The All-Purpose Magical Tent

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series Featuring Glyn Maxwell, Rick Barot, and Lytton Smith

2009-05-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

Chin Music: The Pacific Standard Poetry Reading Series
Featuring Glyn Maxwell, Rick Barot, and Lytton Smith

Thursday, May 28th 2009 @ 7:00 PM

Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
(between St. Marks and Bergen Streets)

Please join us for the next evening of Chin Music, the Pacific
Standard Poetry Reading Series. On May 28th, we are thrilled to
feature three excellent poets: Glyn Maxwell, Rick Barot, and Lytton
Smith. Other writers to be featured in Chin Music this season include
Sarah Manguso, Kevin Goodan, Dan Albergotti, Oni Buchanan, Paige
Starzinger, Blue Chevigny, Major Jackson, and David Baker.

Please note our earlier reading time of 7:00PM.

Located on Fourth Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, near the
Atlantic/Pacific subway hub, Pacific Standard is a literary bar
serving up eighteen microbrews on tap and cask (including both West
Coast and local breweries), fine wines and liquors, and tasty snacks
like chips and salsa, and meat and cheese plates.

FEATURED WRITERS

Glyn Maxwell’s latest poetry collection, HIDE NOW, was published in
2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and shortlisted for the 2008 T. S.
Eliot Prize. He was appointed Poetry Editor at the New Republic in
2001, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Several of
his books of poetry have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and
Forward Poetry Prizes, and the Whitbread Poetry Award, and his most
recent collections—THE BOYS AT TWILIGHT, TIME’S FOOL, and THE
NERVE—were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He
has written a number of plays (BROKEN JOURNEY, THE LIFEBLOOD, BEST
MAN’S SPEECH, and THE FOREVER WALTZ), radio plays (CHILDMINDERS),
opera libretti (THE GIRL OF SAND and THE BIRDS), and novels (BLUE
BURNEAU and THE GIRL WHO WAS GOING TO DIE). Glyn Maxwell is currently
adapting Umberto Eco's THE NAME OF THE ROSE for Moving Pictures
Theatre Company. He lives in London, England.

Rick Barot has published two books of poems with Sarabande Books: THE
DARKER FALL (2002) and WANT (2008). His poems and essays have appeared
in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, American
Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New
Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Tacoma,
Washington, and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren
Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

Lytton Smith was born in Galleywood, England, and lives in New York
City, where he is a founding member of Blind Tiger Poetry, a group
which aims to find innovative ways to promote contemporary poetry. His
book, THE ALL-PURPOSE MAGICAL TENT (Nightboat Books, 2009) was
selected by Terrance Hayes for the Nightboat Prize. His chapbook,
MONSTER THEORY, was selected by Kevin Young for a Poetry Society of
America Chapbook Fellowship and published in 2008. His poems and
reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The Atlantic,
Bateau, The Believer, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver
Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Tin House, Verse, and the anthology All That
Mighty Heart: London Poems.

The Unending Medieval and the Edges of Poetry: Reading William Carlos Williams adjacent the Exeter Anthology

2009-04-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Image from The Exeter DVD Ed. Bernard Muir, Software Nicholas Kennedy, which all good libraries should own.

Tomorrow, I travel to D.C. at the kind invitation of George Washington University's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (thanks for the invite, JJC!) to give a talk about reading Anglo-Saxon poetry adjacent to 20th and 21st century poetry. My talk builds from recent investigations into the way 20th century poets adapted Anglo-Saxon poetry, and argues for adjacent readings of poetry from the two periods; I explore the importance of what is "contemporary to the acting-on-you of the poem," to use a phrase from Charles Olson I thought I'd post a couple of fragments from the talk below, slightly adapted for this blog.

I'll also be reading poems from my debut collection of poems, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, out now from Nightboat Books.

An open, adaptive tendency towards Old English is evident in British poet Geoffrey Hill’s contemporary-Anglo-Saxon poems, especially his 1971 book Mercian Hymns. Here, he turns to Anglo-Saxon poetics—the way poetry is formed—as well as to Anglo-Saxon content. Nicholas Howe has elegantly noted, in a 1998 essay titled “Praise and Lament: The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn” that Hill’s Mercian Hymns look and feel like prose poems, that hybrid genre often described as Baudelaire’s invention, until one reads them as an Anglo-Saxonist, as works written from left margin to right margin but with a lineation “fixed by internal metrical features rather than by layout on a page” (303). To do so reveals “lines” divided into two halves, with three beats to each half. Hill is not trying to do exactly what the Anglo-Saxon scops did, and carry the typical four beat alliterative poetic line over from the 9th century. Instead, he is drawing on the heft and heave of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, its singular sonics. By doing so, Hill teaches us something both about his own project and about the Anglo-Saxon “Mercian Hymns” he read in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader: he makes flexible the template by which we approach and sometimes mistake Anglo-Saxon prosody and poetics. The 20th century is just as able and liable to inform the Anglo-Saxon as the other way round, a process succinctly described by Nicholas Howe, with a nod to poet Thomas Gunn, as the way 20th century poets “loosened and revised Old English poetics” (305). These poets’ forays into Anglo-Saxon were not thievish mining expeditions to extract raw materials for re-use in the 20th and 21st century. Instead, they can usefully discover Anglo-Saxon poetics for us, the current readers of a still-present poetry.

***

The multi-directionality of Spring and All might strike readers of 20th century poetry as disruptive, but it is familiar to Anglo-Saxonists. Beowulf is a poem all about re-telling stories and looking back to past events; its structure is, as Michael Lapidge has argued, retroactive, leading readers to move backwards as well as forwards as we assemble meaning. The famous opening phrase of “The Wanderer,” Oft him anhaga “often the solitary one,” is echoed folios later in the Exeter Anthology by the first phrase of Riddle 5, Ic eom anhaga, “I am solitary.” Where “The Wanderer” advises its audience to seek frofre to fæder on heofonum, “consolation with the father in heaven,” the speaker of Riddle 5 frofre ne wene, “does not expect consolation.” The poems are not companion pieces, nor do they explicate one another, but they self-consciously suggest the possibility of reading across the Exeter Anthology, yet one more way of seeing it, as Muir does, as a carefully organized book, one that comments on its own textual practices. The last phrase of "Wulf and Eadwacer," the poem preceding Riddle 1 in the Anthology contains the word giedd, song or riddle, situating riddlic practice outside of the riddle section, and questioning what it means to call a text a riddle. Spring and All, with its interruption of normative, unidirectional reading practices, offers us a way to think flexibly about the recursions and echoes we encounter within the Exeter Anthology.

Support Shaman Drum

2009-03-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'm reading at the wonderful Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, MI on Tuesday 24th March at 7pm. I'll be reading from my just-published first book of poems, The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nighboat Books), which won the 2007 Nightboat Poetry Prize, judged by Terrance Hayes.

This reading is very important to me not just because I'm excited about reading in Ann Arbor and at such a wonderful location: it matters a great deal because Shaman Drum is at risk of closing in this trouble economy. The owner, Karl Pohrt, is taking very smart steps to secure the store, but he and it need your help now: they need you to buy local, to buy now, and most of all to encourage friends to visit the store in person and online. Remember, in these financially tough times, a book is a really good investment. And if you're paying $15 a month to Netflix, why not pay $15 a month to buy a book at Shaman Drum; then, at the end of the year, you've got 12 new books you can keep and re-read. You can buy online if you live nowhere near a good independent bookstore; Shaman Drum will happily ship to you! (I know Amazon might be cheaper. But publishers get far less money from Amazon than from local independent bookstores; additionally, Amazon isn't doing anything to support readers or authors. If you've ever attended a reading, been recommended a book by a bookseller, or joined a book club at a store, you're aware how much bookstores do beyond just selling books. It's worth the little extra money to support them.)

I hope to see some of you at my reading on Tuesday, and I hope those of you who can't make it can stop by the store at some point to pick up that book you've been meaning to read. And remember, if you don't feel you can afford a book at this moment, you can always let your friends know about this wonderful store: tell 3 people and one of them is bound to buy a book there.

Part Two: Interview with Michael Schiavo, author of The Mad Song

2009-03-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

LS: Would you tell me a little about the publication history of The Mad Song? When and why did you decide to use The Espresso Book Machine? What forays into more, dare I say, conventional models of publication had preceded that?

MS: I entered the manuscript into about a dozen first book contests starting in fall 2006, almost as soon as the thing was written. Never even qualified as a finalist. Sent it to some publishing houses, big and small, and got very friendly, supportive rejections. Shortly after I started working at the Northshire Bookstore in fall 2007, they took delivery of one of five Espresso Book Machines in the world. So I now worked at one of the best independent bookstores in the country that not only had the distribution but the means of production, and the time (fall 2008) seemed right — with Obama’s push for the White House — for The Mad Song to enter the world. It was an obvious decision. It took the risk of the perception of cronyism out of the process but it did leave me without a marketing team per se, which is the second half of getting a book out into the world and getting people to read it. Still, as of this interview, I’m closing in on 100 copies, many to people I don’t know.

There’s a Peter Davis poem that appears in Tight 4 called “Poem For People Who Might Want to Involve Me In Some Other Artistic Project, Like Writing a Song or Something.” It reads, in whole: “I’m open for that sort of thing. Collaborations and what not.” I toyed with the idea of a website where you could click through each chapter or sentence, in different order, making the whole thing available online. That could still happen. I like the idea of farming the manuscript out to other publishers to see, if they were moved enough by the work, what their take on it would be, how they would otherwise present it in book form, making the thing itself, as books should be, a piece of art. Or some other form besides book. Just because it’s appeared in book form doesn’t mean it can’t take other forms (playing cards for instance, as each chapter is 52 sentences). Visual artists like Sterling Allen and Monique Brideau (whom I met during my year at the Vermont Studio Center) have used chapters in their work. I’m keen to see it take the form of animation or a sound recording with music or whatever else some artist working in another medium might conceive. I read the entire thing in public once: at VSC in October 2006. I had a local student play fiddle in between the chapters. I like the idea of presenting it that way, with musical preludes, interludes, postludes.

LS: You’re working in a long tradition of authors who involve themselves directly with the means of publication: Walt Whitman setting the type on Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson binding her fascicles, C.P. Cavafy overseeing the printing of his loosely-bound or unbound folios of work, to name but a few. Like them, you’re harnessing a new technology, or rather harnessing technology in a new way. Would you describe yourself as a publisher, an author, a distributor, all three, none of the above? What’s the key activity your mode of publication — using an Espresso Book Machine, in conjunction with Northshire Books — foregrounds?

MS: A poet is all of those things always. But, yes, practically speaking, I am all of those, un/subconsciously. While I probably have the marketing savvy, I don’t have the energy or time. I throw out an occasional reminder on Facebook or my blog about the book. It’s enough for me to know the thing is out there and available but I’m not resting on my laurels. I do an interview like this and maybe that sparks some interest. I’m finishing up my second manuscript, Green Mountains, as well, and poems from that are forthcoming in jubilat, The Raleigh Quarterly, Sixth Finch, and Turntable & Blue Light, among others — so I can only look forward.

I don’t think poetry can change the world and as much as the impetus to publish The Mad Song during the Presidential election of 2008 was political, I had no delusions that it would turn the tide. The American people did that by themselves, as I knew they would. Whitman knew that Leaves of Grass was not going to be understood at first by the publishing world or generally accepted by the public. But he also knew he was right, he knew what was going on, he caught the wavelength. He knew the people he was talking to and about because he was one of them. He empathized. It all stems from Emerson:

“The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth.”

I think we’re not too far off from a time — if indeed we’re not there already — where writers will be publishing their books at home, with smaller versions of the EBM. Forming collectives, or tribes as Dean Young said (evidently, I wasn’t there) at his reading during the AWP conference in Chicago. Poet/editor/publishers like Matt Hart, Shanna Compton, and Reb Livingston are already doing this, and doing it well. It’ll be as easy as making music and distributing it from your home, as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! proved. It’s a wonder to me that the indie music world and the indie poetry world haven’t found each other in more public ways. It seems natural for a poet like Matt Hart or Chris Martin or my Tight co-editor Andrew Hughes to open up for Animal Collective or The Dirty Projectors or Wilco or be a part of some tour or festival. Sandburg and Segovia. Ginsberg and The Clash. Muldoon and Zevon.

What it will then come down to is your ability to get your book into the hands of readers and independent bookstores (if they still exist) and, believe it or not, the quality of your writing. Bad writing can only live for so long before it’s exposed for what it is, and we’re moving into an era where, in the short-term if not the long, people will be extremely picky where their money goes. You have to give them quality. A good poetry book is a sound investment. You can read it over and over and over again and it will yield different readings at different times. A novel, if it’s good, you read maybe twice? Then, of course, there’s Moby Dick.

LS: What, then, do you understand the “public” in the word “publication” to mean?

MS: Poetry is communication. One human to another. Opaque as some poetry seems, the true poet’s goal is to communicate, and this is where mastery of language comes in. These ways might seem hermetic to some but I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens’ letter to Hi Simons in which he said

Sometimes, when I am writing a thing, it is complete in my own mind; I write it in my own way and don’t care what happens. I don’t mean to say that I am deliberately obscure, but I do mean to say that, when the thing has been put down and is complete to my own way of thinking, I let it go. After all, if the thing is really there, the reader gets it. He may not get it at once, but, if he is sufficiently interested, he invariably gets it. A man who wrote with the idea of being deliberately obscure would be an impostor. But that is not the same thing as a man who allows a difficult thing to remain difficult because, if he explained it, it would, to his way of thinking, destroy it.

The public is far more intelligent than publishers — or the public as a collective mind — gives them(selves) credit for. The big thing now and always it seems is for people to “understand” poetry, to have poetry be “accessible.” The same way you understand instructions to your iPod, I suppose. But if poetry is music, you understand it first with your gut, your heart, your soul, and sometimes only that. How can you explain “Filles de Kilimanjaro” or “Nem Um Talvez” in words? You can’t. You listen and feel. If a poem is doing what it should, not just replicating nature but being a thing of nature, the only explanation for the thing is the thing itself. If the poet knows what he’s doing, it’s easy to get the poetry. Poetry shouldn’t be a warm glass of milk to make you feel good about yourself. It shouldn’t put you to sleep. It should take the top of your head off, as Emily Dickinson told us.

