A Moving Object
March 18, 2008 File under: Alabama , America , Civil Rights , Denver , Editing , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Labwork , Language , Listening , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South
For my RSS readers, I am radically redesigning my entire site, so the blog root and RSS feeds are changing. Please visit me at www.jakeadamyork.com and let's go from there. It will probably be another 2-3 weeks before all the RSS feeds are in place, but maybe you can take a gander and let me know what you think of the new look and function until then.
Diode
September 13, 2007 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Diode, a new electronic journal edited by Patty Paine and Jeff Logde of Virginia Commonwealth University and transmitting from the VCU-Qatar campus, is officially charged. I'm excited to see some collaborative work by Julie Doxsee and Mathias Svalina as well as from Allison Titus and Rob Schlegel, and poems by Suzanne Frischkorn and Susan Settlemyre Williams, two more of my favorite poets in this world.
There are also poems by Chris Abani, Laura McCullough, Rick Barot, Amy King, Bob Hicok, Frankie Drayus, Eve Rifkah, Peter Jay Shippy, Tara Moyle, Matthew Wills, Karen Schubert, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Joshua Ware, Rich Murphy, Didi Menendez, and me.
The VCU group does such a nice job, with Blackbird and they're continuing that work with Diode, which promises to be a fine addition to the reading list.
The Erotic Life of Property
July 6, 2007 File under: Information Technology , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics
A few days ago, I ran across this image, which I originally posted here over a year ago, on Nicholas Manning's blog, where it had a new title, one much better, or at least more powerful, more capable, than any title I'd have ever given it.
I wrote Nicholas, to wit:
*First*
As a regular but perhaps infrequent reader of your blog, I just saw
this post:
http://thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com/2007/05/blog-post.html
And therein saw a photograph I took and posted on my blog some months
back.
I very much enjoy the title you've given it, and I am indeed quite
flattered you think enough of it to post it.
I'm working on an essay about quotation and what Lewis Hyde called
the "erotic life of property," and I was wondering if you could tell
me more about how the image came to you. I'd like to trace its
transit if possible.
All my best, and thank you for your blog,
Jake Adam York
*Second: A Reply*
Jake,
I'm really delighted to have found out where this came from, and to be
able to give you proper credit for your wonderful photo. I'd love to call
it a collaborative effort, though you deserve much more kudos than me.
Firstly, it is indeed a fascinating incarnation of the erotic life of
property: property's fluidity conferred by simple ignoring of borders of
attribution! Was your photo thus unfaithful to you? The erotics of
appropriation, perhaps. The story of this particular attribution is, I
suppose, not atypical of the flux-like, largely untraceable dynamics of
such things. I was having a conversation by letter with another friend and
poet about the hoary but still strangely pressing idea of emotionality in
poetry being justified by mirage-like "non-linguistic" or "non-rhetorical"
or "authentic" displays and mises en scene of Self. Your photo, in this
context, hit me like a gorgeous breath: it was personality's helplessness
in such justifications, a helplessness which was not, for all that,
malevolent, simply, after this century, sad and exhausted, burnt-out.
Being situated in the context of consumption was also extremely important,
for the idea of Personality somehow authentifying language was like the
commodity exchange: a stamp of garantee on the dubious product.
As you saw, Susanna Gardner said it would make a beautiful cover for an
anthology or critical book. But I'm sure it works as a stand-alone piece
as well. Maybe we can do something with it. I'll post it again Jake on the
blog this week and give you your attribution you so richly deserve.
All my best,
Nicholas
*Third: A Continuation*
Nicholas,
Thanks for your reply and your thoughts.
I wasn't concerned at all that my photograph was unfaithful to me. I always expected it to travel beyond whatever gallery I could construct for it, and I'm glad it has: for me a large part of the joy in writing and in photographing lies in knowing the work will always exceed whatever story we tell about ourselves to ourselves and whatever berth we construct for the genesis or the survival of the work. I think this is the test of work, so I'm interested, not because I feel betrayed but because something that was supposed to happen did, and I'm simply interested in the mechanics, the dynamics of conversation and community that transmit work.
I'm particularly interested in this transit because, though the photograph lost its attribution, it nevertheless never went very far afield, or at least it returned somewhat close to home: though you and I have not exchanged before, the ecosystem of poetry blogs is fairly well interconnected, so to see the photograph inside that ecosystem does not represent a radical relocation. I'm asking myself whether circulation (erotism in the etymological sense, always tending toward the other, though not necessarily sexually) within a community, however internally heterogenous, is somehow easier to accept because its easier to understand or because the traces or residues of transit are never completely dissolved.
The new question that comes to me here is why was the photograph e-mailed, rather than being linked? The internet provides for the most durable trace or residue in the link (which indexes all sorts of information), but the photograph is clearly more powerful, more capable, once it's alienated from its origin, and I wonder if the e-mailer knew this or if he/she had received it in turn from someone else.... And that's why I wrote you.
Your reading of the photograph is powerful. I would press many of the same complaints you're pressing in your reading, though I doubt many of those who know me or even read my poems would suspect me of such discomfort. And so, the query is also, as it tries to identify the moment when the photograph left my blog and its attribution, a search for the value of my name and my blog in this ecosystem, not as a narcissism, but rather as a study in rhetoric.
As for the photograph itself, I've no plans for it---indeed, almost
all my photographs just sit around (I did a few gallery shows and got
somewhat tired of them)---so the idea that someone could title it and
give it new life is very welcome. Anyone is welcome to it for a cover
&c.
Thank you, Nicholas,
Jake
***
A lot to digest here, both due to my rather lackluster blogging of late, and because of the recent adventures in the land of licensing, on which more later, as well as the discussion of posting poems on blogs....
Anyone have any ideas here?
Keep It To Yourselves
July 1, 2007 File under: Editing , Poetry & Poetics
You've got to read this.
I like Steve's humor in this matter, though I confess I have mixed feelings about posting drafts on one's blog, unless they're set to expire. As en editor of both print and online journals, I confess that a routine frustration has been the appearance of poems in my box by poets who have long ago posted them on their own rave sites. As an editor of an electronic journal, I find this interferes seriously with the creation of the issue I want, as search engines recognize the journal's posting and the rave site equally, effectively devaluing the electronic journal's work. As an editor of a print journal, I have less of a problem, though I would want to know that a poet who had previously posted the poem would take down the drafts from the site, so the reading traffic might be encouraged toward the journal.
Steve's himself the editor of a print journal and he surely knows how hard it is to keep such efforts afloat financially. One gets a little testy, perhaps unreasonably, when it appears that one's work to gather what one believes is a kind of exclusive content has been compromised.
As a writer, I value the opportunity the blog affords, but I'm increasingly cautious of it, as any reader of this blog will know. More and more the blog seems to present avenues for trouble at work, with students, colleagues, would-be enemies. I guess more and more I prefer to keep my poems in quieter settings.
In any case, read Steve's post. I enjoyed it. Laughed out loud.
Migration
May 16, 2007 File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South
This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...
I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.
If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.
The Crowd He Becomes
May 3, 2007 File under: Language , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
The new DIAGRAM presents a poem of mine, from the new book, which, it now looks, may be out in January (!).
I'm on the radio tonight here in Mississippi. See you then.
13
File under: Poetry & Poetics
Say someone asked me, "I kind of like poetry, but I don't know anything about contemporary poetry. Who should I read?"
I think in some ways I've been answering this for some time, but I'll make a short list (13 seems the preferred number). Others who were tagged made some rules, which I'll ignore, but I'll keep mine extremely contemporary (poets who've emerged in the last decade).
People you should read if you want to know something about contemporary poetry: Zach Schomburg, Karen Volkman, Alex Lemon, G. C. Waldrep, Joshua Poteat, Maurice Manning, Natasha Trethewey, Major Jackson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sarah Vap, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Kate Greenstreet, Peter Markus, Anne Boyer.
There's a short list I would revise again in another five minutes. I'll come back in and put links in later and maybe change the list.
Let me add two poets with books coming out to watch out for: Dan Albergotti and Angela Shaw (it's about time).
Also, the convention seems to be to tag someone. I tag everyone.
Winds Blow In All Directions
April 21, 2007 File under: Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
The wonderful Kate Greenstreet has interviewed me about Murder Ballads here. I hope someone enjoys it.
And if you haven't been reading Kate's first-book interviews, you really should, if you have any interest in publishing and poetry. This is the sort of thing that teaches you and then makes you think you should have a better website.
###
And contratulations to Jeff Franklin, whose poem "Drucker's Mule Barn," containing a suspiciously named mule, appeared on Poetry Daily yesterday.
(By the way, isn't the Poetry Daily redesign looking nice?)
###
Today is lovely in Denver. I'm going to go outside and sweat.
Dear Natasha
April 17, 2007 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Residual
March 30, 2007 File under: Information Technology , Language , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Found on a blog that belongs to someone whose name I cannot uncover just yet:
... Jake Adam York (whose work made my palms sweat at GSU last week) ...
That's a good thing, I hope.
###
Also, among the phrases given to search engines that were eventually recorded by my stats software:
jake adam york is an ass
There it is, whoever you are. The next time you're looking for it, you'll find it, and maybe some proof as well, I don't know.
###
Both blips got me thinking about the residues of our selves, or of ideas of our selves, to which we have increasingly more access.
A few years back, a reporter told me a source claimed to have had an affair with me, and I'm still occasionally accused on the basis of that suggestion.
You never know who says it. And usually the trace is human, a change in the weather that is you in the minds of others.
But sometimes there are these electric residues.
###
Reading Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox, another treatment of such residues. He calls it a "reverse memoir," a collection of all the things in his e-mail inbox on a certain day, what other people were saying to him, and so a reverse portrait as well, a kind of Hockney photo-collage, but in writing, where the pieces of observation imply the lens, the sesne.
Noah's reading tomorrow. You should go.
He's been described as "a handful of fire." He'll make more than your palms sweat.
###
Thank you.
Dear Allison, Dear Joshua,
March 29, 2007 File under: Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics
You left just in time. This morning we woke to five, maybe six inches of snow. I am told the Farmers Almanac predicted this, but this is the first I've heard of it. Its almanac size to quote Allison.
Perhaps this is the appropriate afterward. Your visit was one of the best I can remember. The time you spent talking to our students was wonderfully instructive, even inspiring, if I may pull the raggedy term from the cedar chest again. Your readings were captivating, and the balance was perfect. What more is there to say? This silence, enforced in ice and water, seems right.
I wasn't as aggressive as Mathias in capturing your visit photographically, but I got a few shots for the record.
Joshua listening:
And Allison, I made the mistake of shooting you in digital. I think analog, or analogue, would have been better.
I'm told the control booth sustained a power failure about 3/4 of the way through your reading, Allison, and so much of the sound recording was lost, though we're combing the computer caches to discover what we can. I'm going to tell those who were hoping to hear it as a podcast that this is testament to the power of the reading. Josh, I've got most of your reading, and I'll be working on a broadcast version in the coming weeks.
Please tell everyone about the broadside. We'll have it up for sell next week on the Copper Nickel site.
And, in the meantime, please rest. I hope your memories of Denver are good ones, and I hope we'll see you both again before too long.
All my best,
Jake
Dear Mathias
File under: Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics
You coveted my camera. Maybe it was the bright LCD screen. I don't know. Maybe it was just the mood at the Apache. Maybe it was the magic of Zach reading from The Man Suit.
It's a Canon SD630. Really a daylight camera. It has a flash, but I always turn it off. I want the digital camera to act more like an analogue device. More like my Lomo, so I get these shots, which I thought you might enjoy.
Thanks so much for coaxing Allison and Joshua out onto the plains. We have a lovely time, about which more later.
I'm looking forward to your visit in October.
All my best,
Jake
You Should Already Know
March 26, 2007 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus are reading tomorrow (Tuesday) on campus (7pm King Center). Think what it would be like it Whitman and Dickinson were married and wrote poems in the same house.
Quit your job and be there.
A special surprise for those with loose bills: Copper Nickel will publish a limited-edition broadside of Allison Titus's poem "The Nineteenth Century" as part of this event. Only 57 copies. A free one to the first person who can tell me why only 57.
&
Noah Eli Gordon reads from A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of A Sparrow and a selection of his other 24 books this Saturday, 4pm, Cameron Church, corner of S. Pearl and Iowa. Reception to follow.
Renounce all other gods.
&&
Next week in Denver: Danielle Dutton + Stephanie Young on Monday; Daniel Alarcón on Wednesday.
&&&
And I'm told I can say it now, Southern Illinois University Press will publish A Murmuration of Starlings next Spring as part of its Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. My manuscript was chosen for the second prize in this year's Open Competition. More details to come.
Dialogue/Monologue
November 29, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Nate Slawson, of Dislocate, has very kindly posed some questions to me and posted an interview at the magazine's blog here. I hope some of you will enjoy it or, if not it, then some of the other interviews with some of my own favorite poets, including Davis McCombs, Alex Lemon, and Joshua Poteat.
This Little Piggie...
October 10, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
... is very tired. Copper Nickel 6 is out, in the wild. Should be arriving on the usual newsstands soon, but we're also happy to export this fine metal to your neck of the body politic (won't you please put one of these around your neck, a little literary pendant for you, maybe?). I bartended like a crack-head monkey last Thursday for tips for the journal after the incomparable Anne Boyer read to get it all started. Anne's reading was one of the true pleasures of my last few years, and there's more to say about that, when this little piggie's let to lie in the slop a day or two.
But before the rest, this little piggie's got to go wee wee wee all the way to Tucson, Arizona, where, among other things (RMMLA, a little carne saca, sunburn, hotel html, cellphone sigh) I'll be reading at Casa Libre, this Friday, October 13th, at 8pm (Flier, anyone?). Come on by if you're in town. Or send someone over in your stead. And maybe then, in true American fashion, this little piggie will have some little piggie barbecue there. Then some downtime, I hope. I pray.
Dear reader, take care.
Bus Route
September 12, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics
The Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour's Denver stop was fantastic. The poets were amazing, the space was wonderful, and there were a million books. It's hard to find a better show than this, so if it comes to your town—GO!
Quickly, here are some photos of Joshua Beckman demonstrating proper smoking techniques for the Jim Lehrer News Hour crew:
Get On the Bus
September 7, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Folks, this Sunday the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour pulls into town for a reading at the Tivoli Student Union on our own Auraria Higher Education Campus. Come on down Sunday at 5pm to hear Matthea Harvey, Chelsey Minnis, Eleni Sikelianos, Kristen Prevallet, Matthew Zapruder, Anthony McCann, Joshua Beckman, Bhanu Kapil, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Noah Eli Gordon, Erin Belieu, and yours truly.
This is one you don't want to miss.
Dead Letter Office, Part 3
September 1, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
This morning, I found two copies of Murder Ballads, also so recently de-contender-ized in the Colorado Book Award consideration, in the bargain books section at The Tattered Cover. I picked them up for $4 each, less than I pay my publisher for copies. Anyone want one? I'll pick this one up.
I also found a $4 copy of David Keplinger's The Clearing, which is a contender for the Colorado Book Award. The book's magnificent and certainly a must-read.
David's book has been out just a little more than a year, mine not even a full year. How quickly do these books get moved to the clearance rack?
Meanwhile, what's allowed to sit indefinitely?
I know a bookstore has to make space, has to move books that persist too long, but it takes a while to move a book of poems. I'm just now starting to see some notice of Murder Ballads here and there. The Blackbird review is just four months out, and the H_NGM_N feature Nathan Pritts kindly edited, with a review of the book, has been up just a month.
And I notice with my compatriots the same. Noah Eli Gordon has recently posted a link to a new review of his book The Area of Sound Called the Subtone that's been out for two years.
It takes a while.
I've taken some advice from Noah: with some grant money, I just bought a bunch of copies and am going to send them out.
So I think, from this blog, I will begin giving away a copy a week for the next ten weeks. I'll pick up the postage and everything. Alls you have to do is leave a comment or send me an e-mail with either the lyrics to an obscure country song or a good idea for a poem that includes a bizarre historical fact. Be sure to give me your address in case you win.
Meanwhile, I remain. Denver's cooling a bit, but still clear and blue. The next issue of Copper Nickel should go to the printer next week. Look for some subscription and pre-order options there soon.
Good weekend, dear reader.
Congratulations...
August 29, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics
... go to Aaron Anstett, Jane Hilberry, David Keplinger, and Sheryl Luna for being named finalists for the 2005 Colorado Book Award in Poetry.
Climb
August 8, 2006 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics
Almost the summer's gone, gone too quickly, and in less than two weeks the semester will have begun.
I have finished, but for the small tightenings, a manuscript. I am working on another now. I am staying from the office as much as I can.
*
Read lately Peter Markus's The Singing Fish, Julianna Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Alex Lemon's Mosquito, Mary Burger's Sonny.
Listening to Midlake, Orchestra Baobab, Carla Bozulich, the Black Keys, the construction next door.
*
Sleepy now. Time for a shower.
*
Tomorrow is writing. Thursday is photos and barbecue and cake.
*
Prayers for Gina on her way home. Thanks for a few hours' conversation, a meal, a shutter's allow.
*
Soon, the hand-sown books. My Legba rightly crossed.
*
Almost another year. I continue...
File under: Poetry & Poetics
Congratulations to Noah Eli Gordon, National Poetry Series Winner.
New
August 6, 2006 File under: Editing , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South
The new issue of storySouth is up, with some redesign, by me, that I'm still working through.
If you have eyes
August 3, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
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":
7Closer 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?
8Ah, 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?
Murmur
July 27, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
After a solid six weeks of work on little but this, the new manuscript, A Murmuration of Starlings, is nearly done. All the poems are there, and there's just a bit of adjusting it needs, the sorts of things that come slowly and occasionally. My birthday's coming up in two weeks, and I hope to have it fairly well settled by then.
I'll keep you posted.
H_NGM_N 5
July 23, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
H_NGM_N #5 is now up. Nate Pritts has done an amazing job of redisigning the site and collecting an enormous amount of work for this issue. I have a number of poems there, and Clay Matthews has written a very kind review of Murder Ballads. Poems poems poems by Brad Liening, Brett Price, Christopher Mulrooney, Clay Matthews, Corey Mesler, Daniel Becker, Daniel Nester, Dorothea Lasky, Erica Bernheim, Erin Martin, Evan Commander, Gina Myers, Jason Bredle, JD Schraffenberger, Joshua Beckman, Julia Cohen, Matt Hart, Monica Fambrough, Pablo Peschiera, Peter Jay Shippy, Richard Fein, Samuel Amadon, Sheila Murphy, Steve Orlen, Thomas Hummel, Twilight Greenaway, Adam Clay, Bob Marcacci, Fred Schmalz, Jon Woodward, Lance Phillips, Tyler Carter, Joyelle McSweeney, and Richard Meier. Go now. Read.
Poetry and Community
July 20, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
One way of making the point I want to make here is ask what it means for a poet to be outside the community. Quite simply, this would mean that she has no communication with other poets, living and/or dead. She does not have access to contexts. She has no way of knowing the (multiple) conditions in which the art finds itself at any given time. Every time she writes a poem, it comes out of a narrow awareness of the art and it goes into an obscure space of non-reception.
July 18, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
"The textures of the world are an outline of the infinite. Stevens said, or at least I seem to remember that he said, the thing seen becomes the thing unseen. He also said that the reverse way was impossible."
Charles Wright, 1989, The Paris Review
Industry
July 13, 2006 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
If poets, like musicians, could be assured of multi-book contracts if they had any manifest talent, if there was an industry to promote poets of all ilks and to drive consumer interest in poetry and to continually massage mass consumption, and if there was an industry that took poets on tour ("Monsters of Poetry" (yes, I know it was on The Simpsons)), would we complain as much as muscians do about their apparently execrable music industry?
An Interview
July 11, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Check this out.
Got me wanting to speak poetry again.
A-Shaped Gate
April 29, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
What I Wanted
April 25, 2006 File under: Language , Poetry & Poetics , Steganography
... was for the words to agree in such a way that I could come to them as a man without a soul and take that agreement for my soul and then to understand what it was like to stand inside those words as they emerged from me. Then I would understand.
Careful Reading
April 4, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Poetry needs old-fashioned careful reading (and listening), and it needs to speak against a backdrop of silence. Sometimes it hardly seems to want to speak at all, since it knows that it can never get right -- not really -- what it means to say.
Daily Doses
April 3, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
For National Poetry Month, we have two new daily dispensiaries, Colorado Poets Association and Ghost Road Press, each of which is publishing a poem a day through April. Check these out and the usual suspects, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and No Tell Motel for your RDA.
Bested
March 23, 2006 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
And now, Yours Truly has been named Best Prose Pro in Westword's Best of Denver 2006 edition.
Fortified with 9 Vitamins and Iron
March 21, 2006 File under: Denver , Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Some shots from the show at Ironton
Entering
A glance at my 32-linear-foot poem (over 90 cubic feet in all).
The actual beginning....
I don't know if you can see it clearly, but the poem rolls in three horizontal columns.
The rolling's interrupted by this collection of photos (which I'll post again later) and a second poem that acts as a kind of a legend.
Some close-ups on the panels.
Shots of Emily's arrangements later.
We had a good opening. Maybe 100 or so folks showed. Most stayed to read some of it. Which was nice, if unexpected. I'm accustomed to folks buzzing in and out of the galleries, maybe deciding to come back later.
And a lot of folks asked for text to take away.
I was planning to turn this into a book, but not for another year or so. I may, however, go ahead and work on it, so I can offer it when the exhibit closes.
Hope you all enjoy these few shots, which partially explain my recent silences, on which more later.
Lincoln
February 18, 2006 File under: America , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Is cold.
...
Yesterday, Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson and I left a frigid Denver and moved out over the progressively-more-frigid plains, northeast through the white-out quadrants of Colorado and into clearer and colder Nebraska.
We listened to Nathaniel Mackey while semis eased into the left lane to pass one another and snow lifted in their drafts, long gossamer wings that rode over us for minutes then disappeared.
We were listening to Ted Berrigan reading his Sonnets while thousands of geese collected in filaments across the sundown sky.
We were talking improvisational poetry when we discovered what Zach Schomburg calls the "Jake Adam York hot-air-balloon water tower" in York, Nebraska. Noah suggested we stop for a hero's welcome. We imagined cheerleaders and heavily confectioned cake.
And then there was Lincoln, which we passed in the night & had to circle back to find.
And then we were colder than we have ever ever been.
...
Good eats and talk at Yiayia's, downtown Lincoln & then —
Dear Reader
February 10, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
The Prayers of Others
February 6, 2006 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Steganography
Maybe I've become too easy, but it seems that every couple of weeks I'm discovering something — a book, an album, an artist, but especially a poem, a poet — that comes home to me more powerfully than I remember anything before.
This weekend I have had the immense pleasure to read David Keplinger's The Prayers of Others, which will be published by New Issues in the fall. I'm sorry you all have to wait for it: this is one of the best books I have ever read.
Only the prayers of others can save me. Likewise, mine save only them.
Put this one on all the Christmas lists.
A Turn to the Absent
February 2, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
APOSTROPHE BOOKS
Call for Manuscripts
We are interested in writing that expands the potential definitions of poetry. With this in mind, we actively seek work that investigates language, and consciousness in language, in innovative and/or subversive ways. APOSTROPHE strives to publish work that complicates and challenges the idea of a "well-crafted" poem by disclosing its own operations and undermining presumptions about what actually constitutes a poem. This means we are pursuing writing that challenges the categories and generic distinctions most often associated with poetry. The editors find poetic writing that intersects theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and/or pataphysics to be especially compelling.
