Wine for the aching heart

Not long ago, I was asked to guest blog for TriQuarterly, but it's not going to happen, as it turns out; I'd planned to write about two great issues of the now-defunct print magazine. One was the iconic and long-useful number 43, entitled The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History - published in 1978 and later reprinted as a hardcover book, this whopping 750-page issue was for a long time the best history of American litmags you could find, and it featured entries directly from the folks behind 'em. (I hear that an update is in the works, but who knows...) However, I was also to blog about the special issue - number 19, Fall 1970 - devoted to Edward Dahlberg and guest-edited by the legendary Jonthan Williams. Contributors included:

Williams himself, Eric Mottram, Anthony Burgess, Kay Boyle, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Johnson, Tom Meyer, Guy Davenport, Josphine Herbst, John Wain, Allen Tate, Paul Metcalf, Karl Shapiro, Hugh Kenner, Robert Kelly, Paul Carroll, Cid Corman, James Laughlin, Theodore Wilentz, Muriel Rukeyser, Thomas Merton, Thomas McGrath, Joel Oppenheimer, Jack Kerouac, Stanley Burnshaw, Christopher Middleton, Philip Whalen, Anselm Hollo, Anthony Kerrigan, Larry Eigner, R.B. Kitaj... and others!

That's quite an assembly, although women are conspicuously in the minority; perhaps Fanny Howe's shocking anecdote about Dahlberg - "Because He Was Flesh" - explains why.

Well, here are just a few highlights, posted here as a tribute to the heyday of the old TriQ.

From Jonathan Williams' introduction to the issue, "How to roast a Festschrift, as well as how to cook a phoenix":

I write poems that are laconic as pebbles, so when it comes time to write prose I like to pull out all the stops and do a lot of throat-clearing and ground-pawing, like Anton Bruckner, another rusticated, mountainous person.

Quotations of Dahlberg from Eric Mottram's "Ishmael in America":

Go into one of those vast sepulchral supermarkets, where people hardly talk to one another, and where self-service prevails, and you quite it more wormy than Lazarus. After one has brought canned peas, or pallid, storage carrots wrapped in cellophane as the dead Pharaohs were garmented in papyri, you go to the cashier. Often a sour, wordless man or woman drops the coins into the palm of your hand so as not to touch it. But unless we exchange human germs, or otherwise we dare not kiss our mother, father, or wife, we will expire, diseased and cankered, in absolute solitude.

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The cause of so much newfangled ignorant verbosity is... the result of hubris; the misuse of words comes from the doctrine of pride.

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A word that arouses some sort of contemplative or physical activity is good, and one that does not is base.

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Lonely artists create pariah wisdom.

from Anthony Burgess, "Honoring a prophet in his own country":

The best, said W.B. Yeats, lack all conviction. They also, if they are writers, lack royalties.

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[Quoting Dahlberg:] Should a jobbernowl complain that his jocose tale is tedious, flat, and sodden, I repeat what Robert Burton, fantastical author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, hurled at such an abominable fellow: "If you don't like my book, go and read another."

Ronald Johnson, "'Be Primordial or Decay," quoting excerpts of Dahlberg's letters to Jonathan Williams):

As I belong to no literary merchants' sodality, I do not know what will happen to my own book or where it will be reviewed. I have fought too many pecuniary street-gamins of literature to get balm or even the smallest moiety of justice from most places.

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Do we have to go to books to be assassinated?

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I would rather be dead than stuffed with the kind of success that would make me invulnerable to the acclivities and the oceans and the archipelagos of another human soul.

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... as for who is important, is it not always a gnat, a man who has no talent, and no character, who is always prattling about importance. What is significant in this life? Suppose I write a remarkably honest book, imagine that it has genius, who will believe it, and after four persons admit it, you are in the gutter of limbo anyway, or if you are a successful branch of literature, why that is worse, you are less than a worm, you imagine that because 12 unimportant people say you were as gifted as Euripides you are most willing to confess this to everybody you meet, and upon the first occasion you have.

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I abhor children's books. Why, aren't children human beings? We imagine they are monsters, belonging to some separate race of imbeciles, and compose verse and tales particularly for them. Why not give a boy or girl the best; he can misunderstand Blake or Herrick just as easily at 10 years of age as he can at 50. Better to misconceive the best than to understand the worst...

