Buggeryville

Reading in Portland

2011-06-08T12:59:00.003-04:00

I mean, I can't imagine anyone still checks this thing, but just in case:

I'm going to be in Portland in a few days! And I will be giving a reading with Spare Room.

Sunday, 19 June, 7:30pm
Chris Piuma & Jennifer Bartlett
Open Space Cafe, 2815 Southeast Holgate Boulevard, Portland.

It will be a release party for my new chapbook, Bell-lloc, which is being put out by airfoil. The cover is still being designed, but I should have a picture of it for you soonish.

...

I'll also be participating in this madness:

Machines Must Move Performance Salon

Photographs by Anna Daedalus
Paintings by Nita Hill
Performers (
Machines Must Move): David Abel, John Berendzen, Leo Daedalus, Mark Owens, Chris Piuma, James Yeary & guests

Saturday, June 18
6:30 pm

Studio 30 Salon
5424 NE 30th Avenue

Light refreshments

Performance Salon is a one-night art reception and
absurdist performance in a
Dada/Fluxus vein by a group of no ﬁxed name, having appeared as Demagnetic Cabaret, Three Scrapettes, Blum Blum Shub
, Re-Arrangutan, and Waiting for Stretchers, among others.

...

(Also I will be playing a few songs at a house party; email me if you want details.)

...

There might be more to report soon. If you're putting on a thing in Portland in June and would like me to participate in it, get in touch with me and we'll see if we can make it happen.

See you there!

Portland: As if I were there

2010-08-14T11:22:00.003-04:00

So, first: Tomorrow, Sunday, is the 8th annual Richard Foreman Fest, in which artists of various genres are given a text and a set of rules from Richard Foreman's copious notebooks in order to create a short piece. They have ten days to do this. The result is a benefit for Performance Works NW, a terrific rehearsal/performance space in Portland. It's one of my favorite events in Portland, and this year I was asked to set the rules. They are a bit different than the previous seven sets of rules, so I'm curious how it will turn out. Sunday, 5 and 7pm (different line ups!), Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th.

Second: I forgot to mention this! Spare Room hosted a Portland Polyvocal Poetry event a few weeks ago, and I contributed a piece. You can see videos of the event on YouTube. My piece was fairly different from the rest of the poems; instead of the vocal acrobatics typical of polyvocal poetry, I took a social angle. My piece, "Everyone Gets a Poem", consisted of everyone getting a piece of paper with a poem on it. They were to read the poem, and then either keep it (if they were satisfied with it) or give it to someone they thought might be more satisfied with it, perhaps editing it along the way. The audio isn't, perhaps, much to listen to (although the directions to the poem are read aloud, in case you want to try this at home), but it does capture the "sound" I was hoping for: That of the mix of creativity, conviviality, negotiation, and inquiry that I think of when I think of Portland's poetry scene. (And I'm pretty pleased that the poem seems to have resolved/finished by an edit of the instructions themselves.)

It's a scene that, even though I've been gone for two years, still seems to be the site where my creativity functions. I probably won't be there, physically, in 2010, but almost all of my creative output has occurred there. Hm, hm.

Rethinking poetics

2010-06-22T10:15:00.005-04:00

I was debating whether to file a report here on what I saw of the Rethinking Poetics conference, which was only a success inasmuch as it was a complete failure, and will hopefully force those who thought they were going to rethink poetics to rethink their process of rethinking poetics. (Hint: If you really want to rethink something, don't ask a few of your friends to invite a few of their friends. That is not a good strategy for rethinking.)

Personally, I met a few interesting people and heard a few interesting talks (Ben Friedlander, Kasey Mohammad, Monica de la Torre, Mark Nowak, Joan Retallack, to name a few highlights) but I left halfway through the second day out of frustration and despair (though I especially regret not hearing the panel of Canadians later that day).

But -- well, surely anyone reading this has read Stephanie Young's report by now, but if not, it will give you the flavor of the event. And the fact that much of the discussion around the event has happened in Facebook suggests that Facebook is enabling the sort of closed-door power brokering (well, "power") of poetics that allows Marjorie Perloffs to roam the world clearcutting the landscape to exploit its resources. If I haven't jammed together too many metaphors there. The Facebookification of poetics conversation is enough to drive one to blog. Or at least tweet.

Anyway, I rambled on about this at Rodney Koerneke's blog, so you can read that if you want.

BAH.

UPDATE: Go read Michael Kelleher on all this. He says a lot of things I would say if I weren't so lazy.

Like a house on fire

2010-06-13T18:10:00.002-04:00

Gary Barwin sent a bunch of people a draft of a response to a translation of a poem by Heinrich Heine and asked that they finish it up as they saw fit. My spit-shine job is available here, but do go check out all the responses and how or if they play against each other.

Poetry, money, time

2010-03-08T01:09:00.002-05:00

What if we read poetry as a statement of time. Or a statement of money. It is clear that writing poetry does not necessarily require a significant time investment. It is even more clear that writing poetry does not require a significant financial investment. It can be jotted onto a slip of paper, or thought up in passing, or burbled as you walk or ride the escalator. But we can choose to take time writing poetry. We can choose to spend money writing poetry. Some poems, you read them, and clearly a lot of time went into them. They are hard-edged, polished, crenelated, long, arduous, learned, thoughtful, constrained. None of these things are definitional to poetry, though. Some poems, you read them, and clearly a lot of money went into them. In some form or another. Perhaps they are carved in stone, perhaps they are inscribed into the genome of a bacterium, perhaps they simply took such a massively long time to write that it required not partaking in other financial remunerative options. We could read these poems as saying: This is how much time I had to spend on this poem. This is how much money I could spend on this poem. We don't have to say: Because you invested so much time and money into this poem, we will value it more. That is not how value works. But we could consider it something worth reading in the poem, part of its meaning-forming syntax. But, we could also decide to ignore it, or not read too much into it. We have options. We could remember, however, that these were choices the poet made, as to how much time and how much money to invest in the poem, that they did not try to solve the problem of how to make poetry without spending that much time and money, but rather "threw money at the problem", threw time at the problem. Although we needn't be so dismissive. There might be reasons to appreciate slowing down the production of poetry. This works for the reader as well. The poet asks the reader to spend a certain amount on the book of poems, perhaps, rather than whatever else the reader might spend money on. The poet asks the reader to spend a certain amount of time (of attention) reading the poem. Reading this poem, and not other poems. A poem might require more attention, or less. Can a poem require more attention? It could certainly cry out for it. Pound's Cantos seems to ask for more of your time, if you are going to read it, than an Ogden Nash couplet does. The reader might ultimately be in control, and might choose to spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about the Nash couplet, but even drawing your eyes across every word of the Cantos takes time, much less making the sort of sense it seems to call out for. But that is only one form of reading, and we as readers don't have to privilege it. And yet. We can read it as a statement, as part of the meaning-forming syntax. The Cantos ask you to spend more time reading them (and not other poetry) than the Nash couplet does. Of course, Nash didn't only write one couplet. We are ignoring this, for the moment. There is so much poetry out there, and time is so short. We can question the ethics of adding to the pile. But we don't have to. We can be grateful for the plenitude of options, and the ability to drown ourselves in abundance from this particular author, or that one, or any of thousands more. But what is required, in this situation of superabundance? It does not require us to strain our time or money much. There is poetry enough. There is poetry everyday. There cannot help but be. We can ask for more, even if we have long ago past the point of diminishing returns, even if poetry is left rotting on the vine. Or, fermenting. We don't have to decide. We don't have to worry about any of this.

I have been in Canada awhile, apparently

2010-01-17T19:55:00.003-05:00

Still reading Prismatic Publics. The book is set up with long, in-depth, in-person interviews, followed by short selections of poems by the author. Actually, the selections of poems are about as long, pages-wise, as the interviews are, but poems just have fewer words per page.

During M. NourbeSe Philip's interview, she mentions a reading she gave at the Scream -- a reading that I was at. How is it possible that I was at a reading in Toronto that is now being talked about in a, you know, proper, published book? Have I been here that long?

The interview, by the way, is terrific, and her takes on constraint writing, "freedom", the erotics of grammar/language, and the foreignness of language are all very compelling and not yet part of the mainstream discussion of these issues. Go read it.

bpOwens

2010-01-15T12:57:00.004-05:00

To follow up on the last post: I swung by the offices of Coach House Books today, to exchange a misprinted copy of Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (it happens!). Outside the office there is a poem by bpNichol engraved into the cement. Except it has gotten warmer recently, and the snow has melted, so all the letters were filled in. It was lovely. It had become one of mARK oWEns's puddle poems, but inside-out. (And sorry I was I did not have a camera.)

13 introductions for mARK oWEns

2009-12-09T20:31:00.003-05:00

This is the introduction I wrote for mARK oWEns's reading on 21 May 2006 as part of the Spare Room reading series. mARK really doesn't have a web presence per se, alas. He is not even on the Facebook. I do not get to interact with him nearly enough these days.

* * *

We ask that you turn on your cell phones
We ask that you place your cell phones in your mouths and swallow them
We ask that when loved ones call you,
you raise your heads and you open your mouths
like hungry baby birds waiting to be fed

I watched the sun rise this morning
until it was a glowing letter O on the horizon.
Bravo, mARK.

[asemic mouth gesticulations]

It only took us four years to get him to read.

The intriguing graffito between our homes
that resembles schematics with letters: a poem

I meant to mention it for many months
until we walked by and you told me you wrote it.

Ab-cd-ef-ghi-jk-l-mn-op-qr-stu-vwx-yz
It’s the most remarkable word I’ve ever seen

What is that smell? Has mARK been writing again?

In mARK’s neighborhood,
the chance of precipitation
is directly connected
to the chance of poetics.

A poem that you can feed to your family.
A poem that will keep you warm in the winter.
A poem that you can bounce off your friends’ heads.

10.

Why are we all in the same room right now?
Why are we all walking down the same street this weekend?
Why are we all riding the same bus?
Why are we all able to perform these simple actions?
Why are we both on opposite sides of the window?
Why are we both in fact facing a window?

11.

Love is the force that unites.

12.

mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns

13.

Nothing I have said and nothing I could say
could clarify or obscure or change this poetry.

Oh this old thing

2009-11-03T20:25:00.002-05:00

I am wildly disinterested in writing about poetry on a blog these days.

I am mostly disinterested in reading about poetry on blogs these days. But old habits die hard.

I am mildly interested that many of the blogs about poetry that I used to read avidly have mostly stopped writing about poetry and started posting, oh, youtube clips, or hermetic phrases, or pictures of cats. Cats are cute, though. We have said what we were going to say, and we are tired of this conversation; we are poets, and are tired of this form, but haven't yet worked up a new one.

I am rather interested in reconsidering this space, this conblogoration, and whether it can once again be used as an impetus for social connections, or whether it is best as an archive of ideas and thoughts, and an occasional notice about events and happenings. But a new project recommends a new space. The blog as e-book, rather than the blog as diary or as notes towards an article. National Finite Blogging Month.

I am extremely interested in someone creating a time and a space where I live in which I can get drunk on words again, as I had where I used to live, but I admit, I do not feel like setting it up myself. But perhaps one needs to prioritize these things.

I read in Kingston

2009-09-25T09:51:00.003-04:00

Geof Huth has been saying some nice things about my recent reading in upstate New York.

That last link contains video.

What I read: The Fahrenheit 451 poem. The vegetable etymology bit. A series of dictionary-based collaborations that I wrote with Ron Henry. Some of the redundant poems. My thirty-one-word pieces.

I met some nice people and met again some old friends and was showered with books: This reading thing, it is fun, and I recommend it.

Neglectful

2009-09-18T12:06:00.004-04:00

This I have been neglecting lately: This blog!

Things you can do to rectify this: Come to my reading tomorrow (Saturday) and flatter me. It's in Kingston, NY, (halfway between Albany and NYC) as part of the Cadmium Text series. It's at 2pm. I'm looking forward to it, perhaps you should be too!

Foreman Fest

2009-07-19T15:11:00.002-04:00

Those of you in Portland are, I trust, going to the Richard Foreman Fest to benefit Performance Works NW tonight. I've performed in some capacity in all but one of the seven such annual fests, and they are a great time. This is the first time that I am performing as a poet, or, you might say, as a poet as a poet -- although in absentia. I'm not sure how much I'm going to go into what I wrote here -- I'm not sure how well it will work out of context, without the various lines repeated in the various performances throughout the night -- but I'm totally intrigued by the form that I've worked up for the event, and I might be so moved as to find (an)other source text(s) to make something a bit longer out of it with. Rah rah rah!

More and more

2009-07-09T12:32:00.004-04:00

The Scream has continued, with and without me.

Since my last update, my friends Anthony and Sundar performed Christian Marclay's Shuffle, a conceptual piece that wasn't really designed to be performed -- or, at least, had its concept (photos of musical notation on signage and objects, to be played) well ahead of its execution (including some notation that cannot, on its own, just be played).

Then there was a perfectly pleasant library-based reading which situated various events in various sections of the library -- everyone shuffled over to drama for a drama-based thing, and then over to fiction for some ficiton, etc., etc. Simple and pleasant enough. Having a little exercise (of moving from one section to another) between events was a nice feature.