We are currently accepting manuscripts. Please send ONE book length manuscript (48 pages or more) to each address below:
Richard Greenfield
104 Poplar Hill Ext.
Johnson City, TN 37604
Mark Tursi
66 Lenox Ave.
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301
DEADLINE to submit: April 1st, 2006
Manuscripts will be chosen by mid-June and you will be notified shortly after. Please include an SASE, an email address and/or a phone number. Manuscripts will not be returned, so please do not send your only copy. Electronic submissions will not be accepted.
For more information, visit the website at: apostrophebooks.org
Origin Story
January 29, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Deborah Ager at 32Poems asks, "How did you discover writing?"
My answer in brief:
I was teaching a workhsop for sixth graders earlier this week, and they asked me the same question. So, it's been on my mind.
When I was 17, my parents held a meeting one afternoon and informed me I was going to be an architect. So, I went to college for architecture. Staying up all night three or four nights a week, cutting myself with an Xacto knife six or eight times a week as I worked wood and cardboard and wood to build tiny houses that would have been good for Weebles.
At the same time, struggling in English, I came to respect a professor who would hand my papers back and say "Not good enough. Do it again." And as the quarter wore on I had to use design practice to become a better writer. All that I was supposed to learn in architecture was going into my writing.
At the beginning of my second term, said English professor suggested a poetry reading. Which I attended. In which I recognized the most designed language I ever heard.
I dropped out of architecture the next day and started haunting the English department for permission to take Creative Writing.
Sixteen years later...
One More Time
January 12, 2006 File under: Poetry & Poetics
As is probably clear, I think about Coltrane's A Love Supreme a lot, especially when I'm thinking about writing process or writing form.
It's a sustaning work for me, something that keeps me centered, something I've thought about often and at great length.
But, this morning, responding to Josh's post (or to my idea of Josh's post), I realize something about it that explains why it is so fundamental to me and my writing.
The movement I most admire, that shift from traditional musical time into free time — which is really the movement from a consistently-marked time, in which you can choose to listen to the marks or to ignore them since they recur fairly regularly, to a time in which everything becomes a time-marker thus forcing a heightened awareness of timee — maps the curriculum of my work on a poem.
I spend a lot of time at the beginning of my composition process thinking through the poem's course and schematizing its movement (which could be narrative, and often is in some measure, though narrative isn't absolutely essential). Once the sequence is settled and I have a very rough draft (usually maybe six to ten phrases in a sequence that allows me to monkey-bar swing from one to the next), then I move in my writing to that state of extreme concentration in which everything is timely and moving so slowly I am really in time.
For a few months I've been working toward what I believe will be a long poem or a suite for Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Reeb, and these past few mornings, I've been able to enter that state of heightened concentration where writing really happens, where in a frame that is narrative if not perfectly sequential I set about to write lines that both convey and resist the sequence of time.
On which more soon.
Time and Free Time
File under: Poetry & Poetics
Kevin has pointed me to this interesting entry by Josh Corey articulating a difference between poetry and prose, or narrative.
... a fundamental difference between poetry and prose: when reading prose, even highly enjoyable prose with a sufficiency of verbal flourishes ... I don't experience time in the writing—in fact, one of the primary pleasures of good prose fiction is the disappearance of time, the experience of looking up an hour or two after one has started and noticing the light has changed.
I agree completely with this, though there are some rare books in which the prose has a meter of a kind — Ulysses for example, or Moby-Dick, though one may claim these as poems.
But I find Josh's willingness to expand this opposition between poetry and prose into an opposition of poetry to narrative:
This realization ... explains my impatience with verse narrative: the experiences of time and timelessness produced respectively by the two forms are at cross-purposes. A poetry that causes time to disappear (a version of transparency, what Charles Bernstein calls the artifice of absorption) seems like anti-poetry to me.
If by "verse narrative" Josh means to indicate long story-telling poems like Derek Walcott's Omeros or Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend, I think I can accept the opposition, though even in these poems, which are driven along by the passing, rather than the experiencing, of time, there are moments when everything slows, becomes lyrical.
But if Josh means by "verse narrative" any story-telling poem, indeed any poem that incorporates a temporal sequence, I can't assent by any means, for the lyrical poem that requires one to, as Josh puts it, "read in [a] listening way" can still contain narrative, and a narrative poem can still ask one to listen.
An example would be a book-length poem I'm enjoying immensely at the moment, Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms, a book in which one must read the whole to grasp the lines of narrative but at the same time read the moments: this is a poem in which the narrative and the lyric dimensions are precisely balanced to produce an experience that recalls for me the great tense peace I feel when listening through John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, especially at the end when we move from time to free time.
I think opposition to narrative of any kind is, for some poets, an enormously enabling opposition in that it frees the writing to do other things, but I don't find this opposition necessary.
Actually, I find it rather curious.
Maybe this isn't what Josh is talking about.
But I'm working through it.
I'll be staying tuned.
Resolutions
November 21, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics
Catching
Coming back into my body now. Weeks: readings, radio spots, grading, teaching, reading, thinking.
Backwards I see in my own days where I sweated through fot with linguists and contenders...
I have witnessed and waited, but I have arguments, if few mockings.
Balance
A few weeks back, at the release reading for Murder Ballads, I began to notice things about the book's arrangement as I was reading from it, certain symmetries I can't remember intending though I'm glad are there.
I started thinking, after the reading, how your writing mind, when it's working well, does so many things you're not aware of exactly. You think the poem means a certain thing. You act to preserve that value, to value that meaning. Yet, the poem has other potentialities.
Once alienated from the moment of specific production, you re-enter the poem — again, not so much as a specific statement or a specific value (though this is important, sometimes more than others) but as a process by which meaning is made. And new meanings are made. Some of them are the same as the ones originally intended. Others are new or newly visible.
Walking
Kevin:
I've been thinking a lot about your earlier post, particularly in relation to some of the comments Nick Piombino left at my blog on Hart Crane and my own understanding of the poem as performative utterance, a dialogic exchange, if you will.
Performative utterance.
A performance of meaning.
The meaning of performance.
Notice that all three ideas place as much emphasis on the writer as the reader?
Require the reader to imagine a writer writing this poem, to become interested in those processes by which this text comes to arrive as a text capable of producing, of re-producing meaning, as much as recording it.
Not poems as reliquaries. Poems as prayers.
Prayers
I am praying a lot now.
I go to the reading. A room full of people I do not know.
I take my dark book from my coat pocket (right size) and begin to read. A poem about hate crimes, racist murders, lynchings. Yet, I look like and sound like the kind of person I'm condemning. I have to say the "n" word in one of the poems. Will it seem like I am the kind of person who has this in his idiom? Or the kind of person who needs to enter into certain reticulations necessary to arrive in a certain place?
Or will I be two people, occupying the same column of flesh and breath, a prism through which some intention is refracted into color, some into others. Which colors fall within the visible spectrum?
More importantly, what will they hear?
Love Letters
Roxanne:
What do you think of my current approach to such sympathetic reading--to read text as you would read a love letter?
I love a reader.
As in letters from a lover, we read closely, carefully, repeatedly, and search for clues to how s/he wants us to read it, regardless of the opacity (opaqueness?) of the language/style/form.
Text as a record of desire and what we want is the desiring, the rebirth of desire, the reaching out, the erotic.
How iron reaches out for iron.
Painful or fulfilling.
A connection.
A question asked.
A thousand answers.
Each one containing something you need to hear.
Exactly as Exactitude
November 13, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching
In response to my late-night note about teaching poetry, Dee responds:
The word "exactly" however, is not believable. How can the ideal reader, one with the best of skills and sensibilities and sympathies, possibly reenact the process exactly? And why would he/she want an exact replica of the process?
May I say if not believable that we must act, provisionally, as if it is believable, possible?
I've been slowly, fragmentarily, as I have the time and as my mind clears, thinking toward my own articulation of sympathetic reading, and I can say (provisionally) that I think good reading begins with the attempt to read the text as the author meant it to be read. Maybe we won't enter into the writer, per se, by following the bread-crumb trail back into the forest of thought, but we should enter into the writer's productive subjectivity, his or her imagined or created author or authority, the proximate if not ultimate source of the poem. Of course we won't get an exact shit-and-sweat replica of the process, but if we use exactly as a telos then we arrive more closely. Allow me my fiction.
What I Keep Trying To Teach My Students
November 7, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching
Poems may not be products of a process that is over as much as records of process so sensitive they enable you to repeat that process exactly, if you read them carefully enough.
Sleep & Poetry
October 26, 2005 File under: Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Am sleeping again, just like that.
And writing again.
Not a coincidence, I'm sure.
. . .
Working now on a serial poem about the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
If this poem comes as the Emmitt Till poem came, I could be done with it by the end of November and then more than two-thirds of the way toward the completion of the next collection of poems. I'd like to have a full working MS by year's end. I don't think I'm that far off.
And then I'll get caught in an up cycle and won't sleep for a while or sleep much for several weeks while I work on the poem.
I do enjoy the rush — I can't get it any other way — I feel when I'm in the middle of working on a poem, such intense concentration it feeds itself, and I forget all manner of responsibility and action.
. . .
And then I come down.
. . .
For those who are interested, I have updated my Murder Ballads page. I'll continue to add material there over the next week or so.
I should have the book in hand by next Monday. Perhaps before.
October 18, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
a murmuration of starlings
Why I hate Anderson Cooper tonight
September 26, 2005 File under: America , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching
I'm just returned from another 3-hour History of American Poetry Monday-night-till-10pm extravaganza, and I turn on the television for some World Series of Poker or, if I'm lucky, something actually funny or intelligent, like The Daily Show, and my wife has been watching CNN, and there's Anderson Cooper saying how he got into the news business so that the lives of others could change his life, there's Anderson Cooper talking about how he carries the lives of others with him, how the suffering of others is secreted within him, and I understand now why it's so hard for students to read Whitman and consider his interest in the subject and his apparent self-aggrandizement as democratic, as a promise of equality. Whitman's claims — I am with you — are hollowed out here in this emotional pornography masquerading as magnanimity until we cannot believe anything sincere anymore, any gesture toward the enlarging positive.
Wanted for crimes against American Literature...
The Emergent
September 22, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
A few fine entries by Kasey on the emergent here and supra.
Cairo, Illinois
September 21, 2005 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
Kevin and I are making our travel plans.
Sympathetic Reading
September 17, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
Christopher Nealon, from "Camp Messianism":
... I think we're at an impasse in literary studies, on the way to which we have sacrificed the critical potential of appreciation and advocacy in favor of what has become a rote "problematization" of texts, and a sadly narrow practice of appreciation that is only able to find subversiveness to admire. But what if the texts we admire, even the politically engaged ones, turn out to be not subversive? What if their political efficacy has been evacuated or is pending? Ascribing performative success to these objects — to pick one of our favorite strategies of the last decade — and equating that capacity for performance with agency doesn't seem to do justice to the theoretical power of the idea of performativity, which I take not to lie in our applauding the aesthetic object's performance but in our not being able to pin down when the performance is finished. Crucial to the sympathetic reading practice I want to advocate is an understanding that critical acts are not discrete. To dismiss appreciative or content-driven readings of texts on the grounds that they are insufficiently politicized, insufficiently counterhegemonic, is to mistake the work of countering hegemony (if that's what we're doing) as individual work. When I read a text that interests me, especially for its political-affective comportment, my impulse, my critical impulse, is: pass it on. Highlight it as best you can, read against the grain, or with it where you can, and make sure others take a look. This is as true for texts that I find repulsive as for those I admire: I don't imagine myself, as a critic, judging by myself.
Materiality / Orality
File under: Alabama , America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South
I'm very much enjoying the breadth and clarity of this post over at Jane Dark's Sugarhigh.
I especially like the use of "residual poetics" to describe what I think Silliman would put into the "School of Quietude." I find that in my own work, I am using residual poetics but consciously, as I am most often writing about residues or traces, and it seems the right way to go.
I understand the critique of the "common sense" argument, which I find offensively ahistorical as well. So I want to separate the class of "residual poetics" into two classes at least, into "consciously (even ironically) residual poetics" and "residual poetics that presents itself as presiding poetics" (aka the common sense school).
For it seems to me that residue is not only interesting as fuel for nostalgia but as well as a form of recognition of the past's inflection of the present. It's hard to bring this off, and I think in many ways it's intellectually safer to enter into what Jane calls "emergent poetics" since the formal and significant forms this poetics creates clearly break from and can then more obviously comment on the past without being used or assumed by it. The "consciously residual poetics" I am interested in is always in danger of being assumed or subsumed by the presumptively presiding ahistorical "common sense" residual poetics, and indeed is often claimed by it and in some cases even becomes such poetics.
Take Seamus Heaney as an example. I think in his early work Heaney was playing very seriously with the traditional inheritance from both English and Irish prosody, and he used one to slighly destabilize the other, setting up through seemingly nostalgiac echoes of the Irish tradition, a kind of protest to English in his work. At the same time, his tactic was not to destroy or deform the English as sereverly as someone like, say, Medbh McGuckian, whose work is more clearly a linguistically and poetically formalized protest. So, Heaney, at once delightfully wry, is now claimed by the staunchest common-sensors (censors), as his late blank-verse and Anglo-Saxon work give him trad-cred, while McGuckian finds an audience in those who are interested in "emergent poetics."
But Heaney should not so quickly be aligned with, say, the William Logans and Timothy Steeles, those poets whose metrical histories are decidedly skewed to underwrite the claim of a "common sense" order and who more often than not seem to wish to live and write in another, earlier era. That is a more nostalgiac kind of residue, though it's not altogether clear that such a nostos existed, in the English speaking world anyway.
I'm particularly interested in this as I consider my own writing, not so much because I'd be surprised to discover that I'd been characterized as a School of Quietude poet or as a residual poet, but because I find myself uncomfortable with some of the company I'd be given in such characterizations (there are disagreements, fundamental ones) that seem to me like so many false distinctions. It's not that there's no difference in color that could or would sustain a line of demarcation, but that there's a middle ground --- and it's not just one where (as Silliman implies) people don't think about what they're doing, but a place where the gestures of encampment cannot be made with the same clarity. Some are interested in working in that area of potential dissonance achieved by emulating both signals at once, or by using one for a purpose that's been unforeseen.
Admittedly, such ruse is hard to keep up, and one can find a comfortable embrace by a community with whom one disagrees significantly, but sometimes comfort overcomes disagreement. It makes the lines even harder to discern properly, but if we're cartographing, I want some more complicating shading on this border.
...
Such strict marking says the Southern accent (and it always assumes there's only one) is a sign of ignorance and bigotry, or a witness to it, or a sign that it once existed.
But even if this sound long ago became the auditory marker of these behaviors, does that mean that its survival or its use today should so clearly be nostalgiac, retrograde, Stephen Foster?
Must the Southern diasporite always be representing the planter class or the poll-tax class?
When the answer is yes but the Southerner does not harbor such characters or positions, then there is that doubleness, a necessary, a militated betweenness.
Must I shed my accent to become emergent? Or can I emerge with these ghosts in my mouth?
...
All this to say that while I'm taken with the clarity and the general cartography of Jane's schema, I'm concerned especially by the ways in which emergence is witnessed by and militated by a demonstration of a decidedely Marxist interest in the materiality of language, over and above its oral qualities. I'm concerned because I think the belief that language can ascent above or can transcend the accident into the materialization of language is an especially middle- and northeast-American fantasy.
It's been shown again and again that there is a lattitude that marks what we enshrine as a culture as "standard" American English, and the line runs through Pennsylvania all the way west into South Dakota (Tom Brokaw, anyone?). Those who have lived near the line to the north have been allowed to participate in the fantasy that their accent is not only specifically but significantly different from the accents below the line, as if an auditory map of the United States could provide a spectrum from ignorance to genius. Those below the line carry the accent and the marks.
It is not possible, in the dominant parlence, to be both Southern, in a culturally recognizeable or meaningful sense, and emergent.
Yet we emerge.
Can't you hear it?
Evidence (2)
September 10, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
On the Monk's Music recording of "Well You Needn't," just after Monk's solo Coltrane is supposed to come in. If you have one of the recently remastered copies, or if you turn your record up loud you'll hear Monk shouting to Coltrane (at 2:22), who must not have appeared ready. Sascha Feintstein, in his poem Coltrane, Coltrane" suggests Coltrane might have been in a heroin daze.
Whatever the case, the moment is a remarkable one, one of those moments in which what you think you're hearing, what you're listening to, becomes something else. The song is now not just the record of how these musicians respond to one another through their instruments. It is also a record, an evidence of Coltrane's lag, and enough of a trace of the people in the studio one can begin to imagine what was happening there.
Whenever I listen to this "Well You Needn't" (though he did), I have to turn almost immediately to the recording of Charles Mingus's group playing "Meditations on Integration" at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival. There, about a third of the way through a 25 minute composition (right at 7:01), we can hear Mingus yelling "E! E! E!" signalling a change from one segment to another. And there as well, we get to hear not just through the instruments but between and behind them as well. Though I've never seen pictures of the Monterey gig, I begin to imagine it always at this moment. The recording ends with thunderous applause and a short "Thank you" by MIngus so the imagination can expand, following from the trace into the world.
Evidence
September 9, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Lomography / Photography , Poetry & Poetics
The tune sticks. I don't know enough about music to describe Monk's line on a staff, but I'm drawn again, not to the apparent dissonance that gives the tune its most immediate character, but instead to the logic I find there, the way the rhythmic interplay between phrase and pause asks us to consider the present and the absent, positive and negative evidence, and the way in which the succession of the positions and omissions, so vital to the song, is also key to our sense of authenticity or authentication. There must be a trail. A chain. A record. A trace.
I've been talking about evidence a lot lately, with my colleague Philip Joseph whose been writing about racial reparation, in reading Wai Chee Dimock's Residues of Justice as a result of my conversations with Phil, and in (the highlight of my Denver) talking with Adam Lerner lately about Tehching Hsieh, of whose work Adam is preparing an exhibition.
It's taken Adam's interest in evidence in the context of Tehching Hsieh's work to make me think about evidence more directly in my own work, particularly in my poetry. Evidence is so clearly an important aspect of my scholarship, not only because the evidentiary drive is fundamental to all scholarship, but because I believe evidence to form the solid frame for any work of poetics: to show must always be the first act. But as I think about what I'm writing now toward a new book of poems, and as I think about my photographs a bit more directly, I'm increasingly interested in the explicit and implicit questions of evidence I've been thinking about for some time, and especially interested in how these questions are unfolding through my work.
Once you see Murder Ballads you will see the interest in evidence in the poems that have an archaeological concern and with those poems that are interested in historical, especially lynching, photographs — the concern with the power and the veracity of the artifact and of the document and the enormity of the disclosure such evidence makes possible or makes inevitable.
I hope you will also see, in a poem like "Negatives," the concern with the capacity of the thinker, and especially of the storyteller, to create a new kind of evidence, to create a counter-reality by creating the evidence of a state that does not yet exist, to bring a world into being by counterfeiting evidence of the world the story would find. This last move is especially important in those poems, like "Negatives" or "Vigil," that were undertaken as compensatory visions, attempts to create the world that should have existed.
The evidentiary concern, including the interest in evidentiary process, are clear.
What I haven't considered until today — because several conversations have brought me back to my photographs — is how much larger my interest in evidence is and has been for some time.
I've liked this shot for a long time for a lot of different reasons, and it's one of the few shots I have in my lomographic albums that I know has been viewed by a lot of people, so while there are qualities that feed my interest in returning to this shot there must also be qualities that draw others to it, though I don't know if those are the same qualities. (Maybe you can tell me.)
There are several histories to this photograph — several histories that intersect in this photograph and the viewing of it.
The history that's most immediately germane is the history of the photograph's subject. It's the hand of a student who had been through a difficult time, most of it seemingly centered around her troubled relationship with her live-in boyfriend. She seemed nearly destroyed by the relataionship, and the withering was hard to watch. Indeed, I refused to witness much of what was going on, though I was aware of it nevertheless.
On this day, just a few days after I had a bicycle accident and badly bruised and possibly cracked several ribs, this student, who lives but a block from me, called in sobs saying she'd decided to break it off and asking if I wouldn't mind taking a walk as she talked it out. So we took a walk, she with her break and I with mine, each of us in a pain. I took my camera, as usual. We walked east to Cheeseman Park where we sat on a bench for a rest. She lit a cigarette, and I took this.
I didn't take a portrait face-on. Maybe she asked me not to. She says she doesn't take good pictures. Maybe I just didn't want to face what was already too obvious, what was written in her face. But this shot captured it all, the burning to ash, the suppressing and quickening burn.
The shot captures the moment, which I remember well: November, dried leaves inscribing the sidewalks, chill air occasionally cutting in the lungs, my drug-numbed body.
It is evidence. But not in any compendious way. It is a trace, even as the ash is a trace of the tobacco. The photograph itself is an ash that proves we were there and that those burnings were our acts. And the record is better, more faithful to the moment, for being partial, for being fragmentary, for being incomplete.
The viewing of this photograph produced an interesting history itself when another student accused me of showing partiality to the photographed one, an accusation that produced its own evidence, revealing what many of my students thought of me (some good and some bad), revealing the partiality, the fragmentariness, of my self in the minds of others. I realized that I too was a trace of myself. I was asked to evidence myself more completely in the lives of others. I chose instead to become even more elliptically traced, distancing myself further from the evidence of my going over which others concern, which has actually made my awareness of my appearance to my students and to those with whom I work even more acute. Sometimes painfully so.
I've become interested in being hidden, in being occulted or occluded. Honestly, I've always been interested in hiddenness. Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely" was an immediate favorite if for nothing else then for the line that keeps me sane in interminable meetings: "I'm not here. This isn't happening."
I do want to disappear. To observe from my blind. But not only for distance. Not only for protection. Not only to know what is there.
Because my interest in the hidden, as it has required a sharpening of the evidentiary hunger and the evidentiary eye, has disclosed myself to me as much as anything else.
When I stand at the window that lets me see what someone else has hidden from those within the building, when I stand to capture this hidden message's public broadcast, I catch myself as well. Even if I but make the shadow that makes the hidden visible to my camera. Even if I can trace my shadow, my outline on the window, in the other shadows, from the other shadows. There I am. Here.
Skins are peeled away. Autopsies reveal. And our staring draws a line into the near interior. Attention showing where we tend, what tendencies keep us from within.
In a strange city, the evidence that keeps me is the mark of a former city, a number etched into a long-hid post, a sign for a culture that disappeared nearby. The closed-down restaurant. The note left for someone who may never have shown. But as I stand marking these signs I become the reader for whom the sign has waited. I have closed a circuit. And now the artifact is whole, the body laid to see. What was a trace has led to the whole, has traced me into the circuit so I see the whole more clearly than if I'd stood inside its expedient electricities, seen what was thought important to be seen. We are beyond choice here. Except that what I find, what I choose to examine, to evidence, shows my choice, my interest, my suspicion that what's hidden's never hid. Nothing ever goes away. Always an echo, a shadow, a trace.
...
Maybe this is why I write so many echo and near-echo poems, poems in which the interest isn't simply rhyme, auditory joy, but the trace, the persistence, the uneraseable recognition of one in another. The next book is built on such poems, through which my commenting friends have waded, with bewilderment so often.
Now maybe this can serve as legend.
...
On the Blackhawk recording, the capture seems to widen as we work through the two-saxophone vamp and Rouse's solo, and almost two minutes in we enter more deeply not only the evidence of a night in April 1960 but as well the traces of nighclub conversation. Not just Joe Gordon's trumpet break, but as well a low tenor chatter, one man saying Oh yeah, that's definitetly....
That's definitely. Or that's epistrophy. A turning in place. Turntable vinyl. Acetate under the cutting head. Monk spinning at the keys. A turn away that turns back toward. Theme and reprise. Trace to body to trace again. Perfume haunting sheets at sunrise. A dirty glass. Hair in the drain. My fingerprint smudge on the floral card.