LS: Independent bookstores have closed on an almost weekly (at times, daily) basis in 2008 and 2009 thus far, and even the chains are struggling. Do bookstores have a future through reinventing themselves as not just booksellers but publishers? I’m thinking, perhaps idealistically, of a future that’s not only economic but social, (once again) a community arranged around the publication, distribution, and reception of books? One of the early reviewers of The Mad Song, a colleague from Northshire, writes that “There is nothing like having a talented young poet in your midst to re-ignite a slumbering passion for poetry” and that's true of having a publisher in one’s midst, too.

MS: I think they do have a future but it’s going to take a very brave independent bookstore owner to change the model, and right now nobody is willing to take that chance. I think they’re all hoping to ride out not just this depression but the onset of Kindle and its ilk. I can’t say as I think that’s the best approach. We have to fight.

Right now, retail, specifically book retail, works this way: I go to a store because it has a book I want to purchase and, hopefully, but more and more rarely, it employs booksellers who know what the hell they’re talking about, who are passionate about books, no matter what genre or style, who, if you treat them in a civil manner, will spend hours helping you find what you want. Very soon, the model is going to have to be the inverse: I go to a store or center because there are people there who know what they’re talking about and after I’ve had a conversation with them about X, Y, or Z, I can then purchase the book or author we’ve discussed.

This means the destruction of certain business models, turning bookstores into a model of democracy, wherein the booksellers as the people/congress hold the power and decide the ultimate direction of the store because they’re the ones on the ground; the owner/manager acts as an executive officer with veto power; and the customers/readers are a sort of judiciary, to say “This is OK; this isn’t” with their wallets. This also means that the distribution of wealth will have to shift toward the booksellers. If you hire someone with an MFA to work at your bookstore because of their knowledge, you rightly should pay them $15-20, minimum. Let’s even take the MFA out of the equation: someone who’s well-read is invaluable nowadays. The key is finding someone who’s both well-read and good at customer service, which is tricky when it comes to poets especially, who tend to be social misfits of the most outspoken kind. If a customer comes in looking for the latest Mary Oliver, you can’t try to sell her Christian Bök. Joseph Ceravolo, as big a leap as that is, might be more up her alley. Readers must also be willing to take those leaps, and many are. If you can get readers excited, they’ll come back for more. If you can show readers that they know more about poetry than they think they do, presenting them with good, interesting poets, they will absolutely read so-called “difficult” poetry.

Here’s a story: a woman came into the Northshire in February, was moving her family to Milwaukee, wanted books on the place. I first gave her a Michael Perry memoir, Truck: A Love Story, which is not Milwaukee specific but takes place in Wisconsin. Perry’s great and funny and you figure your typical customer wants prose, not poetry. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned John Koethe, the philosopher-poet who teaches at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin, and showed her North Point North, his new and selected, and the poem, “Early Morning in Milwaukee.” She went with the Koethe, her logic being she could read a poem in the morning every day. That never would’ve happened: A) Had I made assumptions about the customer and not engaged her as a person and; B) If I didn’t have the power that working at an independent bookstore gives me to have a poet like John Koethe on the shelf. Never underestimate the customer/reader, or assume they prefer the prosaic “accessible” over the poetic. You can come up with unlimited computer programs whose parameters will tell you “Customers who purchased Poet Smith also purchased Poet Jones” but no matter how precise you make these electronic suggestions, they’ll never be able to replicate an instinctual human being’s well-informed opinion.

And then there are simply those “a-ha” moments you get in bookstores, like when I stumbled upon Steve Scafidi’s For Love of Common Words a couple of years ago in the Burlington Barnes & Noble (and I was only shopping there because, believe it or not, there are no independent bookstores, save used ones, in Burlington). I was drawn to the title, the cover looked interesting, and from the first poem I read, I knew I had found a poet who was the real deal, who wrote poetry because he had to/wanted to, not because he was looking for tenure. I don’t think that would’ve happened on the solitude of the screen.

LS: Craig Dworkin, in The Consequence of Innovation, explores the literally overwhelming number of poetry collections published today – many through book contests – and the impossibility of reading everything. He suggests that, instead of a comprehensive knowledge of all contemporary poetry, we might become more adept at communicating the poetry we have read to each other. I wonder how you feel this intersects with your own writing and publishing?

MS: Hyperbolically speaking, if there are 11,000 new books of poetry published every year, how many of them are really worth reading and, more importantly, re-reading, now or ever? 100? Maybe 200 or so in the very, very long run, once they receive a wider audience than they’re initially met with, but even that’s a stretch. I’m not talking here about immortal collections of verse; simply books that don’t waste your time. I think one should always be open and on the lookout for new writers but there are only so many hours in the day. That’s why the dearth of good criticism is disconcerting. We need critics, specifically practicing poets, to call out books that should be read by a wider audience as well as books that should be avoided. I’m talking about reviews and essays of different modes and manners, not just a blog post saying: “I loved this book” or “I hated this book.” Let’s have some engagement again.

People know more about poetry than they think they do, and we can get some voices out there that can both promote interesting poetry and make people feel like they can get into it. Kenneth Koch did this with his books on teaching and his anthologies. There’s a feeling that we have to do everything we can to praise a poetry that starts to get a large audience, that we can’t criticize it or poetry in general will be sunk or that those that criticize will be thought to be jealous. There’s also a misconception that we have to write a certain way to, again, make poetry “accessible,” but this is giving absolutely no credit to the reading public or to imagination in general and is indeed doing people a disservice by pandering. If we don’t try to be great, why should readers expect greatness from us? We are no closer to or farther from the ideal - poetically, civically, spiritually - than any generation has been. But others understood, as Emerson did, that there is one mind common to all individuals. Everything that has ever been is available to you. It’s only for you to realize this and act.

Part One: Interview with Michael Schiavo, author of The Mad Song

2009-03-11T05:35:00.001-07:00

Part Two now up here.

LS: Let’s talk about the form of The Mad Song: 13 sections of five prose paragraphs of varying length, each deploying an anaphoric and/or alliterative foundation that oscillates between the imperative and the conditional. How organic or prescripted was that form? Jack Spicer talks about the serial poem as something that you can’t really know the end of while you're writing it, and I wonder how true that is for The Mad Song, too?

MS: The Mad Song could go on forever. There could be coda upon coda that equal or surpass the original 13 chapters. Or you could read it as a literal cycle. As soon as you read “Some rebel, some citizen, some sage” at the end, it immediately connects you to the beginning of the poem: “Of Bedlam in its prairie pride.” Yes, it’s meant to be read in the order in which I arranged it but you can dip in here and there and pull something out.

The form sat in my mind for years before it spilled out, in a 10-day Rilkean surge, September 2006. About 80% of it was originally composed in that stretch, while the other 20% was cobbled together from older poems that weren’t working on their own, or that were working and I just wanted to steal from. I wanted to see if I could write prose poems using certain elements of lined poetry. Sentence count replaced line count. The direct influence was Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, of course.

The other thing was to replicate the traditional mad song stanza — which is cousin to limerick, except it’s visionary instead of bawdy — as paragraphs. That’s where the three longer and two shorter paragraphs come from, imitating the three long lines and two short of the mad song stanza. Gertrude Stein said that the natural unit of composition for Americans is the paragraph, not the line. I don’t know if I buy that completely but like most pieces of wisdom, it has the air of truth to it. America, with its intricate relationships and disputes between states, its interactions with Latin America, with Canada, with globalization, etc, etc, is an expansive entity. The people too. We need space to think, to talk, to convince, to cajole.

The paragraphs are actually not of varying length: each chapter has three paragraphs of 13 sentences and two paragraphs of 6 and 7 sentences, which combine to make 13. These may represent, say, the walls of a room (not necessarily one of drywall), with one broken to let the light in, or to illustrate the ongoing construction of a world. So I set myself up a structure but in doing that, you’re liberated, as anyone who writes in form, received or invented, will tell you. The anaphora was used to both propel and anchor these sentences but also to create that sense of disjunction. “If Texarkana was Tenochtitlán.” Well, what? Is the reader missing the beginning of that phrase or the end? It’s up to them to fill in the blanks using their imagination and their experience of America, historically, absolutely, but also of today. The things around them that move them. Which is a novel concept in an age that demands everything be spelled out. My job as a poet is not to tell you what to think but to remind you of what you already know. And you know it all. I sometimes think that the American people don’t buy much poetry because they don’t need to: they’re surrounded by poetry in their own speech, in their interactions, and observations. They know it but they don’t call it poetry.

LS: One thing I’m struck by when I read The Mad Song is how it questions assumptions about identity. We live in a world where we’re very keen to assume character based on partial knowledge of speech and actions. But in The Mad Song, there’s no attempt to make us feel that any I, you, or other pronoun attaches to a specific person. The sentences and sentiments of The Mad Song float around the book’s country, waiting to be voiced by a reader, needing to be questioned rather than accepted or rejected. That makes reading a fundamentally active process – how important is this to you?

MS: Paramount. We live in a world in which we are not fully engaged. We’ve floated away from the root of things, which causes us to be more easily swayed and duped because we simply accept what’s given to us. But this is a major thrust of Emerson’s philosophy, so it’s nothing new. The genius of John Ashbery’s poetry — and it’s a wonder why he isn’t read and loved by everyone, even those who “hate poetry” — is that he writes poems that you create as you read them. In school, when you’re forced to analyze a poem and the ubiquitous cry of “Why can’t it just mean what I want it to mean?” is thrown up — well, Ashbery’s poetry is exactly like that. Yes, he provides you with a framework, with words and sentences and punctuation, the storyline, but as a reader, you are asked to be as creative as the poet. It’s wonderful.

I’m not sure my poetry goes as far as his — maybe that’s the anxiety of influence talking — but in a similar way, I’m trying to replicate the country in my work, linguistically, philosophically, musically, spiritually, all the -lys, if I may be allowed. America is not fixed, never has been, never will be. It’s constantly changing, pulsing, moving, contradicting itself, even as it moves ever forward, even in the moment. Even as you read this, you have the opportunity to move the world around you this way or that. It’s self-reliance: you look around and within yourself and you find all the resources you will ever need. It’s all there.

More than that, though, America will always be searching for an identity. It's in this sense that President Obama is the representative American: he had to build himself out of disparate pieces, and that's why he so identifies with America, the place and the idea. Anyone who wants to know about the American character, or about American poetry, should read Constance Rourke’s classic tome, American Humor. It’s such a simple and beautiful explanation of who we are as a people. She puts an emphasis on improvisation and she’s right. That’s why jazz and blues are classical American music. All the great American long poems — Leaves of Grass, The Cantos, The Waste Land, "A", The Maximus Poems, The Dream Songs, Dickinson’s poems, Spring and All — all are unfinished or motley in some way, are incomplete improvisations. Granted, improvisations of high genius, but improvisations nonetheless. Incomplete as their country is and ever will be. This is not to be lamented but celebrated. We, as Americans, are always going on our nerve.

LS: I love the adjacency and contingency of this book, by which I mean specifically the way sentences rub up against and repel each other, like magnets placed pole to pole. Two juxtaposed sentences tempt us to read them as connected, and yet there’s often nothing more than our wishing it and expecting it to be so that makes the connection. This technique is a powerful strategy for resisting narrative assumptions and glib romantic (political) ideologies in favour of a more investigative approach to the stories we take part in and pass around. Would you see this book as a sort of anti-story, a telling of events that wants to get at consequences but also wants us to realize that there’s more going on than a simple cause-and-effect narrative?

MS: It’s a tall tale, a campfire story, a song heard in passing, the amalgamation of the capital around me. Like a Yankee peddler traveling through the Carolinas. I don’t think it’s an anti-story at all. It might not have the traditional moves of a story, but it’s a story nevertheless. A word can be a story. A sound can be a story. Keep in mind, too, that the narrator is “mad.” Or is he/she? That’s part of it. There is a movement from the grand visionary at the beginning to a revelation in chapter 7 and then on to a more inward examination before a summary in the last chapter which leads you on to a potential never-ending plotline.

I was talking to a guy in the bar I live above in North Bennington. Guy was a construction worker, drunk off his ass, a little belligerent. We got talking about the connection between poetry and music, bringing up Bob Dylan as an example. I spouted on about how Dylan has the advantage of music, and that’s why he can write surrealistic lines that anyone invested in it can understand because the music can pick up the slack, can inform the mood or meaning, and the way he sings or sneers implies meaning too. The guy cut me off. “It’s because he tells a story,” he said. Damn it, he’s right. You can get away with anything, written in any way, as long as you’re telling a story, keeping the reader/listener interested. That’s also very American.

LS: Kate Greenstreet, in her fantastic series of first book interviews, always asked this question, and I think it’s particularly apt here. Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

MS: I believe poetry can create change in a person. A person can then change the world.

LS: The Mad Song is a book that believes deeply in citizen-ship even as it howls “no fair” at the way citizens have been time and again betrayed by government and corporations. Its very existence is a kind of participation, a taking-up of the challenge and responsibility of being a citizen. I can’t help but think of William Carlos Williams’ antagonist farmer, an artist composing in his field, in Spring and All: would you see yourself as an artist-citizen?

MS: As an American, there’s no way for me to separate the two. It just is. We are a government of the people. To say you’re not involved is to not live in reality. Whether you like it or not (and many do not), you’re involved. Move to a dictatorship if you don’t want to be a part of the government, to take responsibility. Takes thinking for yourself right out of the equation. We get the government we deserve and ultimately the fault is ours, the people, for what goes on here. We can mutter the live-long day about how corrupt the 43rd presidency was but we didn’t howl loud enough because we didn’t want to disrupt the status quo. I include myself in the indictment.

President Obama is smarter than anyone so far has given him credit for, though I know Bernard Goldberg will disagree. He’s a man of his moment, and, so, is like a poet. He knows that there’s no way for a politician to hide his misdeeds in the Internet age. They come out sooner rather than later. So the “craziest” thing to do is deal honestly with people, and use common sense. That’s why the right-wing is in a tizzy. They can’t lie any more and have any citizen with a brain in her head believe them. Anyone who does indeed believe them is in deep denial, living in The Matrix. This is not to say I have no criticisms of the President right now. As much as I appreciate him being honest with the country, he should also start to remind the citizenry of their power and responsibility to be agents of change, to inspire a little more. He’d do well to read Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country if he’s not already familiar with it.

