thoroughly now, as a specifically L.A. song, written about L.A. teenagers who have to deal with gang war-fare. In any case, I am interested in writing something that is not part of the just-completed discourse, but can act as a sort of adjunct to it. Specifically, to explore the idea that lies beneath the entire discourse: that art that is primarily dark has a kind of superior power to art that takes a more positive or positivist stance. That, as the title of the post claims, where art is concerned, darkness is brighter. Thinkers since Aristotle have been dealing with this, but there are reasons to bring it up again in 2009. What do we want out of art right now? What about the Zeitgeist of this moment makes darkness brighter? I can only speak for me, but I have some very specific reasons to prefer darkness (and edge) to anything anodyne or comforting. This is especially pertinent to American poetry because so little of it is genuinely dark. What is dark about most of it is how lame it is, rather than how many genuinely rough edges are fitted in (think William Stafford and get back to me.) There is a kind of indirect darkness to over-used cliches and worn-out tropes, but it is the darkness of a perceived irony. The irony has to do with the fact that 2009 is a new time, unlike any other, and yet in most poet's heads it might as well be 1962. It is unfair to generalize, but specifically on the "Quietude" side of the fence, past-dwelling is rampant and unfortunate.

I do not believe that 2009 is characterized primarily by darkness; I do, however, believe that the newness of this moment is best reflected in dark-tinged work. Think how much time we spend on the Internet which, like everything else, has a dark and a light side. The dark edges of Net-life have to do with chasing phantoms, pursuing illusions, living in a self-created, Other-inhabited No Man's Land. Jim Morrison, in 1967, said that we are all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur, and the Net has magnified this one-hundred fold. The Net has turned us all (or most of us) into little stalkers. Art needs to reflect this phenomenon, because it is a phenomenon with spiritual overtones. Why are we so excessively concerned with other people? Why do we need to keep peeping at these bodies, these products of mind? Ultimately, art that looks at this side of Net-life will be more rewarding, more satisfyingly human, and much more dark than art that leans on the fun side of the Net. What, exactly, is dark? "Dark," where art is concerned, manifests as an unwillingness to sugar-coat hard realities, a willingness to leave in rough edges, and an emphasis on elements of human nature that are compulsive, destructive, and helpless. We need this now because all these elements have been given a radically new context. When I left home for the first time, in 1994, no one had a cell phone, not everyone had a computer, and the Net was something left of center. Think how much cell-phones alone have changed the way we live. Voyeurism is also aided and abetted by cell-phones: now, we can reach anyone, anywhere, at any time. Texts and cell-phones are both intrusive and, I might, effective contraceptives as well (pardon my archness.) Cell-phones have made intimacy more fragile; delicate moods get cut into, tenderness is easily thwarted, all because of a device that is supposed to make things convenient.

So, if you are developing intimacy with someone, better hope the cell-phone does not ring. This seems like a little problem, but it is not. And the fabric of the problem is a kind of darkness, the flip side of "fast, fluid, and without boundaries", as I wrote in my Internet Theory book. Cell-phones at their worst are Kafka-esque, and this needs to be reflected in works of verbal art. Poems need to be this specific, this intense, this willing to look at the minutiae of our lives, or they are useless. Of course, darkness is not a new thing, but new modes of suffering require new modes of art. The resigned Stoicism of the Objectivists, the suave urbanity of the New York School, and the austere beauty of Lang-Po were OK for their moment, but I do not think that any were sufficiently dark to render 2009. I have been toying with an idea, though I do not yet know if I will pursue it. I had the thought of writing a book called Stalk, and setting it in the mind of a compulsive stalker (whether on the Net or in person I do not know.) It would be an exercise not dissimilar to the one that Bret Easton Ellis pursued in American Psycho. 2009 is a moment in which an unprecedented amount of stalking is going on all over the place, and we are all guilty. What do we want from each other? What do we perceive the Other to have that we do not have? Why are we so comfortable staring at the (easily accessed) Other from a safe distance? The answers to these questions cannot be comforting, and reflect the terrible spiritual emptiness of our moment. Technology has become both a passion and a vice so that stalking has never been so easy or so sophisticated. We are living inside each other without really thinking about it, or what it means. Yet it all happens in darkness, without the Other knowing. And that is a dark edge that needs to come out in new poetry, post-avant and otherwise.

"Chaos is a friend of mine"

2009-06-25T05:53:00.001-07:00

This is something Bob Dylan used to say. He also used to say to live outside the law you must be honest, and it is a maxim that rings very true to me. This latest post-avant discourse does seem to have created a fair bit of chaos, particularly in my comments stream. Nonetheless, I have been grateful that poets like Rauan Klassnik, Peter Philpott and several others have found it useful and dealt with it on their respective blogs. And, of course, Ron Silliman, who is responsible for bringing me a good part of my audience. I am not sure if there are any angles left that I have not covered, any nook or cranny in the discourse that needs to be filled. If this is, in fact, the end of this particular discourse, I have to take a look at some tough questions to determine whether or not I have achieved anything substantial. The most fundamental question, and the one that will be most determinative, is whether or not other poets will accept or adopt my own particular slant on post-avant. If poets continue to talk about post-avant as something amorphous, something that has not been defined, then I have failed. Before, no one knew what post-avant was; many hundreds of poets have read the whole (or at least parts) of this discourse, in which I have tried to create concrete significations around it; but a one-man revolution is an impossibility, in poetry at least. I have to be realistic about the fact that my word is not law, and that, because I am comparatively young, I face certain disadvantages where credibility is concerned. How many thirty-three year old poets have any authority? Yet, I stand by the ideas I have formulated, think they have some merit, and hope I will not be dismissed owing to my age.