Back / In School
August 10, 2005 File under: America , Poetry & Poetics , The South
I have returned to a much cooler and moister Denver: it was raining as I drove into town and has continued to rain for several hours, a rarity. It will be fine to sleep in the natural cool with the waves of crickets to time my breathing.
I did not detour to Williamsburg or even slow down through Salina, both through a lack of cash, an unbelievable surfeit (after, if my count is correct, 24 barbecue meals in a row), and a birthday present to myself (today was the day) to make it to the pub in time for happy hour (where I enjoyed a 1972 Glenury-Royal, a dram as old as I).
There's much to digest & much to catch up on. I just read Ron's post on contests and significant poetry, and while I have to say that I've enjoyed many recent contest winners, especially Maurice Manning, I will accept the general observation. Indeed, as the winner of a young contest, though ecstatic, I am aware that I have no literary community, not as Ron describes it. I admire Tim's response in that it draws attention to the fact that community, while supportive and challenging in creative ways, can also be normative to the point that a device that may be alien to the community, or to the policers of that community, can help redefine the norms.
Though I wouldn't claim that Southern-ness is an ethnicity exactly, I think that young writers who self-define as Southerners (even those witth some larger ethnic community to appeal to) have a difficult time finding their publishers, if not their audience. Among the most exciting Southern writers today are Manning and Natasha Trethewey, each of whom had perhaps an even more difficult-than-usual effort toward publication (if my anecdotal evidence can be trusted). Difficulty in this effort certainly can result from lack of a community — but I suspect in cases where the poet's effort cannot easily be defined it becomes even more difficult to identify, let alone benefit from, a community that might support that work. Once the work emerges, things may change, as they have for both Manning and Trethewey. But what southern press looked at or considered their work? What press is interested in publishing southern work?
I suspect Ron would suggest that we start our own presses.
I'll look into that tomorrow.
Sleep now. Barbecue dreams.
A Literary Community and a Literary Public
July 31, 2005 File under: America , Denver , Poetry & Poetics
Last week I wrote, in response to specific and to general frustrations and with specific and general hopes, that Denver's literary community would emerge through what I see as a critical period.
I am glad that every few months someone decides to draw attention to these scenes, but at the same time, I am frustrated (beyond my capacity to articulate) that such efforts rarely recognize the similar desires or attempts of others, the relatively weak attempts to cooperate with one another and to coordinate information.I have often observed that Denver's literary communities — numerous, aboundnig — like Denver's gold lie scattered about, rarely concentrated in veins or lodes. Perhaps we (in the aggregate) who read and enjoy poetry are spread like gold-panners, each protecting a little spill, unwilling to observe someone else's careful precipitation or to combine their flecks into mint-able metal.
Several questions and challenges have been extended, as you will have seen, reading the comments on that entry. Dee Casalaina (who may as well be considered a local correspondent for this blog) wrote severally to ask just what I would propose to improve the scene, and JSR (Jason Stuart Ratcliff) wrote to challenge the very idea of local literary community, proposing instead a telecommunity, defined by shared interest. Both sets of comments push me to detail my interest in, my frustrations with, and my hopes for Denver's literary community.
First, I'd like to expose some of my often implied belief in and ideas about the local and the local community, in its importance and role in public, specifically American, life.
This will take a few paragraphs.
The United States is founded on democratic principles, but our democracy is representative not direct, which means that — though in theory we have many occasions to make our individual interests known and by them to influence the direction of civic, state, or national life — we rarely have the opportunity to act directly and in our own terms, being forced more often than not to act through someone.
We have to accommodate ourselves to this again and again, but I find that, in talking to my fellow citizens, the frustration at rarely being able to act directly fuels both voter disaffection and the growing interest in the representative's (indeed, in all public figures') identity and the citizen's need to identify as completely as possible with their representatives and governors. If I cannot act myself, I want to choose an actor who is like me, who will act as I would act even without having to ask me, and if I cannot find such an actor, I choose to choose no one.
This is an unfortunate present, for two reasons.
One is that this exercise of a desire for direct action misses one of the important points of representative democracy, which is that though the system generally destroys nuance in favor of binary relation (majority to minority), we enforce simple binarism when we don't vote because we withdraw from the mechanism by which we can demand more nuanced and therefore more direct representation.
Tocqueville wrote:
In America, the people choose those who make the law and those who carry it out. They constitute the juries that punish infractions of that law. Institutions are democratic not only in principle but in all their ramifications. For example, the people choose their representatives directly, and in general they do so every year, the better to ensure their subsurvience. Hence it is really the people who rule, and even thouh the form of government is representative, it is clear that there can be no durable obstacles capable of preventing the opinions, prejudices, interests, and even passions of the people from making their influence felt on the daily direction of society.
I suppose this is still true enough, that there are "no durable obstacles" to direct democratic action, but when we don't vote, when we don't enter into this system that, even in the Frencham Tocqueville's eyes was clearly the instrument for ensuring that "the opinions, prejudices, interests and even passions of the people" could "mak[e] their influence felt on the daily direction of society," I don't think that we can expect our voices to be heard directly, however indirectly our cries may travel to our governors.
As I say, this secession, which seems motivated by or responsive to our sense of the impossibility of, and our resultant sense of the greater need for, direct representation — as I say, this secession enforces the simple binarisms our two-party system tends toward, and such enforcement only diminishes the chances for direct democratic action, for it makes the debate that must occur in the representative chambers not a matter of the articulating skill (literally, the ability to combine and coordinate) of our legislators but more often a matter of numbers. Debate is not engaged as a search for truth but as a means to consolidate power until a majority can overwhelm. Then try to assert your "opinions, prejudices, interests, and even passions." If you're not directly represented by the majority, you are out of luck and out of power.
(I am mindful of deTocqueville's sense of those institutions that counterbalance the tyranny of the majority, specifically the courts — a reason to value balance on and in all courts rather than representation — but the courts present both a quicker and more evanescent chance for influence and a more glacial pace of change, compared to election cycles. Besides, as adversarial conversation is prosecuted in the courts, it is not as a matter of representation, though the contest often exposes the excesses of a tyrannical majority's actions; minority interest may be preserved, but errors are uncovered and undone more than it can be said that a suppressed position is brought to political representation.)
I say all this simply to expose the relative lack of opportunity for direct action, specifically for direct representation. And I say that to say that I hold local community so important because it represents for me one of the few arenas that provides the chance for, the mechanisms for, and that presents few if any barriers to direct democratic action and interaction.
The local community is where dialogue can occur, because here powers are equal, politically speaking. Citizen to citizen, we are left to the power of our words and ideas. If we are interested in dominance or self-preservation, the best or worst we can do is withdraw from a conversation without resolution. If we are interested in understanding or rapprochement, the worst we can do is fail, while the typical end is an agreement to try again, and the best we can achieve is an actual articulation, an inter-informing and -connecting exchange, that accommodates both views or creates the synthetic view that will accommodate both to the greatest extent possible. We may also arrive at the extent of coordination and find we can live with partial agreement without pushing too hard for accommodation where it will not come. We can develop an understanding that will allow equal if disagreeing views without having to promote one over another.
The local scene is the scene where most often we have to deal with those who hold view different from our own and where we can know one another with reference to the place itself instead of with reference to our rank or achievement, which become more important if not supremely dominant in hierarchical organizations, such as professional societies.
The local scene is not perfect, nor is it the bottom level. There are sub-local communities that are essentially communities of interest or are gatherings of those whose sameness insulates them from the necessary confrontation with difference — and there are those historical communities that managed to suppress and subjugate the different to the degree that the proper confrontation was improbable if not impossible (the segregated South, for example), though I would argue that such communities were also sub-local and represented a mutant domination of one sub-locality over the whole.
The local is the proper liminal zone in which our private and intimate lives are brought into conversation with other lives without becoming so generalized that the confrontations put nothing at stake and draw so little passion it is easier to dissociate than to associate, and the zone in which we can be and present our selves and lives without inviting everyone into contagious intimacy with ourselves.
It is both an ideal and a contested place. It is an ideal place beacuse it is a contested and contestable place.
. . .
When I speak of literary community, I may as well be speaking of a literary location, and this is much of what I have in mind when I praise Denver for its abundance. Denver has both enough writers and enough good writers that, when they come in contact with one another intensely and extensively enough the conversation about the good, about what is or what can be good, can occur in such a way that, for the writers, artistic ideas and horizons can be stretched, extended, and articulated in a more detailed fashion — ideas can, through conversation and contest, achieve more specific forms that will (such breakthroughs always do) abet and beget more and better writing.
JSR writes, in response to my suggestion that our local universities (including Naropa University, Regis University, the University of Colorado, the University of Colorado at Denver, and the University of Denver) are themselves the center of some very interesting activity, that he'd "been through the university workshop thing" and that he found "the suggestions/opinions of those folks to be about as good as their writing. No need to let incompetent college students vivisect your stuff into a corpse."
I'll agree that a workshop, improperly taught, can quickly become a social mechanism by which difference is not only policed by eroded. If we work for consensus, we will enforce work that appeals to consensus, not work that excels. It's important, in an entry level workshop to use consensus as a means by which to draw out into light the hackneyed and the merely sensational, but the aim of this should not be so much to eradicate the different but to encourage an investigation of the reasons for specific formations, to begin thinking of one's craf by one's own principles. Unfortunately, we are sometimes guided by the lessons of our own democratic political order to drive toward the strong and governing consensus and we run over the different, the minority, even before it can represent itself.
Internet community can provide the antidote, for in the larger arena you always find more of those who will agree with and support you. This is one of the reasons I blog, for I get to interface with people who do care about poetry and poetics much more than the people I work with on a regular basis.
But one cannot let telecommunity displace local community altogether, for telecommunity tends to develop along lines of interest and solidarity. Though it can split and differentiate, telecommunity spends most of its energy enforcing lines of similarity. Difference can be ignored or left to develop its own communal space. In the city, the areas for contingency are numerous and recurrent, and once you've become accustomed to someone's presence, their absence must be understood not only as a witness of frustration but also potentially an instrument of rebuke. Withdrawals, in the local arena, are a different kind of invitation, a different kind of provocation — not secessions or removals to another community. In the local scene there exists in visible organization the fiction of a single community, the fiction, the story that keeps us coming back to one another.
I understand Dee's and JSR's praise of the private space in which writing occurs. I am jealous of my own time, spending each morning in my study, from 8 till noon just writing, and when I am disturbed by a neighbor or the phone I can become angry as if threatened. Composition occurs in solitude.
But the solitude needs a ground of contingency against which it becomes a kind of concentration. A conversation precedes a monologue. Writing is the precipitate and the product of and the offering of ideas, which develop as much if not more so in conversation with other ideas as in conversation with the ideas of the lone genius.
Ron Silliman writes recently of his own blog:
To date, writing here has caused the following things to happen:1. I’ve been able to sharpen some vague thinking into much clearer concepts...
2. I’ve had to become more rigorous in my reading, to actually think a little about what to read next & why
3, My mental map of contemporary poetry has changed profoundly
4. I’ve had to acknowledge the presence of an entirely new generation of poets & recognize that they really are the “poets of today,” however you might care to define that. Their concerns are quite different from those that preoccupied me & my friends when we were in our 20s & 30s. ...
5. I’ve met, online & sometimes later in person, a huge number of interesting new people & gotten to know several folks I’d already met quite a bit better
6. My correspondence has gone up dramatically
7. So has the arrival of books in the mail...
...
10. I’ve become much more conscious of how many different modes of English there are – not that I didn’t know this already, but I didn’t have to see it & think it & read it every day. One trip down the blogroll to the left will cure anyone of any fantasies concerning homogeneity.
11. I’ve been able to spread the word about some poetry I care about a lot.
12. I sometimes come up against other people’s expectations in ways I hadn’t expected...
...
15. Writing here has pushed my own poetry forward in ways I would not have expected & which I don’t think (yet) I can fully articulate. ...
As Silliman testifies, conversation and exchange quicken one, not only as a citizen, but as a poet, as a writer.
With 400,000 hits over two years, Silliman's blog has provided something like local community in the blogosphere. He witnesses the best aspects of contingent existence, even though many of his discussions tend, as is the nature of blogs, toward one set of possibilities rather than another.
My hope for Denver is that the same extent and level of exchange will occur and that we will further benefit from being present to one another in ways that make it harder not to consider the challenging position.
Good poetry will survive, and even be improved or effected by, such challenge.
. . .
But I am also speaking of a literary public, not just a literary community, and I have to fight against my inherited laconicism and ellipticality to say that I mean two things by the phrase "literary public."
One the one hand, I mean the local arena in which literary producers and literary consumers interact with one another directly and extensively, a scene that is produced and maintained in trust. Slavoj Zizek discusses, in The Ticklish Subject (thanks Josh), Alain Badiou's "attempt to reassert the dimension of universality as the true opposite of capitalist globalism" — an idea that comes home to me as Emerson said his did, familiar because I'd thought it before I read this and now I find it articulated in a better way. A literary public — that is, the community we comprise, the community we maintain, and the community we continue to address — will provide us all with the universality that can prevent the aesthetic bullying that drives us most often into our smaller spheres of action and involvement.
What frustrates me about Denver (and perhaps I'm just being selfish here) is that we seem always capable of creating the intellectual density that will produce an incredible, almost geometric progression of our thinking as a public and thereby such a progression in our individual thinking as well. (This is always the benefit of public education and contingent society, that contact produced complexity and complexity amplifies radially, pushing us well beyond the destinations we could have attained alone.) But we often retreat to our own smaller communities instead, and in doing so we don't only duplicate each other's efforts, we perforate them as well.
On my mind lately has been the proliferation of literary calendars, and I'll admit I have a personal, not just a public, stake in this. Almost eighteen months ago, I started denverpoetry.org. The Denver Poetry Festival was about to enter its fourth year, the Copper Nickel was developing finely as well, and two things happened very quickly. First, I received an e-mail from the founders of Syntax that declared their effort a response to the genral vacancy of the literary scene, which was clearly not vacant by any stretch of the imagination. Second, Bryan Roth of the Colorado Poets Association wrote just a few months later to say that he was starting a calendar service, very similar to the one I developed at denverpoetry.org. To Syntax I said that the city wasn't vacant, which at first was received as a gesture of threat, though we soon enough cleared that up and came to mutual recognition. To Bryan Roth, I said "Why don't we work together?" To which he replied maybe. This is about the same response I've received from everyone I've contacted, both about the calendar and bout the poetry festival, which is supposed to be a public event created by public effort. Now my dream of starting a clearinghouse for literary information in Denver has generally decayed, and I am also unsure whether the poetry festival will ever establish itself firmly in the city's culture. Maybe it's me people don't like — if it is, I will gladly give these projects over to someone who will see them through — but it seems more and more that these disconnects result from ongoing general suspicion and the desire to live in a smaller sub-local community of interest.
In general, I'd like to see more cooperative effort, more joint events, and more mutual recognition, so that we can move toward having such a literary public.
. . .
But that's only half of what I mean by "literary public." I also mean a public, a civic society, that is in-formed by the literary. Not merely the artistic, but the excellent.
Dee asks me:
I'm also curious about what you mean when you say Denver is "so close to a community that benefits writers artistically and enriches a greater public." I assume that gifts come with responsibilities, even the responsibility to plow fallow ground, which is hard work requiring a sharp object and patience.
I don't just mean that the artist, that the writer, has a responsibility to work to maintain a service in the larger social system. I also mean that the writer has to present ot the community at large, not just the more circumscribed literary public I described in the previous section, that which is excellent, especially excellent language, for excellent and exacting language can slowly, if not completely, inform, improve, sustain, and enhance our public discourse and exchange, enabling the local political exchanges I described, in a purely political and conversational (not literary) manner in the first large section of this post.
As I noted in response to JSR, the benefits of strong literary community are not only to artists or only to artists and their audiences, but to the city, to the local community at large.
This is, surely, an idealistic prescription. Some will say that this is just a matter of wishing more power for words. And perhaps it is. But since so much of our public life is led in language, such power must be recognized and grasped and stewarded.
It's probably been two months since I first said I wanted to articulate the necessity of the ideal. And this is what I mean: it is necessary to preserve the ideal, as opposed to the abstract, so we can prevent those who would erase and de-represent our positions (those positions that we present in direct or indirect democratic action) cannot be allowed to specify the ideal, as if it were merely an abstraction, and leave us without a linguistic or intellectual ground from which to begin levering again. This, generally, is the failure of the Democratic Party in the national scene: it has failed to prevent its ideals from being specified in ways that erase or obscure the ideal that motivates policy, so much so I'm not even sure the Democratic Party knows what it wants any more. Clinton did this to the Republicans years back, confusing them. Strange that he should have also confused his own party so completely that they can't catch up or even resist without looking so crybaby all the time, which is a shame because Americans deserve a better discussion and generally deserve better than everything we have. Our ideals, if they are to be substantiated, deserve better subtance.
And this is part of what I say here, that Denver's people and its writers deserve better, generally, than the substantiation they have, something finer and more lustrous. Something that doesn't break when beaten. That spreads.
July 23, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
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 building syrup now: my sympathies do not move
this way, building toward the high consolidations (except in
poems), the identifying oneness of populations, peoples: I
know my own—the thrown periferies, 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:
Sequence and Simultaneity (A Draft)
July 22, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Amazingly, little more than six months after Murder Ballads was accepted and I finally stopped working on it, little more than six months after the burnout and the relief settled in, I'm working on a new book of poems.
(Who knows how long it will take me, though I hope less than the three solid years it took to put Murder Ballads together. I hope I have more clarity of vision this time around.)
At the center of the book, as I imagine it now, are four poems running around 10 pages each. One (already mostly written) extends the weave of diction and contradiction that characterized the trial of Roy Milam and J. W. Bryant for the murder of Emmett Till. The second one (struggling with now) tries the same with the trials of Bob Chambliss, Thomas Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The third poem uses Sun Ra as a character for responding to Civil Rights-era Birmingham and the Blanton and Cherry trials in particular (already written) and the fourth (working on now) is an unravelling or revising elegy or elegies for Jimmie Lee Jackson.
In each of these poems — as with some of the poems that will appear in Murder Ballads, like "Negatives," "Consolation," and "Walt Whitman in Alabama" — I'm interested at once in the tendencies of language to erode and to resist erosion. On the one hand, there are accounts of each incident that are clearly in conflict with one another, and one version threatens to erase another, while another version is promoted in ongoing campaigns for justice. In each of these cases, the belief that revision can occur — and that vision can be clarified by revision — motivates the return to the reports, the testimony, and to the courtrooms. At the same time, much of this return and review solidifies some of the artifactual language of alibi and alternate theory. So the poems both allow artifactual language to be material and resistent and promote the erosion and displacement of that language.
At least that is the intent. And I've struggled with a form for this process, which is the real reason I sat down to compose this post.
I worked with various forms of echolalia working up to, and in the poems for, Murder Ballads (check back with H_NGM_N in the Spring, as Nate's going to run two of more obtuse), so I not only considered working with a parallel form, I tried to do it, particularly with the Emmett Till poem, but lately things have resolved into sequence. The sequences I find myself constructing are recursive, in that each poem proposes a situation then revises it so that the epistemological work of the poem is a continual return to a moment, even as the poem's unfolding in the reader's time displays (potentially) linear sequence.
This is the only way these poems seem to work, but while I'm thinking through the whole School of Quietude discussion that's centered at Ron Silliman's blog, and a more generalized movement from, if not coherence, then narrative, I come back to a fundamental but perennial question about the relationship between sequence and simultaneity.
...
The general supposition is that, in some way, sequence and simultaneity are opposed to one another. Some will suggest (I know I need to link and cite here, but I also need to get the thought out) that poetry is defined, in part, by its ability to provide what narrative forms cannot, kinds of simultaneity or momentariness, and that to write narrative in verse is fail to embrace poetry and its most serious capacities. This supposition seems to be at the heart of a frequent and almost off-hand complaint I will hear that a book of poems is objectionable because it is "too narrative-y." Just the same, those poets I know who might trace their lineage to a narrative root are often uncomfortable or perhaps just dissatisfied on some level with the avant-garde (non-"School of Quietude"? "School of Louditude?" "School of Attitude"?) — so, visible lines of contemporary poetic camps seem to confirm this opposition.
What little aesthetic philosophy I know seems to confirm this as well, particularly Suzanne Langer's distinction between discursive and presentational forms. Discursive forms, including much writing, resolve incrementally, while presentational forms (like sculpture), however much they unfold in time (like music) do not reveal their final form until they are considered as a whole.
Poems, I've thought, fall somewhere in the middle — unfolding in time and having a kind of incremental form, yet also, once taken whole, larger and different.
...
(Incidentally, I wanted to enter this into the discussion Kasey and others were having about the paraphrasability of poems. The poem's ultimate form, I would say, is not paraphrasable: it exists fundamentally as phrase that demands all its valences exist in the same form, and so cannot be abstracted from itself; the abstraction is also a copy of the poem. Yet — and this is important to teaching poetry as well as to teaching poems — the poem has an incremental form, located and legitimated in the reader's mind, a form that tends to paraphrase, which should be seen not as an equivalence for the poem but as a means by which to approach the final form, before which all paraphrase will die.)
...
But even narrative cannot so simply be located in the discursive realm. A work like Absalom, Absalom! has a total form that supersedes and organizes the more local forms (sentences, paragraphs, scenes, plots), though perhaps it could be said that the novel is, as one might describe a poem, a sentence, one sentence, which enables it to achieve such a total form. And works like Moby-Dick, somewhat metafictional, while exposing their narrative mechanisms and their arbitrariness, also present something larger and whole.
So, even though the common novel may be simply a discursive tool, a way to unfold plot in time, I think narrative cannot automatically be labelled simply discursive.
Just so, a poem that's narrative isn't necessarily (automatically) severed from the presentational intensities we locate and love in the lyric, even though narrativistic poems do often turn from such.
...
I find myself thinking of these new poems as situated in both the discursive and the presentational spheres, both having internal or incremental forms and a total form that organizes everything, and thinking through this hybrid imagination with one of the back-posts from Ron Silliman's blog in my head I come to the site of my dissatisfaction with the School of Quietude concept, or with the continued implementation of it in a whos-in-whos-out manner, which has made even me wondering where I'm enrolled. I don't recall enrolling anywhere, and I've been fairly explicit about my interests and allegiances, though I haven't talked much about the contemporary work I'm most drawn to, work that's found a place somewhere between the schools, between the discursive and the presentational — the central sequence in Christine Hume's Musca Domestica or all of Larissa Szporluk's Isolato just to give two examples, poems that seem interested, at once, in the propositional work poems do and in the materiality of the proposing language, a materiality that not only complicates but often enables the propositionality of the poems' work.
This morning I'm beginning to think of a third school or of a non-school school, of poems that do the argumentative and ethical work of the propositional poem — the work Whitman's poems do — while maintaining a strong sense of linguistic materiality and its role in argument and meaning and sense, in sentence.
...
And I'm thinking about these poems I'm writing and how to make them work and to work altogether.
And I'm thinking about my interest in sequence, in story, in narrative. Nate Pritts remarked on this recently, and it was interesting how strange so obvious an observation struck me. What does it mean to use narrative? What does it mean for me to use narrative? (I have to articulate this for H_NGM_N, so I'm beginning to work out some of it here, in a way that I hope will also help me write these poems.)
How can I sequence simultaneity?
July 18, 2005 File under: Editing , Poetry & Poetics , The South
I hope I wasn't putting you on the spot in an uncomfortable way. Your post came up as I was thinking a lot about the editing I do at storySouth and Thicket and what I've begun to do with my students here in Denver with Copper Nickel, and I was hoping to enter into an exchange in which I too could think about what I think about journals.