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Do you want a quick reputation, or do you propose to be a poet?

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I am caught in the middle between the marxists who I think have killed letters and the cartels who have destroyed everything, the earth, the furrow, the elms, human affections, the liver, and I think the pudendum too.

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You can't get people to read, and so you prepare as a snare for them drawings or photography, hoping that after they have glanced for a delirious minute at the camera pictures or the artist's illustrations they will then be tempted to go from one to the other. Admiring even a great oil painting by Velasquez requires the smallest amount of intellectual attention, whereas you cannot examine Plato's Critias without employing all your faculties. In short, we are art-crazy because we are lazy, supine, and do not care to use our minds.

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We are not more, but often less than the people we venerate...

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"I am by nature an iconoclast," Dahlberg wrote to Karl Shapiro, "but one who is always in search of images, fables and proverbs - the wine for an aching heart."

My thanks to Ian Morris.

He doesn't show anything to anybody

James Fenton on Michelangelo (from the TLS, April 9, 2010):

"He did not like to show his work around. 'Non mostra cosa alchuna ad alchuno,' his agent wrote to the Marquis of Manuta: he doesn't show anything to anybody. His drawings constituted his stock of original, never-repeated ideas, and they were of intense interest and usefulness to fellow, and rival, artists. But whether it was an artist who broke into his workshop in Florence in 1529, and stole around fifty sheets, history does not relate. Michelangelo notoriously burnt his drawings and cartoons in the last days of his life. What survives can only be a small part of what once existed."

Can you imagine not showing your work to anybody? Burning sheets of your work at the end of your life? Somebody stealing drafts of your ideas? No, you can't!

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And so we might go on very placidly, just as we were doing three months ago, until the undrained marshes of human thought stirred again and emitted some other monstrous beast, ugly with primal slime and belligerent with obscene greeds. Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.

So it is the duty of writers to deliberate in this hour of enforced silence how they can make art a more effective and obviously unnecessary thing than it has been of late years. A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist. Nor is it due to compulsion from above, for it is not worth an editor's while to veil the bright rage of an entertaining writer for the sake of publishers' advertisements. No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which, when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter.

But they do matter. The mind can think of a hundred twisted traditions and ignorances that lie across the path of letters like a barbed wire entanglement and bar the mind from an important advance. For instance, there is the tradition of unreadability which the governing classes have imposed on the more learned departments of literature, such as biography and history. We must rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything. They throw up platitudinous inaugural addresses like wormcasts, they edit the letters of the unprotected dead, and chew once more the more masticated portions of history; and every line they write perpetuates the pompous tradition of eighteenth century "book English" and dissociates more thoroughly the ideas of history and originality of thought. We must dispel this unlawful assembly of peers and privy councillors round the wellhead of scholarship with kindly but abusive, and, in cases of extreme academic refinement, coarse criticism. [...]

Now, when every day the souls of men go up from Finance like smoke, we feel that humanity is the flimsiest thing, easily divided into nothingness and rotting flesh. We must lash down humanity to the world with thongs of wisdom. We must give her an unsurprisable mind. And that will never be done while affairs of art and learning are decided without passion, and individual dulnesses allowed to dim the brightness of the collective mind. We must weepingly leave the library if we are stupid, just as in the middle ages we left the home if we were lepers. If we can offer the mind of the world nothing else we can offer it our silence.

-- Rebecca West, "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," ca. 1914

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O Garden, Garden!

Where the metal is akin to a father who reminds his sons that they are brothers and stops a bloody fight.

· Where the Germans come to drink beer and the belles to sell flesh.

Where eagles perch like eternity, marked by this day with its yet unfinished evening.

Where a camel knows the clue of Buddhism and suppresses the smirk of China.

Where a deer’s but a fright, blossoming wide and stone-like.

· Where people's outfits thrill and the Germans exude good health.

Where the black stare of swan, who is each inch a winter while his beak, a knoll in autumn is too apprehensive even for him.

Where the bluest splendifor fans out its tail, resembling Siberia as seen from the Pavdin Rock, when a blue net cast by clouds runs across the golden foliage of the singed or still green forests, and all of this is unevenly shaded by the roughness of surface.

Where monkeys, variously maddened, display their torsos' limits.