It is a banal commonplace to say that the old must be thrown away to make room for the new. But, as far as I am concerned, it happens to be the truth. Many of these posts were designed to demonstrate the commensurability of younger poets with older ones. In MFA and MA programs all across the country, poetry students are encouraged to demonstrate blind reverence for certain poetry deities. This is part of the bullshit insularity that I have pointed out, and "poetry teachers," if there are such things, need to learn to encourage irreverence. Maybe poetry teachers are afraid to produce students less useless than themselves; it is a big, bad, scary world out there, might as well stay in the bubble. Spoon-feeding of mediocrity by mediocrities to students that need not be mediocrities (followed by expectations of obediance and reverence) is a tragic scenario that I have seen played out at a bunch of different schools. I want other younger poets to see that the good work they are doing may well be commensurate with whatever they are being taught. Most poetry teachers have no balls, and they encourage their students not to have balls either. The prissiness and preciosity around poetry in academia is not to be believed. But now is as good a moment in American poetry as has ever been. The past has a wealth of valuable data to teach us; the present may have even more. Post-avant, as I have designed it, is for now. I am not talking to the brainwashed dweebs; I am talking to those independent enough to think for themselves. Challenge your teachers, just as I have been challenged here. Do not let yourself be spoon-fed by the untalented and the cowardly. Where art is concerned, you don't get any points for toeing the line.

Disjunctive Issues

2009-06-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

The way I have presented post-avant, it would be possible for certain artists to call it a retreat into representation. On one level, it is. However, to what extent this is deemed a problem has much to do with perceived attitudes regarding abstract verbal art. All verbal art, of course, involves a level of abstraction- language itself, we know, is a kind of abstraction. Text is a double abstraction, away from both the immediacy of impulses and of speech acts. Yet there is an insularity to abstract verbal art that makes it unappealing to almost everyone that does not work within its confines. Compare the response that abstract verbal forms have had to abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning: de Kooning and Pollock have reached a wide audience, to whom their art is expressive, emotional, and profound. Abstract poets have reached a comparatively minimal audience. Why? A painter like de Kooning can use certain gestures, brush-strokes, uses of color, smears, shapes, half-complete human forms, to give his work resonance, depth, and wide appeal. The tools to make abstract poetry as expressive are harder to manifest: I have found the tactility of words to be a "half-myth." Words "smeared" or "brushed on" a certain way are just not as expressive as paint and color. So, if post-avant does signify a retreat into representation, I am prepared to acknowledge it without necessarily believing that it is a bad thing. I belive that the preponderance of representation, where poetry is concerned, is very real and very pertinent. Good representational poems tend to be (in my opinion) more powerful than their abstract counterparts. Non-poets that look to poetry generally want to see poems that actually say something. Post-avant is meant to fight against insularity and give poetry a place (which it has lost) in the wider cultural world. As such, poetry that is abstract or disjunctive would need to include some element of representation within it. I want here to present two instances of disjunctive poetry, one that is in what I call the classic disjunctive mode, one that takes a disjunctive approach but adds the darkened (and representational) edges of post-avant. The two poems chosen happen to be by women, but they were not chosen for that reason. Notice how levels of affect effect levels of intensity and vice versa.

This first poem comes from Barbara Guest, and it is called Red Lilies:

Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;
they have taken the accident out of the stove.
Afterward lilies for supper; there
the lines in front of the window
are rubbed on the table of stone

The paper flies up
then down as the wind
repeats. repeats its birdsong.

Those arms under the pillow
the burrowing arms they cleave
at night as the tug kneads water
calling themselves branches

The tree is you
the blanket is what warms it
snow erupts from thistle
to toe; the snow pours out of you.

A cold hand on the dishes
placing a saucer inside
her who undressed for supper
gliding that hair to the snow

The pilot light
went out on the stove

The paper folded like a napkin
other wings flew into the stone.

Compare the moderate, even-keeled tone of Guest's poems to this more post-avant response from Amy King, After Whispering, A Compulsion To Move:

Though I would like to breathe at the best possible moment
when people are waking up after their first cups
of homegrown fresh black brew that is a liquid containing
an important caffeine the rest of a populated race doesn't drink
and slows down without, in fact, as facts, we aren't ever
on the same page, our libidos and metabolisms separate
our bodies, and we call this mixed desire and unmatched
in appetite so hard that you don't finish your plate and call me
a savage with tiny daisies stuck to my fingers. I'm sorry,
I was ravaged by personal pangs, and you would not satiate
my petal-plucking needs, so I blasted the leaves to shreds
with my teeth when I meant I'm sorry,
utensils don't do it for me: I'm turned on by the osmosis
of carnal matters, including the blood that might
flow through these aging forked veins that carry the meat
of life giving particles in their jittery existence as a way to speak
and pass meaning between us. I want to break bread, but my mouth
is open and there's no way you could attempt to understand
the words full and mixing with this white matter coursing
within my corpus system, then out through an unclean sound,
even if I wiped it spotless the moment it moved in closer to you.

