Buggeryville

The Scream has begun. I missed the first night's event, but last night there was an opening for a visual poem art show and an event celebrating the catalogue poem. You can check out the visual poetry over at Type on Queen for the duration of the festival. But the catalogue event is now over, lost to time.

As soon as I saw that there was a catalogue poem event, I wondered why I hadn't been invited to participate, but soon enough I was -- Bill Kennedy, who organized the event (and is the artistic director of the Scream in general), invited me in. The event was a choir of list-readers wandering throughout the bookstore, starting with a single voice, building up to a raucous cacophony of enumeration before settling back down to that same voice -- my voice, as it turns out, reading sections from the oldest list in Western Lit, the catalogue of ships from Book 2 of the Iliad.

I also read sections from Georges Perec's catalogue of all the foods he ate in 1974, Rabelais's list of types of fools from Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Valerie Solanas's list of acceptable and unacceptable men from the SCUM Manifesto. I didn't manage to sneak in Roussel's list of 200-odd things which are similar to each other but of quite different sizes (from New Impressions of Africa) or Cole Porter's list of topmost things (from "You're The Top") or Craig Conley's list of meanings of the word "x" or any of a great number of other excellent lists I brought along. Ah well, next time! Meanwhile other people read from Chistopher Dewdney, Kenneth Goldsmith, The Joy of Cooking, the phone book, and too many other things for me to remember or list here... It was a big chaotic listy mess, and a nice way to start the Scream.

I woke up too late for me to catch today's walking tour of dead Toronto bookstores, which is probably for the best as it would only leave me heartbroken. But tonight there will be some live poetry editing and then a few people (including me) will be reading a poem each before a screening of Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps I'll see you there!

Happy Canada Day!

The Scream is right around the corner -- as in, it starts tomorrow -- and you can go check out the schedule of events -- you don't need me to tell you what to see. I'll be at many of the events, and so say hi when you see me.

But! There will be two events in particular that I'll be out, because I'll be doing something in them. I'll be part of Bill Kennedy's choir of list-reciters on Friday, and I'll be reading a poem before a screening of Fahrenheit 451 on Saturday.

You can try to guess which events I am most excited about seeing. Perhaps that would be a fun game for you. Or you can try to guess which events you are most excited about seeing. That might be even funner. Or, use chance operations to come up with a list of events, and live your life as if those are the most exciting ones to see. You have so many options.

So last Saturday I participated in this event, which, in theory, was making some connections between the life and work of Raymond Roussel (and in particular his novel Locus Solus) and the Watermill Center, Robert Wilson's monumental mansion-cum-gallery-cum-residency in Southampton.

The novel features a group of people coming to the estate of the learned scientist Martial Canterel. Canterel takes them on a tour of the assorted ineffably strange oddities and marvels he's collected or invented, after which he tells them the narrative of their provenence, which often involves several parenthetically inserted subnarratives. At the end, the guests all sit down for a meal.

Watermill, which is filled Balinese statues and tortured modernist chairs and an endless supply of urns and vases, seemed like an obvious place to recreate a suitably Rousselian tour around the marvels of Watermill and the various performances, activities, and tableaux that the other collaborators were going to create. At first, I was going to be writing the narratives behind the various experiences our tour, using Roussel's story-generating method. (Roussel would create two nearly-homonymic phrases and then write a story that would get from one phrase to another; "la règle de l'art", the rule for making art, becoming "la règle de lard", the ruler for measuring things made out of bacon.)

Well, for various reasons, this idea got nixed.

The tour ended up being self-guided, with guests invited to go from one room of Watermill to the next, where they would be able to do, see, or hear a variety of things related to Roussel or Watermill or, perhaps, neither. And I wound up mostly reading a few sections from Locus Solus (in the English translation), while other collaborators performed music or showed videos or invited guests to draw on transparencies. It all ended with a twelve course tasting meal.