LS: There’s a wide-ranging set of influences that have come together in this book, and it often makes me think of medieval conceptions of authors, in which an author is compiling or translating other texts, rather than inventing. You’re drawing from Star Wars and Chuck Berry, country music or grunge rock as well as Shakespeare and Stein. What’s the role of influence within this book, or more widely within contemporary poetry, if you want to take on that grand theme?

MS: You can’t be a whole person and not be influenced by what you love. That’s the whole point, learning from others, in life or in art, internalizing the lessons, making them your own. But that’s what America is also. It’s so many things, some disparate, some similar, simultaneously, it’s its own thing. The genius of America is the contradiction, as we know. A land that touts the liberty of all yet was built on slavery and the forced removal of native peoples. Strike-breakers. Beating civil rights marchers. Yet, again, America is never complete, and it never will be. It’s the striving for perfection, not the attainment, which puts our greatness in motion. It’s stupid to say, “I can use this but I can’t use that,” in your poems. It always has been but especially in 2009. I’m lucky to be part of a generation that doesn’t have to deal with avant-garde v. School of Quietude battles, whatever that shit means. Let’s take two poets close by on my book shelf: love Donald Justice, love Kenneth Koch. I can take from everyone and make my own thing.

I’m also of a generation who loves John Ashbery as much as Chuck Berry. I grew up on Dylan, Nirvana, Public Enemy, hundreds more. We’re heavily influenced not necessarily by the lyrics of rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop — though of course we certainly are — but the rhythms and phrasings of the music, the mood it gives, and the “unh.” Is there much difference between Stevens’ “ki-ki-ri-ki / Brings no rou-cou, / No rou-cou-cou” and Little Richard’s “wop-babalu-bop-doo-wop-bam-boom”? If there is, I don’t know it. Anyone who doesn’t realize this is doomed to be left behind. This notion is why Helen Vendler claimed she can’t read poets born after 1970. This is a shame, because she, along with Harold Bloom, despite the arguments against them, are our two preeminent critics of poetry and neither are long for this world.

LS: I want to ask, since I'm first sending you these questions on inauguration eve: what does this new presidency augur in for poetry, and for the possibility of poets-as-citizens? (Or, if you prefer, is the economic crisis a time poetry can become an activity, rather than just an aesthetics, in the public eye, in the way someone like Oppen or Niedecker (in very different ways) or, more recently, Harryette Mullen in her Stein-like manner might advocate?

MS: Everyone’s been focusing on Obama’s admiration for Lincoln but little to nothing has been mentioned about his love for Emerson. I think if you really want to know what propels him, both in his philosophy and in the way he uses language, you should read Emerson’s Essays. They’re prose poems really. Sure, I wish he had picked Harryette Mullen, or, better, Jay Wright, to read at the inaugural, but let’s ease up on Elizabeth Alexander. If the lines had been broken differently, with her, indeed, stilted delivery, I think the criticism would be lightened by the nod to Dr. Williams. There was a lot of Sandburg in there too, which I loved. Imagist splashes. No, the syntax was not very wild but it, like Obama’s speech, moved in a different way than we’re necessarily used to.

The right-wing accused the President of using too much poetry when he campaigned, then they said there wasn’t a sound-byte ready phrase to shove into the history books after his inaugural address. It all comes back/down to telling a story. The President goes for the big picture, the overall effect, while punctuating his speeches with memorable phrases. He and his chief speechwriter could lean a little more on the Emersonian for my taste, a little less on the too-easy “Yes we can!” but Obama clearly knows how to use language, like any good poet should.

Negative? Reviews and A Mad Song

2009-03-09T05:50:00.001-07:00

In the past week, Jason Guriel, Ron Silliman, and Michael Schiavo have all offered what might be called "negative" reviews of books of poems: reviews that don't flinch from articulating what they see as the flaws of books which have garnered praise and attention. Such reviews might seem to fly in the face of Auden's famous dictum "Criticism will be love, or will not be." Guriel prefaces his own triple-review with an interesting reflection on his process: "Movie critics with whom we disagree are merely wrong; poetry critics (and politicians) go negative." While the movie comparison isn't ideal (I wonder how much negative reviewing there is of independent movies in comparison to mainstream films) Guriel's call for another term - he suggests "necessarily skeptical," admittedly with his tongue slightly in cheek - to describe these types of review is worth attending to.

Part of the problem with negative/positive as terms is that they situate reviewing only as an activity aiming to get us to read or not read a book. Reviewing, though, does much more than that. It develops and articulates the conversation "we" are having about poetry while also broadening who that "we" is. Perhaps few non-poets have read the recent reviews that have caused a stir on the blogs, but we need that to start happening. I've read plenty of theater reviews beyond the number of shows I've been able to see; such reviews, whether they recommend the show or urge me to avoid it, allow me a participation in a conversation about contemporary theatre. We can't read and re-read all the worthy books of poems that come out in any one year - as Ron Silliman's posts on the William Carlos Williams award indicate - which is one of the reasons an articulate and visible review climate, consisting of recommendations as well as hesitations, is necessary. As John Gallaher says "If there were more of a conversation about poetry, and that conversation was something people could find some interest in, then they might start to actually talk about the poetry itself."

Michael Schiavo's review of Matthew Dickman's All-American Poem is especially interesting because it confronts an extremely contemporary book in order to broaden the conversation about it. Copper Canyon's website for the book lists "reviews," four of which are by the judge, two blurbers, and a friend of the author. It is not that some of these "reviewers" are his friends that is problematic; what matters is that their interests and methods do not lie in giving us a complete picture of the book: how does it differ from Frank O'Hara? Does it really mean anything to say "These poems swing with verve and luminosity. They take no prisoners." as Dorianne Laux suggests?

These commenters' partiality - in the sense of being incomplete and of being biased towards, both fine qualities if announced as such, which the description of Tony Hoagland as "judge" does (nowhere does the website admit some of these "reviews" are from the jacket blurbs) - filters down into supposedly objective reviews, like the other two featured excerpts, which are from established venues - Los Angeles Times Review, New Haven Review. As well as using some of the vocabulary the partial blurbers used, these reviews both rely on a mention of Whitman and O'Hara. The conversation about poetry too often develops in this way, by shorthand, the easiest possible ciphers for situating a book. Such ciphers are not only inaccurate, as a glance at Dickman's book shows: they cement the American canon in narrow ways. I long for someone to describe a book in terms of it being "as American as Jose Garcia Villa," and thus to recognize that the description of anything as American must be complex. Michael Schiavo's own review approaches this position as it takes such reviewerly laziness to task: "Name-checking the states of the Republic does not make your poetry Whitmanic. Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s." His target is both the poetry and the conversation, and that's what makes his review so useful to us as readers and potential readers of poetry, whether Dickman's book or no. His own work, interestingly, offers a pretty complex version of America, as I get to later.

Reviewing is fundamental to our reading practices, for what we chose to read and not read. The incautious review that relies on shorthand not only risks giving an inaccurate impression of a book but it takes attention away from other books we could be reading: a far worse thing for poetry than a so-called negative review, since the would-be reader who listens to a review and finds that the book is nothing like Walt Whitman might not return to other books of poetry. And so, in this sense, perhaps Auden's dictum still holds: Criticism will be done for the love of poetry, society, of politics, or it will not be done.

This week on The All-Purpose Magical Tent, I'm going to feature a two-part interview with Michael Schiavo, conducted before his review and addressing in part his own book, which I'd like to suggest is one of the books that fetishizing the Dickman twins' blend of personality and ciphered Americanism could obscure. (A list of five others ends this post; I'd recommend checking out reviews of each to see if they're your cup of tea).

I first began interviewing Michael because I was taken with the means of production of his book. Published via an Espresso Book Machine at Northshire Books in Vermont, complete with a foreword by Douglas Crase, The Mad Song links the production of poetic knowledge - the writing of poems - to the production and distribution of the book itself, an intricate and engaging step that is not fully covered by existing dimensions of Print On Demand, Self-Publishing, the First Book Contest, or the time-honoured and necessary tradition of friends publishing the friends and strangers whose work they admire.

I pitched an interview to Poets and Writers, thinking that they, as the foremost magazine for beginning, emerging, and even established poets, would be keen to feature another dimension of the publishing conversation. They declined, so I decided to run the interview here on Wednesday and Friday. I hope any of you who read it will disseminate it widely as I think it deserves a wide audience. Michael speaks engagingly on The Mad Song, on the methodology of publication, on independent bookstores (he's a bookseller at Northshire), and on questions of American-ness, influence and spirituality.

The other reason I wanted to interview Michael developed once I had begun the process and started reading his book. Formally as well as thematically it engaged and enticed me, leading me to readings and re-readings. Pound wanted us to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase and not the metronome, but Schiavo does both,: the irregular metronome that measures The Mad Song ticks from conditional to imperative, and its hesitancy in remaining at either pole suggest how complex and conflated each position is in the current socio-political arena, and in the historical-mythical America. The Mad Song isn't a unconsidered paean to diaspora, an elegy for a lost past, or a lament for a broken promise of the future, although it put each of these modes into play. What it does is investigate, in its formal methodology - its anaphoric gestures, "incomplete" sentences, unanchored vocalization - and its thematic registers, the challenges and paradoxes of participatory democracy.

The way that The Mad Song enacts such participatory democracy (not to celebrate it only, or to castigate it, but to set that metronome ticking between both positions) is evident from the first paragraph:

Of Bedlam in its prairie pride. Of the roach that winds between the stars, triumphal. Of well-water served in garnet goblets. Of crusted penknife sitting on the pillow in the crib. Of the foxy light July bestows. Of tightwad peace and spendthrift war. Of the ousted governor’s children, especially his eldest, and the way she swings her hips. Of notorious arts and how they make hoi polloi drunk. Of lauren-blue drifts and plumes. Of your vulcanized scent. Of nightly the oceanic barb I must remove from my heart. Of the bison and the owl. Of a country boy, not easy to know.

These sentences pose questions of connection and adjacency: to each other, but also to the worlds and cultural particulars in which they seek to participate. The nod to the epic opener, "of," and the erasure of the familiar "I sing." The gesture to American iconography and the complication of it: how to square "the bison and the owl," how to take the status of the "ousted governer?" The way this paragraph involves the personal is not to sing identity but to complicate it, "a country boy, not easy to know." Amid these recombinant sentences and fragments, where we are mid-stream but unsure if we're missing the source or the end, the question of who we are as selves becomes problematic. The activity of speaking is dynamized within The Mad Song . This book's pronouncements are just there: pronounced, moving between contexts, asking us to speak with and against them. This is the wisdom of the mad song and The Mad Song. As it beats its own, singular drum, it doesn't ask us to follow along, but to join in, keeping a different rhythm if we so choose. That, after all, is where conversation begins.

Check back here Wednesday for Part One, and Friday for Part Two. In the meantime, here's five books which I think articulate Americas in intricate and compelling ways. The links take you to thoughtful reviews.

Quan Barry's Controvertibles
Craig Santos Perez's from Unincorporated Territory
Patrick Rosal's My American Kundiman
Laura Walker's Rimertown: An Atlas
Shanxing Wang's Mad Science in Imperial City (This is my own review.)

Three of these reviews, incidentally, are from The Believer. I wasn't trying to plug the magazine, which I have reviewed for, once (but which also rejected poems of mine having already accepted them, because of internal editorial conflict, so I have mixed feelings). However, it is interesting to note that The Believer , which isn't primarily thought of as a poetry review venue, is featuring reviews of some of the more challenging, ground-breaking, and affecting books of poetry being published in the early 21st century. Good for them.

Writing as a Springboard to Beyond Memory

2009-02-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

Working now on a presentation for Brent Edwards' "Black Radicalism and the Archive," in which I'm discussing C.L.R. James's fantastic and still-urgent Beyond a Boundary , both a cricket memoir and, more strikingly, an argument for the artistic, and therefore socio-political agency of, sport, especially cricket.

One quote resonating with me as I try to shape my thoughts:

"once you have written down something your mind is ready to go further" (59).

More on this book soon, I hope.

In the meantime, play Stick Cricket online here

Dingbat Poetics #2

2009-02-16T06:01:00.000-08:00

We took long car journeys as kids, driving well into Europe. Our parents would stock us with sandwiches and words: reading materials. That's adjective noun. It's also present participle noun. It's also present participle verb. Reading as an activity that makes material, tangible.

Crossword puzzles, word searches, anagrams. Where the blank is, place your letters. Where the letters are, organize a word arising out of them. Where you've been given a word, rearrange, splice, make it new. Favourite of all, this:

W O R D

W A R D

H A R D

H A R T

H A L T

Every letter will change. We are with the atomic, the particle-ular.

Last semester, a brilliant student in my Modern Poetry Discussion Section read the last three lines of Yeats "Who Goes With Fergus":

"And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars."

She brought to the surface w, s, d, as they wandered, dishevelled. Dishevelled itself an unlevelling of a pallindrome which Yeats uses earlier in the poem: level no more. Since reading James Joyce's Ulysses I have never read "world" as anything but "wor(l)d."

Car journeys, and the horizon always level. Staring out the window, the horizon always level and passing. Then, stationary in traffic, an adjacent lane edges into motion and we are of a sudden sliding backwards. Nothing kinetic is different, nothing measurable, and yet we have felt our own motion despite the evidence. Words changing. Unlettered. Recombined. What poetry is. Word to halt and moving on, again.

(Dingbat Poetics #1)

Copy/Right: Shepard Fairey v the AP

2009-02-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

According to, well, the Associated Press, artist-in-the-news Shepard Fairey is suing them because they try to sue him over the correspondences between the above photograph (left) and Fairey's poster (right - directions added for the benefit of the AP).

In the blue corner, the AP says that the photographers who create art through taking pictures have a right to ownership and use of that art; in the red(, white, and blue) corner, Fairey contends that his poster amounts to fair use and, appropriately (or appropriatingly) has retained Anthony Falzone, executive director of Stanford’s Fair Use Project, to argue his case.

The legal intricacies of ownership and copyright I'll leave to the law courts, but what intrigues me about this is an interview Print Magazine conducted with artist Milton Glaser. A couple of excerpts:

PM: How does one distinguish between plagiarism and reference?