Amy's use of the word "jittery" is interesting, because this is, in fact, a jittery poem, and jittery is a synonym for edgy. The most striking edge of Amy's poem, for me, is that it has a between quality: it is situated somewhere between narrative and non-narrative, representational and non-representational. The surface is opaque; affect seethes beneath. The idea of a first-person protagonist "ravaged by personal pangs" is almost Romantic, but the sentiment is soon lost in a barbed stream-of-consciousness that recalls the influence of Joyce and Stein (perhaps even Woolf) as much as it does any Lang-Po predecessors. The Other is rendered imaginatively, but always in a kind of negative context: we do not connect, we do not relate, despite these bodies which we share. There is a large amount of affective and sexual data here that is not available in most disjunctive poetry, but that gives the poem a kind of live-wire charge. In comparison, most of the disjunctive work produced by younger poets seems flaccid, like a kind of empty formalism (right there with Adam Kirsch.) To make disjunctive work exciting, there has to be something human in the poem other than a mess of words: the edgier, the better. Guest's poem reminds me of Reverdy; there is a haunting grace about it, an evansecence. However, much of the energy of the poem is diffused in its many paratactic moves; it does not build to anything, no crescendo. Amy's poem is more like an avalanche or a fire-ball, heading ineluctably toward its goal, of expressed non-connection, the evanescence of the Other. Disjunctive models seem to be in King's mind, but Personism is in there somewhere too. Guest gives us a "you" without an "I"; this lends an authentically classic touch, but precludes an affective edge from entering the poem. Guest is more sedate, more stately; King is more punchy, harder. This is what allows me to place her poem (with, I hope, Amy's approval) under the aegis of post-avant. I feel that if you show these two poems to a painter, or to Bruce Nauman, or a musician, sculptor, actor, etc, they will be more riveted by Amy's poem. People generally want emotion from art, not insularity. This seems obvious, but in poetry in 2009, it is not. Disjunctive poetry needs more than the tactility of words; it needs the durability of emotions. I do not wish to dismiss Guest's poem out of hand; but, as I said, I feel that Amy's poem has more out-reach, and a better shot of translating into something meaningful for a wider community of artists. Edge is something everyone can relate to, and that (for me) makes it important, and worth pursuing.

Post-Avant and Personism

2009-06-23T05:50:00.000-07:00

Frank O'Hara's Personism, though not as stringently defined as Breton's Surrealism, is another movement (a one-poet movement, in this case) that can and has had a fruitful interaction with post-avant. I feel that there are solid reasons to say that post-avant can go further than Surrealism; where Personism is concerned, I would say that post-avant does not necessarily go further, but is substantially different in its approach. Personism involves the social aspect of poems; how they can serve as links between individuals (or groups), and in doing so enact a tender (or fierce) intimacy. What is intimate about the O'Hara poems we know and love is that we never doubt his sincerity as a (usually first-person) protagonist. The edges come from a certain honesty at all costs; that O'Hara does not pull punches, though he is seldom brutal, either. O'Hara is sincere, overt, direct, and touchingly so. What post-avant wants to do is to take Personism and darken it. Post-avant's spin on the Personism ball often produces poems that have an edge of detachment, parody/satire, or even meanness. In the same manner that Anne Boyer takes Surrealism and darkens it, post-avant takes Personism and gives it an edge of experience over innocence. Rather than reality infringing on dreams, reality infringes on relationships. People's edges are exposed, their weaknesses probed, their insecurities laid bare. This is visible everywhere from Thom Yorke's songs (think Creep) right through to the kind of poetry I am describing. To demonstrate the darkening of Personism, I thought to bring in a poem by Jason Bredle, one of the darkest (and funniest) poets working this terrain. I have an affinity for Jason's work (not just because we both happen to be Aquarius Dragons) that is grounded in my appreciation for the way he conveys a certain satiric vision of humanity, that has both tenderness and brutality in it. In the poems to come (one from Jason, one from Frank), notice how things are darkened by the switch from a first person to a third-person perspective.