Where elephants, wriggling as mountains wriggle at an earthquake, beg a child for food supplying with ancient meaning the utterance, Feeeeed meee! Where is my foooood! and squat like beggars for handouts.

· Where Australian birds provoke a desire to grab their tails, and strumming these strings extol the deeds of the Russians.

· Where we squeeze a hand as if it were holding a sword and swear an oath to defend the Russian race at the cost of life, at the cost of death, at everything's cost.

· Where bears with great agility climb up and then look down waiting for the attendant's orders.

Where bats hang capsized like the heart of a Russian nowadays.

· Where a hawk’s breast resembles the cirrus clouds before a storm.

Where a low-flying bird drags behind a golden sunset with all the embers of its fire.

Where in the person of a tiger, white-bearded and with the eyes of a venerable Moslem, we honor the first follower of the prophet and discern the essence of Islam.

· Where we begin to think that creeds are waves fanning out, that their running crests are the species.

· And that the reason that there are so many animals in the world is that they can see God in different ways.

Where animals, tired of roaring, stand and look at the sky.

Where a caged seal bustles about promptly evoking the lot of suffering sinners.

Where funny fishwingers attend to each other with the touching care of Gogol's old world landowners.

· Garden, Garden, where the stare of an animal tells more than heaps of finished books.

Garden.

· Where an eagle laments about something like a child tired of complaining.

· Where a husky wastes her Siberian ardor by performing ancient rites of tribal hostility watching a washing-up cat.

· Where billy goats plead putting through the bars a forked hoof, and assuming a complacent and cheerful expression when their wish is granted.

· Where a gyrating giraffe stands and gawks.

· Where a cannon shot at noon forces eagles to glance at the clouds in anticipation of a storm.

Where eagles fall from their high perches like idols during an earthquake from rooftops of buildings and temples.

· Where an eagle, shaggy like a girl, looks at the sky, then at its talons.

· Where in the case of an immobile deer we consider a beast-tree.

· Where an eagle sits with its neck to the public, the wings oddly spread. Does it daydream it's soaring high in the mountains? Or is it praying? Or just suffering from heat?

· Where an elk, through the fence, kisses a flat-homed buffalo.

· Where deer lick cold metal.

· Where a black seal hobbles across the floor, bending long flippers, and these movements are like those of man tied in a sack, or like those of cast-iron monuments seized by paroxysms of uncontrollable gaiety.

· Where shaggy-haired Ivanov jumps and bangs with his paw the metal when the attendant addresses him as "Comrade."

· Where lions doze off, having lowered their heads on their paws.

Where deer tirelessly knock their horns against the bars and bump their heads about.

· Where ducks of the same class rise in the dry cage the unanimous cry after a short rain as though saying a thanksgiving Mass to their deity (does it have flat feet and a beak?)

· Where guinea-fowl often look like high-pitched matrons with naked and arrogant necks and silver-ash bodies, outfitted by the same seamstress that's hired by starry nights.

· Where in a Malayan bear t refuse to recognize a fellow-Northerner and expose the hiding Mongol, and I want to avenge him for Port Arthur.

· Where wolves express readiness and loyalty with their attentively slanted eyes.

Where, having entered a musty habitat in which it's hard to stay long, I am showered with unanimous "stuuuppid!" and husks of idly but fluently prattling parrots.

· Where a fat shining walrus waves, like a tired great beauty, its black slippery fanlike leg and then falls into the water; and when it surfaces again, its overfed powerful body displays a mustachioed, bristling, with a smooth brow, head of Nietzsche.

· Where the jaw of a white tall dark-eyed llama, or of a squat flat-horned buffalo or of other ruminants moves steadily left and right like the life of a nation.

· Where a rhino carries in its white-red eyes the undying rage of an overthrown king and alone among animals doesn't conceal its contempt for the humans as for rebellious slaves. And it hides inside Ivan the Terrible.

· Where sea gulls with long beaks and cold-blue as though bespectacled eyes have an appearance of international dealers which is confirmed by the inborn facility with which they snatch in flight the flight thrown to the seals.

· Where, recalling that the Russians, in the past, called their great warriors "falcons" and that the eye of a Cossack, deeply sunk under his sharply curved eyebrow and the eye of this, royally related, bird, we begin to comprehend who steeped the Russians in the art of warfare. O falcons, breasting storks down! For all their spear-like beaks pointed upwards, O seldom the carrier of honor, loyalty and duty resorts to pinning up insects!

