Will Wonders
August 27, 2007 File under: America , Poetry & Poetics
“It’s our hope that we will interest college kids in poetry in a new way, make it hip for them,” said Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins that has published Mr. Ashbery’s work. But, Mr. Halpern admitted, “it’s very hard to tell what exactly is going to come of all this.”
& maybe it's just me, but the multimedia links in the NYT story that are supposed to show previews of the poetry spots take me to a video about the difficult life of pro tennis players...
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 p