This famous Personal Poem is taken from O'Hara's Lunch Poems. It is representative of O'Hara's vision of Personism (which he did, in fact, patent):

Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I'm happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I'd like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty's where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don't give her one we
don't like terrible diseases, then

we go eat some fish and some ale it's
cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don't want to be in the poets' walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so

Now, have a look at a post-avant response. This is Bredle's immortal (and I am only half-kidding) Girls, Look Out for Todd Bernstein:

Because after sitting out for a spell
he's back with a degree in accounting and a high
paying position in one of the leading
pharmaceutical corporations in the country
and aspirations of owning that exotic yellow
sports car, license plate EVIL.
And like Dennis Meng at Sycamore Chevrolet
stakes his reputation on his fully reconditioned
used cars, I stake my reputation
on telling you Todd Bernstein means business
this time, girls. No more of this being passed over
for abusive arm wrestling stars. He's got
a velour shirt now. No more of your excuses-
if he wants you, you're there. None of this
I'm shaving my pubes Friday night nonsense-
come on, you think Todd Bernstein's
going to fall for that? He knows you're not
studying, not busy working on some local
political campaign, not having the guy
who played Cockroach on THE COSBY SHOW over
for dinner, not writing any great American
novel. He's seen your stuff and it's nothing more
than mediocre lyrical poetry with titles
like "The Falling" and "Crucible" and "Waking to Death"
that force impossible metaphors, despairing
about love and womanhood and how bad
your life is even though you grew up happily
in suburban America, or at least as happily
as anyone can grow up in suburban America,
which normally, you know, consists of
the appearance of happiness while your dad is doing
three secretaries on the side and your mom
pretends not to know and brags to the entire
town about how you're an actress about to star
in a sitcom about the misadventures of a cable TV
repairperson who, while out on a routine
installation one day, accidentally
electrically blasts herself into the living room
of a family of barbarian warloads on a planet
near Alpha Centauri who force her into slavery
before sending her on a pillage mission
to a planet of Cloxnors who capture her and place
her in a torture institution where she meets
a vulnerable Meeb whom she convinces, because of
her cable TV repairperson skills, to let her
become nanny to its impressionable Meeblets just
before it's about to rip off her limbs
with its ferocious abnons and devour her.
The results, according to your mom, are hilarious,
but come on, you and I both know the story
is just so PREDICTABLE. And Todd knows
your writing doesn't pull off any metaphors
for the happiness taken from you by some dude
who played bass and called himself a musician
when all he could really do was play a couple
of chords and sing about true love and alligators
and how the alligator represents true love
which somehow explains the legend where the guy
cut open an alligator one time in Florida
and found a golfer. There's just no fooling
Todd. Sure, he'll act like he's interested, that's
Todd Bernstein, and he'll make claims
that he too has written or been artistic
at some point in his life, but Todd Bernstein
knows all you girls really want is a piece
of good old Todd Bernstein. No longer
will any strange auras enter the bedroom
during sex and keep him from maintaining
an erection, no longer will any women
walk out on him repulsed. If anybody's walking out
after sex, it'll be Todd Bernstein, I can assure you.
He won't be humiliating himself by falling down
a flight of stairs in front of a group of Japanese
tourists anymore, but rather coaxing entire
masses of women into his bedroom. Because
that's Todd Bernstein. He's on the move.
And he wants you to know, girls, that he's well aware
you certainly can't learn Korean sitting around here
which is why he's out there right now, preparing
for the slew of women just beyond his sexual
horizon, spray-painting GIRLS, LOOK OUT
FOR TODD BERNSTEIN on the side
of a Village Pantry.

An incredible mouthful, to be sure. But, as funny, perverse, and on-the-surface as much of the humor is, notice that there is an ambiguity here that is not in O'Hara. What we have is a poem mostly written in the third-person, with an "I" here and there thrown in for good measure. The effect is to call into doubt what the relationship is between "I" and the legendary Todd Bernstein. The narrative has so many edges in it that the implied relationship could not be farther from the relationship between Frank and LeRoi in the first poem. There, Personism means straightforward friendship, camraderie, a sense of being in cahoots against the rest of the (especially literary) world. We do not learn anything embarrassing about Frank or LeRoi in the poem (unless we want to count Frank's "batting average.") Here, we learn nothing about the poem's "I," and everything (and more) than we ever wanted to know about Todd Bernstein. Frank and LeRoi are equals; the narrator in Bredle's poem seems to be looking down on Todd Bernstein from an omniscient perspective. When put through the post-avant skewer, Personism comes out twisted by the recognition of human frailties. We see so far into Todd Bernstein that he becomes a joke- his delusions of grandeur, sexual frustrations, inability to connect. Bredle's tangents (and there are a bunch) are another way of creating edge; it is the literary equivalent of playing bumper cars. Bredle includes the raw and the brutal, to hilarious effect- the gruesome detail about girls "shaving their pubes Friday night," the suburban dad "doing three secretaries on the side." The net effect is Personism shot through with black humor and satire, and it is, to my eyes, at least as potent as O'Hara's original version. There are spots in the poem in which Bredle appears to be pushing PC boundaries- they do not bother me, but I would be willing to entertain the notion that Bredle has crossed the line a few times. To return to my earlier remarks- experience, in the context of Bredle's poem, gives rise to an irony that is left out of O'Hara. This reflects the sensibility of our era, rather than Frank's- post-avant being the end of the near side of post-modernism, O'Hara being the beginning of the far side. As such, while it is easy to admire Frank's work from a distance, I feel that Jason has more to say to us, the way we live, now, because (let us be honest) irony is everywhere.