Then there was an interesting event that I utterly failed to go to. Running with an idea from Fahrenheit 451, Maggie Helwig asked the audience to do their best to remember a text -- one that was not announced beforehand -- as if trying to salvage it from oblivion. The text she chose was Hamlet. The unexpected outcome: Apparently two friends of mine who were at the event remembered rather a lot of Hamlet, and the event went on for something like two hours as they reconstructed various scenes. A shame I missed that one.

Then there was the main panel event, in which six manifestos were given on the topic of "the book is dead". All the panelists were quite thoughtful, and you can read their various manifesti at the link (or, I guess, watch the panel -- yay the Internet!). Particular kudos goes to Bill Kennedy for coming closest to representing my own take on the various topics that came up, but even the people I disagreed with had interesting things to say. (This is not a very content-filled paragraph. I'm sorry. I did not take the detailed notes that I took last year. I am not even giving you an example of anything anyone said, or my reaction to it. This is useless. Your eyes should have flitted down to the next paragraph, or the next blog, or the next life experience by now.)

Then I was feeling full and headed home, so I missed the magazine launch reading, and I missed the next night's fun, but I'll be going tonight to the event that involves comics. Comics! And poetry! And Kate Beaton! Rah rah rah.

Editing, and then pseudo-Abel

2009-07-05T02:45:00.013-04:00

The Scream continues. I woke up too late to go to the walking tour of where the bookstores used to be in Toronto, but I did make it to the round table about editing. Three editors had been given a poem and a short story by anonymous (until they were revealed at the event!) writers and had edited them. The writers read aloud the original pieces (or, well, a page from the short story), and then the editors discussed their edits, and then the writers discussed their revisions, and then the audience asked questions.

It was mostly a missed opportunity, but perhaps in a productive way. The editors were all frustrated that they hadn't been able to have conversations with the writers while they were editing them. The conversation between editor and writer was thus highlighted* as the central activity of the editing process. An editor is someone who has a meaningful, knowing conversation with a writer, someone who plays the role of a writer's BFF when the writer needs advice or perhaps has to change their life around. And since the conceit behind the event removed this conversation, the audience didn't get a chance to see real editing. There was a moment when one audience member asked why a particular line that she liked had gotten edited: It would have been nice to see more of that. More of the conversation, more of what sorts of negotiations happen in editing, and how various questions are raised and what sorts of things these writers and editors were thinking about when they engaged with the texts.

* * *

Afterwards was the screening of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. This is perhaps not a very good movie. There is some really fun mid-sixties interior design. And some great shots of mid-sixties books -- all those Penguins and Editions Gallimard that burn! But it is kind of a stupid movie, pro-book and anti-television (and, for that matter, anti-comics!) in the most dumb and reactionary way.

But before the movie, six people read a poem each relating to the movie. Including me. The poems were of various sorts -- from Stephen Cain interrogating a book, torturing it and rubbing his face against it, to Katherine Parrish reciting the walkthrough of an interactive fiction version of Fahrenheit 451.

I did what seemed obvious: I used David Abel's eclipse method of adapting a text (I recently linked to his description of the process and my favorite of his eclipse poems) upon the first few sentences of the novel. I found a length that produced all sorts of neat effects in the grammar, and read it quickly to bring out the rhythm and Bradbury's sputtering cadences and alliterations (where David usually reads slowly, using the method to create a meditative reading, like rolling the words around with your tongue). Perhaps I'll make a sound file and post it later.

* * *

Tomorrow my friends Anthony Easton and Sundar Subramanian are performing a Christian Marclay piece that involves playing music from photographs of sheet music taken in urban settings (on signage, for instance), if you see what I mean. I'm not sure how it fits in with the festival, but it's all good. I'll be there.

--

* Why is this not "highlit"?

How do I love lists? Let me count the ways

2009-07-04T12:39:00.004-04:00

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!

Screaming in the distance

2009-07-01T10:05:00.002-04:00

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.

Roussel revived

2009-06-25T21:50:00.002-04:00

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.

I am remiss

2009-06-05T00:35:00.003-04:00

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?

What have I been doing, even.

2009-06-02T20:31:00.004-04:00

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 not always sure I am a poet, but if I am,

2009-05-13T11:56:00.002-04:00

I am pretty sure I am a feminist poet.

A list of what makes contemporary poetry awesome

2009-05-04T22:48:00.003-04:00

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.)

The rime of the ancient poetry blogger

2009-04-28T01:00:00.002-04:00

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

Maybe I will read some poetry. Some Canadian poetry.

2009-04-27T14:32:00.004-04:00

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.

Note to self

2009-04-26T13:24:00.003-04:00

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.

I am diametrically opposed to these so-called "many"

2009-04-11T14:36:00.002-04:00

"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.

Notes

2009-03-31T07:59:00.003-04:00

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.

Two things

2009-03-11T13:21:00.006-04:00

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...)

Against totalitism

2009-03-09T19:26:00.003-04:00

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.

Because I could not stop to post, I posted a nearby quote

2009-03-08T15:09:00.002-04:00

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]

Survey update

2009-02-22T01:01:00.003-05:00

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)

Translatable

2009-02-14T23:56:00.003-05:00

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...)

Will will fulfil

2009-02-13T16:52:00.006-05:00

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.

Bookstores

2009-02-04T14:04:00.004-05:00

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.)

The parts of speech: A survey

2009-02-01T16:08:00.002-05:00

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!

"How poems work"

2009-01-29T23:32:00.002-05:00

I posted this over at Gary Barwin's blog, but I'll repost it here, with the same sheepishness about how the anecdote is structured as if I'm some kind of sage dispensing wisdom (gag):

Maryrose Larkin told me the other day that she had at long last finished her latest collection of poems, but she still needed to go over them to make sure they work. "Go over them and make sure they play," I told her. "They're your poems, not your slaves."

Talking, endless talking (or, Linkdump!)

2009-01-29T14:39:00.006-05:00

Over here (especially in the comments) I'm talking about greatness and disposability with Mark Truscott, and over here Rodney Koeneke said some stuff about the Spare Room Centenary and wrote a cento from it (and I'm a fan of his recent use of color-coding), and here Johannes Göransson quotes a nice bit from Lyn Hejinian in an ongoing conversation he's having about translation which I find problematic but provocative, and here Sina Queyras talks about all sorts of interesting things which have led to a commentsplosion that I have not yet put my unequal e-quill onto.

So that's a lot of nice talking.

Unrelatedly:

When I was in Portland people kept asking me if I'd been asked to read in Toronto yet. And I had to explain that, in Canada, I seem to be known more for writing criticism than for writing poetry. Which, all agreed, is insane, but then I think it's insane that I might be known at all. Anyway, outside of the little twitterms on the side of this blog, I haven't written any poetry in Canada yet, which is fine, since they have enough poetry here. You'd think they'd have enough criticism here, too, but perhaps not. Well, on we go, trying to perceive the bigger potholes in the road and to fill them in as best we can.

My ten

2009-01-27T19:39:00.007-05:00

The ten poems I selected for the Spare Room Centennial, five of which I read:

1. Jackson Mac Low, "3RD DANCE -- MAKING A STRUCTURE WITH A ROOF OR UNDER A ROOF -- 6-7 February 1964", from The Pronouns.

2. Tina Darragh, the first five sections (A-E) of on the corner to off the corner.

3. Thomas A. Clark, Larch Covert.

4. Hannah Weiner, "Silent History", published in Hannah Weiner's Open House.

5. David Melnick, the first five pages of Men in Aïda.

three of which others read:

6. Ted Berrigan, "Ann Arbor Song", from In The Early Morning Rain.

7. Joan Retallack, four pages from Errata 5uite (but not these four pages).

8. Lyn Hejinian, a section captioned "The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically." from My Life.

and two of which were projected instead of read:

9. Aram Saroyan, "REMIEIMBER", from The Rest.

10. Donato Mancini, "The Sorrows Of Young Werther (Goth Phase)", from Æthel.

(For whatever it's worth, people afterwards were asking me most about the Darragh poem. It is one of my favorite chapbooks, and if you read this blog and haven't yet, follow the link and read it. It is dictionarylicious!)

Nearly seven hours!

2009-01-26T01:47:00.004-05:00

It was nearly seven hours long! Many highlights (at least half of which involve mARK oWEns or the performers he drafted, though of course the sound poetry is going to be more exciting from a performance stand-point) (but needless to say I hope that the recording of mARK and Leo Daedalus's remix version of the Ursonate came out -- zounds!) but mostly a feeling of fullness, and a sense of happiness that such a thing could even happen, and a delight at the connections and threads that emerged (as of course they would). I'm glad I was able to be part of it. More later, perhaps; I'm in an airport right now, heading back to Toronto.

Centenary a-coming

2009-01-23T10:30:00.003-05:00

Rodney Koeneke has posted a very sweet note about Spare Room and its upcoming 100th reading, and I am biased in this but I agree completely with his assessment.

I would also like to think that Sunday's 100th reading -- a marathon of 100 poems by 100 poets selected by 10 people connected intimately to Spare Room, which will last for, oh, five hours or so -- is going to be, shall we say, challenging in its content, but made accessible in its form. The diversity of poets, the diversity of voices reading the poems, the ability to move in and out of the event at will -- this should, I think, provide people who are not diehard poetry-reading-goers some sort of entryway (and some sort of emergency exit!) if they are curious but wary of poetry fatigue, worried of being overly bored by poetry that they are, for whatever reason, just not meshing with. But some of the poems read will be long enough to allow some real luxuriating in the bath of a particular poet's syntax. (I believe Lindsay Hill -- spoiler alert! -- is going to read a longer [ten minute?] section from Gerturde Stein's Tender Buttons, which I am particularly looking forward to; I have a similar longish selection from a challenging, ear-wracking work that I hope I can pull off.)

All of which is to say, oh just come to the reading on Sunday. See you there.

Sunday, January 25
starting at 2:00 pm
ending when we finish (6:00? 7:00?)
Free admission

Gallery Homeland (at the Ford Building)
2505 SE 11th Avenue

Our unwillingness to represent things is the thing most representative of us

2009-01-12T08:47:00.004-05:00

I am not posting to this blog so much, lately, and little longer than a quotation, because I am plunged in my academic training, and I suspect it will be that way for at least the next few months.

Nevertheless, a quick note. I am working on my selections for Spare Room's 100th reading, which will be a big hoe-down of an event featuring "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets from the Past Hundred Years". Ten people who have been involved with organizing Spare Room have been asked to select ten poems from ten poets, which will then be read on Sunday, January 25th, starting at 2pm, and going on for a few hours.

And I am flying back to Portland for the event!

Picking ten poets is not the tricky part. I quickly picked a few that I wanted to ensure were included (Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Wiener, and others) and saved a few spots to choose after I saw what others had chosen, so I could balance out the dance card. Those will be easy to fill.

But I was trying to pick exactly which Jackson Mac Low poem to read last night, and it was overwhelming. Not only because there were so many options, but also because I wanted something that would "work" read aloud, and something that would work without context (in case people didn't know from Jackson -- something that would be "self-evident", or approximately self-evident). But I also wanted something that would justify his inclusion -- a "show-stopper" -- and something that would point to all the reasons why he's such an important poet to me. But I also also wanted to use this as an opportunity to read one of his texts that I've wanted to work with for ages.

This is almost certainly too much to demand of a few minutes of text, however. Plus if everyone chooses all of their poems with this method, the evening will be impossibly ponderous, unrelentingly so, and it will reinforce the Norton Anthology approach to poetry -- that it is monumental, and that poems should feel complete in themselves in some way. And some poems do, and sometimes that is nice, but of course that's not actually what I'm interested about in Jackson's work, or Ted Berrigan's (outside of the Sonnets), or Hannah Weiner's -- all of them were interested in making a quotidian poetry, a poetry that lived with them. Jackson's processes, Ted's postcards, Hannah's journals, all point to this very unmonumental approach.

So I'm trying to recalibrate with that in mind. I will try to push the event away from "100 monuments of awesomeness" and more towards "100 years of people doing stuff" -- though the urge to show that poetry can be monumental and awesome is great, and not to be completely neglected, and I'm sure the event overall will be a mix of the monumental, the everyday, and the in-between -- and maybe the event itself will be some or all of those things.

Let's start the year off right

2009-01-02T12:24:00.002-05:00

[In] the rather frenetic world of literary criticism, theoretical speculation enjoys the same symbolic status as cocaine: one has to try it.
[Franco Moretti, "The Soul and the Harpy", Signs Taken for Wonders, p. 2]

Toronto

2008-12-13T17:24:00.004-05:00

The breakup of familial order transposes whole peoples into a sort of lifelong Toronto.
[Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era]

Linkdump!

2008-12-13T16:34:00.004-05:00

1. Kasey Mohammad on the holy grail of relevance.
2. You've seen this by now, but it's pretty nice.
3. The second of these meditations on the semicolon by Gary Barwin is particularly striking.
4. The Atlas of True Names, an etymological map, could be truer, or perhaps less true...
5. The last word on Žižek will probably not be the last.

Three nice poety things: A Voweller's Bestiary

2008-12-08T18:48:00.004-05:00

I wrote three nice poety things about JonArno Lawson's A Voweller's Bestiary over at Agora. Recommended for fans of lipograms, bestiaries, and children's literature.

Three nice poety things: Catherine Daly's Vauxhall

2008-12-02T10:59:00.002-05:00

I guest-blogged a "three nice poety things" review of Catherine Daly's book Vauxhall over at Lemon Hound -- check it out (and the back catalog of guest reviews, the recent interview with Gary Barwin, etc., etc., etc...)!