· Where a red, standing on its broad feet duck makes one recall the skulls of those Russians who fell for their motherland and whose rib cages its ancestors built their nests.

· Where the golden lock of a certain kind of bird contains fire of the intensity known only to those who swore eternal celibacy.

· Where Russia enunciates the word "Cossacks" the way eagles scream.

· Where elephants are forgetting their tubalike cries and make sounds as though complaining about indigestion. Perhaps, discovering our insignificance, they find it only appropriate to make insignificant sounds? I don't know. O, gray wrinkled mountains! covered with lichens and grass in their ravines!

· Where some remarkable possibilities perish in animals, the way the breviary with The Song of Igor's Campaign did during the great Moscow fire.

-- Joseph Brodsky's "fairly literal" version of Velimir Khlebnikov's "A Zoo," from a review titled "The Meaning of Meaning," The New Republic, ca. 1986

Pictured: Joseph Brodsky (strangling a cat???)

On looking into Larry Eigner's poems

1) Uses the word "recession" in its old-fashioned sense, i.e., not economic

2) Death cries wolf throughout

3) Is the great American poet of weather, as Hopkins is the great English poet of weather(snow/rain/clouds/heat/wind (so much wind!)/lightning/showers/rainbow); is alert both day and night

4) (Closes parens more often than you think

5) What to do about typos in the ts.s?

6) So much sky: was he looking up?

7) So many birds and trees (leaves/branches): he was looking out

8) Did he love ice cream?

9) Attics, parked cars, beaches, sand, trees, trucks, hills, cats and dogs, radios, motors, flies, airplanes

10) Writes of books the way ekphrastic poets write about paintings

Copycats, innovators, and slaves of the past: on being "post-all-of-that"

"... invaluable though innovation may be, our relentless focus on it may be obscuring the value of its much-maligned relative, imitation. Imitation has always had a faintly disreputable ring to it — presidents do not normally give speeches extolling the virtues of the copycat. But where innovation brings new things into the world, imitation spreads them; where innovators break the old mold, imitators perfect the new one; and while innovators can win big, imitators often win bigger. Indeed, what looks like innovation is often actually artful imitation.."

Note: I copied this story and pic from another blog - the inimitable 3 Quarks Daily!

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Speaking of innovation and imitation, I was struck by Christian Bök's recent Harriet post about Erik Zboya's using digital techniques to experiment with Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés: struck because the techniques seem so much less innovative than the original. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, mind you. I'm even more interested, however, in B.'s "Xenotext Experiment," which replies on scientific technology and theorizing that is precisely fifty years old now to "encode" poems in DNA. Commentaries on the past as innovation!

Anyway, I've been reading about the latter - and much more - in a fascinating anthology recently published by the wonderful project now residing at Lake Forest College, The &NOW Awards for best innovative writing. A fun thing in the book, edited capaciously and generously by Robert Archambeau, Davis Schniederman, and Steve Tomasula, is Gretchen E. Henderson's Galerie de Difformité, - yet even that piece owes much, at least in theory, to Nerval's The Salt Smugglers - ca. 1850... or even perhaps Laurence Sterne, from whom we all arguably descend. In a sense, possibly a Platonic one, all hats are old. As the Amazon "product description" puts it, the anthology "features writing as a contemporary art form: writing as it is practiced today by authors who consciously treat their work as an art, and as a practice explicitly aware of its own literary and extra-literary history." So again: I'm interested in the idea of innovation as consisting of hyper-awareness of the past - 'cos I imagine that even writers who don't think of themselves as, or aren't considered to be innovative... have that.

Anyhow, something in the &NOW book that really grabs me is DJ Spooky's more lively and convincing "The Future Is Here," which begins:

"I'm just happy to be alive in this era. It's truly exciting to travel around just checking out how strange it all is. I'd say this is going to be a century of hyper-acceleration, and I just get a kick out of seeing it. One of my favorite phrases comes from William Gibson: 'The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.'"

I strongly suspect that the sound structures and social clusters Spooky evokes with such relish represent something of what the future really holds in store, something we haven't quite known before.

Oh, and kudos to the eds. for sampling The New Anonymous - "a literary journal of the nameless, edited by the faceless" - surely an idea whose time has come!