Anne Boyer: Edges of Dreams

2009-06-22T05:33:00.000-07:00

If post-avant has to do with edges, anything that brings to light edges of consciousness would certainly be useful. Dreams, of course, do precisely this. Dreams are one place in which consciousness merges with unknown/foreign elements; whether we want to call it the unconscious, the subconscious, or even the Collective Unconscious does not matter that much. The point is that interaction with these foreign edges can result in the revelation of hidden affect. This affect can reveal itself in imagery, speech-acts, sexual encounters, or mundane situations; however its expression manifests, it has the potential to disturb, unsettle, and effect the waking mind. There is a brutal strangeness to many dreams that make them very simpatico with post-avant, as I am attempting to define it in this discourse. I have not been bringing up Breton for nothing; Surrealism shares many facets with post-avant, and an obsession with dreams, and with states of altered consciousness, is perhaps the primary overlap. I would like to hope that, where dreams are concerned, post-avant is like Surrealism, but sharper. The content of represented post-avant dreams may be similar to that expressed in Surrealist dream-poems; but the tone should have a bit more gravitas. To demonstrate this, I want to put together Max Jacob and Anne Boyer. It needs first to be said that Jacob was a reluctant-at-best Surrealist; he was influential for them, but the movement itself turned him off. Yet it is because his work was influential for them that he is useful here. Anne Boyer, in 2007, released a Dusie Chap called Selected Dreams. It is a little master-work, and the best dreams she presents have that extra something, that sense of more weight, that (hopefully) distinguishes post-avant from Surrealist dream-scapes. I do not want to turn this into an arm-wrestling match between movements (I also do not want to presume to categorize Anne if she does not wish to be categorized); certainly Surrealism has constituent features that post-avant does not. Some may even prefer dreams expressed with a lighter touch, in Jacob's manner, and there are many situations in which lighter is better. Nonetheless, let us dive into these dreams at the deep end.

It is interesting that Jacob actually implicated himself in his introduction to The Dice Cup, his magnum opus. Jacob regrets that his poems lack a certain tone our grief and decency demand; he was writing about World War I before it happened. This is called 1914:

Doesn't lightning look the same to a foreigner? Someone who was at my parents' home was commenting on the color of the sky. Was that lightning? It was a pink cloud moving toward us. How everything changed! My God! Can it be your reality is so vibrant? The family home is there: the chestnut trees at the window, the prefecture right up against the chestnut trees, and Mt. Frugy right up against the prefecture, only its summit visible. A voice called out "God!" And there was light in the darkness. A huge body hid most of the landscape. Was it Him? Or Job? He was poor; his pierced flesh was showing, thighs covered by a scrap of cloth: what tears O Lord! he descended...How? Then couples larger than life descended too. They came from the air encased, in Easter eggs: they laughed and the balcony of our family home was littered with black threads like gunpowder. We were frightened. The couples set themselves up in our house while we watched through a window. For they were evil. There were even black threads on the dining room table where my brothers were taking apart Lebel cartridges. Since then, I've been watched by the police.

Compare the tone of this with this dream from Boyer's Selected Dreams:

Fairly clear the end of the world had come or the end of the world as we understood it had come or the end of the world of humans in a civilization had come and this end had come through some water-borne contagion or at least a backed-up broken-down water and sewage system.

Knowing all this, we went to a large clean building in the middle of a city for an ART SHOW. This building was a hotel or convention center and on the fifth floor or so a woman who may or may not have been Kiki Smith had organized the ART SHOW before it was clear that the world was at its end. Many people at the show were vacuous or self-absorbed or on drugs or whatever so that they did not know it was the end or did not pay the end much notice. Very pale, thin, and glamorous people who were part of the art installations strode in threes naked or half naked and the other half cloaked in fur. Even at the end of the world I was envious of their beauty and furs and paleness. And in one room, there showed an ART FILM. This film was about WHAT YOU COULD BUY to prove you had been at the ART SHOW.

At that time three backpackers entered the room with backpacks. These backpackers knew it was the end of the world: they had put all their things in backpacks and decided to take off, to travel, as it was the end of the world and staying put, i.e. STAYING AS NORMAL, would only mean the end. Other people noticed the backpackers and maybe started waking up to the seriousness of the event of the end of the world, and fearing a panic, my companions and I decided to leave the ART SHOW and take the elevator to the top of the building.

We stepped in the elevator. I started to worry the sewage-contagion problem would damage the power grid. Would we be stuck on the elevator for all of time? Would we die on the elevator we took to escape the ART SHOW? My companions tried to calm me, to tell me "It is too early in the process for the power to go out," but I could smell the stink and contagion, and asked to what purpose is going to the roof of the building of the ART SHOW.

I said- Shouldn't we be doing something other than going to the top of the building at the end of the world?

