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On Community
July 31, 2006    File under: Alabama , Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

For no good reason I looked at my stats for July. The month is ending, but I haven't looked at my stats in maybe five or six months. Probably because I thought I was going to give up the blog. Also because I had much else on my mind, a lot of life changes, a new book, &c. I see today I'm averaging about 120 visitors a day.

I suppose this is good news. At one time, I would have smiled at this. And perhaps I will, tomorrow, but at present I'm mostly confused, because I haven't the faintest idea who reads this.

...

How do you know your community? How do you know what your community is, your place in it, what community to which you belong?

I used to think the answers were fairly straightforward. I used to think direct reciprocity was the best sign. You approach someone. They approach you back. In the face to face lay a recognition in which mutuality could be registered and in which community could begin. But when I think this way, I sometimes get depressed, as I am reminded again and again what gestures I've made that have not been answered, and I'm not sure if that means my gestures failed, if the lack of answer means I'm not welcomed in some conversations, if I am asked to remain apart, if I am persona non grata.

I've been counselled recently against making stuff up, assuming that the reasons are negative, against imagining the motives or the thoughts of others.

And I've entered two conversations lately that have me thinking reciprocity may be a misdirection.

I was reading today another blog, which I found through yet another blog, in which our writer discussed the feeling we can have that we need to have or are supposed to have a spiritual experience after trying to push toward one and how frustrating it is when the experience doesn't happen. We work toward the spiritual but don't arrive. The writer suggested that the sense of work must be abandoned. You can't invest yourself toward the spiritual. But you can make yourself receptive. This struck me as true, recalling how, even in my most serious religious disciplines, I felt not the transforming encounter with spirit I imagined but the structure of discpline, and the comfort a community in which reciprocity situated me. My transforming encounters occurred when I stopped asking, stopped insisting, when I just shut up.

I'm thinking, too, about an exchange I had recently in the context of a salon discussion about writing and the senses.

I was advocating for what I called a transsubstantial writing, in which one commits to putting everything into the poem, all the sensory information that can be gathered, so the poem would become not the report of the experience that might evoke response, but instead the form of the experience, such that it might be replicable in someone else. I said you put your concentration into the poem, and a reader taking the poem for the substance of the world for a moment might enter into that concentration. The poet does not withhold but provides and a serious reader, entering fully into the poem, enters what's provided, what experience. The poem is like messenger RNA, providing the ends to which a reader's knowledge might be joined, allowing for some replication. The poet doesn't endeavor to become immortal, but the poet makes way into places and lives and states neither he nor she could imagine. Through the poem, experience has a wider ken, and it can draw us together in an ethical relationship.

Someone in the audience asked what I meant by a relationship, how I would call it a relationship especially if I never knew who read my poem, if they never wrote me or told me. How is literature a medium for relation?

I was thinking of Whitman, of the seventh and eigth sections of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

7

Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?


8

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?
What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach-what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?

Whitman was fond of thinking the book, the form he'd chosen for the poems, into his texts. Knowing the reader would hold the book, he imagined the reader holding it, and began using that book, that thing in the reader's hand, as a meeting place. For Whitman, the book was a structure for delay of relational attention, for holding his curiosity and later delivering it to a reader (if anyone's interested, I did the scholarship on this in an article that appeared in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review back in 2001). He knew the relationship would be asymmetrical, that he might never have the return gesture, but he trusted that his hand — his physical hand, yes, but more to the point his writing, his handwriting that then became translated into the type in the book, which was designed for the hand (why he shrunk the 1856 and 1860 editions to better fit the traveling hand)— went out, open, and that it would find some hand.

So, too, I need to enter a renewed trust.

...

I do wonder, however, who reads my ladder, in part because, as a poet, I wonder where I fit, where I operate. My teachers, I would say, were what would be considered conservative, and I believe that I write poems that others would consider conservative. Richard Greenfield once described my work that way, meaning that I still held useful old concepts of line and poetic genre. And I think anyone who'd read Murder Ballads might agree: I wrote the book, most often, in song lines. Yet, I don't feel entirely comfortable understanding my self and my work situated in a community defined by poetic conservatism of one kind or another, for I value the conversation of Richard Greenfield, of Noah Eli Gordon, of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, of Hadara Bar-Nadav, of Major Jackson, of Natasha Tretheway, of Dan Albergotti, of Simmons Buntin, of Zachary Schomburg, of Adam Clay, of Tony Tost, of Joshua Poteat, of Shanna Compton, of Aaron Anstett, of Steve Mueske, of Stephen Schroeder, of Craig Arnold, of Larissa Szporluk, of Diann Blakely, of Gina Franco, and the less direct exchange I find in reading the books and blogs of Joshua Corey, Joshua Clover, Richard Siken, Gabriel Gudding, Elizabeth Robinson, and so many others. I find myself moving between two kinds of communities that have long been thought of as separate, opposed, and I have no idea what this means.

At times I'm a ghost, at others a distant greeting. Most often an open hand that, I hope, doesn't look like a slap about to happen.

...

Reader, who are you?

Where are you, so I might know, between you, where I am today?

Posted by Jake Adam York at July 31, 2006 1:56 PM



COMMENTS

Good post Jake. So I'm one of your readers, of course. I will say---and this really doesn't answer your question, but what the heck---that when I first entered the community of blogging, I had a much wider range of blogs I was reading. Part of it was the excitement, and part of it finding voices I trusted and enjoyed returning to: yours, for example, though of course both from Auburn we have a slight history. Now, though, there are only a handful I return to regularly. It is with them that I really feel I have at least a virtual community.

And yet, none of us share our work (other than the blogs themselves, and I've for the most part I've stopped posting my own poetry there); I mean none of us correspond with drafts, seeking critical input to make our work better. And this despite the fact that we have, online or in person, lamented about a lack of trusted reviewers.

This follow's closely to a conversation that Suzanne Frischkorn started on community, and sharing poetry. How we all sort of know each other in the poet-blogging realm---certainly have read each other's published work---and yet have not shared (nor asked to share, I think) the work that really needs the critical eye.

To which I say: Go figure.

Posted by: Simmons at August 1, 2006 1:07 AM




feeling compelled to answer this because I feel that I am a part of your community.

I am in these pages of emulsion, of cotton-rag, of ether trapped in glass, of brick and mortar and of imagination sketched quickly.

Our shared pages come together when the books align in an often too-rare occasion. There are always times when the collective pages have volumes and volumes in the span.

The hands, the reception, is always seen as welcome from either side. Always the palm is faced up in friendship. The back of the hand never seen unless turned to reach out to another satelite in the network. That's our community and we peer through the pages to find all of us as often as we can. That's comfort, in my book.

Posted by: ked at August 4, 2006 2:08 PM




I check-in every now and then.

Posted by: Erin Negri at August 5, 2006 5:02 AM




Thanks for dropping by my blog, and for the link. Related to the question of community, you might appreciate this.

Posted by: Jonah at August 11, 2006 1:21 PM