MG: The process of looking back at the past is very accepted in our business—the difference is when you take something without adding anything to the conversation.
We celebrate influence in the arts, we think it’s important and essential. But imitation we have some ambivalence about, especially because it involves property rights. It probably has something to do with the nature of capitalism. We know that in other cultures, Chinese culture for instance, imitation is seen as a tribute, because you wouldn’t bother imitating trivial works. But in those cases the influence is acknowledged and the skill required is obvious.

For myself—this is subjective—I find the relationship between Fairey’s work and his sources discomforting. Nothing substantial has been added.

and, from a little later in the interview:

MG: what’s most important to the graphic arts is communicating clearly, and sometimes that means using the vernacular of the moment. For the fine arts, the most important thing is being personally expressive. There aren’t that many unique voices in the world.

Glaser's sense of discomfort obviously stems from his strong and avowedly capitalist ideas of ownership, and that seems to place him in a very different camp from Fairey, whose work as a street artist and often-stated views on (street) art as a force for social change suggest, well, a less capitalist standpoint.

That the two have different political and artistic views is fine, of course. What is troubling - setting aside Glaser's construction of Chinese culture as invested in imitation while American culture is not, a painting with broad brush-strokes which doesn't do justice to artists in either China or the US - is that Glazer falls back on the idea of "unique voices" and the need to be "personally expressive."

I'm not so sure we can align those two concepts, in any art, especially where social change is a goal, rather than the maintaining of the status quo. Fairey's poster operates in several directions: it provides a symbol around which a community for political change could cohere; it allows for a questioning of what happens when colour is foregrounded during an election, subtly by the erasure of skin colour in favour of the "national" colours; it offers a commentary on "hope" as a political aim or opt-out; and it also asks that we consider issues of celebration and replication. When the image of one person becomes ubiquitous, what happens to the ideas of individuality, communal understanding of socio-political direction, and the ways we construct those we interact with, especially through the distancing lenses of the media.

In effect, Fairey's piece, for all its questioning, is and should be read as discomforting: not for the way it appropriates a photograph, but for the way it both covers over and discovers President Obama, making visible a double process that is also happening in the photograph the AP used, but which we can't so easily see in that more everyday snap. David Hockney once quipped that "photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed cyclops - for a split second," and while this isn't a critique of photography (an art form I love) I do want to suggest media acceptance of media-generated images remains too unquestioned, too aware of its own split-second paralysis.

Fairey's piece allows us to ask some important questions about how we view individuals within social and political contexts, and whether we've taken into account our own projections as well as their performances of identity. Glaser's critique assumes that art represents a true personal, rather than the way we are each the product of competing and often incompatible influences. Glaser, whose company is called Milton Glaser, Inc, should recognize that such construction underlies and undermines the myth of the personally expressive; then again, if you can found a company named after yourself, perhaps you're so invested in the public image of the self that you can't recognizes it, too, is a photograph, a split-second.

The idea that art represents a unique voice is an all-too-oft-repeated assumption of a certain school or set of schools of art, reflecting a geographical and historical bias that ignores other cultures and times. China enters into Glaser's critique as monolithic and only worth mentioning as an outlying reference point; the English medieval notion that an author compiled, rather than invented, gets ignored. The effect, however, is not simply an aesthetic difference, one camp valuing originality, the other collaboration and reference. In maintaining the idea of the "unique voice," art threaten to removes the social through presenting a hierarchy, the haves versus the have-nots, those who have made it and those who have not. That's a limited and limiting portrayal which doesn't allow art to be fully social or fully an agent from social change in the way I think Fairey sees (and seizes) it: by acknowledging that art proceeds by imitation and intervention, by copying and altering, Fairey reminds us that anyone can become an artist in the way a society needs at a particular point in time. That is, someone gets to enter into and rethink a set of aesthetic assumptions, in order to redirect society, starting with the individual and not the elite.

Whether or not Fairey wins his case, it nevertheless serves to highlight the importance of what his project is doing.

Long John Silver drives a motor car

2009-02-04T07:35:00.000-08:00

J. saw a man driving a car around Manhattan yesterday. He had a parrot on his shoulder.

Just saying...

I can't help of course think of Creeley's "I Know a Man,":

drive, he sd,
for christ's sake,
look out where yr going

New Jersey Hall of Fame

2009-02-03T06:12:00.000-08:00

NPR reports that New Jersey has inducted to its Hall of Fame a curious mix including Jon Bon Jovi, Paul Robeson, Guglielmo Marconi, Althea Gibson, and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams (the former, reports NPR is a "poet," the latter a "writer").

While I mull on how to read this induction - voted for by NJ residents and state agencies - I'll share some lines from Paterson , which I'm currently deep in.

Who are these people (how complex
the mathematic) among whom I see myself
in the regularly ordered plateglass of
his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?
They walk incommunicado, the
equation is beyond solution, yet
its sense is clear - that they may live
his thought is listed in the Telephone
Directory -

If You Could Dream a Reading...

2009-01-27T10:09:00.000-08:00

Join us for a reading by Litmus Press, Nightboat Books, and Saturnalia Books authors

featuring Sebastian Agudelo, Cal Bedient, Stefania Heim, John Keene, Timothy Liu, Jill Magi, Laura Moriarity, Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens), Jennifer Scappettone, Lytton Smith, Kerri Sonnenberg, and Jonathan Weinert.

Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7:30pm, FREE
Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave (Blue Line to Damen)
773.862.4882

I just found out the above lineup for a reading I'm happily included in next month (during AWP, for those who are going.) I'm floored to see so many names of poets on that list who I've been reading for years and admiring the work of, and I can't wait to hear what they're writing. I would single out some folks, but I'd end up just listing the whole list again...

This will also be the first reading from The All-Purpose Magical Tent about which Terrance Hayes has written,

"Whoa… Some poets labor for years — or record the music of aviaries and asylums—in search of a syntax this particular,this peculiar. Some poets dream of inventing and reinventing the kinds of forms we find here"

.

Hope to see some of you there! More news soon (and also more non-book related posts...once I'm out from under the PhD. workload for a brief moment. About to go lecture on Emily Dickinson - very excited.)

Speak Out on Proposition 8

2008-11-23T18:11:00.001-08:00

SPEAK OUT ON PROPOSITION 8

Monday, November 24, 2008, 6:15pm
754 Schermerhorn Extension
Columbia University

Panelists:

Katherine Franke (Columbia Law School)
Kevin Maillard (Fordham Law School)
Alice Kessler-Harris (Columbia, History Dept.)

Moderator:

Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia, Anthropology Dept.)

Please join us for a discussion on California's Proposition 8 and its aftermath.

New Rope (No Money Needed)

2008-10-03T05:38:00.001-07:00

Here's my proactive suggestion to presses, reviewers, and magazines in response to NetGalley's $400 per title idea.

Let's get Devin Emke to adapt his Submissions Manager for galley submission purposes. Magazines would be able to use it for reviews, just as journals now use it for submissions. This would help everyone out (presses, reviewers, magazines) without ending up adding several thousand dollars to the operating budget of presses - money that, if it exists, could be spent on promotion and/or publishing more works.

We can and need to reduce costs and save trees by having more electronic galleys; we can also make galleys more accessible to reviewers by going to an electronic model which would allow them to access the galley anywhere, any time.

However, and it's a big however, there is simply no need for it to cost $400 a title; Rosetta, who are behind NetGalley, would be making money off presses for doing very little themselves.

It seems crucial to me that we don't as an independent publishing community divert our money into the profit margins of corporations. We can do this in better ways.

Money for Old Rope: NetGalley (ADDED TO)

2008-10-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

It's not my fashion to give credence or space to something that I believe is bad for poetry. Why draw attention to such a thing? However, I'm breaking that guideline over NetGalley, an organization which "provides centralized galley and digital press kit services, as well as a place to connect and collaborate with others in the industry." NetGalley has just partnered with Foreword Magazine, which is meant to be in support of the "independently published."

My problem is this: NetGalley charges $400 per title to assist publishers in making their galleys/Advance Reader Copies available online, and to provide electronic notification to publishers on decisions reviewers have taken with their galleys.

As someone who has worked with small presses for several years now to help secure review attention, I have tried to encourage electronic galleys. It costs nothing for a press to prepare an electronic galley. Not $400, nothing.

At a time when review attention and space is decreasing, NetGalley preys on publisher anxiety about review coverage. Net Galley imposes (or, at best, invites) a charge of $400 dollars in order for publishers to do EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO NOW. Under the guise of helping the environment and saving trees, NetGalley takes money from underfunded independent publishers. If the big fiction houses want to do this, great, let them splurge. But when "independent" magazines like ForeWord sign up, poets and poetry presses suffers.

So here's what I propose.

Please join me in this. Please don't acquiesce. Link widely to this post. Write to ForeWord to suggest they rethink, that if they're that keen on electronic submissions, they could facilitate it without NetGalley and without making small presses pay thousands of dollars. We all would love to see less paper galleys in the world, since most of them end up in the recycling bin or, worse, the garbage. NetGalley isn't the way to do it, and encouraging it certainly isn't.

In the interests of discussion, if you're a reviewer, a publisher, a magazine, and you feel I'm missing something about NetGalley, let me know. (EDIT: See Gabe's comment for a less indy press-centric reading of this!) As a publicist, as a writer, as a reader, I feel that this is a corporate entity which doesn't care about or care for words, language, literature. Unlike such wonderful groups as Small Press Distribution, which has really embraced the web, NetGalley is an anonymous organization. I can't find any reason to support them, and I find every reason to propose alternatives that are good for publishing and for writing about books.

ADDITION:

I want to make it clear that ForeWord and other magazines are NOT moving to a NetGalley only system. So publishers who are reading this: you won't lose out if you opt not to go with NetGalley.

That said, my aim stands: I'd love to see ForeWord and others adopt another, non-expensive electronic organizational model, as journals have with Submissions Manager. So I'll keep this issue alive in the hopes of achieving that.

ForeWord, by the way, apparently encourages (non NetGalley) electronic submissions and has been doing so for over a year. This is news to me, news I'm happy to hear, and hopeful that they'll make more prominent on their submissions guidelines in the interests of serving independent presses.

Translation, Iceland, the Sugarcubes: In Conversation with Bragi Olafsson

2008-10-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Here's where'll I'll be and what up to next Tuesday: can't wait! It's being organized by Bragi's publishers, Open Letter at University of Rochester. I'll report back next week - but if you're around the area, or totally in love with a) Iceland or b) the Sugarcubes or c) Translation or d) books with protagonists who spend the entire time under a bed, then come travel to it!

Author Bragi Olafsson, former bassist of the popular Icelandic rock band the Sugarcubes, will discuss literature and writing with translator Lytton Smith on Tuesday, October 7, at 6 p.m. in the Hawkins-Carlson Room. His novel, The Pets (Open Letter, 2008), which features a protagonist who hides under his bed for almost the entire book, was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize and is the first of his books to be translated into English.

Open Letter is offering $65 subscriptions for which amount you get 6, count 'em, 6 works in translation by authors from Margeurite Duras to Ruben Fonseca. $120 for 12! And looking at those beautiful, pop-art covers, I think it's worth $65 just for the covers.

Gary Lutz: Alone with the Sentence

2008-09-28T08:52:00.001-07:00

I can't read Gary Lutz, author of the short-story collections I Looked Alive , Stories in the Worst Way , and, most recently, Partial List of People to Bleach as well, crucially but less often noted, The Writer's Digest Grammar Reference Book.

I very nearly can't read Gary Lutz, though I want to just about every day.

Every time I read Gary Lutz, the problem is, I can't stop the sentences I've read from sounding out, percussive and recurrent, days after in my head. I think a little like a Gary Lutz sentence. I write a little like a Gary Lutz sentence. Actually, that's not a bad fate: the tactics and strategies of a Lutz sentence are well worth dwelling within.

Life could better subsist as a Gary Lutz sentence, and on Wednesday night, in a talk at Columbia University called "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," Lutz let the standing-room only audience (people in the corridor, straining ears, themselves agape) in on how he reads and thinks a sentence by the letter.

Drawing on examples such as Christine Schutt's phrase "acutely felt, clearly flat," Lutz pointed out not just the obvious correspondences between the two monosyllables (and let's not forget one is a verb and one an adjective posing as a noun) but also the way that the first phrase "contains the alphabetic DNA" of the second. He tracked individual letters and combinations of letters through sentences and paragraphs from Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, Fiona Maazel, and Sam Lipsyte. Outlining his "poetics of the sentence" with a nod to Gordon Lish's ideas of "consecution" he talked about "the drama of the letters within the words."

In the hope that someone will publish Gary Lutz's talk, which is the most masterful and useful talk on craft and poetics I've had the pleasure of attending, I won't say too much more about it, except that a close look at the sentences Lutz has clocked up in his own works would be a great place to see how taut and locked a sentence could shut.

Instead, I want to swing this post to two places that I think are adjacent to both Lutz's work, his talk, and each other: the poetry of George Oppen and the Anglo-Saxon riddles. Bear with me, here. Look, Lutz-like, at the opening of Oppen's 1934 Discrete Series :

White. From the
Under arm of T

The red globe.

From under the "arm" or crossbar of the letter T in the word "white" we find the "e" of both "red" and "globe." "Thus / Hides the // Parts" as Oppen says in his next poem.

Or, later, the lines:

Between glasses--place, over which
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaitime passes--a false light.

As spectators for the "drama of the letters within the words" we can notice the way "l" and "a" run through this sentence, each getting ahead of its alternate: "la," "la," "a," "al," "l." What is within "glasses" is also in "place" and "place" is literally and letterally and latterly over "time passes" and thus passes over it - only to run into the "false light" which again contains the elements "between" the start and end consonants of "glasses."

A discussion of rhyme, off-rhyme, assonance, alliteration, cannot and will not suffice. What Lutz's reading of contemporary fiction offers to poetry - and this is a link he at least implied - is a letter by letter reading. The matter of the materiality of the text: not just the "live wood" Oppen calls his book, but the letters that are the "fiber."