Both of these dreams are apocalyptic, but they approach the subject of apocalypse differently. Jacob uses an edge of whimsy, that brings out a kind of human comedy in the darkness, a child-like innocence. Boyer's is definitely (and defiantly) a voice of experience. Not only does Boyer give us apocalypse, she gives us an implicit (and edgy) critique of the art-world, and the issues that many of us would not like to face: the uselessness of art in the face of chaos, the vapid nature of consumerism in regards to art, all the poseurs that dot the art landscape. Not all Surrealist dreams have the edge of innocence that Jacob's has; not all post-avant dreams have the edge of experience that Boyer's has. There are, in fact, a good number of dreams in Boyer's chap that are comparatively innocent. Yet this one, for me, is the most memorable, specifically because it is edgy in more than one direction. It is smart enough to be satire, and strange enough to be a dream. Satire and dreaminess are strange bedfellows, but Boyer makes it work because her quality of voice is so rich, so deep. The surprise in Boyer's poem has to do with a topsy-turvy twist: reality infringes on her dream, rather than vice versa (as would usually be the case). Reality distorts her dream-vision, in a reversal of the Surrealist paradigm. That perhaps, is what ultimately distinguishes post-avant from Surrealism: it has the capacity to tackle real-world issues directly. This is not to demean the Surrealists' achievement, because we are certainly using many of their innovations. The problem with dreams in post-avant is that they can never quite shut out the real world. This turns many dreams into nightmares. Boyer's dystopic vision is certainly nightmarish; it is also laugh-out-loud funny, canny, and sharp as a knife. It shows how a poet can take from poetry's past and go somewhere with it. This new kind of dream-scape definitely (to me) seems like a place worth visiting.

Jordan Stempleman: Softer Edges

2009-06-21T06:47:00.001-07:00

What are the limitations of post-avant? It would be foolhardy of me to try to develop a discourse in which post-avant poetry is presented as capable of covering everything, thematically and otherwise. Like every other (potential) movement, post-avant has strengths and weaknesses, glories and blind spots. At this point, I think it may be useful to bring in a poet who may not be post-avant, to act as a kind of foil. In this process, it will become clearer what the limitations of post-avant are, what it can and cannot do. I have written extensively about Jordan Stempleman, and I find him to be a marvelous poet. Still, I am by no means convinced that Stempleman's work fits into a post-avant frame-work. There are edges, and what Stempleman is doing is (more often than not) substantially new, but edges are usually overtaken by an impulse towards grace, delicacy, charm, and sophisticated perspectives. These are the thematic issues Stempleman raises that this discourse needs to deal with: non-edgy affect (love), straightforward sentiment, caring, affection, and (perhaps most importantly, considering its key place in the aesthetic of poets like Creeley and Ashbery) the domestic. With Stempleman, as with Creeley, what you get a lot of the time is an air of the domestic sublime; poems that address private concerns in resolutely subjective language. All these things seem incompatible with the brutality, rawness, razor-sharp edges, and modes of affect that I see as pivotal to post-avant. They raise questions that post-avant will have to answer if it wants to avoid a narrow slot: how can we address love in a way that is not merely angst-ridden? How can we demonstrate caring? This is a tricky space to maneuver, and I do not have an answer worked out. Still, maybe there are such things as softer edges; maybe Stempleman can be worked in. Let us take a look at a few poems and see.

This poem is called Love, and it is from the Otoliths book Facings. It can be considered the archetypal Stempleman poem:

I told them, you can take half the conversation
away from a stranger without them ever knowing

it, take the real side away, and then turn it
into that place, that day that never happened

to you, some intended thought, now yours. There,
you will have it for years, or because of the excitement

that will no doubt accompany this treasure, the night
will come when, not alone to repeat it only to yourself,

perhaps, lying down in a close but uncomfortable
position, faced with a person equally as exciting (in

their own way) as what you've heard, you will tell
them this side of things, so they can stare at you

as you tell it. And afterwards, before falling asleep
near them, they will tell you, I know, I was there.

There are no (or few) edges, as I have defined them, here. The poem takes its energy from an intimacy that is graceful, relaxed, and even (slightly) epiphanic. Beyond an obvious glow of genuine human warmth, the poem is charged by a subtle kind of pronoun game: who is "them" in line one? Why does the third person plural not appear again? The fascinating depth of having more than one "I" in the poem creates an effect of boundaries being blurred, that is very similar to what we experience in close physical proximity to a lover or mate. Yet the poem's peculiar grace lies in the combination of familiar and unfamiliar elements: it is never obvious, and, while it does not exactly attack, it is certainly multi-leveled. This impression is heightened by a kind of twist ending, not in the Shyamalan sense but in the sense that the poem deliberately leaves unanswered questions. This is done without ever losing sight of an immaculate internal smoothness, the opposite of edginess. How could the second "I" have been there to witness the fabled conversation? Was it a miraculous occurrence? I would say that this poem gets close to post-avant without touching it. There is simply too much grace to warrant the post-avant tag being applied. The fact that the poem is substantially new and, (in my opinion) wonderful, means that post-avant simply cannot do everything. Just as Creeley was close to the Beats, without ever being Beat, Stempleman seems like he could be a prized cousin to the post-avant family. He will (and already has) shown us some of our blind spots, and diffused any claims to a totalized strength.

Here is another Stempleman poem, from his Blazevox book String Parade. It is called Unlike Weight:

There are more faucets
in this house than hands.

My daughter thinks of telling
me, the time is now

to go out and get myself
a gun. She silently looks

at me, eyeing my gumption,
determining how much firepower

my wrists will take.
She looks at me differently

in these times, with a doubtful
pattern of the eyes, quite unlike

when we swim in large bodies
of water. There she is light

enough to carry. There she trusts
my arms will never snap.