I think that, at storySouth we probably fall into a standard format situation such as you describe, though I think I do a few things differently --- and am trying to do those more and more often. We do try to anchor each issue (for the benefit of those readers who even now are just coming to online journals (surprisingly a lot of readers)) with a well-known poet or a poet who might be considered a rising talent, someone who has enough work from which we could assemble a retrospective or a prospective grouping so that the feature would be interesting in and of itself.
One of the ways in which, I think, we diverge from the norm is that, while I do like to see very good poems in my inbox, I treat the feature as a kind of license that allows me to accept and present poems that might now clearly be the most excellent examples of the aesthetic projects they represent. I like to collect groups of poems that say something to each other --- not necessarily or even often in a propositional fashion. I mean pieces that implicitly question each other's aesthetic and cultural positions, especially those positions that say something or suggest something about the South --- what it is, what it means, &c. When I'm considering this, I'm thinking, very much as you are, that I am "finding out ... what is going on there that is interesting/challenging/etc... then presenting that, or making that one component of a view of poetry." It's not always easy presenting what I want to present, but this is my aim in any case, and I couldn't have said it better myself. The established writer is part of that scene, part of what's happening, but just as important are those writers with little or no established reputation, and those are the writers I'm most interested in. All this is to say that my own aesthetic concerns are involved but they're often necessarily sublimated to my interest in presenting an account of, or evidence of, what's happening in and about The South, not just as a locale, but as an idea, a concept. Just so with the spin-off project Thicket which looks at Alabama writers and is becoming a sort of hybrid journal/weblog/anthology/repository, collecting both those who are well-reputed and those who are coming up and those who just have something to say. I like it if the pieces are articulate in some manner, but I think in each case I may be seen as choosing work that falls well beyond my own aesthetic interests (though to confirm that you might have to look at what I didn't choose).
Another thing we're doing more and more of is asking poets --- not editors --- to compile and present views of poets they admire or to create editions of work that will address a particular question that might be asked of Southern writing and Southern poetry in particular. In this way, we're both expanding toward a question model (while not entirely abandoning the poet model) and toward an aesthetic-accounting model, wherein editorial predilection is foregrounded so the conversation, which is what's always been most important to me in storySouth can be fueled.
This is not very interesting to many people, but this is what we try to do.
Working on Copper Nickel with my students, I have found that the "famous writer angle" is much more important, mostly because we have to pay the bills --- it's a print journal (if anyone wants to check it, you can subscribe for a mere $8) --- and the money people like to have some measures of success that appeal to their, shall we say "general"?, cultural knowledge. At the same time, I find myself thinking more and more about design as responding to particular pieces, often daring work by people I never knew (we have some interesting work in our September issue that's forced a complete redesign) --- thinking about the journal as an artifact itself, as a locality itself --- ideas I think I hear in your considerations of FASCICLE, ideas that excite me personally and intellectually, which is why I entered this.
Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I don't get something important here that would show where we don't intersect --- I often think that I'm blind to something important everyone else sees and that what I'm doing is essentially stupid though I can't see it as such, though I keep working on principle until I can be shown my own stupidity --- but it seems like, again, we're in a similar mental space....
All this to say I am excited by your thoughts and am looking forward to your new projects...
Thanks again,
Jake
Unquiet Graves
July 12, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Tony Tost's back in his unquiet grave and lately discussing journals and editing, following somewhat on Ron Silliman's recent comments on good journals and good editing.
This discussion has me wondering what Tony has to say about storySouth, a journal with a rather old premise, one difficult to substantiate successfully, to collect writing from and about a specific social and geographical place. I'm particularly interested, in part, because I think that when we first published Tony's work at storySouth it was relatively early in his certainly meteoric career.
Not that Tony's answer would change what I think of his work — I admire it and have said so publicly, in a review I wrote for American Book Review — or of storySouth, a project I hope to continue for some time to come, I am curious.
Breaking Camp / Loud Music (A Draft)
File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
Though following much of the recent discussion of Camp Messianism, Marxism, and poetics has been difficult — asymmetrical as usual, but also full of a great deal I disagree with —I’ve been grateful for those moments when someone like Josh lays bare a premise I’ve suspected by never confirmed.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been wondering, idly, whether I am a School of Quietude poet (and reading many of the archived posts at Ron Silliman’s blog, trying to find a definition of the School of Quietude I could use to answer this question) — mostly because as I read many of the blogs I’ve come to through Josh’s or Ron’s, I rarely find myself completely comfortable, rarely enjoying anything near the level of agreement I sometimes see between, say, K. Silem Mohammad and Josh Corey or between Josh and Gary Norris or….
(The question’s been interesting to me because I find that I enjoy reading much of what one would find in Fence, The Canary, Octopus, Jacket, what have you, though I admire specific poems or poets only very rarely — about as often as I find myself truly drawn to a poet whose work appears regularly in Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, or Southern Review, three of my all-time favorite journals. This is to say that while I don’t find myself opposed to the poetics most often extolled by Ron Silliman, I don’t embrace them either, and that leaves me to wonder, reading some of the Manichean geographies of contemporary poetic practice (Silliman's only sometimes included), where I stand.)
But reading over the last few weeks has helped me consider my place in the scheme of things much more effectively, particularly in light of the much more transparent discussions of Marxist principle that have entered this discussion of late. While I don’t entirely agree with either Henry Gould’s or with Jeffrey Bahr’s responses to these entries, their critiques have drawn the field into such contrast that I’ve been able to think what I’ve been wanting to think.
I will certainly be accused of a ridiculous idealism, but, as I have written many times of late, I think a certain kind of idealism is essential to a politically and culturally healthy life. Now, however, it is time to own up to my own idealisms and articulate my reasons for maintaining that necessity.
What I’ve been wanting to think: while largely uncomfortable with much in the current State of Affairs, with many of the products of contemporary capitalism (whether late- or late-late- or simply ongoing), I find unsatisfying the premise (often unspoken and only rarely examined) that a Marxist critique — whether plied in academic criticism, a discursive and argumentative arena (such as the blog), or in an avant-garde aesthetic — can provide a complete or total or even largely satisfying answer.
I object on the grounds that anything is so totally forceful that its effects can be called, categorically, good or bad or even effective, and I turn from any (apparently or real) totalizing force holding such force as an affront to the necessarily infinite quality of human life and experience (Levinas). And so, I am dissatisfied by the order of the Marxist conversation as I am by the order(s) of capitalism(s) largely because I resist the assumption that any economy is a totalizing system — if it were, how would any resistance to anything be possible — and because I resist the idea that any life can be completely accounted in any economic system, the idea that economics of one sort or another can say everything important about what we do or do not do.
This is to say, I believe that there are parts of life that exist outside of economics, that cannot be entirely commodified and that cannot be fully accessed by dialogues of de-commodification because they were never fully commodified.
Poetry and language are two of these parts of life.
My declaration should not be taken as an argument that there is no commodity poetry or that there is no commodity language — clearly there are commodities of both sorts. I simply mean to state that I believe both poetry and language cannot ever be entirely commodified. There is always a dialect, always an accent, always an idiolect that cannot be accommodated to the standard, that cannot be governed by the standard — or by the/a counter-standard.
But I would not stop here and be satisfied, for I do not believe that one’s poetry or one’s language need be entirely idiomatic or idiolectic in order to resist.
What one needs is, simply, an ideal, a strong knowledge that the self, that one, may not be totalized.
…
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
…
Must we be organized and regimented by anything other than a knowledge of our own abundances in order to resist?
Maybe we need to be organized and regimented in order to destroy one order, but won’t that call for another order? Won’t the regiment become the order then?
(“… there have always been concentrations of power …”)
…
I may not have the arguments, but I remain unconvinced as well.
…
As I say, such idealism may seem naïve.
I would say it is the root of all successful resistance.
I’ve been as frustrated as anyone who might read this blog with the current war, the current national administration, and more than anything else what seems to me a general erosion of public dialogue associated in my immediate context with the cultural and political dominance (or perhaps just political vociferousness) of Christian conservatives on the far right. My frustration may, however, have a different shape. As I was raised in a very religious Christian environment, as I have worked in the Church, as I have sought through the Church spiritual nourishment I still require, I find myself frustrated with the picture and the version of Christianity that is being peddled in the public square: the Christianity of Jerry Falwell, of James Hobson, of Focus on the Family or the Moral Majority or even of the Southern Baptist Convention or the Episcopal Church of America (of late) could not less represent the Christianity I still observe (difficult as it is to observe in my way). Just so, the political acts of Bill Owens, of Doug Bruce, of John Andrews, of Tom Tancredo, of Newt Gingrich, Tom Hastert, or Roy Moore, even of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Al Gore could not less represent the democracy I believe in and attempt to practice.
…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not wither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
…
Frankly, the world does seem fallen at times. It is not, as many of my friends and colleagues would hold, because of the advance of the Christian right. It is just as much because of the general failures of the left — or any other wing — to meet and balance the debate. It is because of a general failure of ideals.
The ideal is the resistant. It is the teleology that cannot totalize the progress of time but can, nevertheless, shape it.
When we abandon the ideal — as over-simple (yes it is, necessarily so) and inarticulate — for a more complex narrative that we could also have, we do not destroy the ideal, we do not leave ideals altogether, we simply leave them to be occupied by others. We remove ourselves from a dialogue that though over-simple and imperfect must be had in order to regulate power, to combat “concentration[/]s of power,” to prevent commodification at a very high level.
It will seem naïve and perhaps ridiculous, but I believe that we must preserve the ideal of a humanity that cannot be described by capitalism or caressed by a Marxist resistance, that cannot be totalized in either dialogue — in order to have a joy in poetry that is more than the materialization of language and more than a superabundance of pleasure (it is an infinity of pleasures) and to have if not through that joy then beside that joy a power in a poem that is not quiet nor quieting but amplifying and amplified.
New Issue of storySouth due out this week.
July 11, 2005 File under: Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion , The South
Later this week, Jason Sanford and I will launch a new issue of storySouth after a brief hiatus. I'm very happy to announce two features, one on the poetry of Charles Wright, edited by Daniel Cross Turner, and the other on the poetry of Tom Hunley, edited by Jeff Newberry. Also, poems by Nate Pritts, Angie DeCola, Shane Allison, and many others.
July 8, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics , Self-promotion
Some good news these days. It appears Nathan Pritts wants to feature my work in a Spring issue of H_NGM_N in which my work would provide one of the EPs.
And already lots of other potential opportunities to promote Murder Ballads are emerging, so though it may seem tautological, I'm creating a new "Self-promotion" category here to use for announcements of this sort.
The cover art for Murder Ballads
"The Murder," by Paul Cezanne (1867).
Let Us Go Then
File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Poetry & Poetics
Last night's Mixed Taste lecture — "Meat Sausage and T. S. Eliot — was wonderful. Pete Marczyk of Marczyk's Fine Foods introduced us to some wonderful fresh sausages and amazing European country wines, after which I rose to give my crash course in T. S. Eliot.
Among the questions were the inevitable: "What kind of bangers and mash would T. S. Eliot have liked?" To which we both responded that if he would condescend to such probably he wouldn't have had much taste for them. Interesting also: "As far as I know there is no mention of sausage in Eliot, or Shakespeare for that matter?" To which we responded that Eliot's Prufrock, while not necessarily biographical, had thin arms and legs and may have reflected a rather shallow draw in Eliot — there's not much food in the poems. As for Shakespeare, Pete remarked that "Big Billy had a known love for sausage" and then speculated that the omission of such from the plays was surely the result of bowdlerization.
Also asked to composed a poem to sausage spontaneously, we engaged in a quick stychomythia:
P: O sausage, O sausage, how I love thee!
J: "Let us go then, you and I
when the casings are spread out across the sky...
We came together at the end to promote slow foods and poetry at the same time. It was very fine indeed.
If anyone is interested, you can catch me lecturing (and serving) Cajun Food as part of the series on July 28th (b/w a lecture on Clifford Still) and again lecturing on the history and form of the Murder Ballad on August 18th (b/w a lecture on Contemporary Opera). This is the right kind of intellectual spectacle for Denver, I think. If you're in the area, you must come.
Today: sleeping, writing, reading, resting.
Mixed Taste
July 7, 2005 File under: Denver , Intake , Poetry & Poetics
If you're in Denver tonight (Thursday), I've just picked up a lecture on T. S. Eliot as part of Belmar's Mixed Taste leture series: 30 minutes on one topic, 30 minutes on another completely unrelated topic, then Q&A for both at the end. I'll be giving a talk on Cajun Food (distinguishing features and history) and on Murder Ballads later in the summer's series.
I haven't posted here since Monday, mostly because I've been writing and reading a lot this week. Here are some recommendations:
150
July 4, 2005 File under: America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . . eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or
apart from them . . . . no more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me . . . . and whatever is done
or said returns at last to me,
And whatever I do or say I also return.
Through me the afflatus surging and surging . . . . through me
the current and index.
I speak the password primeval . . . . I give the sign of democracy"
Denver Announces Poet Laureate Program
June 30, 2005 File under: Denver , Poetry & Poetics
The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs announces the inauguration of the city's poet laureate program..
A Public Self
June 28, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
To follow my last, Gina's comment also gives me occasion to articulate further my interest in a public self, a self that is neither the "me myself" nor the other nor a complete effacement or negation of the core self, but a self that exists, that is shaped, in negotiation, in dialogue. The core self has an idiom, but the idiom becomes blunted or shaped in exchange. As Gina writes "this is language we're talking about, common ground" — but for me not common ground because language, rather language because we need something to witness our common ground.
Add this to my list of entries that respond to Tony Robinson, especially his statement that on some level, "craft" is a short hand for "what I like." It is, but it isn't, at once. For we know our tempers. But we must also — or we may also — temper those in the service of a negotiation, a conversation, a conversion, an exchange.
I am a kind of burr, I shall stick.
File under: Poetry & Poetics
A walk in the tall grass, I am covered.
How would you define contemporary poetic practice?Self: a kind of burr that sticks.
The first of many that have turned up everywhere in these last weeks. This self.
The last few weeks I've been thinking about some poets whose work I would consider anti-narrative — Claudia Rankine and Noah Eli Gordon in particular, but others contiguous to them as well — partly in service of my continuing response to Tony Robinson and Jonathan Mayhew on the issue of craft. I set out to look at a few poets whose work I can say is crafted even if don't admire it in any particular way. I've been reading again Gordon's The Area of Sound Called The Subtone for the last few days and writing small notes to myself along the way. The book is interesting as a whole, and very responsive to Rankine's work (Rankine provides on of the blurbs, a kind of acknowledgment of a kinship of concern and aesthetic), though I find most interesting the title poem, something of a crown of sonnets, for it's there that the non-narrative work that comprises the book takes a shape that avoids one of the common turns that is for me the most confusing among what some call "new writing," a turn back into a self that, if inscrutable in some ways, seems powerfully consolidated by intensely (perhaps inscrutably) idiomatic language.
Maybe I approach this with an improper bias.... It seems to me that a contemporary conversation against or away from narrative — a conversation into which Gordon fits (in my mind) — assumes primarily that narrative is a matter of sequence. By de-sequencing, a work is de-narrativized and thus freed of hierarchies that would limit the scope of the poem's meaning. (Channeling some of an overview Charles Bernstein once offered me on a Sunday afternoon.)
This is an idea I find interesting and one I have tried, and one I continue to try, to embrace. But it seems to me that a radical turn away from narrative based primarily in de-sequencing runs the risk of avoiding, of failing to consider let alone answer, another set of questions narrative considerations beg, namely questions of position. Who knows this? How do they know it? Who are they? Where are they?
One might suggest that such questions inevitably open onto further ontological and epistemological questions that inevitably lead back to oneself. Valid consideration, though I find myself frustrated with the subjective assumption of "new [lyric] writing" because it seems to give up on the other possibility, that narrative questions may just as well lead us away from our particular selves, even if only by adopting other selves.
This is to say that I find myself frustrated by a turn to the poet's person — not in a biographical or confessional sense, but in a figural or monolithic sense, the poet as a locus that is forever indicated if by nothing else then by the lack of contrary indication. It is as if the deferral of narratological considerations such as focalization don't de-focalize works but at times more agressively focalize them around the poet.
I admire Gordon's title sequence in large part because it seems to me the one poem in the volume (there are only three) that keeps me from asking questions about Gordon himself, a prevention accomplished largely by the poem's form which presents a proxy for the self, a feint that allows Gordon to slip away and not be missed for a time. Not because I am a formalist — I'm not, though I write a sonnet from time to time, and I don't write even so elegant a blank verse as Gina, who is also not a formalist by any stretch — or because I'm a narrativist, though I am more open to that position, but because I think narratological questions must be answered somewhere; they can be resisted but not altogether ignored because a lack of position is not necessarily a zero position. There is always so much forensic evidence of your person, lack of position is not a zero position: you need to efface or contradict the marks you're already leaving if there is to be zero position, and for the most part I don't find that in the other poems in The Area of Sound....
I read that book and I find a self, a recurrent one.
So, I find Gina's argument with self compelling in part because it seems to say what I've been working toward: that to be fixed, to be practiced, sticks uncomfortably, like a burr and, perhaps, is not to be preferred.
It seems a bit strange to write this, recalling an exchange I had with Josh Corey some months back in which he stated his general alienation from his high school cultures, while I recalled being somewhat mainstreamed — student government president for a year, school mascot for a year (a black panther, if you're wondering). As I noted in that exchange, though I had a place in the mainstream culture of the high school, I never felt fully carried by that stream, and witnessing the rather strong bonds Josh has formed through his blog and his poetic exchanges, I wonder at times if that edge-of-mainstream position isn't the more alienated one, neither in nor out completely ("Both in and out of the game").
This in-between-ness has defined me for my adult life.... I was a devout Anglo-Catholic, though I drew in my short homiletic career on the skills of the Baptist preachers I witnessed as a child and my deceased relatives of whom I heard tales. As an undergraduate, I never decided whether to study Creative Writing or literature: I studied them both. And so in graduate school I also did not decide, but took an MFA and PhD at the same time (interestingly, Gina did as well). Like Aesop's bat, neither an animal nor a bird, but both and somehow neither as well.
Defined communities pull, but I, too, feel ill at ease in either. I require both, yet sometimes each seems to require a statement of faith that cannot be provided. This is not a place — in so many ways it is no place, is a by way or an in-between — whose nowhereness can only be expressed by explicit positioning or de-positioning. Though I write a narrative kind of poem, I am not necessarily, and indeed not often, my biographical or biological self. The poems, taken together, are perhaps like a Hockney photo-collage, any individual print not indicative of the center, but taken altogether betraying a curve that is the reach of the self, the surface of the lens on which and through which all things bend. But part of the work is the work of indicating that curve, that horizon of interaction, even if at times we move away from it, reach through it, beyond.
I am sick and tired of being you. But I am also sick and tired of being me. Of being any one person or any one place. I like this reaching in which I feel free, even though the zone of my being is more clearly written all the time. Burr that sticks and moves pant to pant, a secret on a subway car, a church social, a bookstore line.
On Craft — Part 2
June 19, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Two days ago, I proposed to write about a poem I neither like nor dislike but whose craft I recognize and can admire. This --- and the subsequent task of writing about a poem I don't like but whose craft I recognize --- is much harder than I imagined, for as I look at poems of almost any kind, it's almost hard not to admire it in some way.
So here I would like to amend my task and remark briefly on the work of a poet whose craft I admire, though I do not fully understand it, and whose craft, though I admire it, I would feel uncomfortable adopting --- Nils Michals, whose book Lure won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize from Pleiades Press last year.
I've been reading this book very slowly since I got it about this time last year (I think that's when I got it). I received it because I had entered the Lena-Miles Wever Tood Poetry Prize contest, and the organizers generously offered a copy of the winning manuscript as part of a return on the reading fee --- and I'm glad I entered the contest so I could receive a book I would most likely never have bought.
The lyrical intensity of the poems in this volume --- a compression always verging toward explosion --- is simply amazing and is the site of my admiration and my distance.
A brief look at the opening poem, "Westerly," a poem that recommends itself to commentary since it provides a legend for the book, demonstrating or entering onto a demonstration of the book's lyric methods. Most important and perhaps most obvious will be what I would call a serial fragment. The opening sentence is complete enough:
What comes off the sea recalls nothing of loving a world and for those with eyes wishing something other than what is seen it says: listen.
Nice, though slight, hypotaxis slows us through the third line as if to prepare for the visual and rhythmic compression of the fourth which also prepares us for what follows, a fragment that, together with the preceding, constitutes this serial fragment:
Comes off the sea and does not care, says accept there may or may not be a hand in this: a taste of spray, salt, some origin no longer encompassing us with calm, says you are on your own now.
Here the compression is not simply hypotactic but enthymemic. The initial "What" is now to be implied by "Comes," the evocative power of which depends on the reader's catching the parallel. Just so with "says," which implies its "it," itself a stand-in for the "what." Wonderful music in this language, built on the poem's ability to suppress some propositional or semantic elements by relying on the series of periods in the entire poem to supply and distribute the necessary information.
This is a key to the book, which is itself a series of poems that often read like fragments, so extreme is the musical and propositional compression. "Westerly" finds extension, complementing, perhaps even completion, in subsequent poems "Southerly," "Northerly," and "Easterly," which are spread throughout the book. Many other poems appear in series, such as the three poems entitled "Desperation Series" or the seven poems entitled "Horses of the Sun." Each individual poem, wonderfully musical, is often compressed to a cryptic brevity. Yet, altogether, the poems provide much of the necessary context and information to help unfold all that is implicated.
There are many things about this method (which I have described here simply: the book is richer than all this, though I know I have not discovered all its treasures and could not quickly account for those I have found) I admire. These poems sound great --- and the syntactic and propositional compression this music witnesses or produces induces one to read the poems aloud, ever creating opportunities for rapture as well as unwrapping. There's a supreme confidence in this sort of writing, a confidence that the reader can get it, a confidence I both appreciate and covet. The interweaving of the poems makes the book something more than a collection or a collocation: it is a poem itself and in its complexity a work of great intelligence, a work of art (or artifice or artfulness, if you'd rather), the craft --- the detail, the beauty, and the arrangement, the completion of which, are all to be admired.
I will confess: at times I wish I could write this way, wish I had the intelligence or the focus to create a book so finely (which is to say intricately, delicately, and intelligently) wrought.
Nevertheless, as I have intimated, I would not feel comfortable adopting such methods if I could.
While I admire the distinctive and powerful music of these poems, I would not ulimately be comfortable adopting such an idiolect. To read these poems, one must be ready to be turned within --- within one's self, within each single poem, and especially within the volume as a whole. To a certain extent, reading any volume of poetry requires such inwardness, but Lure requires an even greater involution and involvement, a drawing in the title declares. Though I don't know if I would pose such a question of this particular volume, I would want to ask of this method whether this inwarding removes reader, poem, and even poet from public dialogue. I would want to ask if so distinctive an idiolect sacrifices public broadcast (which necessitates a certain shallowing or averaging (more on this later; push me if it bothers)) for depth of (hermeneutic) involvement.
I feel, in my own work, I have a public accounting to provide. Regardless of how adequate I may be to the task, I feel I must, as a white Southern American male, provide a certain account of the South and myself as a representative or critic of it. I have been asked, I continue to be asked, to provide such an account. I accept the demand as an ethical obligation, and obligation further obliges me to adequate myself, providing a great spur to my own writing. With such an obligation to account --- that is, to make intelligible and to lay open for scrutiny or consumption --- I also inherit an obligation to extreme intelligibility. Though music demands some sacrifice of political clarity, though the political account and argument also demands some sacrifice of clarity, of transparency, my sense of my obligation to this conversation renders me uneasy with --- or fearful of the consequences of --- so tightly made a music as I read and admire in Lure. When I chafe at my obligations, I turn to books like this and turn as well to write a poetry much more resistant to the obligated accounting --- perhaps interestingly, resistant alike to the Southern and the extra-Southern reader, however Southern my idiom.