Pro silentio

2008-11-27T22:26:00.002-05:00

for Nicholas Manning

I was thinking we were united in silence!

I was thinking we were on strike!

I was thinking we had agreed, the blog's age is over!

I was thinking we had said our piece (our peace) and were out living and thinking until we had more to say, rather than reshooting the same bullet points in hopes that the horse should become even more dead!

I was thinking we were making pie in the other room, and then waiting for it to cool a bit, and then eating it!

I was thinking this was a sustainable possibility!

I was thinking all that, but mostly I was thinking about other things entirely!

What do poets do again?

2008-11-12T22:23:00.005-05:00

Donatus, writer of a fourth century Latin grammar that was wildly popular throughout the middle ages, took most of his example sentence from poetry, especially Vergil -- including for things like "barbarisms" and "solecisms", things which one, in theory, shouldn't do -- he found it all in Vergil and other poets.

Of all the things poets are supposed to do, to classical and medieval thinkers, this seems to be the one they talk about least: Poets discover and work out the ways language works. And yet, in the grammatical texts, that is all poets do, all they have done. And even a crazy poet like Ennius, who broke all the rules, will be remembered, if for no other reason than he did things which no other poet had thought to do.

Prologomenon to the "poetics as ethics" tag

2008-10-18T17:04:00.004-04:00

Is an ethics centered around one's behavior to an Other located in language (rather than an Other who is another person) a dehumanized and/or alienated ethics, no matter how socially constructed that language may be?

I mean, I suspect it is, but I might be wrong.

Rhyme time #1

2008-10-14T16:46:00.003-04:00

In which I provide some end-rhymes, so you can work them into doggerel.

...Barack Obama
...an Oxford comma

Linkdump!

2008-10-10T10:12:00.009-04:00

Over at Gary Sullivan's place, there's an excellent post about a historical precedent of sorts for the Issue 1 affair, which involves John Ashbery.

Over at Gary Barwin's place, there are a few excellent comics which remix some election-year Peanuts strips from 1968.

Over at ~~Gary~~ Lemon Hound's place, the excellent ongoing series of guest blogs continues with a post in which Jason Christie talks about Ryan Fitzpatrick's poetry. He writes:

I am uneasy these days about my writing. I’m uneasy about the fact that language is at once a means of liberation from ideology and the mechanism that incarcerates me within it. Language forces me into a binding relationship with ideology that it would be irresponsible to deny. Poems that continue to operate solely on the surface level of discourse, dealing with the results of language, that continue to ignore the reality that we are entirely and thoroughly permeated by capitalist ideology, poems that continue to offer trite observations about the human condition or pithy political slogans tacitly reassure us that our way of delivering language is right without ever questioning what could be lurking in the background of our conversations. In a time defined by data and information, a time where the difference between the words swap and insurance can have drastic consequences, language is the direct route for ideology into our lives. We’re accustomed to ideology being obvious, state sanctioned political ads, marketing approved by lobbyists, down with The Man, but what happens when it is the medium as much as the message that is the delivery system?

Earlier, Frank O'Hara wrote:

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
[Meditations in an Emergency]

Christie's sentiment is pretty common these days, I think, amongst poets of a certain stripe: There is an anxiety about achieving a particularly and politically pure writing which they know to be untenable, and this anxiety is the locus of their writing. So I'm not trying to pick on Christie here. Nor am I saying that I am not anxious in similar ways: Oh ho ho no. But still: I yearn for a poetics that does not totally regret language! And I want a poetry that is not incapacitated by its desire for perfection in an imperfect world, that doesn't try to instantiate that anxiety, but rather shows a way (or, several ways) out of it. I want to get my Wittgensteinian fly out of my Platonic bottle. Christie is "mainly interested by poetry that understands our complicated role as writers at a time when no matter what we are trying to say, we are always demonstrating our culpability with a system that benefits from its enmeshment with language and a lack of investigation of the same"; does the system not benefit just as much from our endless reverberating investigation of the same? I am interested in poetry that offers ways to cope with the system, even if momentarily -- I guess it would be too much to hope to transcend the system.

Which reminds me: I really need to finish writing my review of Maryrose's book for Agora.

More on Issue 1 / Issue 1 morons

2008-10-07T15:05:00.004-04:00

(Well, OK, no one involved is a moron, not even Ron, whose take on this situation is abhorrent. I just liked the pun. So sue me.)

Collecting a few of the comments I've made on other blogs:

I respond to Kasey, who is worried about being irritated by Issue 1:

Yeah, what about those of us who aren't irritated, but pleased? Can we be irritated at Ron's post instead, which at least on the surface seems to be anti-free speech, anti-art, and pro-capitalism?

I respond to Rodney, who does a nice reading of the texts that goes beyond what is, by now, obvious:

Would it be too much for me to suggest that those who didn't realize that the connection between poem and name was more-or-less arbitrary basically don't know how to read 21st century poetry?

Well, of course it would; but there is perhaps some truth to it. (Would it be too much for me to suggest that Ron Silliman's reaction to these poems places him closer, politically and artistically, to his beloved SoQ than to anything I'd recognize as belonging to the experimental traditions of poetry?)

Your post here comes closer to what I've been waiting for (read: too lazy to write): An analysis of how the attachment of people's names to poems serves as a force that guides your reading of the text, impelling you toward reading a bit more of an otherwise self-similar text that seems immediately understood (i.e., "conceptual") (i.e., "read") upon "getting the gimmick"; but looking up and analysing the poems with one's friends' names attached brings you back to actually reading the text, actually thinking about what is going on in the text (as a text) rather than referring back to your pat conceptual understanding of the text. This motion, which undermines our sense of how a "conceptual" text operates, is what I'm really digging about Issue 1 right now.

What would be really brilliant: If they had someone actually write their own poem in the style of the other poems and insert it amidst the 3000+ poems. Who would find it?

Somewhere, I think, I also point out that Ron calls for suing these "perps" for fraudulently presenting work as his own right after explaining how it is entirely clear from the text that the claims of authorship are undermined by the text, that no barely skilled reader could possibly mistake the poems in question for Ron's, whether they knew his work or not. This might undermine his potential lawsuit, though IANAL.

FFS

2008-10-05T19:14:00.005-04:00

Should I ever manage to claw my way towards having a "reputation" as a poet -- though that is not my goal, not my project, not anything I find worthy or respectable to do -- I hope I don't get so drunk off my presumed power that I threaten the creators of what might be the most interesting-to-talk-about conceptual poetry (that is how you measure the worth of conceptual poetry, right?) since Kenneth Goldsmith's Day (and long overdue, since we're all fairly tuckered out from discussing that doorstop) and use my eminence grise to suggest that obscene amounts of money might be made by litigating against poets, so please won't you join me?

Revel in "late capitalism" while you still can, eh? There's no poet too small to extort, or to shout down from the bully pulpit.

Blech.

Nuit Blanche

2008-10-04T03:06:00.003-04:00

Also, for those of you in Toronto, I'll be performing tomorrow (Saturday) night at 10:15pm or so as part of Nuit Blanche. I'll be part of "Fantasia Salon" at St. Thomas's on Huron with a few other local poety types. I am not going to tell you anything more until it's over.

Pseudo-Piuma

2008-10-04T02:48:00.006-04:00

I am proud and honored to announce that I have been included, along with a few thousand other people, in a new and exciting anthology of poetry. Issue 1 is available for download here.

Like all the contributors to Issue 1, I did not write the poem with my name attached to it. (It's on page 3017 if you want to skip right to it.) Unlike some of them, I couldn't be happier to my name attached to this work.

I have been reading Pseudo-Cicero's Rhetorica Ad Herennium for a class; I might have some quotes from it to share with you all soon. But I've been talking about how delighted I will be if someday there are Pseudo-Piuma works. That that day would come so soon was not expected however. (I knew I was being included in this project from the initial announcement, but I assumed it would be a process text based on my blog, or something to that effect; this seems to be a computer-generated text that is independent of me, beyond having my name attached.)

Anyway, kudos to editors Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter and thanks for including me in this memorable project!

Dept. of the Unexpectedly Rare

2008-09-28T16:08:00.000-04:00

Results 1 - 10 of about 61 for fuckgasm. (0.27 seconds)

On January thirty-first...

2008-09-26T09:43:00.003-04:00

Piuma, Chris. [On January thirty-first...]. (Crane Paper No. 7). Albuquerque, N.M.: Crane's Bill Books, 2008.

A few copies of this thin, slight, ephemeral book of ten thirty-one word pieces arrived today; more will arrive later. It is handsomely made and probably ticklish.

If you would like a copy: I don't know how many copies of this I will have, but I will trade some for other pleasant ephemera, or I have a few copies of my first chapbook left and would offer both for a more substantive trade, or whatever. Drop me an e-mail. My first name, then my last name, with no spaces or punctuation between, at Google's mail service.

Now it can be told

2008-09-21T23:58:00.004-04:00

1. Following up on this post, as follows:

Agius of Corvey heightens this biblical consolatio in the poem he composed in 876 on the death of the Abbes Hathumod (d. 874). He points out not only the patriarchs but also their wives died; likewise the Apostles and others besides. It takes him over a hundred lines (Poetae, III, 377, 229 ff.). Laudable industry! But hardly a "touching lament," as it has been called.
[Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 80-81]

2. But then as follows:

The piece is titled "Closet Drama" and has been performed twice so far, once in Portland (for the second Sound Poetry Festival in August of 2004) and once in Tucson in 2006. It is both time and location specific, and the content is generated anew for each performance

The performance consists of reading a list of family names taken from death records. There's a brief, ritualistic prelude in which I don a uniform of black hat, black leather jacket, black leather gloves. I read the names quickly -- not as fast as possible, but without pause, and rhythmically.

The laws regarding access to death records vary from state to state. In Portland, I was able to transcribe the names of recently deceased, from the three months prior to the performance; in Tucson, the information is sealed for fifty years. That creates a specific historical distance to whatever information the family names by themselves provide.

You may remember that the Office of Vital Statistics here would have charged a pretty substantial fee to provide the data to me, in electronic or hard-copy form, yet I was permitted to sit in the office of Vital Statistics and transcribe from their computer printouts onto a laptop at no charge (I borrowed your laptop, and accomplished it in an afternoon). In Oregon, the full records are only open to family and others with a demonstrated need or right to know; for nonauthorized persons, the information is limited to name, date of death, and not much else. (So, cause of death, address, etc. is suppressed.)

The piece operates for me on several levels -- it is a list poem, with alphabetic and temporal structures (in the Portland version, the alphabet starts over three times, once for each month from which the names are taken); it is a sound poem (or even text setting), which also represents in concrete form aspects of the makeup/distribution of the community (ethnicity of names, etc.); it is a dirge, an image of faceless dead (in that sense a sort of inverse of Christian Boltanski's nameless dead, the photographs of faces in some installations, that he has referred to as "my Swiss").

I think that it was also a response to the desire to read the phone book aloud -- something that I'd still like to do, but that presents severe logistical challenges. Of course, the two projects are complementary, dealing with the dead and the living. The incompleteness of each of those registers is also important -- that is, I couldn't say that those were the names of everyone who had died in Multnomah County in those three months, only that those were all the names on record . . . .
[David Abel, personal correspondence to me]

3. I guess there's no need to argue with someone writing in the early 1950s. But Curtius was so obviously misguided here. And I knew this because I had seen David perform his piece, and because it was an even more industrious, even more lengthy list of the dead. One that had even less traditional "literary merit" than Agius's, one that was even less concise and sharp-hewn, perhaps, in the sense that David didn't choose the names involved, but left everything to the Office of Vital Statistics and to the vagaries of death. So it was obvious that Curtius's rebuffing of the Agius for being too exhaustive and thus too boring and thus not moving was too simple.

But also, I knew how to listen to David's piece. For one thing, I had an immediate context for it: All those recitations of lists of names of those who died of AIDS that were so... well, "popular" isn't the word... back in the early nineties. And the technical interest of those readings, which at first seems almost inappropriate to mull over: How is this list of names organized? How is that name really supposed to be pronounced? What does it mean, to honor someone but mispronounce their name? Who has authority over the dead, who even has the authority to include them on this list? And when will it end, dear lord, when will it end? And it doesn't end, and it doesn't end, and you just wish it would end, and then you realize that the inappropriate train of thought has become appropriate, because of course you do wish it would end, you wish a cure would be found and this onslaught of death would end, because death is boring and repetitive and endless and we must have something better to do, but do we really have anything better to do than to remember, than try to understand, then try to work our way through the sheer weight of what death has done? Do we owe the dead at least that much? Or do we owe death that much?

4. Not to say that Agius's text does that. I have to track down Agius's text before I make any claims about what might be going on in it. Perhaps it was simply not industrious enough to be a properly "touching lament". Or perhaps Curtius was unable or unwilling to be touched by the text, to recognize its tedium as a effective and affective form of writing.

tedious aphorism #6

2008-09-16T08:30:00.000-04:00

The only thing worse than a fetish for innovation is a fetish for tradition.

Stop justifying poetry!

2008-09-15T08:30:00.001-04:00

This is very unbloggy of me, but I'm reposting a response that I made all of ten days ago to a blog post on another blog. Because one of my plans for this blog was to collect some of these wayward comments, and because I'm too useless in this humidity to write a proper post. Anyway, go read the original and the follow-ups, which make some good points to temper what I write here. This has been slightly edited for recontextualization and clarity and regret.