There is a sweetness and a vulnerability to this that suggests edginess without being edgy. Edge here is an undercurrent, or a darkling hint. But, fudamentally, this is a representation of the domestic, and works admirably as such. I cannot think how this can be done in post-avant, unless it is made threatening and/or surreal, which is of course what Brooklyn Copeland does in Borrowed House. The dynamic between Copeland and Stempleman is interesting: both are low-key, subtle, nuanced, detailed, and (seemingly) rural. The difference seems to be that Copeland focuses on an edgy sense of her own sexuality, rather than on the settled domesticity that Stempleman highlights. Stempleman comes ever so close to overdoing sentiment; but there is an imaginative edge, amidst all the grace, that redeems him most of the time. Here, it is displayed in the issue of fire-arms, in a very unlikely context. It comes to seem like a metaphor for the overwhelming responsibilities of fatherhood- having lives in your hands, having to protect them. Is post-avant mature enough to deal with these issues? I honestly do not know. Eliot did not have children; Pound did not write substantially about his. Domesticity is an issue that will need to be addressed over a length of time. It is too broad and too complicated to solve instantly, even in a discourse that aims to be as inclusive as possible. Maturity is just as important- we need to know (and will, hopefully, eventually find out) what constitutes mature post-avant poetry. Edge can easily degenerate into grandstanding; represented affect is often self-indulgent. There are many things that post-avant poets can learn from reading Jordan Stempleman; if we see the limitations clearly, we can begin to transcend them. On the other hand, perhaps Jordan will declare that he is post-avant, and solve the problem once and for all. What matters is that post-avant needs foils, and Jordan Stempleman is an excellent one to begin with.

Brooklyn Copeland: Borrowed House

2009-06-10T04:48:00.000-07:00

Borrowed House is a chap released this year by Greying Ghost Press. I do not know if Brooklyn will have a problem with being labeled post-avant; out of respect for her, I will only say that to me, these poems seem like post-avant poems. They are, in fact, exemplary of what poems from the "narrative branch" of post-avant can do. The poems in Borrowed House take their energy from dramatic metaphors, some of which are extended for the length of the chap. Copeland's language never veers into the literal; figurative language predominates, and so narrative (in these poems) is immediately distinguished from language, as it appears in mainstream poetry. Copeland's poems haunt because they take their edge from a sense of heightened tension and drama that is all the more potent for being understated. Despite their reliance on dramatic metaphor, these are demonstrably "relationship poems," that work out their edge via "we" rather than "I." Between these divergent impulses, unique textual entities present themselves, that demonstrate both the freshness and the disturbing quality that I locate in post-avant poetry.

These conflicting strains manifest palpably in He Is Watching which, in its eight solid lines, brings together many of the best elements in Copeland's poetry:

Press into the window.
You become

the shallow face
that presses into the window,

surveying all that was
and wishing for just one

more chew on the blade,
another second to swallow.

The understated quality of the poem belies its viscerality, the physical nature and sensations that accrue to a close reading of it. This response is encapsulated in the final two lines: "..chew on the blade,/ another second to swallow." Revulsion is part of the point, what gives the poem its potency, and why I would align it to post-avant. It is disturbing, unsettling, but not presented in a ham-fisted way. In fact, if read quickly, this is a rather inconspicuous poem. You have to read it very slowly and carefully for it to work its magic. The title (He Is Watching) clues us in that the poem, on at least one level, concerns voyeurism. It could be emotional, psychological, or sexual, but it undoubtedly involves a self-conscious narrator, who cloaks her rhetoric in metaphoric terms. This is a very sophisticated game that Copeland is playing. It is a surprisingly complete performance from a younger poet, and doubly surprising because the different levels are not immediately apparent on first reading. If you dig deep into this poem, it is perceptible that the lack of sentiment and fanfare are specifically what allows the poem to play its game successfully. Levels of temporality are important here too: the narrator is "becoming," while "surveying all that was." All in all, a tough, tense performance, that does a good job of hiding its own edges, and allows the reader to venture as far in as he or she dares.

Other poems in the collection play their games more overtly. Flirtations turns emotional confrontation into a children's game, minimizing their seriousness with dollops of irony and raw frankness:

Drunk beside the pond, we play
with ultimatums

:if you cannot fathom this thick mud.

:if you cannot pull the legs from this daddy-long.

:if you cannot stew this prepubescent carrot
in your own blood.

:if you cannot hitch the butterfly with your sugared thumb.

:if you cannot look me in the eye
when you recite

the filthiest passage in the grassiest language.