Oppen's version of Objectivism (which has an ancestor, perhaps, in Rimbaud's poem "Voyelles"?) will be familiar to anyone who has read or, better, looked at the Anglo-Saxon riddles. I'm going to un-name them as riddles (that's a critical addition) and re-name them an Anglo-Saxon "Discrete Series." One point of connection is that contemporary critics, as Conte notes in his book Unending Design often try to name the supposed Object to which Oppen's poems are the cryptic description, just as Anglo-Saxon critics strive to name the word the Anglo-Saxon Discrete Series poems hide. Such approaches are not especially fruitful ways to engage with either series of poems. Consider this poem from the Exeter Book , typically referred to as Riddle 47 after the numbering established by Krapp and Dobbie:

Moððe word fræt -- me þæt þuhte
wrætlicu wyrd þa ic þæt gewundor gefrægn,
þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,
þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide
ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs
wihte þy gleawra þe he þam wordum swealg.

We don't need a translation of this to observe the letter-drama the poem has as its object, to go beyond noting the expected three metrical alliterations per line in order to follow the letters and their interactions. "Word" for instance transforms into "wyrd" by the change of one letter and them "wyrm" by the change of one letter, and then, with one letter changing and two transposed, we have the "þrym," of "þrymfæstne." Or, in the modern English, "word" is swallowed and replaced by "fate/what happens" which in turn is swallowed/replaced by "worm/serpent" and then by "mighty," suggesting perhaps "fixed."

Lest this seem like mere letter-play, it's worth noting that the Anglo-Saxon poem thematically explores the permanence of words and letters. It either/both imagines a "moth" eating/swallowing words, a "thief in the darkness" or/and it imagines a reader reading a text without being "at all wiser for the words he consumed." This, we might imagine, is a reader who is not reading by the materiality of the letter.

The material pleasures, possibilities, and performances of individual and indivisible letters are at play in the various works of Lutz, Oppen, and the anonymous poet of these Anglo-Saxon challenges. This inter-century reading is a necessity: Carl Pyrdum noted at Get Medieval recently that there are important ways to read open-software and Windows-hacking through understanding that "Medieval book enthusiasts were DIYers. They made their own books. They copied texts they liked, freely editing and recomposing--or hacking, remixing, and cut-and-pasting, to use the right lingo." In other words, the constitution of texts, sentences, and even words were "open" to medieval readers and bookmakers.

Reading the work of 20th century poets such as Oppen and of course Susan Howe alongside the work of the Anglo-Saxon poet-compilers offers as a way to disturb the notion of originality and of postmodernism as peculiar and unparalleled. In short, it offers a way to read our now as also someone else's now. It takes the text back from a notion of an author or authority: the open in the Oppen, so to speak.

"I read very slowly," says Gary Lutz. He wants "books that are not page turners but that defeat the notion of page turning." To read slowly is not simply to value a thoroughness of reading; it is to attend to materiality and to the letter, to note tensions and contents, contexts and confusions.

This matters now: not more than ever, but maybe more than ever to us. On Friday night John McCain promised that "As president of the United States, I want to assure you, I've got a pen. This one's kind of old. I've got a pen, and I'm going to veto every single spending bill that comes across my desk." It may not be too alarmist to see this as an election about whether or not we're going to attend to the letter of what we're saying and what we're seeing. What does it mean to "suspend a campaign" or to "win" a war? We've been asking such questions for 8 years and 12 centuries and more.

It matters now, too, because of M. NourbeSe Philip's book Zong!, which I wrote about recently.

Where we stand on the political issues we are presented with does not have to do with our partisan interests or our party support. The last letters of the Exeter Book read:

Þeah nu ælda bearn
londbuendra lastas mine
swiþe secað, ic swaþe hwilum
mine bemiþe monna gehwylcum.

[though now the children of men, land-dwellers, swiftly seek my prints, I at times conceal my track from each one of them.]

Before and beyond us, language has already disappeared: "hwilum" becomes "gehwylcum," time disappearing into nameless persons. We seek swiftly, "swiþe," only to have language readily hidden from us, "swaþe."

What is the form of literacy we are demanding in the 21st century?

Zong!

2008-09-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

Zong! is, in the words of Nathaniel Mackey, "a brash, unsettling book" which "wants to chant or shout history down, shut history up." This book, by M. NourbeSe Philip as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, shuts history down precisely by reclaiming stories from history, refusing narrative. It does so with a passionate mining of words not just for fragmentation but for the usefulness of fracture, for all of what lies hidden (erased) in the visual and aural potentialities of words.

The cover describes Zong! as such:

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

The image below cannot do justice to the intimacy and care of Philip's work, and I apologize to you and her for the damage my photograph does (I wish my html skills allowed me to represent her work more accurately - though no electronic version can be accurate in this case). I can only say that I hope that in writing about this, the first page in the book, from "Zong #1," I'll lead readers to find the actual book, out this week from Wesleyan, and read it in her intended display. I will note that the poem "Zong #1" continues over the page, so here I'm fracturing Philip/Boateng's fragment - but hopefully usefully.

As it unfolds horizontally - across the horizon of both page and ocean - and through time - with some awful inevitability - "Zong #1" seems to stutter or staccato its letters, "w w w." What will result from this, one wonders? The "a wa" at the end of line 1 anticipates "away," an absence that is felt on the page even as it attempts to express itself. Similarly, "w a t" on the next line gestures towards our "wait" for story/history even as it cannot possibly fulfill "wait" alone. Within this poem, letters are not missing so much as words are exploded and become of use to us as they (refuse to) resolve into letter combinations. Even as one is tempted to call their formation valuable, one has to resist both the idea the formation needs to happen or that value is what we want here: to want value would be to comply with the captain and owners of the slave ship Zong.

(And, for that matter, why reach for English words in attempting to form expression, this poems seems to ask.)

This "w a t" leads on the next line to "er" - to error, to uncERtainty, but also to "water," to where We ARE(n'T). The poem proceeds by expressing, never quite paradoxically, an uncertain attempt at expression: one could read this page as attempting to reveal a phrase, perhaps "one good day[']s water of want," or "our water was good one day, water of want." Any attempt, however, to name such a phrase instantly becomes a betrayal of the poem; it betrays by providing a resolution where none was achieved, and it betrays by eliding what I take to be a gesture acknowledging the drowning slaves. Rather than seeing this as a poem read left to right, top to bottom, we must also see it as a poem whose letters are floating upwards, to the water's surface, where they break into pockets of (un)heard language; simultaneously, these letters might be drowning African bodies descending - an idea given possibility in the African names that "footnote" the pages of the first section of the book, 221 in total. Here I, as a reader and critic, am fumbling in the limits of my circles of knowledge, which is exactly part of the recovery that Philip has set herself to and in turn, in necessarily circular fashion, sets us to in her footsteps.

Unlike other examples of poetry which attempts to fragment words and even syllables, then, such as P.Inman or Clark Coolidge, Philip's work is not making a point about combination and recombination, about the infinite expressive possibilities of letters. What actually gets expressed - the legal decision, which she includes in her book - can only make us aware of the ways she and we might "deeply distrust this tool I work with -- language" and also the ways she is both, in her words, "censor and magician." Rather than using that as the springboard for refusing to work with and through language, however, she acutely renders the vitality of expression. This must be told, or not-told.

What I've written above is a first foray into this book. My writing is a necessity of beginning a communal conversation, a refusal of silence. I do not want to read this book alone. I do not want to shout down history alone. I do not want alone to think about what it means for me to read this as an Englishman in America. Where are my ancestors in this hi/story. I want to do all of this. This is the "not-tell[ing]", the anti-narrativizing we need to do. Philip is offering us a way of thinking against the idea the "we die alone." She is offering us a way of thinking through what a story is and does, damage and recuperation. She offers us, for those Africans and through them and their erasure by white English society, "the sustenance / in want."

Narratives of Poetry Publishing

2008-08-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

"what was still, surprisingly, the primary material medium of poetic texts in the late twentieth century: 'The figment of a book.' " - Craig Dworkin

Stacey Lynn Brown began/continued/reopened a debate about contemporary poetry publishing and the contest system with her disturbing account of her experience not just at Cider Review Press but also as a finalist or first runner up at several other presses. At the heart of the issue, aside from specifics relating to an individual poet and individual press, lies questions as to how and why poetry gets selected for publication, what happens to it during the publication process, and where it goes afterwards. As Stacey Lynn Brown most recently writes "Given what I now know about that press, I'm relieved that my manuscript is out from under them and that it won't be associated with them when it gets released."

Before we continue, it's important to note that many of Stacey Lynn Brown's poems are up at the wonderful "From the Fishouse"; there is a risk that in this sad narrative of publishing, the poetry itself gets lost.

There have been many interesting and thoughtful (and, it must be said, emotional and passionate!) responses to the situation: Reb Livingston points out the difficulty of "a compatible working match" where random press and random author are combined; Barbara Jane Reyes asks "How do we subvert this poetry contest system when so many poets (literally) buy into it so completely?"; and Collin Kelley answers that 'Poets need to stop buying into the contest cycle of abuse, let go of the notion that self-publishing makes you less of a poet and that working with a small or micro-press won't bring you any "prestige." Basically, get over yourself. There are many ways to get your poetry to readers besides the ones pounded into your head at MFA programs.'

Rather than attempting to analyze how contests and open reading periods do and do not work for poets, publishers, and poems, I want to pay attention to an issue mentioned earlier: "where it [poetry?] goes afterwards [after what?]"? The word that isn't often mentioned by those of us who identify as writers and publishers before or as much as we identify as readers (at least in these posts - the word only occurs three times in the posts quoted above, and only once does it refer to actual or potential readers of poets' poetry).

One reading of such articulations is that readership has become subordinate to publishing, even where the articulator is a publisher. Firstly, narratives of poetry publishing as it supposedly is, should be, or might be hide the work in question (whether Stacey Lynn Brown's or another poet's). Secondly, the focus of our discussions becomes how to get the work into the world (i.e., Livingston argues, usefully, that magazine publication should not be less prestigious than book publication; indeed, prestige should not perhaps be the issue) instead of how the work works in the world. The "many ways to get your poetry to readers" mentioned in the discussion tend to include micro presses, poetry collaboratives, etc - methods which, however useful they are, continue a narrative in which a poet writes poems until such a point as they take shape in some form of (chap)book (and I include journal within this). The narrative (accidentally) ends at this point, with a book or book equivalent, self-published or not.

All of this brings me back to the epigraph for this post, from Craig Dworkin's 2003 study Reading the Illegible. Lyn Hejinian, in her "notes towards a poetics" for American Women Poets in the 21st Century discusses poetry as a "happening," and the question I think we need most to ask, both before and in light of Stacey Lynn Brown's experience as it stands in for many other poets' experiences, is, What is the happening of poetry as it intersects with publishing as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close?

Given that much of the poetry written in America at this moment is either not narrative or even nonnarrative, it is especially important that this question include reconsiderations of why the book is the end-goal of publication. What other forms are available to us? Here I do not mean that we need to find a digital equivalent of the book, such as the online journal or the flash poem, but that we might reconsider how books are books and why they are books. In doing so, we might learn to value them as unique and separate objects from one another: Craig Dworkin's latest book, Parse feels and acts, appropriately, like a grammar handbook, in contrast to an earlier volume like Strand . In other words, an intervention in the narrative of book publishing is not, per se, a disruption or rejection of it, but an awareness of it: an alienation in order to re-renter the book as a foreigner (a distinction made by Hejinian, ibid).

The quotation torn from Dworkin and used as an epigraph itself quotes Susan Howe from her book Singularities. "The figment of a book" is contained within and disrupts a (fragmentary) book, which has, as part of its poetics, the disruption and fragmentation of a book or set of books Howe has found from "wilderness" America - Thoreau, for instance, becomes Thorow (or does it/he?). Add to this Ann Lauterbach suggestion, also in American Women Poets of the 21st Century that we might consider fragmentation as a whole, and one begins to see the ways in which we do not need to dispense with the book.

In that last sentence, it is the "do not need to" which I want to hold stress. Where we do not need to, we might choose to. Where we choose alternatives to the book, or choose the book as an alternative to something else, I think we come closer than we currently are to not only thinking about how the work gets into the world, but how the work works in the world - especially where the world doesn't itself work.

Maybe, then, at the heart of this issue isn't the question of how publishers should receive and select manuscripts, how poets should select and/or become publishers, or even how the financial aspects of poetry should be managed. Qua Debord and the Situationists, I'm not sure we can avoid capitalism in thinking about poetry, but we can arrive at "freely chosen variations in the rules of the game" (Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle , 24). Questions about publishers and poets matter, but questions about how the work's publication relates to the work it seeks to do matter, I suggest, a little more. The form of the book is not inevitable. Or: the book is not an inevitable form.

Amazon and Small Presses

2008-07-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Guardian is reporting that amazon.co.uk charges small presses 55% of cover price PLUS shipping to Amazon for books it sells. Thus, the report contends, publishers have incomparable access to worldwide distribution at a price which renders it difficult for them to keep operating in the future. Assume that the book retails for $15; the publisher would get $7.50 before paying for shipping, and once you take into account the cost of production, let alone whether the author gets any royalty or the staff of the press gets any salary, and it's a very difficult world. (I'm not sure if the U.S. situation is quite the same, given that the U.S. has a better tradition of small press publishing, but I imagine it's comparable.)

Small publishers get an amazing boost from selling on Amazon, in that it gives them instant worldwide distribution. Amazon should be applauded for the ease with which they grant access to this network. Through what they call their Advantage programme, any publisher, no matter how tiny, can quickly get their books on Amazon. In other words, a publishing house cannot even exist one day and a few days later find their books for sale everywhere from the UK to the US, to China and beyond, through a company whose websites draw millions of hits each day.

However, there's a price for entering such a spectacular marketplace; one so steep that it could be argued that all the economic advantage goes to Amazon alone. The standard fee for small presses working through the Advantage programme is a staggering 55% of a book's cover price. In addition, publishers are also responsible for the cost of shipping their books to Amazon warehouses. This puts these publishers in the horrible position of having access to arguably the best book distribution system ever devised, while being charged so much for the privilege that it becomes difficult to impossible for them to make any money.

My interest in this is partly in how this has repercussions for (written) art. In one sense, the ways internet technology has opened up publishing should allow a diversity of aesthetics. Then again, the 1970s was a time of great diversity in publishing, helped in part by the advent of Xerox machines, but also largely through the use of familiar technologies such as letterpresses (hard now to get a hold off). Those of us who have poet-friends probably know at least one person with a well-received first book unable to get a second book published, and with small presses short on capital to increase their list size in order to take second or third books by poets they've committed to while also adding new poets to their roster.