As Steve Tomasula sez in his intro, writing "now" is really hard to categorize - all we can say is that it's something "post-all-of-that!"

Still: I just read the fascinating book Toward Total Poetry, by Adriano Spatola - one of the fine products of Paul Vangelisti and Guy Bennett's Seismicity Editions about which I recently blogged. And though the book originally appeared back in the early seventies (this is its first translation into English), almost everything we now call innovative turns up in its pages: it's almost a cookbook for innovative poetry. I suppose it can't have been influential among those in the English-language poetry world now among us; but the thinking is there... and it's well over three decades old.

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So: who are the slaves of the past? Everybody, I presume; but appropos of everything and nothing (which is the way I juxtapose stuff, being not a flâneur but a bricoleur), here's "Jane" over on Digital Emunction:

"I think there’s little intel­lec­tual honor in pro­duc­ing some semi-​official metric for the ends of epochs and not making any claims until it had been rig­or­ously sat­is­fied. That, to be sure, is to be a slave of the past."

Bomb news and burrito burps: a dialogue between Seth Abramson and Gene Tanta on "dissidence as entertainment"

A dialogue between Seth Abramson and Gene Tanta on Linh Dinh & "dissidence as entertainment"

Seth Abramson:
Hmm... a poetry that simultaneously "shuns context" and "imitates television." I wouldn't have thought a poetics that does not merely elevate the demotic but literally evaporates everything *but* ephemeral culture could be said to "shun context," unless -- aha! -- "context" is defined in the most limited and limiting way (un)imaginable. In fetishizing popular culture for the sake of skewering it we are already conceding defeat -- we are saying (like so many of those "pseudo-Marxists" that Linh mentions) that poems themselves -- not merely "American poetry," but actual individual poems -- are incapable of remaining oblivious to materialism. Either that, or they simply *can't*, because, as Linh says (seemingly without irony) we need to sell our books, man!

Sheesh. I'm just about prepared to light out for American Metarealism once and for all. If the Russians could do it 30 years ago, why can't we here in the States? It seems an end-around on both materialism (realism) and this new "conceptual" poetry which is in fact merely the New Symbolism -- a new way of thinking in the old way, that is, figuratively (Goldsmith's "The Day" as merely an embodied metaphor for -- well, take your pick!). Only Metarealism offers an entirely new form of discourse -- a discourse which cannot be read either solely literally or solely figuratively, cannot be tamed or co-opted because of its very hybridism, but *must* be taken on its own terms, as a permanent transformation of both the literal and the figurative (leaving neither intact while not, like flarf, engaging in any purely destructive impulse, cf. Kasey's recent statement to the effect that this time Dadaism is going to *really* make it hurt). - S.

Gene Tanta:
“What to make of a poetry that constantly pivots away from itself?”

Yes, we are deprived (depraved?) of holy (wholly) absence. Culture industry up the wazzu. Without the silence to think, we are bombarded with bomb news and burrito burps. What is an ethical culture maker to do? Shared literacy? Online education via Facebook? A publishing house on every desk?

Seth Abramson:
Gene, I think the key word there is "ethics." There is an argument to be made -- Badiou would do it -- that flarf, for instance, is "unethical" (which Badiou would express by calling it, in his terms, "ethical" or "[Western] ethical") because it identifies an a priori Evil, Culture, and in so doing, and in proceeding from that single over-determined premise, generates a framework for Art which can only (re)produce the same Evil it so despises. The conception of "ethics" embodied by, say, flarf -- which would likely term itself "amoral" as a means of escaping this debate altogether (nice try!) -- is one in which there is no possibility of transformation. It is a dead end that revels in its dead-endedness, a form of action (or inaction) which is (in common parlance now) "unethical." Art certainly need not be "ethical" in the sense of its explicit politics -- but in terms of concept and concept/function, yes. What is needed is a means of speaking which engenders a revision of the existing framework, not merely martyrdom upon it. Flarf is not that means of speaking, nor is so-called "conceptualism." These merely re-entrench (Badiou might say) the common Kantian worldview that Evil is our starting point, not Good, because -- presumably -- it is something "we can all identify" and thus work from. What if, say, metarealistic language is actually a Good, a higher mode of (ethical) functioning, that individuals in disparate circumstances (e.g., in Soviet Russia, in contemporary America) can work *toward*, and which can take individual circumstances (ours in the U.S., others in developing nations, &c) and transform them through Art without destroying what makes them something other than... well, a reification of the totalitarian universal-generic? - S.

