Buggeryville

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...)

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.

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.

After over 13 years of providing a venue for poetry of all stripes in Portland, Dan Raphael's "I Love Mondays!" series at Borders has unexpectedly ended.

For budgetary reasons, Borders let their events coordinator go, and cancelled all future events, including Dan's series.

I was one of about 270 poets who read in the series; I read there twice. They were some of my favorite readings to give. Dan had catholic booking tastes; the three poets at a typical reading would come from very different scenes. They were almost always Portland-area poets. Dan has a strong interest in getting people from different communities talking to one another; you can see clear evidence for this (if you know your Portland poets) in the scheduling for Poetland, the 80-poets-in-8-hours event that he organized a few years ago.

Borders readings also had a lot of people in the audience who didn't go to many poetry readings, or who were just wandering through the store and checking out what was going on.

Now, reading with people who aren't your peers for an audience who aren't immediately interested in what you're doing is, perhaps, a bit offputting for most poets. But I agreed with Dan's take, that this sort of outreach is important, exciting, and should serve as a challenge to poets. I went into these readings determined to make some sort of connection, even if a tentative one, to that haphazard audience, and to try to do it without completely pandering. It pushed me as a writer and stimulated my thinking about a poet's role in relationship to the community -- both the poet's obvious community of likeminded poets and readers, but also the greater community of potential readers, or of people who, haphazardly, could be exposed to a poetry reading.

Portland's poetry scene will be missing a vital and quietly characteristic element without Dan's Borders reading series, and it's a damn shame it's over. Thanks, Dan, for so many years of poetry and community organizing.

Dan's hoping to do a final event or two, and I'm sure you'll find word of it here (even though I won't be in town for it) or over at the Spare Room website.

Meanwhile, here's an article the Willamette Week did on Dan nearly a decade ago. Hopefully they'll do a follow-up now.

Maryrose lent me a copy of Paper Air, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1980), all about Jackson Mac Low, who has been a gangly influence on me as a poet. I finally sat down and read it, since I'll have to give it back soon. Here are a few notes, in case you don't have your own copy. Hopefully no one will mind that I'm copying reasonably large chunks of it -- if you do mind, let me know.

1. From an interview with Gil Ott:

GIL: To what extent do you consider your writing a political act?

JACKSON: [...cutting a bit about the langpo attitude to politics and writing...]

But I'm not clear as to how writing is a political act. If any act that involves other people is political, and thus any public use of language is political, mine must be political. However, it is more directly political when I compose performance works that give performers a great deal of freedom within a given structure and when I deal directly with political issues. [...examples of texts that use political texts as source materials...]

GIL: Is any use of language not political? Is Wordsworth nonpolitical?

JACKSON: Oh, Wordsworth was often directly political! He wrote political poems, both radical and reactionary. Early in life, he wrote several poems sympathetic to the French Revolution, but when he was older, he wrote a long sonnet sequence in praise of capital punishment!

Then again, if you mean by politics something that affects other people, working with language in ways other than the usual ones is political because it can affect people in unexpected ways, change the views of language, of thought -- even of society or of human relationships in general!

But is that what we mean by politics? When people make claims that poetry is politically effective, I suspect they mean something a little stronger than "it affects other people". They seem to mean that it's especially effective in affecting people. After all, what stimulus doesn't affect people?

(If anyone knows the name of that capital punishment sonnet cycle, let me know.) (UPDATE: Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death.)

2. There's an essay by Ron Silliman about how, with so little of Jackson's work published at that point (and much of it is still unpublished, I believe), it is difficult for people not in New York (where Jackson lived; Silliman was in the Bay Area at this point) to fully appreciate or even have a sense of the scope of Jackson's project.

There is also this:

If [some of Jackson's] texts are to be understood as scores, however, they are of a unique type. Robert Bly is equally a poet of performance, yet his presentational vocabulary is so narrow in comparison to Mac Low's, and his texts so thoroughly adequated to the imaginative life of college undergraduates, that one can approach his writing with virtually no previous contact with poetry and find something. The texts of the projectivists were likewise scores, always aimed, however, toward a model of heightened ordinary speech. Speech in Mac Low's work, on the other hand, is a tool, not a goal. It can be, and often is, substantially altered, in pace, pitch, duration and volume.

Oral manipulation (not identical with sound poetry, although certainly moving in that direction) has no major precedent in American literature. [...examples of possible but not quite good enough precedents by Jerome Rothenberg and Celia Zukofsky...]

Silliman is always already Silliman. There will always be a Silliman.

Well, it's unclear that Bly's use of a limited (constrained) vocabulary in order to have a (political?) effect on an audience (one that is not limited to the poetry-loving cognoscenti) is less of a "tool" than Jackson's use of that same vocabulary on a different audience. I also suspect that Jackson's poetry seems to employ a broad variety of strategies and vocabularies for those of us who have a taste for it; to those who don't, it probably is all one strategy and vocabulary: Noise. (Except for the Light poems, right?) Similarly, I suspect Bly's poems, so homogeneous to us Mac Lovians, seem nauced and varied to those who are knee-deep in them. This seems like the poetic equivalent of "All [people of some other ethnicity] look alike."

