Buggeryville

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.

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.

(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.

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?

We often talk about the impossibility of being a poet without a cat, but how can you be a poet without QAT?

So lately I've been playing Scrabble (well, Scrabulous) on the Facebook with poets.

I prefer to play open-dictionary Scrabble, which rewards the suspicion of words rather than the strict understanding of what counts as a word and what doesn't. It seems more poetic.

I prefer to play SOWPODS rather than TWL, which is to say, to play using the international wordlist rather than the American wordlist, because SOWPODS contains more words (including a few that are patently real words, like DA, and words that are really useful, like ZO [a variant of one of my favorite words, DZO] and CH and ST). Also, I might know a certain word is acceptable, but forget whether it's TWL-acceptable or not. That is not as much fun. Crazy words are fun. So I prefer SOWPODS.

Also, I am pretty good at it. My rank (which is done chess-style) on Scrabulous is currently a respectable 1561. If my chess ranking (which, when I was playing much more often, peaked nervously somewhere around 1350) were that high, I'd be pretty content.

I've only played against maybe three or four poets (most of my poet-games have been with Kasey Mohammad or Michael Kelleher), which is clearly not an adequate sample size for me to have much to say about the Scrabular poetics of those who identify as poets compared with that of those who don't. Also it's only led to one poem (that I've kept) so far. So I encourage others to hit me up with a game. Remember, "regular" (not "challenge") game, SOWPODS dictionary, if you don't mind -- though I'm not the type to turn any game down.