Gene Tanta:
“What is needed is a means of speaking which engenders a revision of the existing framework, not merely martyrdom upon it.”

Seth, I agree, however, an important function question is: how to start work (writing or organizing or dis-organ-izing) without a commons’ named enemy (that sublime object of desire, that fatted calf of credit)? How can art transform its reader? If you mean, by “materialistic language” the, uhm, “actual” material of syntax, word choice, semantic gesture (it’s hard to stay away from the mimetic properties of language ain’t?), I actually agree. My AWP talk was about how, actually, one of Linh Dinh’s poems ethically (and aesthetically) implicates its readers.

Identity politics claim: as an immigrant, I have more of a material sense of language than native speakers. Hah aha h. Is that how you mean “material” or do you mean it in some sort of Marxian dialectic way about class?

... continued in the comments boxes for this post!

Would you rely on any random American for a trenchant analysis of the USA?

Question: You have a fascination with the concept of “the exotic,” which has become a controversial topic after intellectuals like Edward Said have attacked exoticism in art. What is it about “the exotic” that you are trying to explore?

Eliot Weinberger: I’ve never understood what’s wrong with the exotic. After all, most cultures have stories and poems that are about long journeys– about people going on long journeys and the strange things they encounter. Fascination with the other is universal.

What’s happened, however, is that, in the kind of politics that predominate in universities, they’ve taken Edward Said’s book– which is, of course, tremendously important, but it’s about a very specific place and time, and very specific genres of art and scholarship, which were named Orientalist long before Said– they’ve taken Said and applied him to any sort of encounter between anyone or anything from a Third World culture and anyone from the so-called West. In fact, Said’s Orientalism– as he himself was the first to say– doesn’t translate into the Western experience of China or India– let alone Latin America or anywhere else.

There is this academic conflation of economic realities and the arts. If Ezra Pound puts Chinese characters in the Cantos, it’s not the same as running a sneaker factory in Indonesia. Intellectual curiosity is not economic exploitation.

Q: So you think it’s more the academy that has a problem with this so-called exoticism than actual artists and writers?

EW: Well it’s hard to draw the line these days between the academy and actual artists. In the academy, identity politics has replaced any kind of politics known to the rest of the world. So they’ve invented this idea of authenticity: that one can only talk about where one is personally coming from, and only the people coming from a culture are able to talk with any authority about that culture at all. This strikes me as totally deadening in terms of imaginative literature, and also utterly unrealistic: Would you rely on any random American for a trenchant analysis of the USA?

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Meaninglessness as a capitalist construct. The daily flood of trivia, applauded by such “radical” poets as Kenny G, has become a staple of our media, but it’s not just fluff that gets dished up daily, and here lies the real insidiousness. Presenting in a rapid, endless succession, scandal, fried chicken, bullshit, bombs, boobs, earthquake, four wheel drive, waterboarding, singing contest, actually a pretty good documentary on the Irish in 19th century America, awesome breakfast burrito deal and more scandal, the media flatten everything and nothing sticks.

What to make of a poetry that constantly pivots away from itself? That invites nonsense, and when it creates meaning, refuses to let it linger? What of a poetry that does not allow significance its proper duration? That shuns context, in sum, a poetry that imitates television, especially cable TV with a remote control for accelerated derangement? Is this poetry radical, complicit or merely inevitable due to the neurological damages inflicted by said apparatus?

[...]

Dissidence as entertainment. We’ve been there for a while, haven’t we? At the biggest corporate bash of the year, the Who earnestly belted out “We don’t get fooled again,” yet no one guffawed and spat out their nachos. At a White House soirée, grizzled peaceniks Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performed for our bankster-funded (and yet another) war president. Before strumming, Queen Jane even gazed at Obama and cooed, “Mr. President, you are much loved.”

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss is right.

-- Linh Dinh

The bastardization of English

Kenneth Goldsmith recently said on Harriet:

"Globalization turns all language into provisional language. The ubiquity of English: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism and multitasking. We can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy."