(I will return to this in the next few days. This is interesting and consuming work, but I feel, as I feel at the edges of what must seem my poetic schizophrenia, that I am about to understand something about my current desire or design.)
On Craft — Part 1
June 17, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
To amend my charge to myself, in response to Tony's argument, I want to briefly talk about four kinds of poems in order to situate my claim about the usefulness and the legitmacy of "craft" as a concept that is more than shorthand for "qualities I admire in poems." I want to discuss a poem I didn't like at first, but then came to love, to discuss a poem I neither like nor dislike but whose craft I can admire, to discuss a poem that I don't like but admire, and to discuss a poem I should like but don't.
At the outset, I want to say a word about the word "like." I'm taking it, following Tony and am using it for the present to mean "enjoy," though it's also more complicated than that.
One would want to know not just whether or not one took pleasure from reading a poem but also what kind of pleasure one took from reading a poem, for there will be a difference in the pleasures one takes from a poem that gives intellectual pleasure --- the poem with respect to which understanding is the root of pleasure --- and one that gives emotional pleasure --- say, the poem that says what I've wanted to say about something I feel and by articulating it helps me feel that feeling more acutely (also a form of understanding, but the root is in the emotional life) --- or one that gives visceral pleasure --- the poem that allows me to feel my anger and disgust or just plain queasiness first, before all else. The pleasure may be total, of course: a poem can make you have all three kinds of pleasure, though it's rare to find a poem that makes you feel all three kinds at once, with equal order of priority.
So, in talking about poems I like or don't like, I'll have to qualify the word "like" and say whether or not the liking is based in the intellect, the emotions, or the viscera --- for I can not like a poem because I don't completely understand it or I can not like a poem because I understand it and find some of its positions offensive or just sloppy, &c.
Poems I didn't like at first.
I want to talk about Rodney Jones's poem "Doing Laundry" (from Elegy for the Southern Drawl — a poem that can be seen as conventional or mainstream in terms of its primary poetics, a poem that is fairly easily understood, sentence-by-sentence.
Here it is:
Here finally I have shriven myself and am saint, Pouring the detergent just so, collating the whites With the whites, and the coloreds with the coloreds,Though I slip in a light green towel with the load
Of whites for Vivian Malone and Medgar Evers,
Though I leave a pale shift among the blue jeansFor criminals and the ones who took small chances.
O bridges and grooms, it is not always perfect.
It is not always the folded, foursquare, neat soulOf sheets pressed and scented for lovemaking,
But also this Friday, stooping in a dark corner
Of the bedroom, harvesting diasporas of socks,Extracting like splinters the T-shirts from the shirts.
I do not do this with any anger, as the poor chef
May add to a banker's consomme the tail of a rat,But with the joy of a salesman closing a sweet deal,
I tamp loosely around the shaft of the agitator
And mop the kitchen while it runs the cycles.Because of my diligence, one woman has time
To teach geography, another to design a hospital.
The organ transplant arrives. The helicopter pilotSteps down, dressed in an immaculate garment.
She waves to me and smiles as I hoist the great
Moist snake of fabric and heave it into the dryer.I who popped rivets into the roof of a hangar,
Who herded copper tubes into the furnace,
Who sweated bales of alfalfa into the raftersHigh in the barn loft of July, who dug the ditch
For the gas line under the Fourteenth Street overpass
And repaired the fence the new bull had ruined,Will wash the dishes and scrub the counters
Before unclogging the drain and vacuuming.
When I tied steel on the bridge, I was not so holyAs no, taking the hot sheets from the dryer,
Thinking of the song I will make in praise of women,
But also of ordinary men, doing laundry.
When I first read this poem, I thought Give me a break. It seems a textbook example of the sentimental poem, the poem that appears to hold something dearer or more important than it should (I have in mind Andrew Hudgins's definition of the sentimental, offered somewhere in The Glass Anvil, which I don't have at hand). To hold laundry as a holy office, in which one man can atone for race and gender crime — well, it does seem a little out of balance, more than a little hyperbolic.
Such observations alone might form an argument against the poem's craft. A wariness of the sentimental seems to me a hallmark of creative writing teaching, especially in poetry, and especially among the generations of poets who matured (in the mainstream) after the New Critics but before 1990. And one can easily imagine the time this poem would have in a workshop if it were tendered by a younger, unestablished writer.
I am more forgiving, however, and would not pursue this sort of argument, though I'm ready to hear it. Sentimentality is not something that bothers me particularly --- at least not the imbalance of sentiment and object (I like some asymmetry).
Initially, I didn't like this poem because it seemed to me too easy --- both in its introduction of the racial and gender history that occasions the poem's acts and in its responsive (and atoning) acts --- and because in its ease it seemed to reflect the relative flatness of public dialogue about race and gender. I read this poem just as I was completing my doctoral studies at Cornell, where (as a body) the graduate student community seemed to participate in charades of discussion rather than discussion itself. If a person made an accusation of bias, it was on behalf of a group, and if its was directed at an individual, that person was also representative, and the only acceptable response to such accusations was some effacement of the group. It was a dialogue of gesture, which I found somewhat confusing at first, since the substance of the argument that necessitated the gesture was almost always inaccessible; once I discovered, however, that such submerging was necessary to enable to gestural conversation, at least I began to understand the syntax of my community. Jones's poem seemed to me to engage a similar, though larger, dialogue, a dialogue that can only proceed, it seems, by simple gestures.
I watch with interest and chagrin this dialogue, in which the nation's consideration of its own racism and especially its own racist history tends to locate national malignancy in the South, particularly in the white Southern male --- a dialogue that seems to need more than anything else the effacement, the death of that white Southern male. (Jones acknowledges this debate in the conclusion to the volume's title poem.) I found, and still to some extent find, this dialogue unsatisfying since it threatens to erase consideration of the nation's racism if it has occurred in other parts of the nation or if it has been committed by members of other groups. My youthful mistake was to assume that if the dialogue could not satisfy every need, if it was not sufficient, it was also unnecessary.
Considering such gestural dialogue necessary now, if not sufficient, I'm now obsessed with the national conversation on reparation and with the belated Civil Rights trials. But I also now see Jones's poetry differently. I understand its situation and its occasion better. It strives to make a necessary gesture --- a public gesture, a gesture that must be simple in order to be public (more on this in the following weeks), a gesture whose simplicity demands a certain amount of hyperbolic distortion or amplification.
In short, it's a poem whose distortions could have bothered me in more ways than one, but which make sense when considered rightly. It's a poem in consideration of which we have to move away from a sense of "craft" as a set of objective rule-type criteria (such-and-such is always bad) but not entirely to a subjective idea of "craft." Rather "craft" becomes a category that will allow us to gesture toward the art of the poem's response that is necessarily conditional. This is somewhere between the second and third of the categories Jonathan has now proposed for the four relations to craft.
This is the main point I really want to make, and I don't think I realized it until just now. I wanted to discuss also the (brief) history of my reckoning with Gabriel Gudding's A Defense of Poetry, and specifically its title poem, but I would merely repeat the gestures I've made here, so I will leave that for another time. Suffice it to say that the question there was whether the exaggerated tone and scatological interest was crafty, and the ultimate answer was that it was, despite or perhaps because of the ways in which the poem veered away from what David Wojahn would call the "dominant period style."
Tomorrow (or perhaps later today), to talk about a poem I neither like nor dislike but whose craft I admire...
To Jonathan Mayhew
File under: Poetry & Poetics
In response to this:
Jonathan,
There's got to be a fifth category that is somewhere between your second and third category. Maybe there's a sixth as well.
It strikes me that there's also (the fifth) the poem that would seem to be not-very-well-crafted according to a "traditional" or "common" definition of poetic craft but which, in the right context, is clearly fashioned on principles of its own (see the post just below).
There also has to be a poem that has some of the traditionally crafty elements (a la #2) but which goes beyond them and provides something largely other (as in your #3). Here I'd put someone like A. R. Ammons, either in "Corson's Inlet" or Sphere, where there's a ton of verbal antithesis, symbol, image, metaphor --- lots of elements that Brooks and Warren might dig --- though the poem presents something else (itself) larger than those elements, something that overwhelms the smaller elements rather than seeming made up of them.
Suzanne Langer's distinction between discursive and presentational form (Philosophy in a New Key) might be useful here. Traditionally crafty poems (#2) might be seen as presenting discursive forms, wherein you treat the elements in a linear fashion, recognizing the marks of craft along the way; there's lots of little excellence to admire. O'Hara or Ammons, on the other hand, might present a presentational form, a form that is visible, ultimately, only once you've read the whole poem, a form that is the whole poem and that is larger than and perhaps better than the elements. Langer writes that these presentational forms can seem artless, because they present themselves as wholes and combat attempts to disarticulate them....
Don't know what you think of these ideas, but I am interested to hear.
Crafting
June 12, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Tony responded to my response to his and Jonathan's discussion on craft.
And I replied:
Tony,Many thanks for the reply. I've appreciated your blog and am glad to connect.
I take your point --- most talk of craft is highly subjective and, at best, often proves the point T. S. Eliot made eloquently in "The Music of Poetry," noting that when a poet comments on the work of others, he or she is often, consciously or unconsciously, describing the work he or she wants to write, not the work in question.
And I think your algebra of reading describes the kind of reading that usually helps me decide whether to buy a book.
However, I don't think this kind of reading is enough, and I think we all recognize poems that are good, given the principles of the author or school, even if it has 0% of the X, Y, Z elements to which we personally respond.
Conversely, we occasionally read poems that contain our favorite X, Y, Z elements that we don't like.
And this is where, I think, a discussion of craft becomes not only possible but necessary. Liking the poem we like can't just be matter of its containing elements we like, can it? (If so, I think those Russians, Komar and Melamid would have had more success.) We also have to talk about whether or not, by some standard, a poem can be said to be made well, even if we dislike its contents or disagree with its method.
I'd like to extend this discussion, if no where else then only in my own head, but I think I'll have to find both a poem I don't really care for but can admire and a poem I should like but don't, and explain with reference to those.
Give me a few days. I'm on the road.
I'm in Alabama till Tuesday. Marvelling at what some moisture can do.
Crafty
June 6, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Jonathan Mayhew and Anthony Robinson have had an interesting exchange on craft.
I'm glad to see Mr. Robinson's remark that there is always more than one period style at any given time. I don't think his catalogue is quite complete, but I'm at a loss to complete it at present --- diagrams would be (will be) necessary --- and I'm paralyzed a bit by my agreement with Mr. Robinson that many attempts to categorize are also attempts to dismiss, though I don't think (and I think he would agree) that all attempts to categorize are dismissals. For instance: Stephen Burt's category, the ellipticals (grazed by Anthony), which is defined, clearly, as an attempt to praise or at least to isolate practices Burt admires.
Some consideration of the ellipticals in the sub-discussion of period style would be interesting, particularly as that discussion bears on a definition of "craft." Mr. Robinson suggests, at one point, that the term "craft" may survive a New Critical framework --- a tracery that may be accurate enough, though it also seems to dismiss the term as biased, as does his ultimate position that "craft" can describe the poem you admire. I think a look at poems by Burt's Ellipticals could, in some cases, be described as well-crafted according to a New Critical approach, though they'd surely be dismissed by New Critics themselves. For example, many of the poems in Larissa Szporluk's Isolato are exceptionally melodious, quite allusive, potentially ironic, and all certainly turn on their own brevity, which abets a sense of paradox or mystery a reader may confront. Yet, though as complex as any poem by Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom and though as interested in the results of pressuring a small number of a poem's words, Szporluk's poems achieve a multifarity that would --- if we can judge by the beating Hart Crane received at their hands, or the generally poor treatment of Emily Dickinson during their reign --- have been dismissed by New Critics as perverse.
This may simply prove Mr. Robinson's point that "craft" is often code for "a poem I like," but I'm not willing to give up on the word "craft" so easily, however easy we may be with the term in conversation. I'd like to see "craft" equal "principle" so that when we talk about a well-crafted poem we mean a well-principled poem, one whose suppositions and realizations seem to generate the body of the poem that captivates our sensory attention. So, Mr. Robinson's example, a Frank O'Hara poem could be admired as "well-crafted" once we appreciate its central principles.
I see Mr. Burt as attempting to make such an exchange in his writing on, and collecting of, the elliptical poets, an attempt to define the principles of a group of poets many see as perversely unruly, and I find his efforts much more interesting than those of his mentor Ms. Vendler, who, like Mr. Bloom, delights too much in the work of those authors already canonized.
Such an approach is exhausting, to be sure, but I think it is necessary, not just to combat the reductive canonization and panethonization many of us (responding to Mayhew's questions) have discussed of late, but also, I think, to enjoy any poem well and completely and, of course, to be able to enter into conversation with others who share our interests in poetry.
I've opened myself to charges of naieve idealism, but, as I've written below and promised to expand upon (later), I think principled idealism important, even vital, to individual and collective intellectual life.
Mayhew's Questions
June 4, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Just for those who want some reminding or don't want to follow the link to the source, here are Jonathan Mayhew's questions (for Ron Silliman and others):
1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range? What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?
2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alonside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?
3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?
4. Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"? Is it necessary to have a poetic "pantheon"? How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic "canon"? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?
5. Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"?
6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger "literature," or is poetry itself the more capacious categtory?
7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?
8. Is the poem the thing, or the larger poetic project?
9. What is the single most significant thing anyone has ever said about poetry?
10. Which of these questions asks you to define yourself along lines of division not of your own making, in the most irksome way? How close do these questions come to the way in which you habitually think about poetry? What other question would you add to this list?
First question:
1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range? What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?
In turn/s:
What is your sense of the poetic tradition?
It's huge and a lot like a football game at which a fight breaks out.
There is an ostensible focus of attention, still at work on the field and interesting within certain bounds and there are huge numbers of people waiting for a chance to be involved in the plays and also a good deal of apparatus involved in maintaining the rule and bound that make such plays meaningful and there are many thousands of folks happy to watch what happens there and many people unhappy with the outcomes and ready to step in as a coach or a player or a ref or a league official or to simply eat, digest, and defecate the rule-book.
Between some of these people, usually some of these thousands who watch and dialogue with one another accepting and rejecting the focus of the action on the field, a fight breaks out, maybe as a result of a disagreement about what has happened or what should happen in the field-action focus, but just as likely because of some incident not related to and perhaps violating of the field-action-focus ethic that ostensibly governs spectatorial and commentary behavior. Let us say, a beer spilled on someone's head after, let us say, a substantive disagreement. Two or more of these folks begin pounding.
Meanwhile, action on the field continues.
Several of these thousand spectator/commenter/field-action focused turn to watch what happens in the nearby fight, some watching, some commenting, some wiseacre giving a blow-by-blow, maintaining the sport connection though transforming the contest into one of another kind. Several stand apart from the pulling and hauling at a distance. Some enter the game, in an attempt to dissolve the contest or push it to resolution.
Meanwhile, something important happens on the field and those who are involved in the fight or the watching of the fight miss this play, which is crucial to the rhythm and the outcome of the field action, and ever after these people, who have been involved in the fight or the watching of the fight, watch a different game from those who were ignoring the fight or too far away from it to notice. So now there are two games occuring on the field and at least two games in the stands.
This goes on for a bit, and afterward the university considers banning beer sales but then realizes it depends on the revenues for private jets and under-the-table "donations" to the "athletic scholarship fund" so the involvement in and the discursive life of the game become increasingly more complicated. People continue to have arguments about what really happened in that moment and what it meant. However consequential or inconsequential it may have seemed at the time, the key play, observed or missed, continues to define the relationship fans have not just to the specific game but to the whole project of watching this team and football in general. This may fade after a while, but then people have already discovered other disagreements, which function as extensions of the original disconnet.
This is my sense of poetic tradition, even if I said nothing directly about poetry.
How far back does your particular historical sense range?
Probably I am not the best person to ask this question, for my interest in poems runs back to Homer. I rarely engage Homer directly, but I do often enough to make that engagement important. More often, I'm interested in English vernacular traditions that stretch back to the fourteenth century, the ballad tradition specifically, and I read English-language poetry from about 1500 forward fairly rapaciously. Though Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island (1633?) is not my favorite book to take to the hammock, I still read it as its version of pastoral continues to fascinate me and to which I am still trying to respond. And though I will never write poems like Karen Volkman, I read her work just as often. I'm working somewhere in between. The poet whose work is most important to me, philosophically and intellectually, is Walt Whitman. The poets whose music is most important to me are Hopkins, Thomas, Heaney and Whitman, Levine, Levis --- one Celto-English strand that keeps pushing me back into the past, and one American strain the keeps me in my own time. So let's say that my particular historical sense (with regard to poetry) goes back a solid 400-600 years, occasionally reaching back even further, though --- as my answer to the following question will clarify --- for most purposes we can say about 150 years.
What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture?
Nationality, sure, but also political philosophy. I find the democratic idealism of Whitman absolutely necessary, the right tonic for an America that lets its political organization get too particular or at least too far afield of its stabilizing ideals. And so I also value, politically, the work of Philip Levine as a kind of protest or dissent writing. Just so, I admire and respond to, though I don't know to what extent I can claim as ancestors, the work of Gerald Barrax and Robert Hayden. To a lesser extent someone like John Beecher, with the Whitman in him. So my tradition is not just anything American, but specifically American poetry that presents the ideal or the ironic as a form of minority protest.
Language is specifically more important. As I've testified, directly and obliquely, I am from Alabama, which has meant mostly that my life after moving out of Alabama for graduate school and subsequently for employment has been defined in ways large and small by my accent, so I have become more and more interested in the idea of accent and drawl and other vocal (one might say non-semantic but not insignificant) elements as represented in textual presentations. I tried some dialect writing for a while, and so I still find myself drawn to the work of Sterling Brown and of John Berryman, but I later decided, after Faulkner, but also A. R. Ammons and Rodney Jones, that syntax could communicate important speechways that inflect my writing and thinking. I would, if permitted, draw myself into relation with a number of mostly Southern poets, including Rodney Jones, R. T. Smith, Robert Morgan, Forrest Gander, and A. R. Ammons, a confused community in which brevity and loquacity are equally important and in which the conditions for each are very complex. I would claim a more distant or distanced kinship with some Irish writers, Heaney particularly, whose syntax I often hear when I'm back home.
At the same time, I feel very strong connections to a number of African-American poets. Physically and genealogically I am as white as they come, but life in Alabama and life as a representative of Alabama have made me aware of the linguistic linkages in particular with non-poets like Albert Murray (from Mobile, Alabama) and poets including Honoree Fanonne Jeffers and even Major Jackson, who is one of the maybe half-dozen people with whom I feel I could sit in a room and talk indefinitely.
So, language more important than nation, but nation is very important. Probably race and questions of race, especially as those require some attention to Southern-ness, to regional identity and its racial dimension, would be the most important definer.
I don't know what aesthetic posture is, but I do have a slight scholiosis, so if I have an aesthetic posture, it is probably just as crooked, which may explain why it probably seems at times that I cannot make up my mind.
What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?
First of all, I don't know who my collaborators are, or if I have them, or if what I do can even be called meaningfully poetic labor at all.
I know who I talk to and don't talk to, and sometimes that makes its way into my writing, but I would want to say that I don't know my real or ideal community yet. I find myself constantly between the knotty intellectual dialogues that are like caffeine for my mind --- the more complicated the better for my puzzling brain --- and the earthier, grubbier, dirtier, and bloodier interaction that defines most of my Alabama business and my linguistic concerns. I'd like to be in dialogue with Maurice Manning, in conversation with whom I have found much comfort on our rare occasions: he reads as widely as I do, perhaps more widely, though he reads more deeply and seriously in many cases, and he's Southern and interested in Southern-ness in a sense.
To return to a very unsatisfying question, I guess I would say in some circumstances I find myself distinguished by my accent, in others by my interest in topics that are supposed to stray from that accent's grounds.
2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alonside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?
I'm not sure that any one poem --- or any one issue of any one journal --- defines "contemporary poetic practice" for me. What I value most about what I see at present (as opposed to, say, what was visible to me when I first became interested in poetry as an undergraduate student almost fifteen years ago) is the great diversity of practices. Honestly, for the most part, I would rather read a poem that was an exemplary instance of its kind rather than a wealth of poems in a single practice. For that reason, I often enjoy issues of journals that are guest edited but which are not theme issues, for the guest editor can take more chances, has less to prove long term in his or her position with the journal.
In the widest view, I see that poets, particularly younger and less-established poets, taken as a class or aggregate, seem to be very comfortable, overall, with the entire breadth of poetic practice in Modern English since Wyatt. I think we can see in Gabriel Gudding's work something that, however much it may owe to Catullus and Archilochus, keeps company with Swift and Pope as well as with Pound and Tzara. Maurice Manning gives us work conversant with Berryman, Johnson, Warren --- and host of others, including Daniel Bryan whose 1812 Miltonic epic The Mountain Muse shows Daniel Boone descending from heaven as Christ to help Anglify the New World. In Christine Hume (of Musca Domestica especially), there's obviously a wedding of Dickinson, Stein, and Moore. &c.
At least this is the work I value, work that has a historical depth to it or that engages the long and deep and confused tradition in ways that draw the "past" out of the corner and into play.
3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?
I'm not sure I quite understand the drift of this question....
There are poets whom I admire greatly whose poems I often don't understand even though I feel I generally take the purpose of their project and work --- Nathaniel Mackey or Karen Volkman or Brenda HIllman, for instances, in my case. There are some poets whose work seems mostly opaque to me, like Stein, whose work I read often, though I rarely understand the works themselves (however, I've long assumed this is because her writing isn't propositional in the same way that, say, Whitman's is). I might, in some cases, say the same for Dylan Thomas (who, I've long assumed, didn't always want to be perfectly understood, who reticulated some of his own propositions in a private symbolic language). I admire Pound and Zukovsky both, but I can't sit down and read them, because I don't know enough of the references yet, but I assume this is just a matter of time. (I might say the same for Geoffrey Hill or Paul Muldoon.)
If the question amounts to Who is you just do not get?, then I would say Mark Levine. I do not understand what makes him tick, though I do not feel lost reading his poems. Certainly, seeing him is a whole other thing.
Mr. Mayhew, if you read this, do tell me if I've misconstrued the question altogether.
4. Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"? Is it necessary to have a poetic "pantheon"? How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic "canon"? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?
Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"?
My short answer is: many readers --- maybe almost every reader --- will at some point react to the author rather than to the poem. And so "pantheon" or "star system" is to a certain extent inevitable. At times, such a system tends to obscure the workings of particular poems, which annoys me. Yet such a system also gives many readers a simple focus that will maintain the interest of readers who may become wider or deeper readers at some time in the future, so it's not such a bad thing.
My longer, thinking-through-the-question answer:
I'm not sure who the "we" is here. If we mean "readers of poetry, generally speaking," I might still want to break that category down into what we could call "professional readers" --- that is, those of us who are writers ourselves or professors or academics or book reviewers, people whose primary livelihoods (forget money here) are shaped around poetry --- and "frequent, but non-professional readers" --- those who are avid readers and who often feel that they need to check in on "what's happening in poetry today" (say, the occasional New York Times Book Review reader or who I imagine to be the typical New Yorker or Atlantic reader, the educated person who still views poetry as part of a vibrant cultural life).