I have some issues with Guy Davenport's idea that "the purpose of poetry is to teach". Not that it isn't true, but that, in most cases, it isn't helpful.

After all, you could argue that pretty much everything is to "teach". The purpose of breaking up with your boyfriend is to teach him that he is incompatible with your life. The purpose of mainstream television (in the U.S., at least) is to teach you to be a lazy, content, and unparticipating citizen (or, so you could argue).

This conceptualization of poetry's purpose also presents itself as a sort of litmus test, a sine qua non, and a way of judging poetry. "Did I learn something from this poem? No. Thus it must be a bad poem." I'm not sure it works like that, or has to work like that.

Also it puts a terrible strain on poets. Although this might just be a personal preference: When a poem reads as thought the writer had something important to teach me, I am more likely to be, well, turned off. "Why didn't you write a self-help book, if that was your purpose?", that is the sort of response I am likely to have.

But, that might be a personal preference. Your mileage might, and probably does, vary.

I think the idea that the purpose of poetry is to teach is a tempting idea for those of us who enjoy poetry and who enjoy learning. But I think ultimately it falls into a trap: It tries to justify poetry, which I don't think needs to be justified, which I suspect should adamantly not be justified. I can talk about the benefits I've gotten from reading and writing and thinking about poetry, as I'm sure you and many others can, but...

I don't know, this might be going too far, but justifying poetry is a way of incorporating it into a system of costs and rewards -- into, I guess, capitalism -- in a way that I'd rather resist. It's like talking about the benefits of religion, or love, or having a pet -- sure, having a pet might help an elderly person live a longer and happier life, but I suspect that doesn't work as well if one only gets the pet for that purpose, and I also suspect that for most elderly people, they do not keep their pets in order to stave off death! The analysis -- the act of analysis -- just seems to miss the delightfully ineffable point of it all.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T02:36:00.003-04:00

Unexpected! I was certainly not his biggest fan, though I did enjoy some of his essays and some of his short stories. But I will point to that bit about the footnote that I posted recently, and suggest that, while I can't really say how successful it was in Adorno, DFW used his endless footnotes and many other rhetorical tricks to try to recreate a sense of thinking that was not one-dimensional, but constantly breaking off and curling back and doing all those fractal things that we (or, I) think of thinking as doing.

Canadian poetics

2008-09-11T21:21:00.003-04:00

In 1974, staff at Canada Post's Montreal office were noticing a considerable amount of letters addressed to Saint Nicholas coming into the postal system, and those letters were being treated as undeliverable. Since those employees did not want the writers, mostly young children, to be disappointed at the lack of response, they started answering the letters themselves. The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every Christmas, up to the point that Canada Post decided to start an official Santa Claus letter-response program in 1983. Approximately one million letters come in to Santa Claus each Christmas, including from outside of Canada, and all of them are answered, in the same languages in which they are written. Canada Post introduced a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own postal code:

SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE H0H 0H0
CANADA
[via]

Sarah Palindrome

2008-09-09T22:04:00.002-04:00

God: "Palin? Oy! A yoni lapdog!"

* * *

[A certain newspaper that's running a "Sarah Palindrome" contest -- you google it yourself if you care -- told me they couldn't print "yoni" in a newspaper, after they asked me what it meant.]

An X-O-gesis of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

2008-09-07T01:57:00.004-04:00

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.

Wm Shkspre, R&J, prologue

This is a little complicated, so bear with me. There's a reward at the end, I hope.

Craig Conley created a terrific dictionary of one-letter words, including as many definitions as he could find for each letter. Then, through a series of ineffable events, he developed The X-O-Skeleton Story Generator. You play a game of Tic Tac Toe, alternating between Xs and Os, until the game is won (or drawn). Each X and O is connected to one of a few dozen possible meanings for that letter, drawn from Craig's dictionary. X might refer to magnifying, like a 4x camera zoom lens, or it might refer to the mark one makes instead of signing one's name, or the mark that tells you where to sign it. By the end of the game you'll have a string of up to nine different concepts, alternating between Xs and Os like the kisses and hugs at the end of a letter.

I decided to give this method a try. But I don't write stories, and I enjoy making my constraints as tricksy as possible, so I decided to write a limerick. One that gives a basic account of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, much as he himself does in the prologue quoted above. Also, like the play, the Tic Tac Toe game had to end with neither side winning, which meant packing nine different concepts into the five lines. Also I tried to work in as much internal rhyme as I could, because if you're going to rhyme, you might as well rhyme all the way.

Anyway, you can read "An X-O-gesis of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" at Craig's blog.

I strongly encourage others to give the X-O-Skeleton Story Generator a try; I don't think the possibilities are nearly exhausted yet.

Um...

2008-09-03T22:26:00.003-04:00

So, yes, this week grad school has begun with a battery of language competency tests (which so far seem to have gone fine), but. This blog's ridiculously frequent update schedule will probably take a severe hit over the next few weeks, and then come back to a far slower trickle. Your author would apologize, but we are all probably better off for it. Have I, in some way or another, made my point, and will I not just keep repeating my point? I don't know. If you think I haven't, let me know. If you see something and feel that you know "what would Chris think?", then surely I have. And there are so many other blogs to read, and so many other voices to consider.

Anyway this is just to explain why things will surely be slowing down for a bit. But not to a complete halt, not yet.

The archivist

2008-08-29T08:30:00.002-04:00

1. Ron Silliman, in his recent linkdump, notes: "One of my favorite early poems (i.e. pre-Ketjak) is now available on the web". As if he had no ability to put his poetry on the web, as if getting one's poetry on the web was a hard-won battle. All of Silliman's poetry should be on the web! If it's juvenalia that he's embarrassed by, he doesn't have to publish it; if the poem simply doesn't "translate" into an online format, so be it; if publication rights are controlled by the publisher, oops!; if he simply doesn't have a copy of the journal that this poem was published in, or any archive of the poem -- well, that seems unlikely, and anyway he's in a good position to be able to track such a thing down. If Silliman's poetry isn't available on the web, he has only himself to blame.

2. I read this quote that I disagreed with, and wanted to write a little about it. It reminded me of a piece by David Abel. David is arguably the hardest working poet in Portland, but very little of his work is published, and there is very little online evidence of it. I couldn't remember all the details about the piece, and there was no online (nor offline) archive that I could check. When I lived in Portland, David's work (like the work of all my poety friends in Portland) was there, was present in the air; now that I'm in Toronto, it is not. Being in Portland was being in the David Abel archive, as it was continually being built and rebuilt, organized and reorganized. And now, yes, it's not as if I couldn't e-mail David and ask him for the details of the piece. But also it would be nice to be able to point to it, point others to it, and incorporate it into my thinking here, into my living/archiving in Toronto. And yet at the same time I want to resist the pull to archive everything, and I want to encourage living where you are, when you are, allowing the past to be past without dragging it to the present, allowing elsewhere to remain elsewhere, allowing becoming who you are rather than being who you have been. And yet it would be nice to have access to all this. And yet, and yet, and yet.

3. Which is to say: Is poetry a gift economy? Is memory a gift economy?

Update: I have since written a little bit about David's piece.

tedious aphorism #5

2008-08-28T08:30:00.000-04:00

If you translate a poem that, for its original readers, expanded the possibilities of what poetry could be, then your translation must expand for your readers the possibilities of what poetry could be. That is the most important aspect of the poem to retain.

Similarly, if the poem was "just another poem", then your translation should also be "just another poem".

An Ovid litmus test

2008-08-27T09:02:00.007-04:00

Want to decide whether the translation you're reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a good one? Here's a sample verse for you to test out!

It's from Book 3, the story of Narcissus being chased by Echo. Echo, we're told, would chattily keep Juno distracted when Zeus was off diddling his ladies. Juno, miffed, cursed her so that she could only repeat the last bits of what people say. (You know, like an echo does?) Or as Ovid puts it:

'huius' ait 'linguae, qua sum delusa, potestas
parva tibi dabitur vocisque brevissimus usus,'
3.366-7

In super-awkward translation style: "[Juno] said: 'Of this your tongue, by which I was duped, little power will be allowed you, and of your voice the littlest use.'" Except that the grammar is relatively clear, for Latin poetry, and not awkward and stilted like that English crib.

What to look for: The lines end with their own echo: "-us usus". There might be a precursor to this with "tibi dabit-" and certainly a connection with the us in "delusa" (duped). But the speech ends with this little echoing effect; it's the culmination of this mini-scene. It is, arguably, the main point of providing these few lines of backstory.

So how does your translation handle it?

Arthur Golding's translation from 1567:

This tongue that hath deluded me shall doe thee little good:
For of thy speech but simple use hereafter shalt thou have.
III.456-7

("Good" rhymes with the previous line, and "have" with the next one, if you were wondering.)

Joseph Addison's translation (finishing up what John Dryden left unfinished at his death) from 1717:

And then she cry'd, "That tongue, for this thy crime,
Which could so many subtle tales produce,
Shall be hereafter but of little use."

A.D. Melville's translation from 1986:

...'Your tongue', she said,
'With which you tricked me, now its power shall lose,
Your voice avail but for the briefest use.'

So... it looks like none of our translators reproduced the effect. Hunh.

tedious aphorism #4

2008-08-26T15:46:00.003-04:00

Writing poetry for poetry-readers is like fucking a philanderer. Cui bono?

On footnotes

2008-08-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

[T]he abundance, as well as the stylistic and philosophical quality, of the footnotes to [Theodor Adorno’s] Philosophie der neuen Musik is itself “no accident” and has symptomatic value. The footnote in this context may indeed be thought of as a small but autonomous form, with its own inner laws and conventions and its own determinate relationship to the larger form which governs it—something on the order of the moral of a fable or the various types of digressions which flourished within the nineteenth century novel. In the present instance, the footnote as a lyrical form allows Adorno a momentary release from the inexorable logic of the material under study in the main text, permitting him to shift to other dimensions, to the infrastructure as well as to the wider horizons of historical speculation. The very limits of the footnote (it must be short, it must be complete) allow the release of intellectual energies, in that they serve as a check on a speculative tendency that might otherwise run wild, on what we will later describe as the proliferation of “theories of history.” The footnote as such, therefore, designates a moment in which systematic philosophizing and the empirical study of concrete phenomena are both false in themselves; in which living thought, squeezed out from between them, pursues its fitful existence in the small print at the bottom of the page.
—Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form, 9 (footnote)

My brain has been on vacation the last few days, I guess. I was going to offer this quote bare, so that you could agree or disagree or be made a bit queasy by it or whatever. But I had this half-thought. If we think of "the inexorable logic of the material" as forming a one-dimensional train track of thought -- and anyone reading this can think of examples and strategies and conceptual reinterpretations that encourage us to disagree -- but if we support a one-dimensional sense of a "main text", then footnotes allow this text to develop a second dimension. If the train comes to a fork in the road, it knows its chugging along in two-dimensional space. But if the footnote needs to be "complete", then perhaps this branch loops around, or dead-ends. Does this need to be read as two-dimensional, then, or can we suggest that it is fractal, somewhere between one and two dimensions -- until the footnote itself branches off, until the nodes form something like a grid? Of course, that moment of stepping out of one-dimensional space is exciting (think Flatland) and feels like suddenly "living thought". But we knew that, right? So much poetry strives to turn the one-dimensional railroaded experience of reading or listening, done through the resolutely single dimension of time, into the explosion of dimensions that we perhaps suspect our inner lives exist in. Here I want to say something like: Poets don't suffer from dementia, but dimension. And duck, and run off the stage.

Linkdump!

2008-08-22T19:36:00.000-04:00

English syntax the to anew change. (via)
British English, elaborated, is different from American.
Is this the new old new old conceptual poetics? (via)
An alliterative anti-alcohol argument from 1882. (Craig alerted me to it)
James Earl Jones recites the alphabet, and it's almost like a Warhol screen test, with minimal (liminal?) content.

The Agora: Joseph Bradshaw's This Ocean, or Oppen Series

2008-08-20T08:30:00.003-04:00

The Agora is a very new website, with spit and polish still being applied; it will offer reviews of poetry, as well as broadsides and other publications. We like reviews, right? We bemoan the lack of reviews in our culture, we complain that the book review sections of our newspapers are shutting down, we wish for ever more discourse about emerging work? So much work, not enough thinking about the work, is that the cry? Well, let's get to work, then.

The editor, Aaron Tucker, asked me if I'd contribute some reviews, so I agreed to. The first one is about Joseph Bradshaw's This Ocean, or Oppen Series. It is part of my ongoing process of building a bridge between Portland and Toronto. Enjoy it, and check out the rest of the site.

Three nice poety things: Ancient Writing and its Influence

2008-08-18T08:30:00.002-04:00

This overview of the history of writing (which mostly looks at the distinguishing characteristics of the writing styles of Greek and Latin in the classical and medieval eras) is from 1932, and many of its notions are perhaps a bit outdated. Certainly, Ullman's rah rah sense that the Roman alphabet is the bestest one ever seems based more in his deep familiarity with that alphabet than with any sort of empirical evidence; his hope that all the world will soon turn to the Roman alphabet (especially those stubborn Greeks!) is odd for those of us who appreciate the existence of, say, the strange (to our eyes) and evocative Georgian alphabet.