And yet... though many languages may be the kindred bastards of English, its parent and oldest offspring are quarreling over their real and perceived differences.

Steve Burt, in the pages of the PN Review, recently claimed that "most American poets, alas, are not reading contemporary British poetry." What?! The fact is that it has never, ever been easier for Americans to read work by the UK poets. Books published by Carcanet, Bloodaxe, Faber and Faber, Salt and others are more easily obtainable here than ever before (thanks, in part, to conveniences like The Book Depository and Amazon), and such poets as Don Paterson, Simon Armitage, Alice Oswald, Robin Robertson, and Carol Ann Duffy have large trade publishers here: FSG, Knopf, Norton (let alone good mid-size presses like Graywolf). When the reclusive J.H. Prynne came over to Chicago for readings and talks, it caused considerable excitement; he was lionized by his fans, among which I count myself. I'd add that hardly an issue of Poetry goes by without a poem or review – or at least some mention of – a British poet; and as our circulation ranks as about the highest of any literary magazine in the USA, the claim that poetry doesn’t travel from there to here seems wrong to me.

Now what about the other way around? What do they think of American poetry in the UK? As I recently blogged in a post about the "Atlantic Rift" in contemporary poetry, Fiona Sampson read some recent books by American poets with skepticism and bewilderment. And there's now a Guardian podcast relating to the ostensible break between American and British poets in which some pretty odd ideas about American poets are floated. According to Don Guttenplan, an American editor for The Nation who lives in London and one of the participants in the debate that can be heard on the podcast, Anne-Marie Fyfe, who is also part of the discussion, noted "the fall-out from separate histories, cliques, the post-division era, the supposed continuity of the avant-garde, the very differences of accent, emphasis and daily life etc." She notes dissimilarities too, in the poetry "industry," claiming that American poets are "largely dependent on private subsidy, university tenure, academic reviews; [while] UK poetry [is] still very people-based, democratic, ground-up; resulting American poets now write only for other poets, no concept of a general readership. I exaggerate, of course, but significant differences and significant impact on actual craft."

Frankly, as for what Fyfe thinks, I'm astonished: hardly any US poets get private subsidies or academic jobs (let alone tenured ones); and most litmags here are not connected with academia - those that are have been in dire straits and, like Shenandoah and Tri-Quarterly, are probably an endangered species. And I find it hard to believe that UK poetry is more “people-based, democratic,” etc. than poetry over here - assuming those are real virtues to begin with. And certainly there are proliferating writing programs and cliques in the UK, just as there as here, viz. the ad pages of the LRB and TLS, and the recent blogfeud between Todd Swift and Roddy Lumsden about who’s a British poet.

We have a long way to go if we're going to understand each other, that's for sure. But the good news, it seems to me, is that British and American poets are indeed now really reading and meeting each other; it's only natural to squabble over our differences and similarities (real and imaginary), after a few decades of operating in more or less distinct atmospheres. And so these are tempests, no doubt, in our respective teapots and coffee-makers. I'm happy that things are not so globalized that our writing is or has to be alike. Yet how to explain the rocky oceanic rift that still lies between us?

In 1935 (five years before she published "Stanzas in Meditation" in Poetry magazine), Gertrude Stein delivered lectures before a packed audience at the University of Chicago. She had just returned to the US for the first time since leaving it in 1903 to live abroad. In one of her lectures, "Narration," she said that because American and English literature "completely differ one from the other and they use the same language to tell everything that can be happening it is naturally very naturally not at all the same thing." Daily life in each culture is different, so naturally the narrative of life in each culture is, too:

"And that is what literature does it emphasizes what every one has as the life of the nation which the life of every one in that nation makes it be. That is what literature is as anybody can see if they read the writing as a nation makes it be."

And so -

"Americans and English use the same language but the Americans have not a daily living as any Englishman does and can have. [...] It is going to be very interesting and it is very interesting and it has been very interesting to see how two nations having the same words all the same grammatical construction have come to be telling things that have nothing whatever in common."

Interesting, indeed. And in a stroke of good timing, the University of Chicago Press is bringing Stein's lecture back into print this spring; you can pre-order a copy (introduced by Thornton Wilder!) here.

Kenny says: "we used to renew what was depleted, now we try to resurrect what is gone."

I suppose that for some, the reprinting of old books falls balefully into that last category - and yet there are books that do not perish, and what's contained in them turns out to be an endlessly renewable and useful resource.

