Buggeryville

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).

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.

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.

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.)

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.