This is part of a larger issue which requires much thought, but in the immediate future, I'd suggest that buying books directly from small presses is the solution. Many small presses offer discounts or free shipping: Four Way offers a 32% discount, comparable to Amazon's (the difference being that they, rather than Amazon, get 55%, and they're a non-profit); Omnidawn is offering Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus for $9.95 and free shipping if you order before 7/31.

So no more buying from Amazon. I should have done this an age ago. It's tough to reconcile the student stipend with the desire to support contemporary poets with regular poetry purchases (I could use my university's library, but that's not supporting contemporary poetry), but it seems to me now that it's better to buy one less book a year but to buy them all directly.

???? killed the Radio Star...

2008-07-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

Short post: what's the state of poetry on the radio today?

I've spent the past few hours trying to get the lie of the land, and found some wonderful archives big and small, and lots of exciting things marked "series finished". There's a few podcasts out there, and a half-dozen radio shows, but what I've found is either fairly mainstream (meaning poets you'd find in national chains) or fairly genre-specific (poetry that labels itself spoken word, or devotional, or by region).

Anyone have any good recommendations? It seems that several pioneers out there, like Susan Brennan and Daren Wang, have gone quieter or moved on to other ventures in recent years...

Writing as Event: Try This At Home Edition

2008-06-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

The Grand Piano reading at NPF gave me this idea, which I offer in the hope some of us will actually do it. This is very closely based on the "ant wort/brat guts" exercise (see Grand Piano Vol. 1, among other places). Two versions below, dependent on the size of your collective.

An Exercise in Collective Collapsible Autobiography, or What Participation as Writing Readers and Reading Writers

Version 1. Assemble a group of 10 people, along with copies of Grand Piano (for 10 people, you need 9 copies; it'd be cool if everyone had their own complete set, to date, so that people could technically end up reading the same passage). Each person is also asked to bring 4-6 texts which speak to them autobiographically but which they have not themselves authored. (For instance, if Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness is formative, for whatever reason and in whatever way, include that). 9 people read simultaneously, while the last scribes; the readers alternate between GP and the supplementary texts. The choice of how to alternate and how often must be left to the individual: follow a whim, roll dice, draw lots, etc, as suits your own habitual methods of negotiating the texts of the world as they compete for your attention.

In theory, and if organized in advance, the reading/writing should result in all of the existing sections of Grand Piano being read, and everyone writing in response to them. That completeness isn't vital however.

The resultant writing should be scribed by one member of the group and sent round to the rest, to re-shape and re-use whenever and however wanted. (I'll also post here anything anyone produces; keep me posted.)

Version 2. Pretty much the same, but with only 3 people, like the original ant wort/brat guts sessions. Might be more viable.

(Note: this is close to what was done at the NPF reading, though with more people, so I'm not claiming this is a new exercise; what I'm interested in is the effect on polymorphous identity, on the I-am within the group we-are and we-are-not, when other people's autobiography and autobiographical tendencies impact on our own selves as formed within, through, and despite language. I'm suggesting that for someone outside of the so-called Language school, outside, that is, a certain generation in San Francisco in 1975-1980 and also outside a group most verbally but incompletely represented at present in the ten writers of the Grand Piano undertaking, for those people to perform a writing and reading exercise by means of Grand Piano constitutes a very different engagement with collective autobiography. The method is duplicated but the experience not retained, partly because of the changing involvement with revising and, to quote MKH's comment, re-visiting.)

The Grand Piano-Elephant in the Room

2008-06-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

(photo from Tom Orange's Flickr)

In the Class of 1944 Hall there is a Black Box Theater. On Wednesday 11th June it was fairly empty. Around midnight, some people with language written down gathered and they read that language while other people listened. Most of you missed it, but that's okay - those who were there will read again.

The next night, 11pm, same Black Box, but this time with a grand piano, silent and unacknowledged, in the back of the room. Hardly anyone mentioned it, this citation of the San Francisco Grand Piano reading series, this quiet joke, this recreation of...what? atmosphere? scene? the setting for when the famous poet I forget began to play music through/in accompaniment to/despite the other famous poet's reading but was silenced? And what is a famous poet anyway?

The occasion was the group Grand Piano reading, featuring three of the ten people engaged in a collective autobiography effort to chronicle, engage, and even revise, the period between 1975-80 the way a part of San Fransisco experienced American and the ending of an in any case arbitrary decade.

"Instead of 'ant wort' I saw 'brat guts'" records and explains Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten's way of explaing the "Brat Guts" reading process (in The Constructivist Moment ) by which members of a group produce writing in response to the reading aloud of writing by other members of the group. This process was performed on 6/12/08 in that Black Box, backed by that piano, which was not but could in any case have been the piano against (or at first towards) which these 3 readers (Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Barrett Watten) read, as did the other 7 writers of the collective autobiography project (some at the conference but not part of this group moment, audienced rather than reading/writing; some absent from the conference), as did dozens of other writers, some almost never mentioned with the so-called Language poets too easily and too erroneously grouped together (Philip Lopate, for instance, read in the series).

What the reading performed, then, in its method and in its visual props, was a layering of (competing) experiences, (competing) symbols of experienced, and (competing) articulations of experience. Readings overlapped, so one had to tune out one of the two, or let the mixture work. Readers read from 5-6 source texts in addition to the issue of the Grand Piano from which they were ostensibly reading. All the while, readers were writing, but not (at least as far I could see) reading what they were writing (experienced left unarticulated for now, experience of what). Lines were shared but, identical in the letters and ordering of letters that comprised them, they were not identical in the different uttered iterations.

I'm writing about the Grand Piano group reading not because I enjoyed it, or was there, or found it a new experience, a different type of reading. The event - as Ron Silliman titled his post today, "Writing as Event," a familiar but needfully repeatable phrase, worth further thought - is itself layered within a group experience of the "Poetry of the 1970s" conference which includes the experience of those there, of those not there but in some way a participant in the decade (there at the time, reading of it later, etc), and all the differences that encompassed.

Indeed, one tension at the conference, hopefully headed in a productive direction, is between the New Sentence theorists (at times equated, too simplistically, with the so-called Language poets) and the New Narrative theorists (at times equated, too simplistically, with anti-Language poetry, with minority poets of various definitions or anti-definitions). There's not space now to write in a nuanced enough way about this debate, save to say that the New Narrative panel offered some interesting and vital glimpses onto the blurred quality of group identity, as well as the danger of seeing the 1970s in relation to a Language school of poets which is, for whatever reasons and with whatever validity, at odds with itself and often denies its own existence).

The process as well as the content of the Grand Piano group reading thus stands as part of a greater engagement with not just the Poetry of the 1970s but the articulation of group experience in ways that allow for difference without essentializing it. A record of an event can be always in revision because writing is itself event; the need for a record to be revisable, and not monolithic, does not preclude works of record and chronicle providing those works recognize and encode their own status as process.

Not Live-Blogging the NPF Poetry of the 1970s Conference

2008-06-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

After a long silence (moving apartment, finishing up the semester, hiding in rural England and drinking much ale) I'm back, but not in NYC: I'm in Orono, ME, for the Poetry of the 1970s Conference hosted by the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine, Orono. Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Nicole Brossard, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, Ann Lauterbach, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth and Fred Wah are among some of the many, many folks here.

I had planned to liveblog the conference, but then on evening one, before evening the opening Art Reception, featuring some of Bernadette Mayer's "memory" installation, my laptop died. So this is a change of plan, a sort of "NPF Today" round-up each day.

Wednesday 11th

The first two of twelve (count 'em, twelve!) readings tonight, featuring Fred Wah, who's new to me and whose reading I really enjoyed, particularly a longish poem in two voices he read (but which I didn't get the name of - mic troubles) and his closing poem, on mis-uses of his last name, particularly by spam mail; and then Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, and Eileen Myles, who will be on Saturday's Queering the 1970s panel. Thanks to the four readers, and the beer and wine on hand, we had enough energy to (sort-of) have the first of four Open Readings, curated by Bill Howe, who reminds me of someone I just can't place (I think for this reason I keep staring at him foggily). Highlight was probably Tom Orange's impression of Apocalypse Now veering into taking pictures of the audience and then being compared to Robert Frost. All very non-linear, which is how it should be.

Thursday 12th

Really interesting panel at lunch on the history behind No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, which was edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. I was struck by the range of ways this anthology was discussed. Ellen Smith, who chaired, situated it within academic conversations involving key favourite theorists such as Kristeva as well as important thinkers such as John Retallack; Judith Johnson's approach offered a more free-wheeling narrative that addressed the problems collectivity alongside individualism, what it meant to be a unique human being identifying as a poet, a Second Wave feminist, etc, etc; and Florence Howe herself gave a personal narrative of the anthology coming into existence that spoke to the happenstance of its origins, as well as to the stunning need for it, even as late as 1973.

I don't want to privilege any of these responses as a more valid way to proceed, but rather to suggest the interplay between modes of discussion, recollection, situation, and understanding is invaluable because productive. Some of the other panels I've attended have presented excellent academic arguments that have pushed my thinking and revealed new ways of reading the objects of their gaze. They have, however, also threatened to mask their texts, to place the texts at least alongside if not behind a reading of the text after-the-fact. The No More Masks! panel kept present the urgently creative and pedagogical (in the widest, least strictly institutional sense) possibilities of writing, editing, reading, making, etc.

So that's where my thought is tonight, before heading of to see Bruce Andrews and Jayne Cortez read, followed by some Grand Piano collaborators, and another open reading extravaganza. Jerry Springer style, my thought of the day is that discussion of created works, from punk zines to literary manifestos, from Ian Hamilton Finlay's aggressive gardening to a ground-breaking anthology of poetry by women, work best when they allow the works to continue to be creative events, in process even if published and technically created. This conference is pleasing in part because it's not only about academics (or writer-academics) talking to one another; it brings together people moved to think and respond to a time-period, in disparate modes and methods. Here's to that continuing through Sunday.

(Apologies for typos...I'm going to be late for the Andrews!)

Burma / Myanmar Cyclone

2008-05-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

I've watched with some disbelief the numbers of Burmese people killed in Cyclone Nargis rise from 350 to 50,000. The Times reports, too, that the junta which runs Burma (or, as the military insist on calling it, Myanmar) were warned 2 days before the cyclone struck (by India) and that they are still hesitating about opening their borders for aid.

The plight of the Burmese people over the past decades has been a sad and worsening one, and the recent cyclone is not just a meteorological tragedy. While the weather cannot be controlled, many lives could have been saved were it not for the oppressive control of a small number of people who have grown rich off Burma's teak forests (now largely gone) while censoring, depriving, and imprisoning those it is meant to govern, preventing any means of discussion.

Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma is an all-too readable account of the situation in Burma; Emma Larkin is a pseudonym because of the restrictions of the Myanmar junta on foreign journalists and writers. I'm not one to recommend an Amazon purchase, but they're selling it for $6 in hardcover.

Burma's story is continually passed over without resolution, and I fear that the solution isn't monetary aid (though that's necessary) or people helping on the ground (thought that's vital) but some larger form of action. To find out more, go to Irrawaddy, a Thailand based magazine focussing on Burma.

To donate, I suggest here

HACASHND: An (early) Turn to Language

2008-05-02T06:40:00.001-07:00

In a post mourning the passing of Aimé Césaire over at In the Middle, JJC recalled how Césaire's poetry not only restored to him a love of French (and other?) languages which had been a little dented by high school rote learning, but also unsettled the expectation, "Wasn't politics the realm of the prosaic, wasn't art a realm untouched by cultural turmoil and decolonization movements and racism?" he writes, "Forget buying une voiture. I was shopping for Cahier d'un retour au pays natal."

You should check out the group blog In the Middle, which I hesitate to call a medieval blog, not because it isn't (well, it isn't being written in the medieval period, though for a medieval person currently blogging, see Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog) but because it really troubles the line between ideas of the medieval as past/passed. Hence posts on Césaire, whose work I'm looking forward to looking more closely at, thanks to JJC's post.

Here, though, I'm beginning to answer a question he posed in the comments, wondering what turned me towards poetry.

Anyone ever play Dingbats? Or, as it might be known in the US, Whatzit, either known as the "game of batty wordplay" or the "board game of fractured phrases."

In the game, you're presented a card. On the card are letters arranged in ways that might look like gobbledegook, or might be recognizable words with letters spread about the card, or might resemble words you're familiar with but in strange combinations. You're meant to associated each arrangement of letters/words with a recognized idiom, "three blind mice," "make-up," "cash in hand" (this last would look like HACASHND). Some examples here.
As much as the idea is to "solve" the "puzzle," what these cards do is ask you to think about how language works, in relation to itself and to common idioms.

I played this game when I was knee high to a grasshopper, with my family, mainly when we were living in Germany during school holidays. To play a game that relies on an audience with shared expectations of recognized functions of language (idiom being a very idiosyncratic aspect of individual languages) when in a country which speaks a different language, merits further thought. Thinking back, though, I was less struck by this and more by the way words could be broken down, unexpectedly combined, rethought.

That, then, is a radical for poetry. It's particularly true of certain poets, (see my post on Saroyan below), but I don't mean to align the re-conception of language in Dingbats only with a poetry that gets defined as, and isolated as, "experimental." I remember being won over by Gabrielle Calvocoressi's debut collection, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by the line/stanza break

heads bent beside their husbands
come up from orange groves

just greening

That break seemed to refigure what language was drawing my attention to in the world, and how these lyric elements of husbands, orange groves, and ripening were combining together. One doesn't have to do what Saroyan does, or Susan Howe, or P. Inman in order to draw attention to language. Put somewhat essentially, I'm more interested in poetry which is conscious of language used in relational ways rather than referential ways (though can the two be so cleanly divorced?). That's part of what I understand from the phrase "the turn to language" which is used by Barrett Watten in Grand Piano Vol. 6; while it describes a particular moment associated with language-centered writing in the 1970s, Watten's interest in the turn to language by his collaborators is useful beyond that context. And so, while I think of some of the work of explicitly language-centered writing as exhibiting the properties I look for in a poem, that dingbat process, I think we can and should undergo such a process both when a poem visually disturbs our expectations and when it appears not to. It would, of course, be a mistake to remove from a poem the power to turn (us) to language. which is one danger of the sort of labeling of poetry schools that happens in contemporary poetry in some camps at the moment (but that's a topic for another post).