But Ullman clearly adores the (Roman) alphabet:

1. Early on, the Romans had three letters for what we think of as the /k/ sound -- C, K, and Q. Which you used seems to have depended on what followed it: ka, ce, ci, co, qu. Of course, if those three letters were in fact representing the same consonant (or didn't mark a distinction that mattered to the speakers) then it makes sense that eventually they were smoothed out: Q soon was only used before consonantal U (that is, as it typically is in English: a /kw/ sound, before a vowel), and C was used everywhere else. K basically disappeared, except in a very few well established words, like Kalends, the name of the first day of the month. But:

But when the Roman alphabet was adopted by English and German, k again came into honor. And so we see that letters, like human beings, have their ups and downs.
(36)

Even punctuation marks are anthropomorphized:

The question mark is first found in the [eighth] century. At first it looks something like a prostrate S, then it becomes semi-erect, and finally stands upright -- thus portraying the evolution of homo sapiens himself.
(214)

Ullman frequently gives human characteristics to letters, punctuation marks, and scripts, not just as a pedagogical tool, I suspect, but because they are vibrantly alive to him.

2. The letter W is a relatively late addition to our alphabet, popping up first in seventh century Anglo-Saxon sources to represent the /w/ consonant we still use it for today. This had been represented by U in Latin (where it meant both the /w/ consonant and the /u/ vowel) but consonental U had migrated to sound like our /v/ (more or less, with regional variation). Then W spreads to Germany (where eventually it represents /v/!) and France (where it remains rare).

To-day it is looked upon as a characteristic letter of English and German, and Italian printers love to introduce it in quoting an English word, whether it is correctly used or not, as if no English word were complete without it.
(157)

So W serves as a prototypical mark of an Italian elaboration of English! I wish that there were an example of this reproduced in the book. I love elaborations of things that are "natural" to me -- like foreigners doing American accents.

3. Gothic script reduces a few lowercase letters to one or more of the simplest possible lines: i, n, m, u. Such a line is called a "minim", which is a terrific name, considering. An i (there were no dots on them yet) has one minim, an n or a u has two, and an m has three. So if you see five minims in a row, you have a lot of options: um, nin, uni, etc., etc.

This, as you might imagine, gets annoying. So there's an anecdote from the thirteenth or fourteenth century; the book has the relevant quote in a Gothic typeface (reproduced below), which isn't nearly as unclear as the actual handwritten text would be:

The story tells of a letter sent to the senate at Rome by actors of small stature expressing their unwillingness to give up their function of distributing to the actors the wine obtained from certain vineyards near the walls:

[mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt.]

"The very short mimes of the gods of snow do not at all wish that during their lifetime the very great burden [munium is neuter singular] of (distributing) the wine of the walls to be lightened."
(133)

"Written in Gothic," as Ullman notes, "it makes a first-class riddle." (Compare it to this.)

Which side are you on?

2008-08-16T11:24:00.004-04:00

As both poets and programmers have realized, for different reasons, the reader's mind works most actively on sparse materials.
Charles O. Hartman, Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (31),
as quoted in C.T. Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry (56)

...or...

In the language of Adorno – perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist, of them all – density is itself a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking.
Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (xiii)

tedious aphorism #3

2008-08-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

A cliché is a phrase that has become a word.

Foreman Fest

2008-08-14T14:35:00.005-04:00

This weekend is the sixth annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival over at Performance Works Northwest in Portland. Each year they gather up a dozen or so "experimental" artists in various genres and, about two weeks before the show, send them a chunk of (NYC-based experimental theater writer/director) Richard Foreman's notebooks and a few rules with which they create a new work (about 5-10 minutes long). The results are diverse -- ranging from silly to somber (to, ideally, both!) -- and encourage people to play around with a more Foreman-esque presentation, or to bring Foreman's ideas into their own practice.

This is the first year I am not taking part (as either a creator or performer). Even last year, when I was in NYC all summer, I managed to contribute a video. I have no particular feelings one way or another for Foreman's work, but it is very usable and reusable to foster this type of event, and it is always a highlight of summer in Portland.

Since I can't be there (sigh!), if you're anywhere near Portland, you should go for me and report back. (In particular, I think Rodney should participate next year.)

Sixth Annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival, August 15 and 16, 8:30 pm. Tickets $15-$50 for one night; $25-$75 for both nights, sliding scale. Reservations: 503-777-1907 or brownpapertickets.com

Satellite of love

2008-08-14T10:48:00.003-04:00

Satellite Telephone #2 has arrived, with a great pink cover and featuring work by Rodney Koeneke, Dan Raphael, Kimberly Lyons, Sam Lohmann, Fanny Howe, Kevin Killian, Lynn Behrendt, and many more. Including me.

It's been a few years since I've had poetry published in a journal. I only write (or submit) poetry when asked. There's more than enough of it out there. But Robert Dewhurst, proprietor and editor of Satellite Telephone, did ask, so I found something for him. Issue #1 was typed on a typewriter (I can't tell whether #2 was, but it might as well have been). I gave him a very old piece that requires a monospaced font. (And one that, I realized upon rereading the published version, I totally cribbed a line from and reused it in Exercises In Penmanship -- ah well!)

But (more than) enough about me. Two other thoughts before you scamper off to get your own copy (Robbie will do trades, so you have no excuse).

1. Rodney's fun poem on Urdu is included. I heard him read this at a recent reading in Portland, and now I have it in print, in a journal. This seems like how poetry journals are supposed to work, for those of us "in the life". But I'm not sure I remember it happening before! I feel like it must have happened in FO_A_RM at some point. Maybe I'm crazy. Anyway it was a nice experience, seeing a poem I had heard appear in a journal. If you weren't at that reading, though, you might not get that experience.

2. There are several pieces of criticism. And they are interesting and well written, but I couldn't help feeling that because they're not online, they are somehow impotent. That is, they aren't part of the conversation. People wanting to think about, oh, Jeni Olin's The Pill Book won't know that they will find a few pages of thought about it here. It's not googleable. (Well, it is now, because I mentioned it!)

That's crazy, of course. It's good to have some discussion outside of the internet, and it's good to have these little pockets of modest obscurity. Not all thought needs to go into the database, though it pains me to say it.

Lynn Behrendt's contributions, some critical writings through of Ron Silliman's blog entries, erasures and poemifications (Lynn has been the one updating Ron's blogroll), feel somehow more real for being on paper (though maybe it's just because I still can't read poetry on the web), just as the criticism felt somehow misplaced for not being online; but this was criticism as well as poetry. It underlined my anxieties nicely.

Anyway, go get it!

Three nice poety things: The alphabet

2008-08-12T11:21:00.009-04:00

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

That is, the Roman alphabet as it's typically used in English. We might look at some of its closest rivals -- the Greek, the Hebrew, the Arabic, and the Cyrillic alphabets -- another time.

1. If poetry is form, then there is much to admire about the form of the alphabet. The classic distinction in the alphabet is that between vowel and consonant, and the alphabet announces this in its first two letters: A, a vowel, is immediately followed -- in a classic case of poetic disjunction -- by B, a consonant. The vowel comes first, and the vowels serve as the landmarks, each one spaced like rest stations along an interminable stretch of highway.

Replacing each string of consonants with the number of consonants being replaced, we get:

A 3 E 3 I 5 O 5 U 5

3:3:5:5:5 -- a strict formula, like counting the syllables in a haiku.^* But with a swerve at the end, for the penultimate letter is Y, which is sometimes a consonant, sometimes a vowel. A classic twist during the denouement! And one that causes us to rethink the pattern. Do we lose it, if we treat Y like a vowel? Not at all -- if we reconsider the alphabet as an oral text, and (like in a haiku!) count the syllables instead:

A 3 E 3 I 5 O 5 U 5 Y 1

What is that last letter doing? How does the alphabet end? Well, remember, we're reading it aloud now -- and we discover that not only is Y's status as a vowel or consonant ambiguous, but Z's status as a pronounced letter is also ambiguous -- zee or zed? The alphabet, which starts out so firm and resolute, with a clear vowel and a clear consonant, starting with letters that recall the very name of the piece, ends muddled -- or perhaps, ends by breaking apart the strict categories that seemed so necessary at first, leaving us with options, choices, possibilities -- in a word, freedom.

(When we do Hebrew we might see that this freedom was implied from the very beginning!)

2. If poetry creates form, if poetry creates structure and meanings we can hang our life upon, then the alphabet is a notorious source of such structure. We can alphabetize all day long (and yes, this is a poem that is clearly a technology, though perhaps not a technology in its role as poem). We can write abecedaria and we can organize our little black book. And the alphabet, as it rolls along, provides us with a form for such things. Who has not started an abecedarium excited and proud at how well it is going (apple, banana, cherry, durian, elderberry...) only to realize that, although the "B" challenge seemed tricky at the time, it is nothing compare to the clusterfuck of challenges meeting you at the end of the game: VWXYZ as the ultimate level boss. But it is good to start out with a light step, and end humbled but accomplished! This is a narrative of learning, a narrative we like seeing in our poetry (and in our alphabets).

3. If poetry is a delightful misunderstanding, then:

"Somewhere in the middle, it gets awfully QR to me!" A queer reading of the alphabet, on public television, in 1969! Heavens.

* * *

* Perhaps like a tanka, instead? And yes, technically you count the moras in haiku, not the syllables. Whatevs.

N.B. I'm totally stealing the initial thought about counting the consonants between the vowels from someone, but I can't remember who. I'm pretty sure the second part, about counting the syllables between vowels, is all me.

Poetry as other

2008-08-11T11:52:00.006-04:00

More Lakoff-inspired thinking about categories and poetry. (Though first, via Silliman, an article about Lakoff and politics.) Warning: I make a few logical moves here that I'm not sure I stand behind, although I'm more or less OK with where they end up.

Lakoff likes to refer to certain interpretive models as being psychologically "real", meaning something like "not just an interpretive model, but one that can be clinically shown to have meaning." I'm not sure that's different from a non-"real" ("ideal") model?

But: One categorical concept he wants to suggest is "real" is the notion of the catch-all category, the "other" or "misc." category, where anything that doesn't fit into the other categories might fall. In English, we nouns are replaced by pronouns, and some nouns fall into the "he" category, some into the "she" category, and some into the "it" category. We can say that "he" and "she" are determined by rules -- categories which seem to have definitions -- and "it" is the catchall. Nouns in the "it" category don't necessarily share positive characteristics the way nouns in the "he" or "she" categories do. (This is my example, not Lakoff's, and like all such examples it might be philosophically problematic, but it still might be useful, so let's go with it.)

So I want to suggest that "poetry" is an "other" category. If you take the category of "writing", you can come up with rules that pull out various subcategories ("prose", "plays", "memoirs", "three-hundred-word album reviews", "personal ads") and what doesn't get pulled out has to be "poetry" -- what else could it be? (Well, "nonsense"? But we recognize spam as poetry! As better poetry than our own humble efforts. Well, many of us do, anyway.)

(I wonder if poetry in the small sense might not actually be an "other" category.)

Anyway I don't necessarily think this conceptualization of "poetry" as "catch-all" in necessarily true (or "real") but it at least points to a desperate plurality and heterogeneity within poetry (no shock there).

But that heterogeneity -- this possibility that poetry is not a thing but a collection of unthings -- might be why asking a question like "is poetry a technology" is so itchy-making. Poetry is not as specific or coherent as the sorts of things we call "technologies".

And so when Kasey wants to ask: "I want to ask if there's a way of thinking about this in which it becomes clear that poetry absolutely cannot be a technology, almost by definition." -- we can suggest that because poetry is so indefinite, it can't comfortably be a technology. (Though is the Shakesperean sonnet a technology? Is whatever you want to call the method that Kenneth Goldsmith used to write The Weather a technology? Probably yes.)

And when he adds: "And at the same time, I wonder whether poetry assumes an ironic relation to technology, in which it exploits technological resources, explores technological themes, and generally behaves as though it were a member of the set 'things that are intelligible under the rubric of technology,' precisely in order to burlesque that relationship, to flaunt its total resistance to any subsumption by (modern) technology." -- we can suggest that again, poetry is by definition heterogeneous and not assuming, en masse, a relation to anything (except those categories of "writing" that it is not falling into).

But then, is Kasey making a definitional move here? Is poetry, for him, going to be writing which "assumes an ironic relation to technology" (or things like technology), which aims for or acheives this (potential political) end? Is this descriptive or proscriptive thinking about poetry? Does it take into account Susan Polis Schutz (or is her work "not poetry")? Is this less a query towards the status of poetry than it is a query towards the formulation of a manifesto?

Further tree news

2008-08-06T11:02:00.004-04:00

Following up on Kilmer, trees, and modernism! I'm reading George Lakoff's classic Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, and it discusses this very issue, of the naming and categorizing of trees (pp. 31-38). In particular, it points to an article by J.W.D. Dougherty which finds that, while distinguishing between "maple" and "oak" might be "natural" for the Tzeltal Mayans, it is not so natural for urban Americans, who think of both as just "trees".

Dougherty says: "[T]here is a shift in the most salient taxonomic rank of a hierarchy toward increasingly more inclusive levels as the overall salience of the domain itself declines and the taxonomic structure devolves."