See also Hannah Brooks-Motl's recent essay on this subject; click here; and Todd Swift's remarks on the Best American Poetry blog.

Whose poem is it, anyway?

If even the silent reading of a poem, to get to know it, is a form of interpretation, then I no longer see how one can form a historical judgment of a poem, if knowing it means creating another poem in one's own mind. Should we be judging this other one?

- Cesare Pavese

You cannot win if you do not play.

Via Daniel Nester

Some words I stumbled upon in recent stuff written about poetry

implicate the reader with problematic hybrid transformative
other heteropatriarchal intrusions grammar slippage institutions bodies tropes
hegemony valorization kitsch dominant dynamics manifests authority conventions
othering confessionalism schools hybrid authentic essentiality subsumes margins
soverignty appropriation normative singular production decoupled delimit polyvalent
deixis powerlessness deictic constructiveness proximity interiority exteriority
occupying generative dialogical void recursive non-participatory parataxis spectacle
discourse arrangement/affinement activate coterminous diacritical
consciousness recourse cleave site exigencies syntaxes [sin taxes?] absolution
domination resistance subjugator subjugated border-jumping rupture
transgression topographies frontiers melanges
cognition expropriation virtuosic praxis statization pressure saturated homonym
privation gaze collective reproduction interests potentializes discrete
utterance assemblage
dissonance authentic phatic defection commodified common vacuole theorizes
neoliberal openness disparity privilege status space canonization re-canonization categorical exclusions legitimated sensibility frame-of-reference borders convergence shifts
porous relational paradigm explorative deep decadence stakes terrain prolepsis contingency positionality solidarity decentered torqued soritical exteriority rupture synonimes
transpose extraneous central
Badiou Deleuze Zizek Bourdieu
endgame

*

Re both the above and the search for the next-big-thing in lit-crit:

"Much energy has been exhausted in that search — with Marxism (which proved too blunt an instrument to carve out the meaning of individual works), with psychoanalysis (which rendered those works as symptoms of mental dysfunctionality), or with French philosophy (which was absorbed, largely undigested, by both teachers and students who possessed little training in philosophy).

In all such instances, “English” behaved as supplicant, assuming that the other discipline was powerful in ways that it was not. But in all such instances, what began as infatuation ended with a dismal parting.

Let’s hope that the relationship with brain research will prove a productive meeting of equals, between scholars uniquely qualified to interpret the meanings, in their subtlety, of literary texts and scientists now proceeding upon a terrain that is still largely unmapped — the infinitely complicated procedures, on electro-chemical pathways, by which the human mind sorts, processes, highlights and suppresses, systematizes and clarifies while yet rejecting the inessential, the flood of information it encounters, second by second, every day of our lives.

Those scientists hardly claim to have the answers; theirs is a pioneering spirit tempered by modesty about what they really know. Rather than naively assuming they have met their betters, English professors might help those scientists by luring them on into the truly complex networks of mind and imagination that words alone, words in all their intricacy, can generate."

-- William M. Chace, professor of English and president emeritus of Emory University, and former president of Wesleyan University

AWP Week, NaPoWriMo, and cosmic irony

"The superhuman greatness of Shakespeare is plain, not only from his works, but also because he died leaving two thirds of them unpublished... There you have wisdom so vast that it borders on cosmic irony. A superhuman wisdom." - Cesare Pavese

Pictured: Will's will.

Happy AWP week & NaPoWriMo!

UNWRITING. adj. Not assuming the character of an author.

The peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily mo-

lested. - Arbuthnot.

(Samuel Johnson's Dictionary)

APRIL FOOL’S IMITATION-TYPE TEST TO WHILE AWAY A LITTLE TIME

I'm celebrating April Fool's day with Jonathan Williams's classic quiz! Below is question number 11:

I have said on many occasions that a course in reading and writing could perhaps be better taught as manners or decorum. I.e., that craft, in large part, consists of being receptive, democratic, ecological and in not thinking that the world rises and sets in our own private anal orifice. Do you agree? More particularly, do you see that poetry can sometimes be the making of refined art objects, not simply forms of therapy, self-expression and gunning for people?

Take the full test here!

Pictured: Stained-glass window depicting the motto, "Manners make the man."