I think there is some hero-worship in both readerships, mostly for good or at least understandable reasons. Within the community of professional readers, I think the various forms of hero-worship are short-hands for aesthetic kinships and shared concerns, and knowing who one's peers' heroes are often tells you a great deal about what they are apt to think about one issue or another, which can save one a lot of time and wrangling in a conversation. At times, such worship effectively prevents all conversation (e.g., "What? You don't carry The Maximus Poems in your knapsack at all times?!?!"). Unfortunately, it is often impossible to read which form of hero-worship you may observe when entering into a conversation with someone for the first time. But, the second type of conversational-buffering hero-worship I saw more when I was in graduate school. I see less of it now that my immediate conversations are with other poets who are no longer students, but I do occasionally run up against the iceberg of a colleague's worship for, say, a formalist ideal.
Among the second class of readers, the "frequent, but non-professional, readers" I think there is the kind of hero-worship we see in any mass market, a worship for particular figures who seem as important for what they represent about the possibilities for poetry as for their particular poems. So, lots of people know who Philip Levine is --- he's a working-class representative, or he's a writer of very accessible poetry --- and they will come hear him read, almost as much because he presents a poet "people can read" as because of particular poems. At least, this is the impression I get from post-reading interviews I randomly conduct after events I organize or attend in and around Denver.
I might want to separate from this second class of readers yet another class, a class of readers who think that they should like poetry because it is important but who as yet know very little about poetry at large. These are the readers who are attracted to work that strikes me, at times, as over-postured. Our department of Student Life was able to sell 3,000 tickets for Maya Angelou, because many of our students are attracted to the magnetism she presents: everyone who went paid to go. Yet, there were maybe 200 people at DU for a reading by Paul Muldoon, who I think is the more interesting of the two poets (Richard Greenfield, say what you will).
It's good to keep this in mind, I think, if one is interested in organizing programs that try, over some period of time, to push the kind of poetry that will hold the attention of the professional readers and yet appeal to and expand the experience of the non-professional readers and even challenge those readers who respond to some other sense of obligation or interest in power. I think a strong program of readings has a mixture of these two kinds of readings: even though you won't get all of the non-professional readers to come to a performance by a poet who will appeal to the professional readers, you gradually expand the sense of the field of poetry the non-professional readers have the opportunity to survey. You draw from the act of hero-worship or, more generally, required figuration, and you use that to draw readers and auditors to events they might not choose in another context.
The pantheon or star system happens more or less on its own. I think it is a function of the narrow entrances many people find to poetry and which book-marketing teams embrace (some suggest that marketing requires such narrow-ness, and it may, I don't know). So we don't get to choose this really. And I'm not sure that combating it directly is really useful in any way. But I do like to get inside the temple and introduce other figures to draw the deification back into process.
This, of course, is what we professional readers do all the time --- we question the pantheon others accept, and if we don't codify it all the time, I think we have something of an unofficial canon, which at times overlaps with the popular pantheon, though it often doesn't. I don't think that the pantheon and "the" canon are mirror opposites or rivals. They are occasionally-overlapping views of a universe that is always shifting. Quantum possibilities for future states.
5. Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"?
I'm pretty sure such states aren't malignant, but I'm not sure they're entirely benign. I'm against total absorption in or by anything as it suggests one is too liquid and the container too porous.
"Poetry as a way of life" could be interesting as long as we're not talking about poets leading some sort of regulated and heavily-consumed life, like that I imagine professional wrestlers lead. If it means something like a general elevation of language use in the world, then I'll welcome that.
Also, I'd say most if not all of the intellectual habits I consider essential and those I consider useful can be learned from long life with poetry, and if "poetry as a way of life" means being a better and more principled thinker, then OK, bring it on.
6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger "literature," or is poetry itself the more capacious categtory?
I see it as both, in the way, say, Alabama is interesting both as part of the United States and as a separate country altogether.
7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?
The question poses a false dichotomy. Humor is on some level always a sine qua non: one can explain how we get to a laugh, but a laugh exceeds reason and creates its own discursive space that is always, at least in part, discrete. This, I think, is the root of humor's power. For only if it is also discrete and powerful in its own right can humor perform as a defense mechanism or as a cover for subversive discourse. Humor is, in a sense, always subversive in a dialogic setting, since it swerves from reason and logic and is an interruption and an explosion of volubility that exceeds the bounds of most discussion, which is part of what makes humor relieving. Because of this, humor provides a cover for more subversive discourse, such as discourse that questions social attitudes about race. For this reason, I would count Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy among the most important orators and civil rights activists in the Twentieth Century.
I would say the same for irony, when it's humorous, though it's often not.
Irony seems to me more complicated, for, as opposed to humor, irony's power is dependent on someone getting everything it's getting at. With humor, especially with the comedy routine, you can be laughing at a part of the joke and not be understanding everything involved and yet still take away with you, to consider later, those elements that didn't strike you as funny; you can laugh at Eddie Murphy's funny voices yet fail to consider the politics of his constructions of those voices until much later, but the initial laugh functioned as a preservative. With irony, you have at least to sense something strange or extra-literal in the utterance in order to engage it. For this reason, irony can be used a kind of gatekeeping utterance, allowing the initiated into the fold and rebuffing others, and it can be used to extend an invitation to those who have the potential to be like-minded.
It also may provide a form of cover in that one can always insist on the literal meaning in order to vacate the subversive suggestion. But for this reason, it can also be dangerous, depending on who one's primary audience is. As I mentioned in my answer to question #1, I find race to be the most significant shaping force on my work, and in accepting that force I have become most comfortable with ironic strategies that allow me to camouflage an argument in common language to be triggered by a reader's own ironic response: when this works, the racist logic and its counter exist simultaneously in the poem; when it doesn't work, or when someone doesn't catch the trigger, then I'm just another racist from Alabama or a good ol' boy, depending on who's asking. So, irony is a defense strategy, but it doesn't defend you against everything. There is always more than one person listening.... Maybe these strategies keep us from saying what we want to say, but if they help us say in ways we could not otherwise, then they're worth they're risks.
8. Is the poem the thing, or the larger poetic project?
I think both. I don't think a larger poetic project --- however interesting in its concept --- is worth much time if the poem or the poems aren't also solid. I'd say the same about a poem, better the better each individual line is. Yet, I find that the clearer my understanding of my own larger projects, the better the individual poems and components become. So, both.
This is the question of all these that is philosophically most interesting to me, for it is the question I that I ask myself in order to think about the articulations between the large andd the small, or the instance and the aggregate, a question that I take from Whitman and from Ammons. At times, Whitman took the business of articulating the individual with the group or polity as the central questions (most clearly articulated in Democratic Vistas), and, of course, Ammons was always considering the relation between the one and many. Though much of my work appears in short, discrete forms, I am always thinking about the whole, whether that be the collection of seemingly discrete poems or the long poem (like the Tapeworm poem I play with here) that provides a frame to consider different levels of discreteness and articulation.
9. What is the single most significant thing anyone has ever said about poetry?
Sidney: "Only the Poet disdeining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit."
It's that last part: "as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts" --- this is to say that poetry is extensive, not reflective, though it extends principles familiar from nature. This is the most difficult and important thing to teach a student about poetry.
10. Which of these questions asks you to define yourself along lines of division not of your own making, in the most irksome way? How close do these questions come to the way in which you habitually think about poetry? What other question would you add to this list?
I don't know that I'd consider any of these questions irksome exactly, but question 7 is the one whose premises I can't even begin to accept. The dichotomy is a false one, calculated so I suspect (as I've answered there). I think the second question supposes a clear sense of artistic or aesthetic community in a contemporary setting, and that question asks something of me I cannot provide. I suspect many of my blogging peers, with the possible exception of Gina Franco feel much more comfortable and connected to main lines of contemporary practice, and many of them seem to have a much more well-defined community of interest.
The questions that get closest to my own habitual thinking are the first and the eighth, each equally important to me desipte the disparity in the length I've given to each. In answering the first, I could fall back on my "professor of the history of poetry" knowledge. In answering the eighth in as detailed a manner I would have to talk much more about myself than I normally wish to.
The questions I'd add to the list are: What poem or kind of poem that you cannot now write would you most like to be able to write, and what's keeping you from writing that poem? What would you have to learn?. And What are you working on now that is most important to you?
Untaped
June 1, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
I've been taped for a while, mostly busy, but also a little ambivalent about my blog.
Now it's time to tangle again.
The next several posts will be messy indeed, so I just want to lay out some pathways for the following.
I want to stumble and stutter toward some statement of my interest in the poetics of publicity --- public poems, public performances, public poetry programs, the relationship between poetry and the public and between poems and the public. A huge topic to be sure, but an important one for me.
Some of you will know that I wrote a dissertation that then became a book about the way images of monument modulate poetic speech to address public constitution and public concern. (Some of you will not know this, and no one can afford the damn thing.) I was happy to be done with it when Routledge brought it out in January and also happy not to be asked much about it since the $85 price has kept it out of wide circulation.
Recently, however, I was asked to speak on a panel addressing the issue of "Arts and Engaged Citizenship" at the Culture, Commerce, and Community Conference here in Denver (a joint project of the Denver Office for Cultural Affairs, the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts, the Colorado Council on the Arts, and the University of Colorado at Denver, among others), during the course of which I found in particular my interest in the means by which a particular poem can enter or impact a public dialogue. While the conference preferred discussions of arts programs and public festivals or performing arts seasons as means by which to make the arts more visible in their local publics, I kept coming back to consider the power or the potentiality of a single poem.
I have just survived yet another Denver Poetry Festival, a public program I and others have been trying to institute here in Denver, with varying success, and as usual, after this festival is over, I want merely to read one poem. This reactionary return, and the pleasure I feel inside a single poem, are stimulants for my present concern.
One particular event within this year's Denver Poetry Festival has also been a goad.... At the Favorite Poem reading we organized at the Tattered Cover, Mayor John Hickenlooper discussed a Lalo Delgado poem as representing his political philosophy and his vision for Denver, and his claims sparked my interest, once again, in what kind of public or political weight a poem can bear and whether or not a poem can be designed to bear such weight as effectively as the poem that just happens to find its way into a public dialogue (the way, say, Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" became the 9-11 poem for many people, as opposed to Galway Kinnell's New Yorker poem or even Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers).
I have also been in increasingly interesting (though too-episodic) dialogue with Richard Greenfield, mostly instigated by other elements, like Paul Muldoon's recent visit to Denver --- and in the course of this dialogue, I have, fueled by my own paranoias to be sure, felt moved to defend some of my own interests, most specifically some of the means by which a poem enters dialogue in the American public. So here I don't mean any public --- not the way in which any poem, once written and shown to another person leaves a private sphere, or the way in which any poem's inexorable expression of its author's politics pushes it into public situation --- but the American public, by which I mean an admittedly and necessarily (I will explain) shallow sphere of interaction whose primary interest is (ostensibly and ideally) not the particular interests of any of its actors but instead the health of the polity or community, long-term, and the stability of its principles --- a public in which one's belief may be construed as naieve, though I hope to articulate my sense of the necessity of believing in just such an ideal public.
Large.
Equally large are the interrogatives in Jonathan Mayhew's recent questionnaire. I saw these about a week ago and thought they were too large to address quickly, and they're still to large to answer quickly, but I can do it slowly. I'm hoping that by answering these questions I can begin to establish a more manageable framework from within which to address my own interests in the publicity and the propositionality of poems.
So, in my next post, I will begin with Jonathan's questions.
Fee Fie Foe Fum
March 28, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
I've been typing away the last week or so unaware that my recent win of the Fifth Elixir Press Award has been called into question at Foetry. To wit:
Let's see. Please tell me if I got anything wrong.David Baratier's letters and poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, editor Bin Ramke, professor, University of Denver.
Baratier is editor of Pavement Saw Press, in Ohio, which gets money from Ohio taxpayers in order to establish, according to Pavement Saw Press's mission statement, a "non-university affiliated press" which helps Ohio's economy by attracting outside attention and publishing "works of national signifiance."
Dana Curtis, Ph.D. University of Denver, wins Pavement Saw Press Prize, picked by Ramke. Curtis is founder & editor-in-chief of Elixir Press, based in Denver.
Jake Adam York, director of creative writing, University of Colorado at Denver, and Colorado Council on the Arts fellow, wins Elixir Press Prize.
Sounds to me like university-affiliated Denver is the cat and the Ohio taxpayers are the cream.
It looks like, so far at least, there's a nice little Denver system in place here. Very nice.
Probably I will regret posting the following at Foetry, but it deserves to be said:
Not that it will make any difference...... but I, the person in question, have never met Dana Curtis, director of Elixir and, though we do live in the same town, I have still never met her since the announcement. In fact, when Ms Curtis called me to inform me and I mentioned to her that we lived in the same town, she was surprised, not having noticed my one address (or apparently registered the proximity of the area code) in the pile of hundreds.
I have also never met Jane Satterfield, the poet who chose my collection.
And though my university --- the University of Colorado at Denver --- is beginning to work with the University of Denver --- an altogether separate institution --- we have historically had no connection whatsoever. In fact, this 2005 Poetry Festival will be the first time we have worked together, and my contact with DU is with the Hebraic Studies Program --- which is hosting Paul Muldoon --- not Ramke or Brian Kiteley, the director of the Creative Writing Program at DU. Denver is in many ways a small town, but it's also a city of nearly 2 million so, though poets often run into or near one another, we're not very well-connected or very cooperative (in part because we share almost none of the same aesthetic or artistic concerns).
So I'm also hard pressed to understand why I should not have submitted.
The chain of connections put forward here is interesting, even if it assumes both an unlikely amount of malice, a much higher level of intent and organization than I have ever found in a university, and a number of connections (the geographical one most importantly) that seem meaningless. I hear Dana Gioia speak last year at AWP, and I've quoted him in an article and a scholarly monograph: does that mean I shouldn't apply for an NEA on his watch?
Add these to the mix: I have entered the Georgia contest twice and have received absolutely no notice whatsoever, so my familiarity (such as it is) with Bin Ramke (shallow as it is) has not helped me out.
And, when I entered a contest in which Rodney Jones was the judge, though his father had dated my great aunt back when they were in high school, neither Rodney nor I knew that at the time and he did not pick my book.
I have entered in the last three years approximately 50 contests, putting out more than $1200 in fees, have been a finalist or semi-finalist in 21 of these. In none of these cases have I known anyone who was working on the contest.
Outside of the contest circuit, I have approached several publishers I have actually known about publishing the book, each of whom declined for various reasons. So my connections, whatever they may be, have not helped me very much at all. (And, though holding a PhD from Cornell, I have three times been turned down for a job at my alma mater, Auburn University, where their familiarity has not worked in my favor the least bit.)
I think if you read some of my work, readily available on the web, you'll see an aesthetic kinship with that of Satterfield, who chose my work, but nothing more. And I think you'll see there's very little conceivable poetic connection between me and Ramke or between me and Curtis, and the fact of the matter is that, by and large, poets do not so much choose the work of poets they know but poets whose style and work suggests aesthetic relationship.
I've been as appalled as anyone at certain results --- the appearance of Joshua Clover's MADONNA ANNO DOMINI under the aegis of a contest judged by Jorie Graham, his former teacher. There are some legitimately suspicious results, and I'm glad people are talking about them.
Fora like this one have pushed presses to be increasingly more assiduous about protecting the identity of judges from contestants and contestants from judges. Of the 50 contests I've entered, I knew the identity of the judge less than a dozen times. (And, yes, I admit that some presses may be concealing judges' identities so you will submit, not knowing to avoid those whose aesthetics do not welcome your own.) But we will never again see a connection like Auden calling Ashbery for SOME TREES because he didn't see it in the finalist pile.
There are some legitimate complaints. I just don't see how this one is one of those.
Lemon (for G)
March 15, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Hands greased fumbling in the outside sink he handed me lemon halves working one over knuckles and nails grease bubbling up running grease fingers in the drain clink of ice in glasses through the window sharp lemon breeze the lemonade the pie would be waiting there would be stillness expanding the dry throat belated drink sliding down kind of smile what we didn't say my grandfather his clean hands around the glass his gold ring a galaxy sparkle a whole night of stars a lemon skin held to light suns nesting in its pores
For/e
February 20, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Gary's exploded from silence at Dag and has an especially intriguing post that speaks to the issues of writing with/for/toward and of the mainstream discussed recently here and elsewhere.
I see Gary's position now more clearly, and I'm drawn to his idea of writing for, especially as he envisions the work as occurring within a geography:
Renovation, in my opinion, literally grounds innovation. Places innovative work within a landscape that must be nurtured. This is not a linear narrative that plots a place and time for poets and their work, begging both to fit within a given tradition. Quite the contrary, this geogrpahic location offers contemporaneity, a cross-section of here and now moments. Individual poems and poetics concresce and become more or less luminous communities in the greater cultural landscape.
Given my geographical self-identification in my earlier comments about writing for, one won't be surprised that I'm wakened by this.
Still I can't even begin to agree with Gary's comment about the limitations of working for:
Work completed for a community, for a cause, for a class, for a tradition always depends on an author's skill to accrue within the poetic object what is determined to be at-that-time--which is always at least one moment old--both significant and formal. This skill is never quite innovative enough to be anything other than creative (showing imagination) and is always a directive that points to something else that has not been nor ever can be fully achieved.
As I wrote in a response to Gary's post over at Dag, I think this argument has some merit if one considers "writing for" as something equivalent to writing under hire. But when the writing for, the gesturing back to those whom one envisions and requires as readers in some sense, takes place within one's own community and as part of one's ethical relationship with others, I think the work is already capable, through its relations with the community, to do more than accrue current determination to itself. Insofar as the relationship is not simply a linear or even a logarithmic feed into the work or into the author but is always interactive (with the work interacting through the author with the community that motivates and receives the work), the writer and work do more than accrue: they also project. In a sense, the work puts before the demanding community not simply a vision of the community as if it commissioned the work as a portrait, but rather a vision that requires the receiving community to answer back to the work, to become or withdraw from the work's vision. In a sense, the work accrues not only determinations and accrues not only to itself, but rather sediments its response as determination and as projection into the landscape of the community, perhaps through a narrative, but in a way that the work becomes part of this contemporaneity of which you write.
Maybe this is what Gary means when he envisions writing or working with. But his vision of his fellows as producers like himself --- not just in a general sense but in a specific sense --- pushes me off that mark. I take his point that to turn away from poetics may suggest that one's interlocutors are not smart enough to engage poetics, may set one up as the worst kind of arbiter, may make the person who's willing to say that poetics is not for everyone the most terrible elitist willing to insult his or her audience. But I find the alternative, that we each become theorists in the same idiom, just as uncomfortable, for it suggests that translation is not just inexact but impossible --- and I value and even derive great joy from both the possibility and in the inexactness of translation.
I recall Bejamin's idea of translation, recognizing that exact transmission is impossible, that languages (idioms) do not align perfectly or even often well, but as well knowing that such asymmetry should not cause despair or dissuade one from the task. The translator's task is to make palpable the difference between the languages involved, to find a way to distort one language by means of another and express through this distortion the character or weight of what cannot be rendered in the target language.
I hope any conversation involves the same. Recognizing that we don't idiomize in the same ways. That we must accept the influence of the other's strange language into our own, that we must change our tongues, twisting as we exchange. That we come to feel the enormity of all that is lost between us. That we stand around this enormity, warming our hands over it, finding its concentrations from our gauge of the powers of its radiated heat. We will not touch it but will nevertheless understand enough about it to keep one another from harm and to keep one another in health.
The inexactness keeps the language lively, always struggling toward that erasure it can never completely overcome and in the process creating more erasures that will have to be approached anew. I don't want us to work with so much, to speak the same language. I want to be preserved in that part that is always erased. So when I write for and am, perhaps, written under or off, I am under the writing over, crease in the page, erosion that draws all waters to witness and enlarge it, the absence that is passed on. So that there is always a communication (in the latin sense) and a preservation.
Perhaps it's narcissistic, but I believe this, more than anything else --- an idea of a robust speaker, a translator dedicated to transmitting what can be offered to others and to preserving what cannot in such a way that the impalpable becomes recognizable without being exhausted --- helps us preserve our power as actors in a democracy.
More on this, via Whitman, after sleep.
Braided Streams
February 19, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Academia, Leisure, Fair Play, and "The Market"
February 12, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
The question of Academia v. "The Market," that so charged me to follow the Ward Churchill controversey, has crept into the discussion boards at Foetry.
I can't quite keep it all straight --- who wrote what --- but I've just read that academics live in leisure, avoid serious critical problems, substitute friendship for judgment, covet tax dollars and the fees of unsuspecting poets, and generally spend their time devising ways to cheat people. There are folks on the boards there who are arguing against this view, noting that academics also work hard to teach. But I'm fixed by the notion that the problems against which Foetry testifies would disappear if we did have something more like real market forces at work in the poetry world.
It won't surprise anyone that I can't agree with this assessment, but I'm not here to spread news. Rather, I mean to extend my articulation of complaint against the market solution in several directions --- (1) considering what my recent negotiations with (non-academic) market agents suggests about the viability of a market solition; (2) considering what my experiences in academic markets suggest about the viability of market solution; (3)clarifying my sense of the difference between economic or market system and political (especially democratic (small d)) system; and (4) speculating on the reasons for the recurrence of market-solution proposals.
This is going to take several posts to complete, but you have the outline here, to help keep it straight as it comes in.
1. Market Forces In Poetry: a consideration in two parts: consideration of (1.1) market trends in publishing; and (1.2) how working with businesses (market agents) on poetry-related initiatives suggests that "The Market" isn't free at all, but just as prone if not more prone to insider-ism and network advantage.
1.1: Market Trends in Publishing
As almost anyone who is trying to publish, is going to publish, or has recently published a book will tell you, getting a book of poems published must be one of the most difficult projects one could undertake.Those who have been publishing for twenty years or more seem to have a more acute sense of this, as they've seen the field of poets who are being published --- and the field of publishers --- change very rapidly and, most important for my consideration here, have seen print runs shrink and sales figures tend toward an average of somewhere less than 1000 copies per title, figures that prove there is, essentially, no money to be made by publishing a book of poems. (I can expand upon this later.)
As I see it, over the last ten years, a number of factors have contributed to the rise of the contest as the primary means by which one can publish a book of poems.
For one, the number of poetry titles published per year is actually increasing while sales figures (for books in general, not just for poetry) are not increasing, so the competition for market dollars is much stiffer and profit margins much tighter. A typical, non-chain bookstore (I'd say anything with fewer than 10 stores) can expect barely more than a 2% profit over costs --- despite being able to count on a 30-40% discount for stock --- which means bookstores, more and more, have to choose to stock books that will move quickly, to maximize that margin, perhaps pushing a little past 2%. Over the last five years, I've seen the poetry sections of every bookstore in the Denver area shrink considerably, which, if I can generalize from local phenomena, means that while there are more titles available at large, only a very small percentage of them are presented to any one segement of the total book-buying market at any one venue (online stores being the exception, of course). Which means that selling books of poetry is quite difficult and that most books of poetry sell less than 500 copies.
This --- the relatively small sales figures for poetry books --- has lead to a general shrinking of print run. I don't know how bookstores and publishers calculate the cost of storing books once they've been printed, but, judging from the flow of copies into the remainder sales around Denver, it must be too costly to shelve a book for more than 18 months or so. Presses are trying now to ensure that, for poetry in particular, the number of copies they have to remainder will be very small, since they'll let these copies go for a fraction of what it cost to make them (which costs, per unit, have been rising as paper prices have been generall rising) and never recover their storage costs.
And the shrinking of the print run has, in turn, reinforced the general shrinking of the earning potential of any single book of poems, making it all the more unlikely that any book of poems will actually make a press money.
The contest has offered presses not a means by which to grift potential submitters, but rather a way to subsidise publication of a title, which, if the contest didn't exist, would be impossible to publish, meaning no manuscripts would be considered.