But we readers of poetry already knew this. So I want to point to Kilmer embracing this urban, modern unawareness of tree distinctions, an inability or disinclination to thinking of "oak" as a "natural" category -- to think of cats as "mammals" rather than "cats", perhaps? -- and also perhaps suggest this as part of the poem's popular appeal. It will not get bogged down in the distinctions of yesterday! He will strive to invent a cloying sentimality for the twentieth century, for the pre-World War I optimism of the future, today!

tedious aphorism #2

2008-08-05T08:30:00.000-04:00

poetry : criticism :: mind : body

...or perhaps the other way around.

An informalist approach to botany

2008-08-04T12:51:00.002-04:00

In 1913, Alfred Joyce Kilmer heralded a new era in poetry with a poem that began with the now-famous lines:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree

For centuries, poets had been expected (it was in the job description!) to know the names of different species of trees, and so they filled their poems with alders, baobabs, cherries, dogwoods, elders, firs, guelder-roses, hawthorns, ironwoods, junipers, kiawes, larches, maples, nutmegs, osiers, poplars, quaking aspens, rhododendrons, sycamores, tupelos, umbrella pines, verawoods, willows, crossbreeds, yews, and zelkovas. After Kilmer, poets were free to say, it's just a tree. It’s lovely, and it’s called a "tree".

News!

2008-08-03T10:53:00.003-04:00

Hey, it just occurred to me: Some of you reading this have friendly feelings towards me, live in or about Toronto, and aren't friends of mine on Facebook, in which case: I'm meeting up with people for drinks tonight to celebrate my birthday (which was yesterday); 8pm at the Bedford Academy, and e-mail me (chrispiuma at google's mail service) if you need to. I have no idea how many people will be there (I suspect not too many, as it's all very short notice and I'm still new in town) but/so come if you can.

* * *

If you haven't noticed, I've started writing five-word poems via Twitter, which I'm Huthily calling "twitterms". The latest can be read on Buggeryville, the archive is on Twitter.

* * *

Also I've started a medievalist blog, which will surely be even less informed, less coherent, and less frequently updated than this one.

* * *

Which also reminds me: I've been thinking about writing a sort of user's manual or manifesto for this blog (and perhaps even more so the medievalist one), but all I've gotten so far is a half-formed aphorism:

That the erotics of failure should entice more than the erotics of righteouness.

Or, perhaps in a more practical way:

That I am here to be wrong, and you are here to correct me into a different state of being wrong, and vice versa.

Hence "erotics".

Three nice poety things: Unless As Stone Is

2008-08-02T18:43:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, Sam Lohmann's new chapbook Unless As Stone Is arrived. It is a handsome publication, containing a single poem in seven parts (six plus envoi, perhaps?), variations on Dante's sestina "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra". I guess I could plot it along my recent theme of appropriation and emotion, but I don't have much to say there. Still, here are three nice poety things about the book.

1. Two colors (colours? I need to decide whether I'm going to "go native" about these spellings) predominate in the poem, "green" and "yellow". When I imagine those colors, they are like crayons, or Pantone swatches -- solid, bulky, no nuance. But the book itself has a chartreuse cover and manila pages -- a very different (and more interesting) suggestion of what "green" and "yellow" might mean. The physical book itself reminded me of further possibilities for these words; instead of having illustrations in the book, the book itself was the illustration. (Which itself is a reminder: Until Gutenberg, there was really no need for writing to be thought of as black and white. Was it? Someone investigate that. It could make an excellent Encyclopedia Brown–style plot point.)

2. I was reading the book aloud to myself, pacing back and forth in my kitchen, and stopped on this italicized line:

His science has progressed past stone.

And -- as I like to say -- I rolled it around in my mouth. I repeated it it a few times, really enjoying how the consonants propelled the sentence along. I have become a sucker for a repeated /st/. Here it makes a nice little dramatic pause before you get to the payoff -- and it switches from a-e-i vowels to an o-u vowel (which my research (and others') suggests is the major vowel divide for English speakers). And the meaning of the sentence tied in nicely enough with the Dante -- I was pleased.

And then: Sam does the same thing. He spends the next few lines rolling around that sentence, with its /p/, /s/, /gr/, and /st/ consonants:

Hiss, scient asp or greased piston;

as sign's hasp or grist turns to regress,
past's tone is graps;

as ions aspire, grass sought up a stone,
a sighing sass, poor grace to pass on:

siren's purr grates diapason

on stone in grass. Wake up,

"Wake up"! It was the same thing I had felt when I got through with the italicized line and though, oh, hey, I should get back to the poem. Here it marks the end of rolling around, bringing in a new set of sounds, its meaning echoing its form.

Really, when a poem reenacts my reading of it, it is very exciting.

3. This book makes no bones about being a poem, and yet I enjoyed reading it. That is something of an accomplishment!

(Nice poety thing #3 might just be a repeat of nice poety thing #2, however.)

You can get Unless As Stone Is at Powells, and a few other places (see Sam's blog for details).

Linkdump!

2008-08-01T10:15:00.001-04:00

A short documentary on Jordan Scott, stuttering, and poetics thereof. (Part 2. I'm not clear on whether this is the documentary that aired on Bravo or just connected to it.)
Oh sure, now that I've moved away, there's a contest for writing five words about Portland's transit system! (via Silliman)
Dystopian lexicography.
Craig Conley's take on "for Gale Czerski" continues its spread across the internet.
On a well-annotated reviewer's copy.

Poetry as a second language

2008-07-31T09:03:00.002-04:00

We write poetry, typically, for people who speak the same language we do. We write as native speakers of our languages for people who are also native speakers of our language. We take advantage of this native mastery of the language, which allows us to be subtle and allusive, and still feel secure that at least some of our readers will get similar meanings out of our language as we do. The writer's contract with the reader states that the writer has devised a text that appeals to their sense of the language, and that the reader will find the text appealing to their similar sense of the language.

What would our poetry be like if we wrote under the assumption that our texts would be read by people who were not native speakers of our language, perhaps not even fluent?

Or,

What would our poetry be like if we read under the assumption that our texts were written by people who were not native speakers of our language, perhaps not even fluent?

Or,

What would our poetry be like if our standard model went something like: A writer who is a native speaker of language A writes poetry in language B for a reader who is a native speaker of language C?

Or is poetry always already like this, exploiting one of these models? Could one of them serve as a makeshift definition of poetry? And would any of these strategies promote certain genres of poetry and discourage other genres? Obviously this would depend on the sociopolitical status of the various languages. But perhaps not entirely.

When I am feeling rambunctious, I say that we can only read poetry in languages that we aren't fluent in. But now I'm wondering what kind of strategy it would be, to write for readers who are not native to or fluent in our language.

"By sheer art, many hopeless / pleasures are made to seem possible."

2008-07-29T20:43:00.000-04:00

And I keep thinking about appropriation as a way of accessing the sentimental.

I read for Spare Room back in July 2006, and as always I was trying to write something new for the reading. But I was emotionally overwrought (oh, you know... boy trouble) and this got completely in the way of writing anything. I had too much to say. I had something to say and said it, and it was not poetry.

I won't publish the poem I ended up writing, as I don't see much of a point in it existing outside the time and place of that reading (which happily wasn't recorded). But think I'm happy with it as a solution, so I want to say a few words about that. But I don't want to do the dickish reductivist Conceptual Poetics 101 move of conflating the idea of the poem with the poem itself. Let's not do that. Reading about the poem is unlike reading the poem, and quite unlike being at my reading of the poem in July 2006. If you weren't there: This will not be the same. But perhaps it's interesting to talk about (which is the other thing they teach you in Conceptual Poetics 101).

I ended up working with "The Windhover", Gerard Manley Hopkins's emotionally charged poem. Both I and the cause of my tsuris were both deeply fond of Hopkins, and we had a "moment" over this poem, which he had memorized, and which I happened to be carrying a copy of -- well, enough about that.

I broke the poem into short fragments, a few words at a time, and rolled them on my tongue, surrounded each fragment with homophonic translations, changing the lines' meaning by placing them in the midst of a rush of other meanings, and repeating as necessary.

Hopkins' consonant-dense, stress-dappled, clumpèd-cluster-cluttering lines encouraged the repetition and sound-based reorganization. And Hopkins' ejaculations -- "O my chevalier!" -- and his overcharged vocabulary -- "ecstacy", "my heart in hiding" -- all... well, it gave me an excuse to write like this:

...the motion set in
motion, meaning
moored in minute
motions, minute
mentions, making
many million
maybe-meanings
set in motion.
More was said for

keeping off dangerous offers,
keeping off dallying dangers,
keeping off delight. Deep in the
kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,
center of dimly-dealt-with
inner endangered doings,

deeply damped down
deeply damped down
deeply damped down
deeply damped down
deadened dendrons, the
dapple-dawn-drawn
devil starts to
tap a tomtom.

Which, oof, is a bit much, especially on the page (or on the screen). But it was written as a text to be read aloud at a reading, in a particular time and place, for a reader who was in a particular emotional state, for an audience mostly made up of people who knew me (but who mostly didn't know I was in such a state) -- it became, of course, performative, but what isn't these days? And I am told that it was effective and striking, although what exactly was going on was obscured and deeply coded (because the details were probably not interesting and certainly not poetry). (Oh yes -- the obscuring of a romantic situation you didn't want to talk about, that also made Hopkins seem like a good choice...)

Still, I've already included way too much of the poem here (on the record!), and if I weren't such a packrat I would have deleted the file immediately after the reading.

flim is back online

2008-07-24T19:10:00.002-04:00

flim, the quasi-literary journal that I published in various forms from 1996 to 2005, is back online. Or at least, the 2005 edition is back, which was being published daily until computer problems overwhelmed it. Anyway, pop over and check out the archives, if you haven't before.

Three nice poety things: Lemon Hound

2008-07-24T13:10:00.001-04:00

1. If Geof Huth met Longfellow halfway in Longfellow Memoranda, Sina Queyras meets Virginia Woolf halfway in Lemon Hound. But I suspect Queyras and Woolf don't live as far apart. Lemon Hound returns, again and again, to a Woolvian world-weary melancholy, to that other sense of "the poetic". One poem starts: "If you open your mouth, ache. If you don’t open your mouth, swelter." I don't know Queyras's work outside of this book. What is her relationship to such melancholy? Is she leaning on Woolf to assume this emotional register, or as a way to incorporate this register into an exploration of other aspects of her poetry? Or is that register "natural" for her poetry? (Even if it is "natural", it's not unquestioned.) (And there are many other registers in the book, but this register is the tonic note that the book keeps coming home to.) I have been thinking lately about appropriation as a tool for accessing or allowing emotional writing. Does this book do that or not? I'd have to read other books by Queyras to tell.

2. But let's keep going with that poem:

If you open your mouth, ache. If you don’t open your mouth, swelter. If you open your mouth but hold your breath, ether. If you look for colour, coral and tea leaves. If you follow the moon, wet and concrete. If you cling to the earth, pistol and candy apple. If you give up your garden, maze and globe, hydrangeas and moon vines. If you lose your shoes, pumice and strain. If you have no money, tin and clang.

That's the beginning of "If". Like many of the poems in the book, it has a certain structure. It is a prose poem that repeats the opening phrase of each sentence ("If you..."). They are, in a certain sense, list poems. Lemon Hound explores, ah, not so much the form of the list, but the form of the list poem.

So far, the clauses before the comma are mostly stable: "If you X your Y", with one "If you X your Y but P your Q", which is not so different. But the clauses after the comma flicker. "Ache" and "swelter" are imperative verbs, but "ether" must be a noun. Hm. Well, "ache" and "swelter" are also nouns. Although, does "swelter" want to be a noun? It prefers being a verb, I think. Similarly, "wet" can be a noun, but wants to be an adjective. So there is some grammatical tension building. At first, the nouns go together nicely enough. "Coral and tea leaves" both connect to "colour" easily enough. But "maze and globe" require interpretation to be resolved, and "globe" re-moons the "moon" in "moon vines". And "pumice and strain"?

Later in the poem: "If you can, software and lingerie.", which adds (bitter?) humor to the ache and swelter. Then, instead of nouns, there is a verbal phrase with "If you love flowers, do not fold." But: "If you are blonde, topple, flax, moraine." And towards the end: "If you know anger, detonate and flex." "Flex" can be resolved into a noun, but "detonate" and "topple" can't, and the pattern of verbs forced into nounhood is complicated further. Can we imagine "a topple", "a detonate"? The form is a list, and at times reads as a preacher's rhetoric (get Obama to do the audiobook), but the expectations set up are, again and again, subverted.

3. It's not just Woolf: There's a secondary strand of Stein running through these poems. Lemon Hound is a book of short declarative sentences. There are almost no relative pronouns. Removing relative pronouns removes a form of subordination. It encourages repetition. It encourages lists. It discourages the overgrowth, the weedy and untended patches of nature that too easily grow in, say, my blog writing. It is a neatly trimmed pubic area. But it is a still human geometry, trimmed but not airbrushed, manicured but still pungent.

Let's Aristotle

2008-07-23T20:26:00.002-04:00

I guess I think of poetry in three senses.

Poetry in the small sense, that is, received opinions on poetry held by, oh, the culture at large. "Oh, isn't that poetic!" "I was feeling upset, so I wrote some poetry and now I feel better." "I'm a poet and I don't even know it!" And so on, et cetera, und so weiter, kaj tiel plu.