So, for about two hours on Saturday, I read sections of Locus Solus. One guest actually stopped to listen to me read for a good twenty minutes, hearing almost the entire story of the giant diamond filled with the heavily oxygenated aqua-micans, the long-haired dancer swimming in the water, and the shaved Siamese cat who would put its head in a funnel which then touched the brain of the skinless and boneless head of the French Revolutionary orator Danton and brought him somewhat back to life to move his eyes and lips vigorously, as if trying to recreate his famous speeches.

Locus Solus: It is an odd book.

I feel as though I should say a bit more about Roussel and his methods and his life, but I'm not sure I have anything to say which his various commentators -- most notably Foucault, in his book on Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth -- haven't already said. But, maybe.

I do recommend picking a few sections of Locus Solus out and reading them aloud a dozen times, as it will make all sorts of interesting details in the work much clearer.

Good heavens, if Ron Silliman is going to link to the recent profiles (with video!) of my old Spare Room collaborators Maryrose Larkin and David Abel, it's ridiculous that I haven't. (Actually, I hadn't heard about David's, somehow!) Oh, and Robert Mittenthal and Jeanne Heuving! Well, well, check it all out, eh? Who will they feature next?

There is a new pdf zine thingy thing thing called würm and I was asked to submit a poem for it and so there it is. It's one I read at my last reading in Portland. Nico Vassilakis has one in there too. Karri Kokko has one that looks similar to mine but it is also quite different. Lots of visual poetry, but not just. Lots of other people in it too. Why not download it, print it out, read it, draw on it, détourne it, whatever the kids are doing these days.

Meanwhile I am participating in a project to bring Raymond Roussel to Robert Wilson's Watermill. He should arrive June 20th. So if you're in the Hamptons, you might want to come see what that could mean. Perhaps I will talk more about Raymond Roussel here soon. He is quite the fellow.

I am pretty sure I am a feminist poet.

Q. Do you see your poetry, and the poetry you admire, in this list of characteristics?

A. Nope.

Well, for the most part, nope.

- Very interesting language, an extremely personal style

"Very interesting language" surely, although that seems vacuous enough. Does interesting poetry have interesting language? Surely. Well, perhaps not visual poetry, sometimes. Some of that is interesting and language-based but not an example of what you might call "very interesting language" -- more like an interesting pointer or dissection of language. Paralanguage.

Plenty of the poetry I like has an extremely impersonal style or a style that, at least, is unrelated to the person who wrote it -- texts based on other texts, in particular.

- A great emphasis on connotation, texture (as opposed to direct statement)

I like plenty of poetry that involves "texture" (in a broad sense), but I don't think the driving force behind something like, say, "Tjanting" is focused on connotation, texture, or direct statement, but rather in the relationship of its constituent parts, not in such a way that it blurs into "texture", but -- an emphasis on connections. But there are yet other modes.

- Extreme intensity, forced emotion, violence

Please no.

- A good deal of obscurity

This assumes that there is something "under" a poem that can be obscured. Most of the poetry I like has no such assumption.

- Emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances
- Emphasis on details, on the part rather than the whole

For the most part, no, although a few texts, sure.

- A tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization

While that is certainly true of enough poetry I like, most of it is actually highly formal and organized (in its fashion) or at least is built upon connections, and so has a certain internal organization even if it tends towards external formlessness.

- All tendencies are forced to their limits

OK, yes, this one seems true.

- Emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective

You could probably force this sort of reading on a lot of what I like, but that's not how I read it.

- Attitudes anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public

I'd just as soon poetry not deal with attitudes so much, but plenty of it seems to intersect with the scientific, the common sense, and the public.

- Not a logical, but an associational structure

How is that not a logical structure? I guess, in the sense that it isn't building a logical argument? Perhaps this too is familiar then.

Anyway.

(Via Catherine Daly, who has her own take.)

Everybody always talks about poetry, but nobody ever does anything about it.

Recommend me some books of Canadian poetry to read. Ideally, shorter books that "cohere" in a more explicit way than "a bunch of poems put in a compelling order". Also, perhaps, books that I "should have read already", in that cocktail party sense of "books people have talked about". But really anything. Or, anything I'm likely to find in U of T's library.

I don't want to be one of those poets who is thinking about something or feeling a certain way and then sits down to write a poem thinking, well, that's what I'm going to try to put into the poem.

