Archives > October 2007
15
in the generations and becomings of our minds, anthologies,
good sayings are genes, the images, poems, stories,
chromosomes and the interminglings of these furnish beginnings
within continuities, continuities within trials, mischances,
fortunate forwardings: gene pool, word hoard: the critic
samples the new thing, he turns it over in his consideration,
he checks alignments, proportions, he looks into the body of
the anthology to see if the new thing hooks in, distorts, to raise
or ruin: he considers the weight, clarity, viability of
the new thing and reconsiders the whole body of the anthology:
if the new thing finds no attachment, if energy, cementing,
does not flow back and forth between it and the anthology,
16
it dies, withered away from the configuration of the people:
but if it lives, critic and teacher show it to the
young, unfold its meaning, fix its roots and extend its reach:
the anthology is the moving, changing definition of the
imaginative life of the people, the repository and source,
genetic: the critic and teacher protect and reveal the source
and watch over the freedom of becomings there: the artist
stands freely into advancings: critic and teacher choose, shape,
and transmit: all three need the widest openings to chance
and possibility, so perceptions that might grow into currents
of mind can find their way: all three are complete men,
centralists and peripheralists who, making, move and stay:
17
groups form — it’s natural — agglutinations, a center shaping,
a core center of command and focus: group attaches to group,
some slight delimitation still distinguishing them, and region
to region, till a public is formed, however tenuous and
widespread the binding syrup now: my sympathies do not move
that way, building toward the high consolidation (except in
poems), the identifying oneness of populations, peoples: I
know my own — the thrown peripheries, the stragglers, the cheated,
maimed, afflicted (I know their eyes, pain’s melting amazement),
the weak, disoriented, the sick, hurt, the castaways, the
needful needless: I know them: I love them: I am theirs:
I can’t reach them through the centers of power: the centers
18
of power aim another way from them: I reach them out in the
brush in the rangeful isolation, night: I touch them: …
***
Kate Greenstreet, who's taking two months off (maybe more?) from blogging, has declared her first-book interviews a set at 104. Where else could one learn so much about contemporary poetry and the business that must happen though it's seldom discussed?
Kate's interviews have provided for me a kind of index, or a look at the possibility of an index of what's happening right now—an index that stands beside the blogroll and the anthology as a vital tool for orientation. I'm hoping that such orienteering will be explored further when Copper Nickel hosts Kate and 11 other poets in the Denver Mint Poetry Festival October 18-19, when we hope to repeat some of her inquiries in a more crowded environment. I'm describing it to folks as a survey of contemporary America poetry in 12 hours. It's not fully representative, but it's well-populated, and what's missing from the readers' panel will be supplied, hopefully, in the context of an exhibition we're opening at the close of the festival.
"Manual Labors," an exhibition that pairs manos, collected from southwestern Colorado, with manuscripts from more than 30 contemporary poets, will open at The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar on Friday October 19th.
The conceptualization of Manual Labors began when Adam Lerner, The Lab's director, saw a collection of what he thought were merely "rocks" on display at the Lakewood Heritage Center: each bore, very clearly, the center's accession numbers, numbers which can't help but mystify the casual visitor. What does this mean?
Adam wanted me to help him organize some kind of exhibition in which such artifacts—seemingly natural, yet drawn into a system of significance by these strange, intrustive numbers—would be set with text, written by contemporary poets, that would expose this intersection and explore it. We started talking about the exhibition and soon realized, with the help of the Lakewood Heritage Center's conservators, that these were not merely geological exhibits but manos, stone grinding tools used by Puebloan and Native-American Plains cultures. They'd been "gathered" by a road surveyor in southwestern Colorado and later brought to the Heritage Center for preservation. So, here we have not just a rock that's coded with numbers, not just a sign of the museum controlling a natural artifact with its conspicuous system of indexing. We have, as well, an artifact of a culture that predates European exploration and conquest of North America by hundreds if not thousands of years, a culture that was itself overrun by the very cultures that transmitted this style of numbering and the language that gives us this word, mano, whatever its native term might have been. With its accession number displayed, this artifact records the dominance of its culture. We have a hand-tool, but no hand.
I wanted this exhibition, going forward, to become capable of exposing not just the conflict between natural system and artificial system and not just the difficulty of the intersections of Native American and European culture, but as well to attend to the absence of the hands that first shaped these stones. So I asked more than 30 poets to create manuscripts, to lend their hand and to write their hands into the sign-systems that will, hopefully, shape a visitor's reckoning of these artifacts, of what they and what their exhibition means.