Probably the presses make a little money off of these contests, but I bet it isn't much, considering the typical contest draws about 500 - 700 entries, drawing in approximately $10,000, of which $4000 - $5000 will go to actually printing the book (in Denver, it costs about $3500 to print 800 copies of an 84-page book with glossy four-color cover and 80# paper stock), another $1500 - $2000 in marketing and distribution, $2000 in royalty advances to ensure submissions in the first place, and probably some money to the judge and the vetters, meaning a contest, in most cases, helps a press break even. Then they make a little on the sales, if they sell half of a print run or more, which is becoming less and less likely, even when the work is by a well-known poet (who, if he or she gets a contract with a press outside of the contest scene, will not get an advance and can maybe look forward to about $400 of royalties at best).
To strain the situation even further, it is conceivable that the advent of the contest means that more people are submitting manuscripts than ever before. So the supply curve rises even as the demand curve falls, virtually ensuring negative earning.
And this is all market force --- if anything anyone at any press, academic or commercial, is to be believed, and I hear it so often from so many different kinds of presses, that it has to be at least partially true.
So, one example in which market forces don't seem to solve the problems of literary judgment and publication. In fact, such forces may exacerbate these problems.
1.2: Poetry and "The Market"
My discussion of the economics of publishing focused primarily on the ways in which the monetary forces of the market actually seemed to me to produce the problems some commenters presume will be solved by the same market. I want here to talk, anecdotally, about what my recent experiences exploring cooperative ventures between my academic institution and local businesses, a process that suggests to me that business (market involvement) outside academia may involve more insider-ism and relationship- or network-value than interaction within academia.I've tried, with several colleagues (most of whom could not be described a social friends), for several years to solidify a poetry festival in Denver.
The first few years we had significant financial support from the university and several university-related agencies, but we were made to understand that we would have to seek other kinds of funding to ensure the long-term longevity of the program. So, we began to write proposals to various agencies around town, began talking to local bookstores, other literary and cultural groups (most of them businesses in their own right, not state agencies or academic programs), and very quickly got nowhere.
No one would argue with the fitness of the idea or the plan or program or with the quality of the proposal. Everyone would say that this was a good idea but would not give anything --- no money, no space, no goods, no advertising, no support whatsoever, not even verbal support.
This was mostly frustrating to me because I saw other agencies, of roughly the same size and character and with programs that seemed to me to have approximately equal appeal to the public at large, receive money and support from these same agencies. I'd talk people who ran or worked for these more fortunate groups and would discover that they'd spent several more years than I cultivating some kind of relationship with the funding agency --- a dialogue of sorts --- or had managed to get a nod from an inside heavy.
I was, as one is, tempted to complain about this, feel crestfallen, rejected, &c. I was, as one is, ready to rail against the system.
Perhaps I'm a man of little principle for deciding finally, in the interest of the festival, in the interest of producing a public arts event, not to fight the system, the market, but to engage it on the terms it, the market, proposed. I have, responding to market forced, had to become much more of a politician in the interest of advancing the festival, trading work for support. I can't say for sure that this year's effort will be any more successful, but it appears that the planets are coming into line, the tides magnifying in the right directions. Regardless of the festival's degree of success, however, my experience suggests that all markets produce situations that demand a certain degree of political interaction, familiarity, discussion.
Maybe this is a bad thing, but if it is, then the market solution seems to promise nothing better than the system about which we now complain.
2. Field Notes from/on The Academic Market
Here, I want to look askance at the idea that the world were be better if Academic were subject to market forces by looking at the fact that Academia is a market, with its own market forces that are, in many ways, just as free and just as bounded as the forces at work in non-academic markets (or "The Market," wherever that is: if anyone knows, send me the address).
2.1: Academic Markets / Market forces in (and into) Academia
The assumption in much of the recent suggestion (either in the context of the Ward Churchill/tenure-is-a-bad-idea discussions or the Foetry discussions) that market forces, if allowed to impact Academia more directly, would solve all the problems, seems to assume that Academia is both currently immune to market forces and unacquainted with them. To which I respond: you haven't spent much time in universities, have you?Academia is certainly affected by market forces, since Higher Education is every year becoming less and less public (by which I mean the "state" (however you define it, general or particular) is investing less in it and its contributions), and it certainly knows such forces not only by being open to the effects of economic market forces but as well because there are other market forces that operate within Academia.
I want to discuss these in reverse order.
2.1.1: Academic Markets; or, Market Forces Within
Anyone who has been a student in an area of the humanities, either as an undergraduate or a graduate student, and anyone who has attempted to get employment as an academic scholar or teacher knows that there are some fairly formidable forces within academic disciplines and within Academic in general that make one's life as a student or thinker fairly complicated.
For example, when I began graduate school in 1994 a second wave of Identity Politics rolled across Academia, encouraging everyone to base his or her scholarship on his or her politics which were in turn to be based on his or her identity. If you were, like me, a Southern white male, this proved a difficult task, since, in the logical oppositions that gave a certain political power to anyone who could claim racial or gender oppression, someone like me made a fine candidate for antagonist. That I was not interested in the politics of my cultural identity (because I didn't agree hold the positions my cultural profile ascribed to me) and was instead interested in poetics made me a particularly suspicious character and, while I didn't have a terrible time, I received my share of indictments, warranted or no.
One might ascribe such a situation to a non-market force, such as the draw of conversation in which mutual intellectual attraction of the like-minded may press out all non-participants, as an explosion of compressed gas blows the air from a room though not really burning it. But insofar as the draw of this conversation enabled new engagements of issues that concerned many academics in the humanities, interests in and engagements with Identity Politics began to shape the academic job market, which in turn affected the kinds of teaching that were encouraged and therefore the kinds of discussions one could expect to have in any course, regardless of primary subject, and generally made life as a narrowly-focused student of poetics bleak and often difficult. You couldn't, in some cases, have a discussion about the architecture of a poet's line without first answering various questions about one's political attitudes or the history of one's family and potential for involvement in various kinds of criminal activity.
As I said, difficult for a student of poetics, strictly speaking, but neither unbearable nor a waste of time --- for even the student of poetics has something to provide discussions of race, culture, and language. The student of poetics learns to consider the architecture of line as something more than a theoretical problem, as something more than an aesthetic consideration, as something that is decided in a fraught space where poetic history, contemporary idiom, race, class, and culture (all of which influence the contemporary idiom) converge. The student enlarges, comes to contain, if not multitudes, different versions of him or her self, of his or her interests, as a way of continuing to be engaged in intellectual exchange, as a way of continuing to adress one's own technical interets, and as a way of facing the market that will shape one's capacity to continue one's intellectual pursuits, in or out of Academia.
Different questions place different pressures on the market --- post-colonial studies, queer theory, &c --- and anyone who's watching the MLA's Job Information List, the classified ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education, or the job list provided by the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) can see the way the market changes from year to year in response to genuine intellectual interest, to various desires for continuing exchange, study, and scholarship.
And though this is the result of positive forces (interest, exchange), it can have negative effects, making most wary about what positions they espouse in case they might be seen as antagonizing the intellectual interests that define the academic markets from year to year. (Some of you may have read Laura Carter's comment on Foetry that her blog might just be the thing that keeps her from getting a job.)
This is to say that there is a market in Academia, a market shaped first by ideas, whose power shapes the economic structure and flow of that market. There are market forces of supply and demand at work within Academia --- not just within the separate disciplines but as well across the broad divisions of universities and even within and among universities themselves --- and these do not solve the problems about which complain the opponents of Ward Churchill and the opponents of tenure and the Foetry critics who confront perceived inequities in the systems that publish poetry in the United States.
2.1.2: Academia's Experience of Outside Market Forces
Academic communities are affected not only by the forces of interest and exchange that stir within Academia. They are affected as well by forces that are driven by and that define "The Market" outside Academia.
Case in point: Colorado economy and Higher Education funding post-9/11. The 9-11 airport shutdowns, followed almost immediately by a rather unbelievable fire season in the midst of a serious drought had a major negative impact on tourism in Colorado, at which point we discovered just how much the state's economy depended on tourist dollars. Over a period of about 18 months, both the major cities and the state itself saw sales-tax revenues decline and a concomitant decline in income tax revenues, which meant cutbacks in state programs, which pretty much mean cuts to Higher Education, since in Colorado every other segment of government spending is constitutionally protected from reduction. I don't know what the final figures would come out to be, but over about two years, we saw a double-digit cut in the state funding appropriations for Higher Education, which, at my institution, meant a freeze in travel (I had to cancel one conference paper), freeze in salaries, freeze in library acquisition, hiring freeze --- a freeze in general.
In this case, Academia, at least in Colorado, felt very directly the impact of market forces and was transformed, temporarily by them. This transformation affected Academia nation-wide and for several years, resulting in a general reduction of positions, further complicating an already complicated market, a reduction that is only now showing signs of clearing.
I can't say what the effects of this situation have been on most academic communities, but I can say that the general tightening of the job market seems to me to have, in some cases, made it more important for departments to find job candidates with whom they agree in every conceivable way, the perception being that Academia will become more and more immobile precisely because of the power of the external markets on what happens inside Academia.
So, once again, since I see many of our present difficulties (not all of which are bad for us) as the result of market forces, I don't see how anyone can expect that an increase of market forces will in any way solve anything. Market-force operation has actually seemed to reduce competition and argument, both within Academia and within the political communities that seek some influence over Academia. (More on this in Part 3.)
2.2: Academic leisure
As an assistant professor in my fifth year of my current appointment, I find it more than mildly amusing and irritating to read what seems to me a rather flippant and stereotypical complaint that Academics live a rather leisurely life.I suppose this image is rooted in some fertile soil. Emerson (yes, that one) described the life of a thinker thus: "Melons and plums and peaches, eating and drinking, and the bugle, all the day long. These are the glorious occupations that engross a proud and thinking being...." Of course he also struggled with the idea that the thinker was not a do-er. And I suspect that even then Emerson was speaking with an American conviction that a non-practical occupation was (as it would have been in frontier or Puritan America) a waste of resource (physical or spiritual as the case may have been), ideas that come down to us today as common anti-intellectualism.
And I suspect that the current idea of the Academic life as a leisurely one is in part a species of indictment against the lazy intellectual.
Of course, there are also some serious convictions that the most creative life is one rooted in leisure. Much of the research into creative process suggests that periods of mental rest, or incubation, is necessary if one is to leap forward. So, many of us, including myself, in creative fields of academic do covet our private time as time in which we can push or rest as we see fit, in pursuit of the next arc.
Now, that said, the image of the Academic life as a leisurely one is heavily misinformed. It is serious fiction. Ours is not an arduous life, I will admit, because it has its rewards. But academics typically work more than 40 hours a week in direct service to the university, in teaching, preparing lectures, grading papers and commenting on them, meeting with students, attending meetings, writing grants, working on committees, engaging in outreach programs, &c. And then comes one's research or creative work....
Academics work many hours. Again, many of these are their own reward, but academics are not loafing about. Academics are, by and large, reacting to market forces (internal and external) in some fashion, whether they be writing, answering to the deans or legislature or to the taxpayers, or teaching or preparing to teach or researching a new area of knowledge they may be asked to teach before long.
And though this work may tempt one to substitute friendship or connection for judgment, it doesn't happen very often. Academics are a contentious lot, by nature, and spur one another's work more often than you might imagine.
Increase of market force might have a serious effect on life inside Academia, but again, I doubt it would solve the problems that have been named by those arguing against Academia, either as a shield for runaway liberals (which is how many describe Ward Churchill and the system critics say protects him) or for unscrupulous literary judges (the complaints levied against particular persons but by implication against the system at large by several commenters on the boards at Foetry. com) or loafers of various types. The environment against which many complain is already too much a product of market force.
3. Economic v. Political Systems; or Power in Systems Asymmetrical and Symmetrical
In my previous two posts, discussing the presence and role of markets in Academia, I've tried to speak against the increasing call for market solutions to problems with or complaints against The Academy, arguing from my personal experience of "The Market."Here, I want to think through my sense that market forces will not solve the problems in question — either supposed abuse of privilege based in university tenure, a complain that's surfacing in the discussion of the Ward Churchill matter, or the inherent unfairness that results from literary acquaintance or the willingness to value acquaintance over purely poetic merit, a complaint that's threaded through much of the critique I'm reading on the Foetry site — because these complaints are complaints against asymmetries of power in a system of relation and the market itself tends toward similar kinds of asymmetry.
3.1: Asymmetry in Market Economies
Again, I am not an economist, so I may be very very wrong in my assumptions about "market forces." But it seems to me that one cannot simply rest on a definition of a market as a system of exchange, where the desires of individuals come to complement one another to precipitate mutual and equal exchange and everyone leaves happy or even of a view that removes individual cases and looks at market trends as generally satisfying basic demands.
We all know that no one finds a single person to satisfy or supply the satisfactions for all of his or her desires, so the simple one-to-one exchange model won't accurately describe market transaction. Rather, if we accept the basic framework of market economy as an arena for the satisfaction of desires, when we seek satisfaction, we become involved with increasingly larger numbers of actors and are then drawn into a network of actions, i.e. "The Market."
The network does not simply provide a situation in which an average can be calculated. Rather, it is the averaging force, or the framework that sustains and thereby becomes synonymous with averaging forces.
The network does not tend toward endless proliferation of supply. It does not tend toward a state in which all things are available to those who want them. Rather, it tends toward a situation in which what most people want is most readily available, for this is the situation in which exchange can be ensured most seriously. And insofar as "what most people want" is a reflection not just of economic value but of social and moral value, market systems tend to enforce majority values on everyone who operates in the market or to expell those who don't participate. The only way to insulate one's self from the tyranny of the market, long-term, is to accumulate wealth that may be used to procure the rare. If one cannot accumulate wealth (which probably means at least in part participating in the most popular exchanges the market will support, those exchanges that ensure fulfillment), if one's values do not interface with the market's central trend, one is literally starved out.
(An example of this: someone who lives for several years in the wilderness, who holds no home or car and therefore has no equity, who has no direct interface with the market, and then tries to re-enter society, to acquire capital and equity, which are difficult to acquire if one has none to begin with. Sure, some (maybe many) homeless become so as a result of substance abuse or mental disorders or other health disorders, but some have been drifters, operating by different economies who find their trade-system displaced and who cannot now enter the dominant market.)
The market may take care of many people, maybe even an overwhelming majority of folk, but it does tend to encourage the hoarding of wealth in the interest of insulation, and does tend to extinct those who refuse to support the system. The market tends to institute these kinds of asymmetries, paradoxically magnifying the market power of some sets of dissenting but not necessarily antagonistic value while diminishing other sets of dissenting values. Most people never notice, because they are borne up by the market in the middle, and so believe that the solution to indigency is to re-enter the market (i.e. "Get a job"), forgetting well that to participate in the market, one cannot simply enter it: one needs to be already there. (Jay, here's the first nod to your feedback loop formulation.)
Many people probably do recognize these processes as features of the market. Many may not because the market will appear to make all things equal over time, but not by providing to all.
I'm not trying to gripe about the market here, only to describe it, and this description has been undertaken in large part to lay bear the inherent tendency of the market toward asymmetry while constantly wrapping itself in fictions of symmetry, such as the idea that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar and that, therefore, all persons have equal share in the market. Since we all know that, while money may not buy everything, a lot of money can buy more things (not theoretically, actually: you don't just have opportunity, you have ability, if you have scads of dough) than a little amount of money. Dollars may be equal if each market participant has only one, but when one market participant has twenty and the other has but one, at the end of the day, the two aren't equal in terms of market power, and one is more satisfied, market-wise.
3.2: Democratic SymmetriesAgain, I'm not complaining about the market. I am generally in the middle of it and am living well enough to be writing this, which means the market is supporting me.
I simply want to state that the market will only solve problems of asymmetry of power or opportunity by gradually extinguishing those who don't parcipate in the dominant value system, which means that those who complain of being victimized by an asymmetry in which their power of access is unfairly diminished can only hope for resolution through the market if they overthrow and transform the market. (Though this is no guarantee that asymmetry won't be re-established.)
So, here, I want to look at some fairly basic ideas of democracy as it has been theorized in America, ideas that point to other ways of conceiving relations between individuals and between individuals and groups and that suggest the possibility of symmetry in ways that may make us hope for something the market will never allow us to enjoy (or at least not for long).
The basic principle of democracy, whether we are drawing from de Tocqueville or the Declaration of Independence or Leaves of Grass, is that sovereignty derives from the people, not from God and not from money and not from power or society.
That the Declaration of Independence delares that "all men are created equal" suggests that it is important to note that political power derives from not from the people as a mass but rather from the people as a collection of individuals, each of whom is equivalent to each of the others, meaning that each citizen is a source of power. This is an idea that is slow to be fully realized, but we see it expressed, especially, in the writings of Jacksonian America. As Whitman writes in "Starting from Paumanok," "I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any circumstances be subjected to another State." There the language of state's rights filled Whitman's idiom, but it was based in the notion of the equivalence of citizens, their equivalence as sources of political power. This is why there is so much balance between the "I" and "you" in the opening lines of the 1855 Leaves and why the poems that follow the eventual "Song of Myself" look out toward others.
The importance of equality is continually ramified in post-Civil War amendments and over a century's worth of Civil Rights legislation.
Whitman, of course, realized that despite the assumption of equality, the majority tends to gather power in a way that compromises the sense of equality, but held the underlying assumption of equality so important that he undertood to consider in his work some way to resolve the conflict between the individual and the mass. As he wrote in Democratic Vistas:
We shall, it is true, quickly and continually find the origin-idea of the singleness of man, individualism, asserting itself, and cropping forth, even from the opposite ideas. But the mass, or lump character, for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully weigh'd, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the other, comes the chance of individualism. The two are contradictory, but our task is to reconcile them. ** The question hinted here is one which time only can answer. Must not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging, usurping all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, the like of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of general country? I have no doubt myself that the two will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and that from them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at present they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in the United States.
The ideal of political equality, rooted in the image of the sovereign individual, must be protected from the force of the mass, of collected power that seeks to magnify its influence and effect.
De Tocqueville, writing earlier than Whitman, had a somewhat more complicated and perhaps less optimistic view. In considering the balance of political power in American democracy, De Tocqueville argued that, in early 19th-Century America three forces counterbalanced the tendency of the majority toward near-tyrannical rule of all: (1) the absence of centralized government; (2) the practice of law according to adversarial principles; and (3) trial by jury. I think the absence of centralized government can no longer be indicated in the United States (not after the Civl War), which leaves us with de Tocqueville's vision of the legal system, one that rests, in his description on (a) the legal system's ability to even the scales at the outset of a trial, allowing logic and reason to counter the force of political agglomeration, and (b) the division of power in a courtroom in such a way that no one person can advocate and codify or enforce a position.
But as de Tocqueville turns to argument within an arena that allows for disinterested judgment, to philosophical and ethical deliberation to balance the exercise of political power, he seems to stand with — or at least not against — Whitman. Each thinker sees the very real potential for the threat the mass poses not only to the minority individual but to the individual's sovereignty itself and, thereby, to democracy in general. (See de Tocqueville writing that majority tyranny is the root of all the forces that most seriously threaten the longevity of democracy in America.)
3.3: Competing Systems, Irresolvable Incongruities
My point in walking, perhaps very obviously and surely over-simply, through these two systems is to suggest that there is fundamental incongruity between market system and democratic system.
In the market system, the dollar is the basic unit, equivalent to every other single dollar, but since singularity is rare in the market, such equality serves only as the basis for proportionality in calculation of power.
In the democratic system, agglomeration of singles, which are also assumed to be equal, threatens the viability of the one, but because such a threat also damages the possibility for democracy, the political system, ever recalling the equality of citizens, one to one to one, checks the free reign of the majority and forever returns to protect the one — or at least struggles to return to its root in the individual.
The run of market forces forever renders difficult, if not impossible, the situation of the sovereign one at the center of our democratic consciousness, is forever pushing toward asymmetry and inequality.
The two systems, the system of democratic thought and the system of market economy, are working by opposite means, however much the two may postulate the same ultimate goal, an improvement of the average American life.
And so, I submit to you, where the complaint from some segment of the population is rooted in a sense of inequality or disenfranchisement, market forces will tend to work against rather than work for equation
So, why do so many people call for market forces to solve such inequities?
4. Fantastic Markets, Fantastic Solutions
My conjecture is that "The Market" is a kind of Utopia or a mechanism for utopian vision.
4.1: Market as Utopia
As I'm considering all this, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example in which a purely free market has produced the undeniably best solution to any problem. However, I'm not an economist, and because of my interest in a purely and uncompromisably equal political sphere, I'm probably biased against the market solution (which I see as tending away from a democratic or egalitarian state) and therefore cannot see those solutions --- so I may be wrong.(It seems to me that most champions of free market forces turn to scientific or medical innovations, but I think it's hard to look at such fields, that are influenced by the work that takes place in institutions like universities that are never purely free-market agents, and say that they have operated in an entirely free and open (i.e., unstructured) market.)
But I'm wondering, since there's no real historically obvious example, if the free market solution isn't attractive precisely because it would be a new thing, something that has really never been tried before? It's utopian in a way.
And I think that the idea of the free market may be so ill-defined and -exemplified that it's become a magnifying mirror, a mechanism for utopian self-enlargement: when I imagine the market, I imagine a world where there are more people like me than I can now discover. The call for the market to solve our problems seems, then, a kind of fantasy whereby we project our own values out onto the world at large and are enabled to see that the world not only agrees with us, but supports us to the point that we don't see those who don't agree with us.
4.2: Markets as Erasers
When I come to this point, I wonder how akin this is to violence? I don't think market forces will solve complaints about asymmetries except insofar as they may provide the disenfranchised or the oppressed an opportunity to revisit on others the same forces they currently feel has been visited on them or insofar as the market, promoting the moderate course, begins to crop the extremes. Though I think true that Joshua Sharf's comment that the way Ward Churchill's recent comments may affect market behaviors may ultimately result in Churchill's disappearance (see his February 10th post on Tenure), I think this supposes the capacity of the market to starve its own margins toward the middle or out of existence.I do understand that the possibility for the turning of tables is thought by many to be the basis for a democratic society, everyone being equally suceptible to market forces, but it seems to me, any way I turn it, that these market forces create what de Tocqueville termed "the tyranny of the majority," the tendency of majority groups to magnify one another's political force to subdue dissent. The process ensures that "things get done," but I'd hope we'd be more than a little concerned about this political power (though with the Democratic and Republican parties taking up much of our collective attention to such processes, we're probably not seeing other squeezes).
4.3: Toward Ethical Solutions?
As I noted in part 3 of this (overly long) post, de Tocqueville turns in considering challenges to individual sovereignty to argument within an arena that allows for disinterested judgment, to philosophical and ethical deliberation to balance the exercise of political power.Considering that before, my question was, first, why do people turn to "The Market"? Now, I'd change the question to ask, if the real concern is that there's an imbalance or asymmetry of power, why there aren't more calls for ethical solutions that don't answer asymmetry with inversion but rather seek to step away from power machinations, investing long-term well-being not in the strength of the majority but of the intellectual and ethical soundness of the solution?
I think that this is what's happening at Foetry in the best moments: people are really complaining about the ethical system and hoping to force a change based on a recognition of disenfranchisement (though again, though anonymity helps set the conversation, I don't think it can force the final confrontation that will precipitate such recognition).