Poetry in the middling sense, that is, poetry as the creations of a bunch of people and communities that think of themselves as creating poetry or working in poetic traditions. These creations are often called "poems". See this is slam poetry, that is post-avant poetry, this is a poem I wrote for my dog, this is a Norton anthology filled with poems.

Poetry in the large sense, that is, anything that is being read or understood as poetry, whether everyone would recognize it as poetry or not, whether it was created with the understanding of being poetry or not.

Hopefully this has clarified nothing. But I think that when I make big "poetry is X" statements (a bad habit) I sometimes would say something different if I were talking about a different sense of poetry.

Neighbo(u)rs

2008-07-21T11:53:00.004-04:00

So I'm finally on the Silliman blog roll. Who are my neighbo(u)rs?

Below me is Dave Pollard, who has a blog at Salon.com that seems less about poetry than it is about "making the world a better place". He asks: "If we're going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place?" Well. Also, if we're going to spend time making burritos, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Also, if we're going to spend time cracking our knuckles, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Also he has a chart where he "reframes" received wisdom. So, instead of "if you want smart people to work for you, you have to pay them a competitive rate for their time", he reframes the idea as "what if you could produce an invitation so compelling that smart people would be willing to come together and solve a problem for free?" Which is true and handy and based on the fundamental principle that smart people shouldn't be compensated for being smart. Which, you know, perhaps they shouldn't.

Above me is Pearl Pirie, whose blog is nicely titled "Humanyms"(which sounds like a cross between humans, homonyms, and Houyhnhnms). She links glowingly to a Geof Huth piece, has Crag Hill on her blogroll, and uses the word "poet-y". Although it looks like her actual poetry blog is here? Anyway her blog(s) look like they're worth exploring.

She lives in Ottawa, and Pollard lives in, oh, apparently Winnipeg. I have made some sort of Canadian tic-tac-toe in the middle of the P section! Nick Piombino, you're next...

Three nice poety things: Longfellow Memoranda

2008-07-19T16:15:00.000-04:00

Geof Huth's new book, Longfellow Memoranda, consists of 366 poems written into the small spaces provided in a 1917 day book. Each day was accompanied with excerpts from one or two Longfellow poems, which Geof riffs off. You can read more about the book, follow links to samples, or order it. Here are three nice poety things about it:

1. Voice. Many of Geof's signature forms -- the pwoermds, the fidgetglyphs -- operate within words, or even within letters, and don't engage with concepts of "voice", of the characteristics of an imagined narrator or an imagined listener. They are, instead, nestled within the crenelations of the building blocks of language. But Longfellow's poetry is invested in the concept of "voice". And by meeting him halfway, Geof takes on its challenge. But by meeting him halfway, Geof complicates the challenge. Is the voice in these poems Geof's? Geof's through Longfellow's? Longfellow's through Geof? Some newborn persona, born through a dialectical struggle between the two? Longfellow (especially in the quotes selected for the day book) is sentimental. When these poems are also sentimental, is this Geof's own sentimentality finding a formal excuse to creep through? Or is he play-acting, or trying on foreign modes of sentimentality? And these questions neither have nor need answers, of course. Nor am I by any means suggesting that this book is alone in raising such questions, heavens no, but it did raise them in a clear and sustained way.

2. Form. Because the day book gave four lines per day, the majority of the poems are four lines long, though a few are shorter if the original owner had used up the space. A reproduction of a page of the day book included towards the end shows that on April 12th, the original owner used up all four lines, forcing Geof to write his poem in one cramped line underneath. This suggests that Geof could have occasionally gotten away with a five-line poem, but he never choose to do so.

Now, four is an irksome number to deal with. The classic problem with a foursome is that you just end up pairing off, which defeats the purpose of getting everybody together in the first place. Geof does a good job of working through the combinations here, in part through the judicious use of indentation (unless I missed something, he restricted himself to one level of indentation) and the occasional poem with less than four lines. You've got your ABBAs, your ABABs, your AAABs, your AAAAs, and your ABCDs, all of which are aggressively symmetric, but again, with the occasional indentation you can make a ABAB', which helps unsettle things. But what would the book have been like if it had only three lines, or a generous five lines! Five is the magic number, after all, where the combinations and asymmetries explode in your face. But perhaps the symmetries and formal rhythms of fourness are part of meeting Longfellow halfway.

3. Ligatures. Another book I'm reading right now, Steve McCaffery's Seven Pages Missing Vol. 1, has "ct" and "st" ligatures: ﬆ, should that character show up. I'm not really a big fan of such ligatures, in general -- they look nice on their own but they're distracting when you're reading. Longfellow Memoranda goes full-tilt with its ligatures: "gi", "sp", "it", and the creepily subtle "ee" ligature speckle its pages. Geof included the abundant ligatures as among the reasons why he chose the font. And I wouldn't bring it up, because in generally it didn't "work" for me. It looks "old" but the day book itself doesn't include such ligatures, though perhaps Longfellow's books during his lifetime would have -- but it looks older than that, even. But it was all worth it for this one poem, which as far as I know might even be a (terrific) typo:

Which reads, should the ligature show up on your browser:

122/244

read
reader
readeﬆ
readst

This poem, playing off the "readst" in the original Longfellow, is on more familiar Huthian ground (note there's not much "voice" here!): "read" as verb, "reader" as noun, but "readest" as quasi superlative adjective, recasting "reader" and "read" as adjectives, reminding us that "read" is unstable and could be read "read", the past tense of "read", and with an old-timey ligature on newfangled superlative "readest" but not on the source's actual old-time morphological form "readst". The Longfellow poem begins: "Maiden, that readst this simple rhyme / Enjoy thy youth, it will not stay", and not even the word "readst" stayed. The grammar has shifted out from under us, had in fact already well shifted by Longfellow's time. The slippage can serve as a memento mori -- and the other Longfellow poem for that day is entitled "Morituri Salutamus" -- "We who are about to die salute you" -- and, well, who knew a list of morphological forms could be such a downer?

Well, Geof knew.

(There's also a really nice bit of typesetting involving two of the numberings for the poems, but I'm not going to spoil that surprise for you.)

Linkdump!

2008-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Cradle the sonnet in your hands.
The Toronto Transit Map, anagrammed.
Yes. (Rather than: No.)
A method for presenting translation. (Via Languagehat)
Someone recently reached Buggeryville by searching google.ca for "canadian poet blogs"; this blog is hit #30, which cannot possibly be right.

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz; buzz, buzzz.

2008-07-17T15:42:00.005-04:00

Actually I don't think I have much to say about Jack Spicer's Language after all!

Here is what I will say: It reads like a book that was at some point avant-garde. It is a collection of short verses gathered into longer poems gathered into a short book. And, like hundreds, maybe thousands of books and chapbooks that are published each year, it is a poetry of working out an idea or two. It is essayistic. It is a thinking-through. The last two lines (two words, even) spell out the intersection: "That time leaves us / Words, loves." But baseball, the death of JFK, and whatever else was at hand is mixed in as well. But I think what separates Language from those hundreds or thousands of books of experimental poetry is that Spicer doesn't seem primarily concerned about his thinking-through. He does not want to impress you with the quality of his thought process, or his insights, or the intersections of ideas that he is making -- though some of them are of quality. Instead of connecting ideas, he's connecting lines of poetry. The ideas just happen to be there, when they are. He would, I suspect, jettison an interesting idea if it would lead to a more interesting combination of words.

I've edited this from the sort of post I abhor to the sort of post I merely detest, so I'll sign off now. Go read the famous opening section or listen to him read the whole book. I can't find all of part 3 of "Morphemics" online ("Moon, / cantilever of sylabbles / If it were spelled 'mune' it would not cause madness.") but it's particularly choice.

Buy now!

2008-07-15T16:47:00.002-04:00

This will be up for only a few days for perhaps obvious reasons, so if you actually want any of this crap, grab it quickly.

I was a Dominican nun in the sun

2008-07-14T10:18:00.007-04:00

Secretly, yesterday's reenactment of Jack Spicer's last lecture was the event in the Scream's line-up that I was most excited about. I suppose this makes me a nerd of the highest order. Or a poetry fan. Or both. But it was a great idea; old poems get read all the time, but old lectures? old interviews? Outside of, oh, the Gettysburg Address, how often do lectures get re-presented?

The lecture was given at UC Berkeley, as part of a series of lectures given by the New American Poets from the Allen anthology (Ginsburg, Olson, Creeley, etc.). The topic was "politics and poetry", and Spicer's message, to oversimplify it, is that if you want to have a political effect, you're not going to achieve it by writing a poem. This is a contentious thing to say to a bunch of UC Berkeley students in 1965. Much of the lecture consists of Spicer asking for questions from the audience, and the audience trying to convince him that, yes, poems can have political effect, and Spicer being utterly unimpressed with the examples they bring up.

(If you haven't noticed, I'm more or less in Spicer's camp.)

The one person in the audience who brings up an example that Spicer is down with is Mary Norbert Körte, who at the time was a Dominican nun. She suggests that 1930s labor and civil rights anthems had some political effect, though perhaps they don't count as poetry? Spicer gets excited by this idea, and breaks out into a verse, "You'll get pie in the sky when you die." But he's not sure poetry achieves that effect very often.

It's a nice and meandering lecture, where both Spicer and the audience are thinking the issue through -- it loses focus at times, brings in other elements, starts with a firm conclusion and ends up less certain of it, you know, all the typical "thinking" characteristics.

So. Jesse Huisken (of This Ain't The Rosedale Library, yet another great little independent book store in Toronto) (unexpectedly on display there: Doug Nufer's Negativeland) came up with the idea of re-creating or re-presenting this lecture. Stan Rogal played Spicer, Jesse played the panel moderator (and, delightfully, Peter Gizzi's footnotes to the published transcription), and those of us in the audience played the people who were in the audience at the original event, ad lib. I ended up asking Mary Norbert Körte's question, for instance. And we sat on the concrete lawn in front of the bookshop, the sun blazing on us with a picnic table umbrella offering only so much protection, and we worked our way through the lecture.

The general feeling afterwards was that everyone was itching to ask a question of Spicer that wasn't in the script, because how often do you have a chance to ask Spicer a question? And we were all reacting to the issues brought up by the lecture, but we were thwarted from doing anything with our reactions unless it happened to be something that someone in 1965 asked. But Stan Rogal isn't a Benjamin Franklin impersonator (or whatever the Canadian equivalent would be -- are there John A. MacDonald impersonators?) and presumably wouldn't have felt comfortable answering for Spicer in that way.

Anyway what I want to say is obvious enough: There is a certain type of attention that a performative moment -- even one so barely performative as an amateur re-presenting like this one -- encourages, and it's one of the reasons why people go to lectures in the first place, and we sometimes re-present poems, but I think re-presenting lectures or events such as this one should be done more often, as a way of reading, or of pointing, or of paying attention.

. . .

My books arrived here in Toronto on Friday, so I got to spend the morning doing my every-few-years rereading of Spicer's Language, and I had a few things to say about that, but I guess I'll save it for another time.

. . .

I went to another event last night, and I don't have much to say about it. (OK, I have this comment: The piece based on Jordan Scott was based on a recording, and pulled some fun scattering rhythms from his stutter, but the thing about stuttering is that it's unpredictable, and the precision playing and the carefully lain out composing didn't recreate that -- not that it had to, but that was the aspect of Jordan's speech patterns that I was most interested in hearing "translated" into music. But that's my expectations being foiled, rather than the piece itself lacking anything -- it was a different piece than what I was hoping for, is all.) OK, I had a little to say about it. But I don't want to give Torontonians the idea that I'm always already going to endlessly blog about every little thing I go to. I am far too lazy for that.

Linkdump!

2008-07-12T15:55:00.000-04:00

I think the new rule will be that as soon as I get five links, I will dump them.

Love poetry and advertising.
A new high (or perhaps low, I can't quite tell) in inflation.
Another look at lost letters.
A slightly out of date cheat sheet to the Toronto (or, Canadian) poetry scene.
On philosophers and poets. (#2 is quite nice. #3 suggests Plato was a successful philosopher and a failed poet, which only makes sense if you hate life. How does Wittgenstein fit into #3? In #6, the mathematician would favor the poet.)

Fisticuffslessness

2008-07-11T02:31:00.000-04:00

Our panel: Marcus Boon moderating, Alexis Muirhead, Michael Maranda, Kenneth Goldsmith, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Sonja Ahlers talking. The topic: Appropriation, a.k.a. "stealing shit".

Marcus lays out a history of originality. It is not an original history but it will do. Originality didn't use to be so important. You know, medieval times. But then the Romantics. Also emerging at that time: copyright law and globalization! Also, the reaction against this isn't new: Dada appropriated, and appropriating African art. [I wonder: Nationalism? Dvořák? Messiaen, even?] Also: Communism took issue! But now, ach, DNA is being copyrighted. Anyway, Marcus wants to know what you do.

Alexis writes fanfic. She writes Due South fanfic. Some writers (Anne Rice) hate when their work is used for fanfic, some (J.K. Rowling) seem cool with it. Fanfic is female and queer and thus can fly under the radar -- some people just don't want to think about it! [I think about Todd Haynes finding out about fanfic after Velvet Goldmine came out and being surprised and delighted by the whole thing.]

Michael offers an artist's statement, but it's appropriated from someone else, which is to say it's a quote. From Italo Calvino. Then he talks about turmeric, as a traditional medicine that in 1995 was patented by a pharmaceutical company, but people complained, and it got overturned. He mentions many other legal cases. He has done his homework. It is interesting. He is soft-spoken. He wends from turmeric to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and beyond.

