Buggeryville

"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.

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.

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.

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

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.