4.4: Intelligence of the Majority; Submission as Accession to Right, not Might
In the discussion of the Ward Churchill situation, however, I find the attitude to be very different. When Governor Owens suggests that the people of Colorado want Churchill out and that the university must accede to their demands, I don't feel that he's making a statement about sovreignty but is rather suggesting that the majority have been tyrannized by the minority (in a way that echoes common current complaints by conservative groups about "liberal bias") that must, in turn, be subdued. The implication, or my inferrence, is that the majority is right, is more intelligent — that professor Churchill, the university, and academics in general are using the tenure system and the concept of academic freedom to illegitimately subdue the will of the majority — and that the tyrannical minority must assume its place under the heel of the majority.The assumption that the majority is more intelligent than the minority has historical roots. De Tocqueville wrote that this is the primary assumption undergirding the American system of majority rule.
However, I think that much modern investigation of crowd psychology has proven that assumption false or at least complicated it enough that you can't accept the notion on its face....
4.5: Where do we go from here?
I don't know, but I hope we can move toward an ethic that places a higher value on an individual confrontation, face to face, something that would be nourished by the philosophies of Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas, and Martin Luther King.Kevin rightly raised a concern that racial inequality makes such interaction difficult if not, at times, impossible. And I think he's right. But I want to think that the ramifications of racial inequality in one-to-one interactions are the results of the sense that each person represents a race, a group. I'd like there to be some way to strip that away, to come down to a face-to-face conversation, where the face is the qualification, where you have to face the other, not wish the other will be swallowed by the majority.
How we get there, I don't know, but I hope we begin by turning away from market systems and toward ethical systems that weight individual sovereignty more equally.
I undertook all of this to say, or to have the opportunity to say, that academic conversation, with tenure as a support that actually enforces individual-to-individual equality, can actually push us to more frank and productive exchanges, as long as we are willing to accept the fundamental value of the interactions of persons who are not just philosophically or theoretically equal but actually equals in every sense.
The academic markets I described in parts one and two of this post can, like any market, promote inequalities and work to eliminate the extreme ends of the community, and tenure serves as a check on the market force, actually equalizing relations within the university and making candid conversation realize-able.
I realize now that (1) this entire post has been way too long and that (2) despite that, I need to tie up some of the ends, and that (3) when all this is done, it will either serve as proof that I need to quit now or that this whole blog thing wasn't a bad idea after all.
Tricksters, Secret Selves
February 10, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
I like what Kevin's laying down here and here w/r/t the issue of anonymity and the place of the speaker.
I'm especially intrigued by the way the introduction of the racial dimension alters the consideration considerably. Who can argue with Kevin's observation?
we all don't have the comfort of assuming that full disclosure will necessarily strengthen our arguments. The biases and prejudices that tend to favor the dominant group while disadvantaging minorities fades as awareness of status fades.
And so again: "But a person's race, gender, education, status, and so on, our social differences, can also negatively influence how we evaluate someone's argument."
I couldn't agree more --- at times one is unseeable despite one's face or name, and in such times, one has to take a different tack, perhaps stepping away from individual identity to join a crowd and thereby magnify one's power and even one's self. (Insert readings from Freud's Group Psychology and the Alter-Ego here.) This was the power discovered by Martin Luther King in the marches that are many of the visual memories of the Civil Rights movement and by Malcolm X in turning not just to the African-American crowd but to the Islamic community. And, of course, there's something to be gained by the monstrousness of the faceless, something the Black Panthers exploited interestingly.
At the same time that I accept Kevin's arguments in support of anonymity, I recall King's constant turning to Martin Buber for a language to describe his desire to become a real person, with a name and a face --- (see "Letter from Birmingham Jail) --- something I was edging toward in discussing Levinasian ethics (which are themselves based in Buber's idea of the I-Thou and I-It relationships).
And then I have to say that history shows the power of both anonymity and of confrontational ethics.
In the context of the discussion about Foetry --- I do want to get back to Kevin's larger point about whether or not one writes in or out of the mainstream and how one's identity of lack thereof enables one to or inhibits one from engaging all or part of a society --- we have to ask (1) what social differences we might attribute to Foetry contribute to a negative evaluation of their arguments and as well what (2) would it mean to consider Foetry a minority group?
I take Kevin's point about the silencing of the minority, and I suppose in a consideration of the poetry-contest scene, where names are removed from manuscripts and no one ever sees his or judge or has a change to engage the judge in conversation about the manuscript, a scene that, by Levinasian standards is profoundly un-ethical and prone to privilege the individual power of the judge (though, again, I thought this was the point of the contest set-up), there can be no visible social differences (except perhaps where the poems themselves may indicate that the writer is a minority), in which case the difference of position comes to bear all the weight that difference can bear. This could, potentially, be unbearable. And could lead to a negative evaluation of one's argument. In which case, anonymity could be one remedy.
However --- recalling the discussion of anonymity and identity within the context of the Civil Rights movement --- one then has to ask what degree of power the entrance to anonymity provides.
In the case of Foetry, it seems that anonymity does enable them to continue to present their complaint --- which is I think an important one however often I disagree with some of the specific points. Anonymity prevents assasination, keeps one alive. There is good argument for surviving to continue the work.
I think that I, personally, would become dissatisfied with such a tack, for I would always wonder if the shield of anonymity, the prophylaxis of self-effacement, would ultimately bar me from engaging the problem more directly and more severely. I might want to confront Jorie Graham right out, in such a way that force a response and provide the opportunity to gauge the truth of her response (a situation one Foetry poster describes by saying that he saw JG lie to his/her face). All crimes have faces. All virtues, too. And though potentially troublesome, I think showing one's face is often worth it.
Recent non-poetic case in point: Ward Churchill. I don't agree with his tone or with many of his supposed illustrations (though I do think the argument still must be considered, despite the offensiveness, perhaps even because of it), but I have to admire his willingness to own his comments. I know many people who said, in the days after September 11th, the same things he has written. The arguments, the attitudes are out there, but we often don't know where. At least Churchill gives those arguments a location that actually enables debate. And now I am glad he's involved in his spar with the governor, for the governor has been forced (or has been given an occasion) to lay bare his own positions on a number of issues, including Higher Education funding and governance.
On the other hand (because I like being even-handed, even tangled), Churchill's getting a lot of grief (more than I think most of us could withstand) and providing an object lesson for avoiding such visible controversey --- so there's still plenty of reason to adopt an anonymous stance.
All this to say, I've come to think that one needs to be able to take advantage of anonymity and of identity, as Anasi or Ananke, the Spider, did. (Those are great stories.) I'd like to see, complementary to Foetry's rousing, a more public challenge. Perhaps the Foetry folk are operating under their real names elsewhere and we cannot see it, though it doesn't really matter if they operated nonymously or not: it's not their faces I need to see (I don't need to criminate or to situate in order to believe or argue) but a face, someone's face. Perhaps in the Writer's Chronicle or Poets & Writers (which does occasionally address this subject).
And this to say to Kevin's query that clearly one needs to be able to use or hide one's name when necessary, play both sides, trickster, rabbit both in and out of the briar batch, thicket, tangle, stream, main and otherwise.
Rejection & Acceptance; or, "What Would Levinas Do?"
February 9, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
I appreciate Josh's response to the writing with/toward/for concern.
Strangely, I can say that high school was no joy-ride for me either, yet I still feel a very intense connection to those with whom I have very little, other than the place, in common. In high school, I often felt the same sense of alienation Josh describes. In fact, I felt, and continue to feel, a bit out of place when I go back home (for reasons other than that I am continually reminded of the fact that I could never earn a living there). Though, at the same time, for whatever reason, I was accepted, in a sense, because of my own sense of alterity.
A few episodes in the personal history:
I attempted a brief career as a rapper as a freshman (this was about 1986 or so and probably my first encounter with anything approaching poetry --- and there's more of a story here), which was surely considered ridiculous in the extreme by my fellows, yet resulted not in my general banishment (those rhymes were reason enough: I don't know that I'd have been sympathetic to my former self) but in the sense that I'd make a good high school mascot. I did the mascot thing for a year --- with trademark 3/4 somersalt and a controversy involving my stealing the head of the rival Yellow-jacket --- during which time my sense of alienation as the only boy in a cheerleading squad of girls manifested itself in what others called subversive behavior (but was really a terrible physical expression of anomie) and I was asked to stop being the mascot. And then, though my own classmates weren't very excited about spending any amount of time with me, I ran for student government president and won, having found myself in a strange coalition of the outcast and typical who were shunned by the athletes and (my former teammates) the cheerleaders who then, though disappointed, turned to take me seriously in different ways. We didn't become great friends, but we had a very definite social order in which my place was on the edge but very audible.
As self-aggrandizing as it probably is, I still see myself in that way --- not very well integrated in the day-to-day sociality of the old home-town, but still having a part. And not just having a part, but being expected to contribute in certain ways to the ongoing life of the community. To the order.
So, they're my people, though this is no familial embrace. It's something more civic, overall. And I write for them, to feed something back into that conversation, though I trust that my contributions are very oblique --- so I don't write to them (even when I do attempt the epistolary thing) or with them (except insofar as their talking strengthens and stretches my own idiom).
The relationship has something of a Levinasian quality to it.
(Perhaps it's boorish to roll out Levinas, but his concepts do explain it best, and I think this will ground some of my statements to Gary about this issue of writing for and my comments about anonymity w/r/t Foetry.)
In Totality and Infinity Levinas lays out the parameters for ethical relation, suggesting that ethics begins when we recognize that we cannot fully understand or represent ("totalize" is his word) the other, whose boundlessness, whose otherness, whose transcendence, whose "infinity" we recognize when we are engaged in some conversation or confrontation. As he writes:
A relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence ben produced within the general economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face....
Once face to face, one confronted with one another, we are forced to witness the infinity of the other (who we cannot totalize) that then puts us in the position of being responsible for maintaining, through the maintenance of the face-to-face interaction, the other's infinity, for resisting our desire to totalize the other in a way that alleviates the necessity of thinking about the other.
Though never at the center of a social group, though now bald after being known for thick over-long hair in high school, I am still recognized back home, drawn back into a face-to-face relationship that reminds me that I don't know the other person, who (I'd have thought) would have forgotten me. When I engage the town in my writing, the town is, in a sense, the infinite other that holds me responsible for maintaining its reality even as I represent it (in its infinity) to others --- and when I confront the town's general infinity, I have to confront the high-school pal's infinity as well and am thus drawn again into an endlessly ramified obligation to write --- not toward as if he/she/they/it were target/s, and not with since he/she/they/it are not extensions of me in any way (they forever escape me) --- for them, to fulfill this obligation to preserve their infinity.
So, I approach the town in very different ways in each poem (and yes, though I try hard to resist, about 90% of my poems end up returning there), showing in some measure (I hope) the town's endlessness, the endlessness that doesn't just drive me to write it down but actually obliges me to write it for its own sake as well as mine.
This is to say, to return to some of Gary's original language and to some of Josh's language in response to Mike Snider, not that I have a fiction of a Common Reader who is homogenous or that I put the reader first but that I write in obligation not to offend the reader's existence, in conversation with that reader but not necessarily writing with that reader, because the reader, infinitely different, will respond in an appropriately different way.
(Incidentally, I've now explained to myself why it bothers me so when a casual acquaintance from home approaches me by saying "I wrote a poem," as if what I wanted was for him/her to speak to me in my own idiolect, when I crave the radically different tone and root of his or her own voice.)
Surely, I've oversimplified Levinas a bit, but I think I've properly conveyed the main theme of his ethics, which I want to draw into a clarification of my comments about the anonymity of Foetry (some of whose members have said very complimentary things about me and my response to Gary's post (which I appreciate) though still feeling that I was slanted against Foetry).
When I wrote to Gary that while I understood the motives for anonymity I wished for a less anonymous interaction, I think I hoped, for the sake of the productiveness of the conversation, that we had something that would constitute a face-to-face interaction. We can't see each other in this textual exchange, but names, the proof of the facticity (yes, I just used that word I wanted to avoid) of others, put us in a congruence that's enough like Levinas's face-to-face that the ethical obligations begin to enwrap us and we actually become more respectful of one another. In the anonymous exchange, though sometimes necessary, there seem to come a moment when the idea can be abused as a proxy for the person who, if real, would exact some sympathy from the interlocutor. And though I don't think that the Foetry discussion is abusive in general, I'm interested in some discussion of the occasional inevitability of entanglements, relations, sympathies, and I'm not sure this can happen except when we recognize one another in some way.
These and all else were to me the same as they are to you, I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river, The men and women I saw were all near to me, Others the same --- others who look back on me because I look'd forward to them, (The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)
Writing for, with, toward
February 8, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
Gary writes in discussing Foetry and "the market":
I must say I am inclined to agree with Creeley (citing Ginsberg.) We should think about our audience. Who do we write for? At this moment, who is my audience? I cannot see you all, but I do have an image of you. I am always inclined to shun a for in favor of a with. I reflect, often to my great pain as colleagues will testify: Who am I writing with? "Who am I writing for?" always serves my own purposes and often only on the level of base desire--I can answer the for question in a way that makes me feel better without having to engage myself and others in any real work. My work is in conjunction and cooperation with many other writers, possibly readers I do not know. Yet, an image persists. Whose image persists? (We're getting somewhere here--a "who" always after my own looking for an audience might be a good start to an complicated answer.) Yet, we will always write for some reason or another, regardless of who our audience is or should be.
I think there's a great deal wound up in this comment --- as if it's an enthymeme, something I hear a great bit in Gary's speech --- and though I suspect we will ultimately agree, I wanted to spend some time commenting through it as a way of thinking myself toward my own internal clarity.
When Gary says that "'Who am I writing for?' always serves my own purposes and often only on the level of base desire --- I can answer the question in a way that makes me feel better without having to engage myself and others in any real work" does he mean that simply identifying a target audience, a roll of those you'd like to imagine with your book in hand, serves one's own purposes by reflecting outward one's self-crafted self-image? Or is there something more here?
Certainly, we all have the moments when we'd like to imagine, say, Philip Levine or Bin Ramke or someone large reading our work and thinking good things about it. And that's probably self-serving to a certain extent, though such fantasies also help us lay bare to ourselves the more complex elements of our aeshetic striving that remain hidden even to our own self-searching.
I believe Gary reaches beyond that to suggest that when we imagine our audience in some passive posture, receiving our work, we don't force ourselves into any relation (while we may force others into some kind of system), and I'd have to agree with him here, though I'd argue the preposition. In such a case, are these not the people we're writing toward? Those to whom we aim our poem like missives or missiles?
I want to push on Gary's comment a bit if for no other reason than I think the obligations (moral, social, literary, &c) implied by the notion of writing for someone are important in ways that cannot be suggested by the notion of "writing with" that Gary seems to favor. (And here, I'll edge onto territory covered in Josh Corey's conversation with Mike Snider, and as well echo some of the ideas in a recent post at This Public Address.)
In explaining the concept of "writing with," Gary says, "My work is in conjunction and cooperation with many other writers, possibly readers I do not know." This idea offers some comfort --- I enjoy collaborative work, and I like the idea of belonging to a community, and I enjoy belonging to a community --- but I'm not sure it's enough, for this would seem to cast my lot almost solely with other writers. Perhaps, too, it casts me among my readers, but since in Gary's post the readers seem to follow the writers, I can't help but think here we're calling out to the more athletic and professional readers among us.
I find this dissatisfying in part because I feel this limits the conversation about the work and the conversations in which the work can participate by those that can be sustained in a single kind of professional or communal discourse. While I do enjoy being in conversation with other poets, and while I agree with Josh that critical and theoretical discourse functions to make observations controversial, to throw them into dialogue so we can't rest on our own (potentially self-serving) notions, I think the seemingly general agreement about what constitutes theoretical or critical dialogue (in most of these posts, I am reminded of the questions of my own professional community) suggests a sequestration I cannot welcome entirely --- in part because settling into such a home would make it impossible for me to fulfill what I see as my ethical obligations as a writer to a number of very un-literary folks.
I grew up in a medium-sized industrial town in northeastern Alabama that has, in no small part, shaped my choice of subjects, my idiom (or "accent" if you will: shout to Rodney Jones, fellow Alabamian), and in large part my desire to write and to write about subjects that are somehow generated by the town or seek to speak back to it, both in agreement and disagreement (though mostly disagreement). I have no illusions that most or even many of the people back home will read my book once it appears --- though I do not expect to view my writing as writing toward them --- I still feel that I write for them. Though as an American one feels the impulse to turn against the hick, I do not want to make their Southernness (which is also mine) ridiculous or stereotypical, and I do not want to dishonor their idiom (which is also mine), and not just because without these things I would not have come to write.
It would be easy to say that I have to honor them because if I don't I am also dishonoring myself, in which case I am being self serving again. But I won't say this because this is not what I mean: I mean I write for them because I am bound up with them, not in a communal act of writing or thinking about writing per se, especially not in a conversation about poetry. I am bound up with them in the business of community, a human ecology in which I have but few functions, the primary one to engage the linguistic materials of the community and to make something out of them. The language asks for this --- often through agents, the people I know who send me news clippings and what-not ("There's your poem").
It calls, I respond. We work together.
Maybe this is what Gary means by "writing with," but I'd like to see this construed in a sense that reaches out of the common roles we imagine for the poet or the roles that mark our deep involvement in communities of trade or markets.
Josh Corey wrote back in November "I think the purpose of poetry is to turn its readers into poets." I see Josh's point --- he's very eloquent and convincing,a good speaker he --- but, God, I hope not. What discourse doesn't suffer a kind of lateral attenuation as it deepens in its centers? Who doesn't want to talk to the local mechanic about the way the V8 engine works just for the occasion to say something about trochaic tetrameter, and not to turn the mechanic into a poet --- for fear he would become one of the predictables at the one local coffeehouse --- but to draw something new into one's own idiom. Maybe Josh means that poetry's idiom grows as others enter it, but I fear the institution, even as I serve it.
Gary Norris On Foetry
February 7, 2005 File under: Poetry & Poetics
After reading Gary's post about anonymity with respect to Foetry, I rattled off the following screed, which is, I'm sure, incomplete, but I want to put it here, to duplicate my remarks at Dagzine, in case I want to add or refer to them later.
Gary,Yours is a large and complex post, so I may not respond to it in its entirety, but I want to engage your comments about anonymity in civic dialogue, certain of your arguments about the nature and value of publication(s) and the "gift," and perhaps value in general with regard to the contest and publication "scenes."
First, the issue of anonymity. I do tend to agree with you, by and large, especially after reading Creely's posts at Foetry. He shows up, names himself and his history. Yet, the moderators of the discussion board participate in a very marginal and authoritarian way in the discussion, founding their authority on their anonymity rather than on their specific history. So there is a differential that cannot ever fully resolve itself into a difference of opinion or intellectual position: the asymmetry in the conversation prevents commensurability on some level. So, to the extent that the discussion is instigated, by Foetry, and engaged, by Creely, in the interest of understanding, the nonymous v anonymous conversation is ultimately unsatisfying if not altogether assured of failure. Therefore, I wish, in the interest of a fair, open, and ultimately more useful dialogue, that the Foetry folk were not anonymous, for then we'd know they weren't pulling punches, withdrawing information in the service of withdrawing identity. Foetry serves two masters here, one more effectively than the other.
On the other hand, as the Foetry writers seem to feel victimized by the system, even as the champion the victim, the desire to remain anonymous is perfectly understandable and perhaps unavoidable. I know this started well before the Ward Churchill thing blew up, but if ever a case illustrates the tendency for controversial positions to inspire not dialogue but retributive action, the Churchill case is it. And while there are fewer stories (apocryphal or not) about poets being criminated for their disagreements with systems or communities, they are nevertheless there --- take for example the supposed banishing of Gabe Gudding from the Buffalo Poetics listserv --- so it's understandable why some would believe anonymity the only course (and yes, I am aware of the weakness of my Gudding example, since he fought back in with his "A Defense of Poetry").
I think we try, when we teach Creative Writing, to preserve a student's anonymity from time to time, bringing work suddenly and without announcement before the class to illustrate a point. In such cases, the student whose work is in question studiously maintains his or her anonymity, in most cases, in order to avoid ridicule. The idea that your friend may be the person in question keeps you, the commentator, kind --- though one hopes this does not keep one from being honest.
Now, beyond these general reasons for preferring anonymity, I think the anonymity of the Foetry folk is part of their general argument (and here I get down to the issue of value, as well). Foetry seem to assume that one wants a fair contest because the contest is worth something --- and it would be understandable to assume that the contest is worth something because someone respectable, i.e., the judge, authorizes and envalues your work by his or her choice. This last assumption is a reasonable and, I think, widely held one (more on this below). The basic complaint of Foetry, based on these premises, would then be that the determination of value, which was supposed to be determinable in some abstract and absolute sense, has been avoided or that poetic value (the value of the poems' craft, &c) has been substituted by personal value. The protest involves the divesting of all names and identities in the hopes that poetry, like argument, can be evaluated without interest in the person.
(The moment on the Foetry discussion board in which one of the posters and then the moderator reverence Creely is evidence of the power of recognition.)
I only wish this were taken a bit further --- as far as you are taking it, Gary --- into an investigation of the mechanics of literary value. For, it seems to me, if one wants to question the worth of personal value, one would eschew contests altogether --- not just the allegedly unscrupulous ones --- since the whole business of judgment, the identification of the evaluator, brings the system of personal value into play again, thereby rendering impossible on the part of future readers the pure literary judgment the Foetry folks seem to desire.
I would like to see this talked out, for it would get to the root of the bias against self-publication (though not against self-promotion of any kind). University communities seem to thrive on resting the onus of judgment elsewhere ---as in tenure reviews or job searches in which the external review becomes at least as important if not more important than the internal review --- and self-publication frustrates the search for external validation that indemnifies the local community against mistake. (It's just a matter of time before those complaining about Churchill's tenure at CU bring this up, but they cannot recover the external letters used during tenure review without violating tons of privacy concerns.)
At the same time this discussion (especially within the Foetry forums) needs to become more explicit about the question of the location of value and the specific value of the contests, the discussion also must get clearer on the issues of money and the gift.
Money. By and large, folks assume that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, and an equal payout procures not an equal chance but an equal product. When one puts money in at casino or the OTB, one gets a proportional chance at the odds, though not a guaranteed equality of outcome and not a guarantee that the odds will remain constant through the contest. The field shifts and one's sure bet becomes a sure loss. You have to remember in such a situation that you are not buying a product or an entry into the pure operations of chance. You are paying for the evaluation, for the act not the outcome, so you have to abide by the decision or show your own desire to be for your own validation. (This is why I find ridiculous the Foetry call for the "no judge shall be bound" clauses to be stricken.)(And there's more to be said about this w/r/t the Churchill thing.)
The gift. Gifts are parts of exchange economies, but, as Lewis Hyde showed in his book The Gift, a gift is illegitimate if it is proffered in payment for previous receipts or favors. You hope for a gift, the offering that cannot by its nature be paid, at which point you become obligated not to repay the favor but to give another and different gift (Hyde again). I think the concern that judges are somehow repaying their friends belies the complexity of any gift economy --- if one could prove that mutual gift obligations interfere with the judgment (see the interesting comments at Foetry on whether or not Komunyakaa knew one of the folks he chose as the winner of a contest) or a conversation.
Creely rightly points out that, as a judge, one's own sense of values comes into play very seriously --- this is why the judge is engaged, right? --- so one shouldn't be surprised to see the results of a contest reflect interests of the judge that may be evident elsewhere --- in personal or professional association, for example. The idea that people agree with one another without recognizing or even reaching out for their sympathizers is just ignorant and proven so by Foetry itself, though their requests for recusals seem to wish for just such disinterested and disconnected judges.
To summarize (and I'm sure I've left something ragged here), I understand the motives of Foetry, though I think they complicate themselves in ways that make the fulfillment of their own motives impossible. If there were a reason to come out, so to speak, the interest in a frank and open system would seem to be the best reason.
If I come to any other ideas, I'll post them in one of my blogs and link back to you.
Thanks again for a quickening post.
Jake
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