Kenny says the internet writes better than writers. He makes an analogy: internet:writing::photography:painting. He says, some people are writing as if the internet never happened. He says this as if it is not a good thing, as if those writers are doing something wrong. He asks what writers are to do, now that the internet. He says, writers don't write, they organize.

NourbeSe ties appropriation in with academic practices and with the footnote. She ties appropriation with the 80s sense of inappropriate appropriation of voice, which was a bad thing. [Later I think: That was the most interesting connection anyone made, and no one went with it.] She has been writing from a text of a legal case involving an incident in which a ship's crew dumped slaves because they could make insurance money. She makes a metaphor involving the desiccated legal language of the original document and her attempt to replenish it with water, but water is where those people drowned.

Sonja also provides quotations as a sort of artist's statement, but she has several quotes, and presents them somewhat randomly. Her work, like Michael's, is also visual, though his is more fine art, and hers is more zine art, but now zine art is fine art. She makes, you might say, visual poetry collages. Also she lives in Whitehorse, which is in the Yukon. [I think: I thought that the Yukon, like the Ukraine, now prefers to be "the"-less, but perhaps not.] She likes to appropriate "gently". She likes to preserve the ephemeral, what would be forgotten anyways.

Is that everyone? Yes, but wait Kenny is reminded of when Warhol displayed his Brillo paintings and they were a huge success and he made lots of money and then the guy who designed the Brillo packaging came in and was pissed cause he was a frustrated abstract expressionist. Oh and also he is reminded of how a bunch of people came up with a silent music piece at around the same time but Cage got the credit and at some point he was asked about this and he said "I was the first to bring silence to the market" and isn't that ironic because Cage is a Zen Buddhist but here he is using market speak! [And I think: Oh, Kenny, you know Cage well enough to not actually find that ironic.]

OK, well, Marcus wants to know what signing your name is all about. How does that work, when you steal shit?

Sonja thinks that, now that her zine work is art work, signing her name means something different.

Kenny talks about economies. Some are functional (and make people money). Some are broken (and make people poetry). Ubu stuff doesn't make any money; it's part of the broken economy. There is a John Lennon piece on Ubu, but it is nothing anyone would pay for, so the Lennon estate don't seem to care. And what makes more money than Lennonania? But only in the legitimate economy. He says, once you leave the legitimate economy you learn that copyright law is an illusion.

OK, says Marcus, but that doesn't really get to my question about signing your name. You signed your name to Day, the book where you copied an entire issue of the New York Times. What was that about?

Kenny thinks that Day was the "greatest book ever written". More specifically, it was a newspaper, and Marshall McLuhan (or someone) thinks that any copy of a daily newspaper is the "greatest book ever written", so Kenny will appropriate that comment.

No one breaks out into fisticuffs.

NourbeSe didn't want to use her name on her book, the one about the drowned slaves. But there were economic issues involved, because the publisher could use her name to make more money, and she could use the money too. Kenny pops in with an O RLY?, surprised that she makes any money at all at poetry. Anyhoo, she and her publishers decided that they could say the book is "as told to the author by..." which nicely ties it in with slave narratives.

Michael signed his Kant-based book with his name, and his Melville-based book with Melville's name, and these days signs his name when someone else is publishing it, and doesn't if he's publishing it.

Kenny sent a copy of Day to the New York Times and believes they threw it out. Marcus brings up how Brian Kim Stefans did something with the New York Times, and Kenny tells about how Brian took the nytimes.com design and replaced all the content with anti-war texts, and he got a cease-and-desist. But it was more for stealing the look-and-feel rather than the content.

Alexis points out that she, like most fanfic authors, writes anonymously. There is, she says, a culture of fear in fanfic, because they could get ceases-and-desists or other legal action should CTV decide that they don't care for Due South fanfic. So they stay anonymous and write elaborate intros about how they don't own the characters, won't make any money off this, and are just in it for kicks. [But does Kenny "own" that edition of the New York Times? He might not have made any money off the book, but surely The Scream paid for his trip to Toronto, and probably gave him an honorarium as well, due in no small part to Day. How broken is Kenny's economy?]

Kenny asks Alexis if she is an amateur. She says she is. He asks if she considers it a hobby or does she think she has made a body of work. She thinks it's a body of work. She thinks it's literature, but she thinks most fanfic writers probably don't think that about their work. I think somewhere in here NourbeSe made a comment suggesting that anything you do that doesn't earn money could be called a hobby, sure, why not.

No one breaks out into fisticuffs.

Marcus wants to know whether all this leads to a "gift economy".

Michael thinks it's more of a "service economy". More like McDonald's than Starbucks, because of the lack of benefits. But Revenue Canada will let you write all sorts of things off if you're a writer, and "the promise of income doesn't need to be one's lifetime". So, yeah, keep writing things off. Thanks, Canada! [Not that I can earn revenue here, except through my school.]

Kenny thinks Ubu is a gift economy. Ubu doesn't ask permission, so they get things done. MoMA asks permission, so they don't have much on their site. Go Ubu! Michael wants to know if that's a gift or a theft economy (he means no disrespect). Kenny says that no one is stopping them, so that makes it a gift.

No one breaks out into fisticuffs.

Marcus wants to know what everyone's attitude is towards appropriation, or the materials appropriated?

Sonja collects and organizes and falls in love with things, with images. [I think: collecting and organizing everything you fall in love with -- is this the story of my life?]

Alexis wants to get back to the gift economy thing, because that term comes up a lot in fanficland. For instance, she will write a fanfic for someone specifically for their birthday. Or to trade for someone who will make an image for her.

No one breaks out into fisticuffs, not even when question from the audience is solicited.

Someone in the audience [update: apparently, Paul Dutton] wants to know about legal retribution and John Oswald. Kenny points out that the Plunderphonics stuff has been reproduced everywhere online and so it seems that the legal injunction was useless. Marcus finds legal decisions to be but a moment in an ongoing history about an issue, and that the relationship between the law and lived experience is in no way a one-to-one correspondence [and how often have I brought that point up in history classes?]. Michael sees copyright violation as an excuse to bring down the law, or so my note says, although I can't remember what that meant.

OK, audience, you've said enough! Thank you for not fisticuffsing! Marcus would like to end with a zinger: Does anything belong to anyone?

Alexis: Yes. Fanfic is a fear-based community, and they are constantly aware of ownership issues and limits and the ethics of claiming the characters are "their" characters. [I think: Well, I think a set of things that are not easy to write out in a parenthetical -- and also I am no expert, and feel like I'm stepping on toes here -- on about the nature of fanfic authorship and ownership, how they can't own their characters for it to properly be fanfic, how admitting this Due South mountie was not the Due South mountie would fuck everything up.]

Michael: "It's complicated."

Kenny: Legitimate economies are fine, but they're not the only economies.

NourbeSe: Yes but [inaudible -- it's changing?].

Sonja: Yes and no. Use common sense if you appropriate.

. . .

Then it was over, and there was a brief and fisticuffs-free intermission before a reading, which was thoroughly great and which I probably won't really go into here, but big ups to derek beaulieu for writing poems that I no longer have to write, and for Rob Read and his budgie poem, the first time I've seen a sound poet pull off polyphonic sound poetry on his lonesome without electronics or anything but plenty of lip and tongue action.

But yes: The panel did not go terribly deep, nor was it terribly energetic, but it was surprisingly broad. Kenny and Michael are the obvious go-to people for this sort of topic, but bringing in fanfic and zine art were great ways of going with this topic, and NourbeSe had interesting things to say on the topic that were very different from what Kenny and Michael were saying, but unfortunately she got a bit lost in the shuffle. Alas.

Polyphony sucks

2008-07-10T13:01:00.000-04:00

[Of course, I forgot to scan/photograph the illustration where Feldman has doodled "POLYPHONY SUCKS", so I should have gone with a different title. It's on page 158 of the book. It's cute.]

The essays from the first decade or so collected in Morton Feldman's Give My Regards To Eighth Street make frustrating reading. They're suffused with the petty complaints, the pointless character assassinations, and the implausible approbations of an ambitious young artist clearing a path:

Messiaen on the other hand is more robust... Messiaen is artistically Gallic and considerably more abstract -- remember he's a younger man. He is fascinated by complicated rhythmic cells derived from the East and shows a curious preoccupation with bird calls.

Out of this poor man's aviary a sustained piano chord in unbelievably bad taste raised the audience to a state of exaltation. I closed my eyes. Slowly the same bourgeois family came into focus. This time they were endlessly climbing hills -- or was it always the same hill? In the frenzy around me I couldn't quite determine. Let me say only that Paul Jacobs's playing of the piano part was so brilliant, so matter of fact, so Olympian, that one felt he should be climbing not hills, but mountains. This, unfortunately, ruined the outing for the other members of the family, but that is merely incidental.

"Mr. Schuller's History Lesson", 1963

This is, you know, fun enough, I suppose. I'm not sure Messiaen's famous bird calls are any more "curious" a thing to get fascinated by than, say, Turkish rugs (although perhaps Feldman wasn't fascinated by them yet, in 1963?) or mushrooms. But connecting Messiaen with the bourgeois family is something Feldman chose to do, it's in Feldman's head -- music is not that programmatic! -- and it's unclear that anyone else would have made that kind of connection. So this passage is amusing, maybe, and gives us a look at how young Feldman (about two years older than me when he wrote this) thought, but I'm not sure it's very... helpful.

After a while, the essays stop trying to tear down "respectable" composers and are satisfied in offering up the fruits of Feldman's wanderings. "The Future Of Local Music", a set of anecdotes, doodles ("POLYPHONY SUCKS"), and reinterpretations of artistic problems, is the highlight of the book. There, he tells stories involving other composers, and sometimes to disagree with them. But he is not quite so interested in calling them bourgeois, clucking at their interests, and washing his hands of them:

Stockhausen asked me for my secret, "What's your secret?" And I said, "I don't have any secret, but if I do have a point of view, it's that sounds are very much like people. And if you push them, they push you back. So, if I have a secret: don't push the sounds around." Karlheinz leans over to me and says: "Not even a little bit?"

"The Future of Local Music", 1984

And so why does he make the switch? Let us say it is entirely my fault. Ten days after I was born, he wrote this:

August 12, 1975

Until about ten years ago I wrote often about music. I no longer do. The writing was usually polemical in content. In recent years I do not want to argue with talent. I want to be thankful for it regardless from where it comes.

"Statement", 1975

Feldman was going on fifty when he wrote that; if you listen to these fantastic conversations between Cage and Feldman from nine years earlier (and if you're at all interested in either of them, you should) you can hear Feldman struggling to accept this position. I think it's a good position, and I'm struggling to accept it as well.

(Nevertheless, tonight I'm going to see Kenneth Goldsmith, who is talented yet antagonizing, so that should test my mettle.)

Continuing to Scream

2008-07-09T16:41:00.000-04:00

I dipped into another of The Scream's events, this time to see a revival of the Lexiconjury Reading Series. This gimmick this time: Have three "younger" poets read, and pair each with an "older" poet who will do some sort of collaboration with them. Each collaboration was done differently -- Steve Venright transformed and enlimericked Alixandra Bamford's poems, Sharron Harris illustrated Natalie Zina Walschots's series of poems about supervillians, and Paul Dutton joined Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl in that way that sound poets do. Norðdahl is of the "fast and articulate" school of sound poets, along the lines of Christian Bök (whom he read a poem dedicated to, an Icelandic monovocalic piece in which the only vowel was ö), and was a treat, and he and Dutton performed together quite well, in that way that sound poets do.

During the first break, Jay MillAr (who I guess went to the mARK oWEns school of capitalization) set up his mobile bookshop, which had a terrific collection of poetry books, and oof I just wasn't in a position to throw down a few hundred on poetry books. Not just yet. But I was agog at the selection. It included books by Kaia and Kasey, which again made me a touch homesick.

Afterwards there was an "Open Michelle", and I decided to stop being a total wallflower and read. The rules were that you had to read a cover poem and one of your own. I mostly took my time saying "hi" and explaining who the hell I was, lurking at these readings. Eventually I read Joseph Bradshaw's "'You,' by George Oppen" (from his new book This Ocean, and maybe more on that later) and then "for Gale Czerski".

The open mic was generally pretty great, and it was good to hear the variety of poetries that people are working on. And to actually meet and say hello to people this time. And this post has been far more LiveJournal-y than I want Buggeryville posts to be, so I'll leave it at that.

Thursday night: Kenneth Goldsmith, Michael Maranda, and others on a panel about copyright and appropriation. Should be a treat!

Ennodius

2008-07-08T17:54:00.000-04:00

I finally found the complete Ennodius (in Latin) (see also). It turns out that the beloved rabbit/lion poem is part of a set of epigrams about hermaphrodites (or a hermaphrodite). I decided to translate a few. These are, uh, not the most literal translations; Ennodius is not quite Dorothy Parker.

Exige mendaces, populorum uxorcula, barbas,
Ne minuant quaestum mascula labra tuum.

To a hermaphroditic whore

Lose the 'stache;
you'll make more cash.

. . .

Ludit in ancipiti constans fallacia sexu:
Femineum patitur: peragit cum turpia, mas est.

Your sex is shady,
it's either/or.
A pleasant lady,
but male? A boor.