"Like many, I enjoy contemplative, epiphany-seeking poetry" begins a new guest post over chez Lemon Hound, but happily it quickly moves on to other possibilities for poetry. Still, it is hard to imagine an opening to a blogpost that would be more calculated to make me run screaming.

There is a Flarf vs. Conceputal Writing tourney happening at the Whitney in NYC soon, which might have coincided with a handy time to visit the homeland for a bit, but it doesn't look like I'll be getting down there, and perhaps it is "sold out"? Ah well. Nico Vassilakis has a vispo exhibit going on for a while there, and I might manage to catch that, though I doubt I'll be down for his reading. To be in NYC at a time other than summer or Christmas, when poetry is actually happening, how odd will that be?

I'm just trying to ease back into the blogging thing, folks, don't mind me.

1. Yeah, it's the end of the semester! So I don't have time to write here. But I'm not dead yet.

2. I make it a rule to befriend all the poetry people who want to my friend on Facebook. I am a friend to the poetry people. If you read this, and want to be my Facebookfriend, go for it. Or you can join that weird Facebook blog-following thing for Buggeryville... or don't, either way. It's just a website, and I'm not doing anything particularly poety on Facebook. Still, it could be nice and friendlylike.

3. I might be trying to set up a few readings this summer/fall for the greater NYC-Toronto corridor, with a possible stop in PDX. If you are somewhere in that world and want me to read for you, drop me a line. This also means I'll be writing some new stuff soon. Gasp.

4. There's a button now that suggests I could "monetize" this website, which I doubt would really work. But nice try, Blogger. Don't stop believing.

First, if you're curious and haven't heard the news through other channels: I have been accepted into the PhD program here. Rah!

Second, someone forwarded me this unexpected bit of "bad" writing, and it's a treat to read, but of course my response was largely different from the responses of the LJ commentators. I come from a context where people active attempt to write texts that are that disruptive, and would just as soon discard the rest of the "novel" structure, instead of excising this passage from the novel. (And that's why I study medieval stuff, and not poetry; it seems redundant to bring my "largely different" point of view to poetry! And yet, this very blog...)

So, Lytton Smith wrote an interesting post about negative reviews and the purpose of criticism, centered around a particular very negative review by Michael Schiavo that is maybe getting discussed a bit in the blogs. So maybe, go read it, or read them all; I pick more nits in the comments of that last link. I want to jump on one particular bit that bugged me about it, but I still think it's worth reading. It's actually from the original review, but he quotes it approvingly:

"Name-checking the states of the Republic does not make your poetry Whitmanic. Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s."

But, doesn't it? Of course it does. These are specific features that the poetry in question shares with Whitman's and O'Hara's poetry. Because they share features, we can talk about the one in terms of the other. That is how such comparisons work.

So, what's the problem? Well -- and yes, I suspect this is all fantastically obvious -- Whitman's poetry and O'Hara's poetry and the poetry under question all have all these other features. And these other features don't match up. So a reviewer can say "this poetry is Whitmanic" without articulating in what way it's Whitmanic -- which of Whitman's poetry's various features it shares. Because Whitman's poetry has so many various features, saying another poetry is Whitmanic doesn't let you know which features are shared. It becomes an inane comparison.

But, of course, that isn't what Schiavo is complaining about. Schiavo is complaining that for a poem to "be Whitmanic" it must share more than this one feature of Whitman's poetry. It has to share in a significant number of features of Whitman's poetry. Or, what I think is really going on: It has to share in all (or a significant majority) of the features of Whitman's poetry that Schiavo finds salient. I suspect that Schiavo that if he found a poem that shared in a majority of the features of Whitman's poetry that he finds salient, then he could call the poem "Whitmanic" without qualification -- but I might be putting ideas into his head there.

I worry that Schiavo is upset that these reviewers are thinking of Whitman in terms of specific features, rather than appreciating him as a complex whole. But this might be my own resistence and discomfort with the idea of Whitman-as-a-whole. I think Whitman's symptoms are stable enough to merit discussing, but the holistic Whitman is a kairotic assemblage constantly being reformed and discarded. Or, I'd rather push for that, for us to not "decide" upon Whitman-as-a-whole, but to keep him (such as there is a him; to keep the "totality" of his poetry, anyways) as potential, as occasional, as tentative.