The list of poets who've agreed to participate in this project reads like an index of contemporary American poetry—like any anthologynote, not perfect, but suggestive—and while that wasn't the primary intention of the project, it [this indexical quality] is either an interesting product of trying to find a good mix of poets whose approaches would lend both variety and coherence to the exhibition at once or simply another delusion of my own obsessive interest in indexes, in anything that provides an entrance to itself and to its kin...
... which is exactly what I think Kate's interviews have done. In a way I'm sad to see them brought to a close (though any investigation, any effort, carried on by a single intelligence must come to some kind of close in order to make way for creativity, for imagination), but I think (besides the fact that this closure means an opening for something else (& if you don't know Kate's book case sensitive, well, you should)) this closure turns the interviews into an index, not just a collection: in reading them I continue to think about what sorts of disclosures this particular interview might produce, which, after all, is the purpose of an index, not to tell you everything but roughly to guide one to the neighborhoods in which your desires might reside....
This is what I appreciate in Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: it's not exhaustive, but suggestive, and more powerful, I think, for being limited. It's not clear, altogether, that Simon's choices in this volume are representative, but they are suggestive in ways that allow the index to expand in the imagination in ways that a truly (exactly, perfectly statistically) representative list could not.
Take the above picture, for example, a strange visitation to a hymenoplasty clinic...
One of the captions for this picture reads thus:
Taryn Simon, Hymenoplasty , Cosmetic Surgery, P.A. , Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The patient in this photograph is 21-year-old woman of Palestinian descent, living in the United States. In order to adhere to cultural and familial expectations regarding her virginity and marriage, she underwent hymenoplasty. Without it she feared she would be rejected by her future husband and bring shame upon her family. She flew in secret to Florida where the operation was performed by Dr. Bernard Stern, a plastic surgeon she located on the internet. The purpose of hymenoplasty is to reconstruct a ruptured hymen, the membrane which partially covers the opening of the vagina. It is an outpatient procedure which takes approximately 30 minutes and can be done under local or intravenous anesthesia. Dr. Stern charges $3,500 for hymenoplasty. He also performs labiaplasty and vaginal rejuvenation.
The point of this particular photograph, as part of the Index, is, I think, not to represent the kinds of surgeries that are recommended by communal mores or even alone to dramatize the kinds of respressions to which the female body may be subjected, but, as well, to open our minds to consider the many kinds of specialized surgeries that are offered in the United States, that sustain specialized surgeons, that produce their own physical and visual environments, even to ask us to consider the ways in which the postures in which the reconstruction of the hymen might occur echo those in which its deconstruction might occur: this moment indexes, it indicates, it points to, so many other moments, and in this it finds its virtue as a kind of information technology: everything can't be said discursively at once, but it can be crystallized in a second.
But then there's the index that serves mostly to return the reader to the entries themselves, say Tony Tost's "Complex Sleep" (in the new book of the same name, though some of you may have read it in The Black Warrior Review), a poem the author's note explains is "an index of alphabetically arranged sentences and significant syntactical units (presented in sentence form) that made up a prose poem called Complex Sleep which was written between August of 2004 and February of 2005 and was intended as a reconsideration of statements, assumptions and values embedded in previously written pieces" (64). This is to say, the poem "Complex Sleep" is a re-arrangement of phrases from another poem now unavailable except through this re-configuration. This is to say the present poem indicates an earlier poem with the same title whose order and character we cannot discern. As an index, "Complex Sleep" identifies another text to which attention can never arrive, and the infinite distance (Xeno's paradox) between the present index and the ostensible object creates an arena in which the present entries must be sufficient in themselves as a text. While the alphabetical arrangement of the sentences and phrases (they're alphabetized by first word) seems to derive from the apparent instrumentality of the text as index, in the absence of the indicated text, the alpabetical scheme scaffolds the poem's sentences into extremely intimate proximate relations to those before and after that in turn enable the reader to mark the gradual transmogrification of sentence into sentence (as if the index tab, the initial order of letters that determines a sentence's placement in the order, being exhausted gives way the next most immediately possible tab and so forth and so on) until the poem reads like a dream, one element displacing another.
This is the experience of reading a Gertrude Stein poem or a Karen Volkman poem at times. There seems to be a trace, but the chalk never leads to a stick, so the marks, seemingly ghostly, become the final objects of your attention. Like Jenny Boully's The Body (recently republished by Essay Press), a book of footnotes that appear, as footnotes do, as annotations on a text that remains under erasure, though, in the end, the uncorroborated indications make the footnotes the final text.
I want to say that every poem does this, to some extent, but the persistence of the use of terms "narrative" and "lyric" (or non-narrative) as antonyms, and the serious recursiveness of texts like Tost's tell me I must be missing something.