Also, I never expected to be defending Bly against Silliman. I feel really old all of a sudden. But I own almost all of Silliman's books and none of Bly's: But you can't make statements like that based only on your taste, right?

Later in the essay:

Here is the man who demonstrated, fifteen years ahead of Clark Coolidge, that content is texture.

"Content is texture" is a nice angle on Jackson (or writing in general), and puts content in its place. But -- oh yes, it was Clark Coolidge who was the only other person to use content as texture! That was who we thought first came up with that idea! Not Gertrude Stein, not Laurence Sterne, not whoever came up with lorem ipsum... Semper Silliman.

3. In the middle of all these densely typeset pieces that run far longer than any blog post would, there's a small and typical Larry Eigner poem. It is slight and touching, like most of his work, and an enormous breath of fresh air after the density of what surrounds it. Remind me to employ that strategy more often.

4. Armand Schwerner's essay is perhaps my favorite of the the lot, though I'm not sure how much additional light it sheds on Jackson -- really, I'm not sure how much light any of this sheds on him, for those of us who have lived with his work for a decade or so, though it probably shed a good deal of light when it first came out. But in Schwerner's essay there is a simplicity, a clarity, and a hesitance to make any too-broad statements, or pin too much down on his own sense of the world, that I like. There is a humility.

"The poet's not a literary historian, not primarily in any case." Which is true enough, although they often do a better job of it than the professional literary historians. But poets can get bogged down -- not to pick on Silliman too much (though I suspect he relishes it), but his recent look at the conceptual vs. flarf kerfuffle, with its zealous attempts to align this current movement with that historical movement and to fully flesh out the mapping, is a good example of the problem -- a possibly helpful historical analogy gets overdeveloped past the point of usefulness, to where odd statements are made:

Like Personism, [Conceptual Poetry is] not about individual works of great art. It doesn’t overvalue personal creativity. It opts for fun. And it’s nostalgic for traditional forms – Kenny Goldsmith & Christian Bök, to name two, are deeply retro in terms of the projects they choose. Their relationship to fluxus & dada are as direct as Ashbery’s are to Stevens & Auden. All they’ve done is to switch the nameplates.

So remind me which of those qualities is not true for flarf? Silliman, like many poets, can't pass up a ludicrously extended metaphor, because it makes for good and fun writing, even if it makes for terrible and implausible historical analysis.

Annnnyway. More Schwerner, on a topic I've broached here before:

I have often enough experienced -- what? boredom? at poetry readings. No that's not exactly it. It was a vague guilt at the fact that my attention would wander and I'd go in and out, guilt because I was supposed to 'pay attention', be fair, give myself to the work. I've talked about the situation with a number of poets recently, Chuck Stein comes to mind, and Maureen Owen, and of course I find I'm not alone. Some comfort? For two minutes. But what if the 'poem' is of such a nature as not to require implicitly the kind of attention we, most of us, assume is demanded of us? Suzuki Roshi says, in a discussion of concentration in a Zen context, 'To concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes...' Now if are members of an audience listening to a string of sentences connected through rational essayistic modes, we know how to listen an drefer ourselves to the minor sub-system of logic, and stay with it. The listening to poetry however sets up a field of vaster potential occurrences, closer in their nature to the swinging door of consciousness which process itself clarifies the illusory nature of an apparently solid 'I'. In addition we are animals which react more powerfully to the mantric particularities of hearing words and sounds than to the processes of reading them? Poetry's originally chant or song; writing comes late, and reading. So to David Abell's comment, 'Why do I find the STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK electrifying when Jackson reads them and why are tehy more inert on the page? Is it their nature or our experience of them? Perhaps what they do is bring you to yourself more.' And in fact the STANZAS are explosively telling at suddenly experienced nexuses, persistent in their overtones, which surface in the memory unexpecedly like dream fragments without keys. 'Tuberous begonias...'

So, that is nice, and might be worth keeping in mind when you come hear me read tomorrow -- not that I'll read anything as effective as the Stanzas. But he throws out David Abell's name there as if we'd know who he was. But, of course, those of us in Portland do know David Abel very well, and we know how to spell his last name...

I want to argue with Neoliberal Poetry and yet it's mostly because their heads are so much in the right place that the few parts that make me uncomfortable make me very uncomfortable.

I am not convinced that the Surrealists, the Beats, or the Situationists were politically effective. I am not convinced that "taunting priests in the streets" and "mocking the bourgoisie" -- though I understand the impulse! -- are, in themselves, politically useful or even humane goals. I am not convinced that "utopia" -- "noplace" -- is a worthy goal, or that anyone who thinks they know what the best possible world looks like should be trusted.

But I do roll my eyes with them at the examples of unengaged poetics they point out. And I do think they have their hearts in the right place. And while I distrust a poetics that aims towards "utopia", I am in favor of one that aims towards improving particular situations, one that is aimed not at poets but at people who aren't aware of how poetry works in their lives, one that is built more on listening and understanding than on writing.

(I'm unhappy with how I've phrased that last sentence. This is all a draft.)