Which is to say, I'd prefer for "Whitmanic" to mean "name-dropping American geography" or "writing slobbery poems about young soldiers" or "using a whole lot of exclamation points", rather than trying to point to some totality about Whitman or Leaves of Grass.

And this is what I want from my poetry reviews, as well. I don't want them to try to lay out the totality of a poem, or of a book, or of a poetics. I want them to open a few doors into the tangle, so I can wander indecisively. And I worry that Schiavo's use of "Whitmanic" (which, to be fair, he only sorta uses in that review) is, in fact, more closed than the obviously facile uses found in the reviewers he rants against. After all, the next time they talk about a "Whitmanic poet", they'll probably be referring to something like the length of his beard.

L'aspect subjectif de la chanson (le sens du je qui la chante) n'a pour nous d'existence que grammaticale. [The chanson's subjective aspect, implied by the singing I, has no more than grammatical existence for the modern reader.]

[Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, p. 192]

That's Prof. Oddfellow's response to my minisurvey about the parts of speech; Geof Huth has just posted a long and detailed response to the question, which I encourage you to read. I've gotten several other responses, and they've all been interesting; I encourage you to send me your thoughts on the matter, if you haven't yet. (chrispiuma at google's mail service)

An essay in the current Harper's talks about the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died last summer. (Registration possibly required for that link.) Here are a few comments from the essay about his well-known poem "Identity Card":

The poem’s refrain is typical of the straightforward, conscientiously unpoetic diction of Darwish’s early work. ... Each stanza of “Identity Card” fills out the quarrier’s unhappy biography: his occupation and physical traits (“hands hard as stones”), his family history and village of birth (“Remote, forgotten,/ its streets without names”). The monologue ends with a warning directed at the Israeli official and his government: “Beware my hunger/ and my anger!”

Critics have puzzled over this small poem’s enormous popularity. At the time it was published, poets in Beirut, Baghdad, and Cairo were writing verse of great sophistication, combining an avant-garde fondness for obscurity and metrical experimentation with themes drawn from Greek and Near Eastern myth. By comparison, Darwish’s poem seems crude. Many fellow intellectuals, and even Darwish himself in retrospect, wondered if “Identity Card” wasn’t a collection of sound bites rather than a poem. Its assertion of Arab identity, thrown in the face of a hostile authority, was admired as a political gesture, yet the poem seemed to lack the necessary complication of literature.

The complications of “Identity Card,” as with so much of Darwish’s early poetry, are found not in its verbal texture but in the ironies of its imagined situation.

I'm not interested in declaring whether "Identity Card" is good or bad. Nor am I necessarily all that interested in saying whether it is "a poem" or not. It's some text written in the context of poetry, by someone who called himself a poet, and called the work a poem. But the text is "unpoetic"; its intricacies "are found not in its verbal texture", but in its "situation", its "political gesture", told through its "assertion of Arab identity". Its features, the reasons people give for liking the poem (even, apparently, the poet himself) are prose features, features built around the content (the signifieds) of the text and the (narrative, historical) context of it being said; it functions no differently than a short story.

This doesn't say anything about how worthwhile the poem is, how effective or meaningful a piece of political rhetoric it was, or whether it can legitimately be called "a poem". But when we read the poem, we appreciate it using the same facilities, so to speak, that we do when we read prose; we do not get as much out of it by paying attention to the "verbal texture" or any of the other features that seem particular to poetry. Or, at least, I don't. When I read that poem, I feel the poetry-reading parts of my brain failing to light up. And, again, it is being described as "unpoetic", so perhaps I am not completely idiosyncratic for thinking that. At the same time, I'm always stressing that that part of the brain lights up when dealing with things that aren't typically considered poetic. But there are many ways that people seem to mean "poetic" or "poem" or "poetry" or "poet". I just want to point out the one I'm talking about when I use such terms. It is, perhaps, limiting in some senses, but it also invigorates the term in other ways; it aligns the sense of what poetry is and where it lies in a way that has almost nothing to do with what appears in books called "poetry books" but which draws parallels across huge swathes of experience, and encourages us to take poetic delight where we can find it. That seems far more interesting and productive, to me, than the hustle and bustle of whatever these hastily-appointed people called "poets" happen to do (or forget to do).