(It seems that Whatzit, at this website, has rechristened itself Dingbats, and is now messing around with images, too. Boo!).

And a Dingbat to leave you with:

B
A
B
E
L

(well, it seemed appropriate given the post...answer it in the comments)

Garfield Plus Garfield Plus Nonnarrative

2008-04-21T09:14:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking a lot about Barrett Watten's ideas of nonnarrative as not a negation of narrative (sorry for the reductive quality of that statement) and the lack of vocabulary for nonnarrative (my spell checker doesn't recognize the word, for instance) as a contributing factor to the sense that nonnarrative is an absence of narrative when it might instead be a positive aspect of a text. I'm thinking of Wattern's Progress and Hejinian's My Life as texts in which we might see this. Check out Watten's fabulous The Constructivist Moment for a better discussion of what I'm channeling here.

Anyway, an illustration to make you smile, courtesy of GB (thanks!) who, like many of my friends, and me, are hard at work in the library. This site stitches together random Garfield panels stitched with delightfully nonnarrative results. You can generate your own! Go here!

Aye-Aye? Eye, Ye? E-i-o?

2008-04-19T14:01:00.001-07:00

I wasn't living in the States when George Plimpton selected Aram Saroyan's poem

lighght

for Paris Review , thus earning him (and it) $500 of National Endowment for the Arts funding and inviting the fury of Senator Jesse Helms and others (almost all Republicans, interestingly) at the use of government funding for something Helms didn't think was a poem and certainly thought was misspelled. (The reasons it's not misspelled I hope to post on another day. But I'm still writing that darn essay and can't stop long today.)

This post isn't really about that poem, but the fact that, in the context of Aram Saroyan's eponymous first book, the poem is in a sequence between

eyeye

and

morni,ng

I never knew that until I was reading his Complete Minimal Poems today. I feel like more people should know that. Because while there's something so delicious and open about "lighght," I'm thrilled to think of it in sequence with these two other words, to construct such phrases as "eyeye lighght morni,ng" and hear "a light mourning" or "I like morning."

I'm looking forward to spending much more time with his book. Another favorite is crickets, which I can't reproduce here. Go out and find it!

PS: Ugly Duckling Presse do amazing year-long subscription deals. $80 for a year of amazing poetry in the most beautiful editions, books that make owning a book really worthwhile and essential. I had one last year and didn't get one this year. I regret that. I'm getting me one again for next season. I recommend it.

Are You Notable?

2008-04-17T23:35:00.000-07:00

You may not have noticed this, but please take note: here.

To simplify, Wikipedia believes that the publication of two poetry books is not a notable act and therefore doesn't qualify for a bio.

Wikipdia has hardly a single bio for a living poet. I'd guess that there's not one for a poet born after 1960. [EDIT: I found one today for Jeff Clark. So there may be a few. But too few.] John Gallaher challenges us each to post one. Go do it now. He's claimed Martha Ronk. Click here and scroll down. [Clark's is a good model to follow.]

For an encyclopedia, especially one claiming to be a "free Encyclopedia which anyone can edit" and which has as its "primary role [...] to write articles that cover existing knowledge; this means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles" this is stunning and depressing.

What makes it worse is that the commenters voting on whether a poet's bio stays or goes base their votes on whether the poet is published by a mainstream press, or whether he/she has won a mainstream award.

There are so many problems with this. Some of them are ours, as poets and readers of poetry, to deal with: to inform people better about our poetry, about the poetry we love, about the situations in which poetry comes to be published, whether as a chapbook, a webzine, an act of graffiti. Many of these problems relate to Wikipedia, however, indicating an elitism, a narrow-mindedness, and an ignorance that I believe don't reflect that views of the multitude of users and contributors to Wikipedia.

I'm writing this because I believe poetry is notable. I believe a book of poems is notable. I believe that part of being a poet is pointing out how poetry affects us today, and how we should take note. For Wikipedia to tell me poetry isn't notable is beyond belief. Please take a moment to post a bio for a contemporary poet.

A Reading: Thursday April 24th, 440 Gallery

2008-04-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

(I'm a big fan of readings that involve multiple art forms and therefore interest audiences from many backgrounds. I'm delighted to be reading next week at an art gallery with two of my very favourite fiction writers and one of my very favourite poets...hope to see/meet you there!)

JOIN US FOR A READING AT PARK SLOPE’S 440 GALLERY!
WHEN: Thursday, April 24th from 7-9 pm
WHERE: 440 Gallery, 440 Sixth Avenue (at 9th St., F to 7th Ave.)
CONTACT: Brooke Shaffner at brshaffner@hotmail.com
Admission Free

WHO:
Carey McHugh’s chapbook, Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c., was selected by Rae Armantrout for the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She currently lives in Manhattan and teaches writing in the Bronx.

Karen Russell's first collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was named a Best Book of 2006 by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times; in 2007 she was featured in Granta's Best of the Young American Novelists and in The Best American Short Stories. She lives in New York City where she is working on another story collection and a novel about a family of alligator wrestlers, Swamplandia!.

Lytton Smith grew up in Galleywood, England and now lives in New York City, where he studies Anglo-Saxon, travel, and poetics. A chapbook, Monster Theory, was selected by Kevin Young for a New York Chapbook Fellowship and was published this month by the Poetry Society of America. His book, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, won the Nighboat Poetry Prize, judged by Terrance Hayes, and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in March 2009.

Scott Snyder's collection of stories, Voodoo Heart, was published in 2007 by the Dial Press. He teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College and lives on Long Island with his wife, Jeanie, and their son, Jack Presley. He's currently at work on a novel to be published by Dial in 2009.

Todd Erickson, April’s featured artist, will present a talk on his current show, Light, which focuses on his Park Slope backyard. As an environmental artist, his previous installations have documented ecosystems fromFire Island to the Gowanus Canal. Born and raised on Long Island, he received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1999, a Certificate in Horticulture from the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in 2007, and has participated in two artist residencies in Hokkaido, Japan. Todd is currently weaving his artistic practice, garden design sensibilities and knowledge in horticulture into a small business called L.O.G., Leaves of Green.

(Todd Erickson image via 440 Gallery's website.)

About 440 Gallery: Park Slope’s only artist-run gallery, a jewel box space offering an alternative venue for Brooklyn artists. 440 Gallery seeks to present surprising, unexpected art to the community through exhibitions, talks, readings and events centered around direct contact with the artist. Open Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays from 12-6 pm, or by appointment.

Heartened (finally!)

2008-04-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

Ron Silliman is judging the William Carlos Williams Award, awarded to the best book published by "a small press, non-profit, or university press" in the preceding calendar year (2007). He's been posting on it since Thursday, and I'm planning a considered post at some point soon.

Something Silliman had to say today, however, made me need to post. He'd expected to find many books that simply weren't competent among the 150 books he's been sent. In reality, he found 5. Setting aside those books that might prove amazing on re-reading but that he didn't "get" first time, and those that lack ambition (a good number), and those where he can't judge impartially (hurrah for making this decision), he writes that he has 70 left.

That there are at least seventy books worthy of such attention in any one year’s crop – not to mention those other volumes I held out on the basis of my relationship with their authors and those volumes that never got submitted – probably is the best assessment of the quality of writing that is taking place at this very moment. It’s really a stunning realization. At least it stunned me.

Ever since I got to the U.S. four and a bit years ago, I've had many people, usually poets, tell me how terrible contemporary poetry is. That simply isn't true: there's a wealth of great poetry out there, with huge ambition, and if we devoted our time to finding it and then telling other people about it, more people would be reading poetry. The tired reiteration that modern poetry isn't any good not only indicates a lack of engagement with what's out there (and yes, there is a distribution issue to address, but the blogs do such a great job talking up a range of books that it is no longer that hard to find something) but also does massive damage to the chances of occasional readers of poetry picking up a book.

I'm going to try to recommend at least one book of poetry a week on this blog, and to mention as many poets and poems as I can. In the meantime, one book Silliman must be considering and that I dearly loved is Paige Ackerson-Kiely's In No One's Land which I reviewed here. There's a lot of great books out there, many of which I didn't read, but among the many I read, this is a strong contender, methinks.

1000 balloons = 7000 rockets

2008-04-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

Today on campus 1000 red balloons mingle with the lingering blue-and-white balloons inflated to welcome accepted prospective undergraduates to their campus visits.

(Photo from deryke.blogspot.com, not of campus.)

Signs around campus starkly read "1000 balloons = 7000 rockets."

My first thoughts turned to the war in Iraq, though sadly there are so many conflicts using what I feel it's accurate to call weapons of mass destruction (not only the military/government/mainstream media gets to define that term) that the statistic could refer to many places in the world. It does in fact refer to the Gaza strip: on April 9th the Candanian Chronicle-Herald reported, deep in a story on the visit of a Canadian-Israel Committee to the Gaza Strip, that "Since the Israelis pulled out of Gaza, there have been over 7,000 rockets sent from Gaza landing around and in Sderot" (according to committee member Michael Zatzman).

Here's not the place to debate why it takes a local story - visitors from Canada, or x untouched place, under fire in a zone where residents are regularly under fire - for the media to pay attention; after all, that the story is news is worth focussing on.

So too are the 1,000 red balloons on campus, and the equation accompanying them. The equals sign reads to me as a question mark and then as a not-equals sign, the gap in number of balloons and number of rockets an implication that, quite aside from partisan affiliations involved with the issue, nothing can stand in for the current of rockets on the Gaza Strip.

The balloons do act as a stand-in though, bringing some version of the idea of rockets to a community which has many strong ties to the area and many members who, like me, have never been to the area and whose only affiliation with it relates to friends, academic study, and media reports. A bright and visual presence on campus, the balloons are also fragile and temporary objects, bound to deflate, fly loose, or burst.

Mapping these three possibilities back onto the rockets brings home one point of the presence of the balloons on campus. The deflated balloons are perhaps no longer a pleasant sight, but they are in a sense disarmed, dead. Those that fly away leave their intended target (the campus community) but their lack of trajectory diverges from the directed flight of rockets. It is only the bursting balloon that echoes the rocket, leading passers-by to stop and look before they continue to pass-by. The continuing to pass-by is, of course, not possible for those who are the advertent or inadvertent targets of rockets.

The balloons then, lead to pause, which sets up the possibility of our acting differently, of not-passing-by, of changing direction. They also attempt to convert, symbolically, the rockets into something safer, something no more dangerous than a loud noise and fragmented rubber. Air escaping.

I'm left wondering what effect they have. It is not enough to write this, and it is not enough because too often it seems enough to write something, to draw attention to it. Is the failure of the media as a fourth estate the continuing direction of attention to events that should be reacted to, rather than the directing of their and our own (written) efforts towards some form of action?

(I'm reminded of a lingering image from Simon Armitage's book-poem Killing Time which reimagines the Columbine shootings as the gifting of unexpected flowers to various students. The effect is haunting, in part because the flowers do not lessen the devastation of the event. The substitution makes what happens seem at once arbitrary and causal, which is pretty much how Aristotle defined tragedy. I'll post an excerpt when I get my copy of the Armitage back from the friend who I've loaned it to.)

Life Flickring By, Library of Congress Style

2008-04-13T12:53:00.001-07:00

Today's post, while I'm mired in revising a long essay on how various texts travel around the landscape of Beowulf, causing all sorts of interpretive crises for the communities who end up encountering them, is about the picture that forms part of this blog's title.

I've had a couple of folks ask me where it's from. The Library of Congress has a Flickr photostream, including a set of over 1600 colour photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. To quote the LoC's introductory material:

These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944 [...] The FSA/OWI pictures depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, with a focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization.

The one I chose for this blog is called "At the Vermont state fair, Rutland" and was taken by Jack Delano. Below is another of his, called "Side Show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland" which I almost chose, but in the end I love how our view of the fair ends up being through a trailer, with the blue sky framed against the orange paint. Plus, the guy staring of into the distance in front of trailer fascinates me: it's as if he's looking towards a horizon he might be contemplating walking towards. I wonder if he ever did.

So, lastly, a challenge/opportunity. Poet John Gallaher has in the past posted pictures on his blog and wondered what poems/poets might echo them. I'm keen to see what poems/poets images lead us to, so your challenge is to either write a poem or find a poem that somehow sums up or responds to this image. I'm going to try to post an image a week, and see if we can get some conversation between images and poems new and already written.

Review(?): The Age of Huts (compleat) by Ron Silliman

2008-04-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

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(Comments in red provided in response by Michael Golston.)

Poetry as Canary in Mineshaft?

2008-04-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

Still Life with Canary

I will retell your version of loss
in bauxite. The fox holes in the field
are cut clean. Mountains to signify

height, to misrepresent sound.
We panicked then pulled men
black and up like early bindweed.

The huntsman kneeling is unfixed
in a grove of new mint. It was like this.
The quiet of the after-hunt. A sackcloth

calm. After the audible cue, a note
on the mineshaft wall There will be oxygen
enough without speaking—

—Carey McHugh, from the chapbook Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c (PSA: 2008)

I'm thinking about that poem a lot this week, in part because Bookslut interviewed poet Galway Kinnell the other day:

Kinnell once commented that poetry might be the “canary in the mine-shaft.”

“Of course I was thinking that one of the places and one of the ways of keeping the lovely and precious from dying out would be poetry,” he says today. “I think you could extend that to: A whole culture of a country could be kept alive through poetry. So many, many people write in this country that it’s quite astonishing.”

The original canary-mineshaft-poetry analogy was made in the Cortland Review, from an interview conducted early 2001:

DG: I understand what you're saying. Far more Americans will always know who the baseball players are than who the poets are. Does that discourage you?

GK: What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

What Carey McHugh's poem does, among many things, is offer us a way of thinking about poetry today that is confined to a tired discourse of the "lovely and precious" or the poet-as-celebrity (do poets want to be known the way baseball players are? Poet Trading Cards anyone? I hope not).