The anaphoric catalogue presented here is interesting for a number of reasons. Since both partners are "playing," it can be difficult to tell which partner is saying what. The most obvious ultimatum, of course, is the "prepubescent carrot in your own blood," which seems to issue from the female protagonist. She seems to be indicting her partner's sexual immaturity, his inability to raise himself above self-obsession and infantilism. These two lines are placed in the center of the anaphoric structure, making them both more visible and asked to carry more weight. Conversely, we are presented initially with the fact that these lovers are "drunk": this would seem to cast doubts on whether the catalogue can be taken seriously, or if it is merely a kind of game. Why are the lovers placed "beside the pond"? The pond, in fact reappears throughout Borrowed House, but what it denotes remains elusive. A pond is not wild or active like a river or a sea; it is (like the astrological sign Scorpio) "fixed water." As such, it can be taken to denote the settled feeling of unease that has developed between the two protagonists, or something they have in common, or something between them that is draining their energy, or a little bit of all of these. Ultimately, Flirtations is interesting because it seems to contradict its own title; rather than seeming like flirtations, these ultimatums feel more like a game of Russian Roulette. Between the title and the substance of the poem, a layer of irony is added which makes the poem that much more satisfyingly obtuse. That kind of depth, of multi-leveled attack, is what post-avant is all about (or should be.)

"Anything with an edge": Rethinking Post-Avant

2009-06-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

Many definitions have been posited for post-avant. There was a flurry of action about five months ago, in which I and a handful of other poets had it out over what post-avant means and what it does not. It was my impression that no general consensus was reached, and that much had been said but little of it had a substantial impact. This goes, certainly, for the things I said too; I do not privilege my own formulations here. Nonetheless, I think the discussion is a worthwhile one, and thinking about it has led me to some new conclusions. Here is the original definition I posited for post-avant: the diasporic movement of Lang-Po towards a new synthesis with erotic and narrative elements. That's roughly it. What I have been thinking over the last week is slightly different, and simpler. It is defining post-avant poetry as anything with an edge. This begs some immediate questions. What do we mean when we say that a poem, or a book of poems, has an edge? How do we strictly define edgy poetry? Colloquially, if it is said that something has an edge, it usually denotes that it is pointed, direct, sharp, and that it skirts the uncomfortable or the unsettling. It may deal, thematically, with a difficult issue, or it may take an unusual stance on an issue that has become stuck in a rut of settled representations. One obvious historical example would be Shakespeare's sonnet My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..., which takes Petrarchan conventions and turns them on their heads. Or, the way Pound conflates two seemingly irreconcilable disparates in In a Station of the Metro, creating an unlikely synthesis of urban and rural imageries. Perhaps, owing to the sophisticated games played in his sonnets, we could call Shakespeare the first post-avant poet. Why not?

What else is edgy, pointed, direct, and sharp? I might be useful to name some things that are not edgy, but that tend to bear the post-avant moniker. Lazy disjunctive writing is, for me, not post-avant, specifically because it has no edge. Having an edge necessarily connotates making some kind of sense. It is hard, actually, to have any kind of thematic element included at all, if you do not make any narrative sense. I have no intention of picking on anyone in particular, but we all know lazy disjunctive writing (most of us know it a mile away) and it is not difficult to see that by this new definition, it does not fit under the rubric of post-avant. Epiphanic poetry, anything that relies on sentiment, would obviously not be post-avant, in these terms. How about spoken word poetry? That is a tough nut to crack; good spoken word poetry certainly has an edge, certainly carries thematic elements, so it would be hard-going to deny it a place in post-avant. What needs to be discussed is how stringently standards of formal rigor are applied to post-avant. If no standards are applied, someone could get onstage at a reading and say shit fuck piss ten times and be post-avant. All those tired arguments about "serious" poetry versus "performance" poetry need to be dragged out of the closet for the thousandth time; we have to find ourselves making distinctions and setting boundaries that might be unreal. I have no intention of laying down my version of the law; but where performance poetry is concerned, inclusion under the aegis of post-avant cannot, I think, be taken for granted. Which may, unfortunately, invalidate the anything with an edge tag-line. Or maybe not. The beauty of dealing with a new movement is that it is still amorphous and, if you are lucky (which I may or may not be), you can do your bit to shape it.

I affixed a picture of Frank O'Hara to this post because (perhaps this is a bit obvious) anything with an edge follows directly from going on your nerve. Why is it that O'Hara (along with few others) gets respect from both major sides of the American poetry landscape? How is it possible to be loved by both Billy Collins and Language Poets? There are myriad reasons, but I would say that a major one is the deft manner in which O'Hara creates narratives that have an edge. New York City created O'Hara just as surely as Paris created Baudelaire; O'Hara's version of Negative Capability meant creating poetry that mirrored, as precisely as possible, the edginess of New York street-life mid-century XX. If O'Hara was a kind of conduit, this was facilitated by the seeming impetuosity of his poems. Is "anything with an edge" impetuous? Not necessarily. But the element of conscious craft and "edginess," taken as an indicator of aesthetic worth, make uneasy bedfellows. On the other hand, the tension between uneasy bedfellows can make for interesting poetry. There is no way to seal this thing up in one post (and blog-posts are often themselves "go on your nerve" exercises); but I think the idea of post-avant and anything with an edge could lead to a fruitful discussion, especially because it gets boring writing a diasporic movement... over and over again. I have always felt that O'Hara's best poetry started something that has not yet been finished. How would O'Hara feel about potentially having started a movement? Well, he did Personism already, so technically this would be the second movement...the more (I hope he would say) the merrier! I hope to go into what constitutes "edginess" and "anything with an edge" in days to come.