Also, as it happens, "Identity Card" appears to be a reasonably translatable poem. (But then, the article later suggests that the refrain of the poem is a translation itself, of actual words spoken by Darwish in Hebrew, translated into Arabic...)

I was reminded today of just how goofy Shakespeare's 135th and 136th sonnets are, with their incessant pounding punning on the word "Will", as volition, as desire, as schlong (your willy), possibly as lady-bits, as auxiliary verb, and as Shakespeare himself. Many of the Wills were apparently italicized in the 1609 Quarto edition (and we all know about Italian Wills, knowwhatImean?).

Sonnet CXXXV.

WHOEVER hath her wish, thou hast thy Will
And Will to boot, and Will in over-plus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
  Let no unkind ‘No’ fair beseechers kill;
  Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

Sonnet CXXXVI.

IF thy soul check thee that I come so near
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;
Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckon’d none:
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy stores’ account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee:
  Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
  And then thou lov’st me,—for my name is Will.

I'm not saying "Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love / Ay, fill it with wills, and my will one" is a bad couple of lines -- but it is the sort of aggressive wordplay, the sort of relentless silliness, the sort of excessive disproportionality that usually gets supressed from the canon. I am glad Will willed his wills into his work, so they might willy-nilly get preserved, when surely hundreds of similar poems were relegated to the dustbins.

Exercise for the reader: Rewrite the sonnets as if his name were Richard Shakespeare.

Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City, the oldest gay bookshop in the US, is closing.

Bookstores are an infrastructure for the cultivation and dissemination of ideas. They work in ways that other infrastructures -- the internet, say, or libraries -- don't quite work. But they're also not as profitable as they are necessary. I've been thinking about this, in terms of Obama's plans to improve the US's infrastructure; some sort of bookstore subsidies seem in order. Though how that could be fairly implemented, I don't know.

I went into the Oscar Wilde Bookshop maybe twice in the decade or so I lived there, even back when I was a bookish gay teen who spent all his time in both halves of the Village and who thought reading up on queer stuff was urgent, and I doubt I ever purchased anything from them. It seemed to be, maybe not a relic, but certainly something irrelevant to my life (even as it was so clearly positioned to be part of my life), but still something I was glad was there, in some abstract sense. So I'm not that affected by losing this bookshop on a personal level -- yet, like with most bookshop closures, it still seems tragic.

Everyone has blogged about bookstores closing, and I don't have terribly much to add, I suppose. We all know that the disappearance of bookstores isn't quite made up by the abundance of the Internet. We all know publishing and bookselling, when done properly, isn't a sustainable business model, yet they seem to improve lives and to create opportunities and potentials in society that far surpass their costs -- much like, say, highways. But, as they say, everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Is there leadership on this issue, is there a plan, or do we have faith that the internet (or some other structure) will replace the bookstore network's various roles adequately? Or is this a structure that has lost its energy, which no amount of regret and wild gesticulation will restore? (I lean towards thinking, well, we should at least try to salvage something, perhaps something exciting will come out of it.)

(Thanks to LH for tipping me off to the news, via Facebook.)

I am conducting an informal survey for what might turn out to be nefarious (but are probably just para-academic) purposes. Please participate, and please pass around.

1. Rank the eight parts of speech, from favorite to least favorite, or from most "vital" to least "vital", or however you want to think about it.

1b. If that request made no sense, let me know that instead.

2. Are you a poet?

E-mail your answers to chrispiuma at gmail dot com. No answers will necessarily be kept confidential. You can post your answers to the comments here, but I'm hoping to minimize thought contamination. (That's why I didn't list the eight parts of speech -- if you can only remember some of them, just include the ones you remember.)

Thank you!