McHugh is able to tell us "It was like this," to give us an account of a disaster (averted?) which we feel in the marrow. She shows us the huntsman "unfixed" while also showing us him "kneeling" and a "grove of new mint." Refusing to romanticize the rural imagery, the way Kinnell seems to want to in his canary analogy, she gets to a deeper loss ("a "version of loss / in bauxite"): that the "panicked" quality of men correlated to "early bindweed" can co-exist with, and thus be forgotten amid, "sackcloth // calm." The challenge the canary in the mineshaft represents is a challenge to not let that happen, to not let the moment go unnoticed, unspoken for.

Like the most rewarding poetry, however, "Still Life with Canary" resists a final description. In content, in imagery, it asks to to notice. It's manner of doing so, though reminds us how easy it is to fail to notice: the miners are "pulled [...] black and up." We expect "back" and up, but don't get it: we get instead the image of them coal-covered, or a comment on the numbers of miners of African-American descent working in white-owned mines (see Alena Hairston's wonderful The Logan Topographies). The men are never quite pulled "back and up" unless we read the word hidden with "black". McHugh forces to the foreground the figures of the miners, and we cannot take their rescue for granted. Even brought up to the surface, to what surface are they brought?

I'd venture that Kinnell's analogy is useful, but not in the way he's presenting it. The canary in the mineshaft is a reminder of present danger, of the subterranean unknown, of human attempts to get resources from below the surface, in the dark and lung-clogging tunnels we head into. That can be one way of talking about poetry, but it isn't "lovely" or Romantic. It's precious precisely because we can't respond only to its beauty: we have to respond to its challenge. That's where McHugh leaves us, unfixed ourselves, always within her poem: There will be oxygen / enough without speaking—.

What we speak is itself precious, resourceful and using up our resources. What we speak and what we breathe come together here, and the uttered word has never been so valuable, so necessary -- nor has it been so vital that we choose our speech carefully. That is what Carey McHugh's poetry lets us experience, and it is an experience I take beyond her poems to the groves of mint and the Olympic torch processions and the current election. If the poem is a refuge from the world - and it can be - it is also a warning that the world is still there waiting.

The cover of Carey McHugh's chapbook, designed by the amazing Gabriele Wilson. Original Instructions will soon be available to purchase here or from her in person when she reads on April 24th at 440 gallery Brooklyn, 7pm (with the fantastic fiction writers Karen Russell and Scott Snyder; I'll be the other poet).

Judging a Book by its Trailer?

2008-04-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Skloot, National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) member, has been blogging a lot on Critical Mass, the NBCC blog, about creative book publicity. It's a subject this blog will return to often . One of the things I'm really interested in is how to get (poetry) books into the hands of people who would enjoy reading them, but wouldn't usually find themselves reading them.

For now, I wanted to draw attention not only to Rebecca's crusade (hurrah) to highlight creative book publicity, but to the idea of book trailers, which seem to take all manner of styles. Given the film learned so much from the printed book, it makes sense that books can take a leaf (so to speak) out of the film industry's playbook (playfilm?). I'm watching with interest to see where this leads, but for now I have a challenge to throw at y'all:

Your mission: suggest a trailer idea for a contemporary book of poems (your own is allowed). If people come up with ideas, I'll see if I can find an enterprising film or visual art type who wants to make it a reality. So get thinking! (I can't promise this will happen, but I'm fairly optimistic. Of course, if anyone out there would want to make a poetry book trailer, and is looking for ideas, do get in touch.)

(An aside: Bruce Andrews, in a seminar yesterday, was lamenting what he saw as the failure of different arts forms in NYC in the 80s to work together; in his view, artists in NYC were so successful in their own field that they didn't have time to really collaborate outside of it, at least in a way that challenged their collaborators to reach new goals. I wonder if that's still true today, and I guess it's not accidental that I'm throwing down this inter-art gauntlet the day after his comments.)

Life is Better without Garfield

2008-04-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

No offense to the lovable/hateable tabby, but a genius has for several weeks now been presenting Garfield comic strips without Garfield. Not only is this a chance to uncover the Jon Arbuckle behind the Garfield, but there's also something reassuring and delightful in Jon's small triumphs over, battles with, and failures in, the world. It may just be because I'm wrestling with an essay on the movement of people, objects, and stories about the geography of Beowulf , but the below makes me feel so much better about the world:

There is something profound and comforting in that panel of silence and space in which Jon is either a) changing the light bulb in the refrigerator; b) failing to change the light bulb in the refrigerator; c) distracted en route to changing the light bulb in the refrigerator.

I'll take my solace where I can get it, folks.

Click through for your daily dose of garfieldminusgarfield; you can even subscribe to an RSS feed. Nerve.com's Daily Scanner described it, ages ago, as strangely Zen, and I'm inclined to agree.

On Susan Howe

2008-04-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading various poets associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine and "Language School," whom I'm resisting calling Language poets not only because where does that leave everyone else? but also for some of the reasons well articulated by Barrett Watten on his blog/homepage. I'm reading these works under the aegis/direction of Michael Golston. Each week we're asked to provide some writing in response to the work we're reading for that class. These assignments offer me the chance to experiment with the style, form, and limits of critical writing, a practice that of course owes a debt to the writing included in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E . Here's some thoughts on Susan Howe, particularly in response to her book Singularities .

1.

Maybe this does not belong here. (To be continued…)

2.

I have been mis-reading Susan Howe—as one is meant to. Thorow becomes Thoreau becomes Thor, row becomes (almost) throw, possibly thorough, possibly through. The text re-reads its authors’ (author + reader+authors read = authors’/author’s) reading & transcribing of a word.

It is in this sense, among others, I think about Howe as a poet of typography and topography: writing the landscape of the page (“The Frames should be exactly / fitted to the paper, the Margins / of which will not per[mit] / of a very deep Rabbit”) thorow writing the particularities (particle-uarities) of words.

3.

“Thus, how do we read what is meant precisely to be read? That is given for not other purpose, and without distraction […]. Wordsome.” Bruce Andrews, “Text & Context,” Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis, p. 7.

4.

Susan Howe is a poet and critic. What does this sentence tell me? That she writes poetry and that she writes criticism. In the past, and at times now still, I would have assumed that she is writing two things: poetry, one thing, criticism, one thing. Singularities (as well as My Emily Dickinson and possibly Souls of the Labadie Tract) offers to recategorize them as one thing, as spectrum rather than binary. This is especially true if the term critic is not restricted to the literary: Susan Howe is a critic who reads Lake George, New York. “After I learned to keep out of town, and after the first panic of dislocation had subsided, I moved into the weather’s fluctuation.” I was not expecting what she moved into to be anything other than an alternative to the “cabin off the road to Bolton Landing.” As a critic does, as a poet does, Howe has reconceived the world and most importantly the assembly of the world for me: moved, into, weather’s fluctuation – these I understood, experientially and theoretically, already; their construction, causality, togatherness I had not.

Susan Howe has also been a painter. Susan Howe has also been an assistant stage designer. I want to conclude that Susan Howe has been a painter of stage scenery, to keep her biography’s language in motion as she is keeping language in motion. In motion: unresolved. Possibly exhibiting unreadability. “ ‘Unreadability’ – that which requires new readers and teaches new readings.” Bruce Andrews, “Text & Context,” Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis, p. 7.

5. How we read what is meant precisely to be read: a list of substitutions provided by the brain, an interruption somewhere along the page-word-subway car air-eyeball-iris-brain that is the material of the world entering the mind as abstract, or so Aristotle said (in a fashion). The following list to be otherwise called “Single Rarities”:

Mustketsquid. (p. 41). Language of the prairie (p. 36). Weather in history and haven (p. 37).Sigh by sea (p. 22). Token (p. 38). etc.

I sometimes find myself reading Howe for the membrane between the word on the page and the word that could have been on the page, thinking of a membrane—the skin, say—as what conducts rather than what barriers. Catcht (caught, catechized) as I am, in the channels of word-osmosis, reading what I imagine to have been almost on the page, allowing what is on the page to remain there, mistaking what is on the page for what I thought was on the page.

7. (…as promised). This criticism belongs (longs for, but extremely so, the difference between a loved and a beloved) where? Or, in other terms, how do we write a criticism of the new poetics that isn’t in the traditional (read: expected; read: expected by who(m); read: for what group with what traditions?) manner. At what point does Andrews’ criticism become a poem (cf. “Suture”) and Howe’s poem become criticism, since each is shuttling between both stations though I know “Text & Context” as criticism in a way I do not initially know “Suture” as criticism and have to come to know it as such, rethinking what I want for and from criticism and poetry in the process, in process.

In what terms do we want the new poetries (some of which are new only to us, some quite old now, some still newer than newly written poetry in the old models) to be conveyed, especially where the reader is rushed, defensive that this is Poetry (and we must GET poetry, we were told, must PARSE poetry, must LEARN AND ROTE it, LEARN AND ROTE it, must UNDERSTAND, we were told, told wrongly). How much work can the criticism ask of the reader? Or, to put it another way, what is vitally lost when the criticism doesn’t ask of the reader a form of work—a radical reconceiving and reconceptualizing of world that would allow for social, political, economic, spiritual, chronological, historical, etceterical revision—that the poetry itself does?

7. Da capo al fine, but with criticism for poetry, poetry for criticism, critic for poet, poet for critic. (I mean also that the critic must be for, in support of, the poet.)

Left Facing Bird

2008-04-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

At 10.15 pm in Rock Creek, Montana, Lucas Farrell, Greg Hill Jr., and Brandon Shimoda wrote to a number of writers, hoping to solicit work within the next four hours for a one-off online journal of contemporary poetry. They received and published work from 100 poets, which can be found at Left Facing Bird

That we are in April, and National Poetry Month, fills me with some lethargy: as much as I love finding new poems and poetry, my inbox is full of too many daily poetry e-mails to read. That said, I have to applaud those behind Left Facing Bird: it's not only a great idea, but a treasure trove of poems and poets that'll last long beyond April. It's going to take a while to read this one, and for that I'm glad.

So pass the link onto anyone you think might like to read a poem (especially if it's someone who wouldn't otherwise read a poem in April!). Recommend one, or tell them to pick at random. They're in for a treat.

The Bridge

2008-04-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

Watched, last night, companied, The Bridge , a documentary which captures some of the 24 suicide jumpers who took their lives at the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. Through interviews with friends and family of the jumpers, and with the one survivor, the film brings its viewers uncomfortably close not just to the moment of suicide, but to the web of human connections involved: the passer-by passing by, a stranger taking photographs, the last phone calls, the left behind.

Comments on the film on imdb address the ethical issues in making the film, the question of its success as a documentary, the validity of its suggestion that mental illness plays in suicide, the social narratives created about suicide in Western society, and so on. What struck me about both the film, and the discussions it seems to have generated, is the need for those left behind to have an opinion: not just to bear witness to the end of life but to become a part of the story, perhaps because the act of suicide attempts to end a narrative, often but not always one that has repeated itself too many times before.

The Golden Gate bridge - any bridge - is a desire for connection, for connectivity. We will not be prevented from reaching what is visible to us but separate from us, the bridge insists. Lucy Blakstad's book Bridge: The Architecture of Connection offers a visual and textual consideration not just of how bridges connect, but also how they can sever, and its this idea that lingers most for me after the film. The film The Bridge raises the question of why the Golden Gate is the most popular place for suicide in the world, and the friends of jumpers identify a drama or romanticism that might explain why their loved ones sought the GOlden Gate. One mother describes the bridge as "calling" her son, as "magnet-like." While a single reason for the Golden Gate's appeal must elude us, just as a single explanation for the when, how, and why of suicide must, if we are to avoid simplistic understandings of the complex and variously emotional and rational decision to end one's life, that the Golden Gate is a bridge matters.

The choice of the Golden Gate, often during the light of day, seems to allow the jumpers an accessible means of suicide which is also public, witnessed, verifiable. It aligns anonymity - everyone seems a stranger - and identity - the jumper must be noticed. The bridge offers a possibility of connection, of interacting with people, even as the jumper literally moves away from and out of the possibility of connection, into a quick, unreversible descent. The jumper has always started to cross the bridge and not completed the journey, or resisted the idea that there was a journey to complete. A different definition of "the other side" operates: a religious conviction, sometimes, or the refusal to accept the social murmur that better things await elsewhere. We have built bridges in the expectation that people will want to cross over them, that there must be worth getting to from here. The jumpers from the Golden Gate are a flurry of activity often too fast for the viewer to catch, the camera to capture; they pause the activity of crossing, force us to stop and wonder. Without the camera, this would have gone unremarked by all but a few.

Treehousing

2008-04-05T10:52:00.001-07:00

The current issue (5) of A Public Space has a wonderful illustrated guide by Lucy Begg called (Field] Notes on/from a Treehouse [in Texas]. She describes and illustrates in drawings and photographs the building of a steel treehouse in the Lost Pines area of Texas, on a piece of land belonging to Richard Linklater, near Bastrop TX.

Perhaps my favourite part of the guide is the naming of the treehouse Skylark, and the picture of the wonderfully bearded "hand old-school sign painter" Greg Jones.

I loved the name because it seems to sum up the endeavour exactly: a lark in the treetops, up by the sky. There's another reason for the name, though: chief architect Steve Ross suggested it when the Wordsworth poem "To a Skylark" came into his mind during the project. Ross writes to Linklater that "Wordsworth used the skylark as a metaphor for a more 'fully self realized life'" and recalls that Emerson wrote about the poem (Linklater's treehouse ambitions owe a lot to the Transcendentalists).

It's beautiful to think of Wordsworth, that earth-bound poet always walking, walking, walking, but with his gaze so often to the air, christening an aerial space that collapses sky and ground, a platform 21 feet up in the air around which the tree can continue to grow.

The poem, however, and somewhat pleasingly, isn't Wordsworth's, but was written in Italy in 1820 by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The authorship matters less, I think, that the imaginative possibilities a mis-remembered line suggested to a group working in the woods, eating tacos cooked on off-cut steel sheeting, hauling a structure into the air. But the poem's worth reading, not least because it contains the fabulous address "thou scorner of the ground." I've posted it separately below.

Picture is of the oldest treehouse in the world, a Gothic design at Pitchford Hall Estate, United Kingdom. If anyone has pictures of Linklater's treehouse, let me know.

To a Skylark (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

2008-04-05T10:50:00.001-07:00

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight -

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see -we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt -
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now!