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...)

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

For whatever reason, I've been listening to Tears for Fears' Songs From The Big Chair a lot (well, more than necessary, at least) in the last few months. And, in particular, whenever I listen to "Head Over Heels", I feel a bit frustrated, because there are things going on in that song which cannot be replicated in poetry. (It doesn't frustrate me at all as a songwriter.)

There are plenty of things poetry can do that pop songs can't do, and I never feel frustrated that my songs can't take advantage of elements that formally work well in poems. There are plenty of other aspects of other genres of art that I don't try to fit into yet other genres. I don't worry about how to capture brushstrokes in a poem, for instance. (Though, how would you?)

"Head Over Heels" has a vocal line that engages with the rest of the song's interlocking instrumental contraption but stands apart and disguises how simple, complex, strange, or overly familiar it is. Something about that particular set of relationships would be very nice to capture in a linear stream of wordlikethings. (But if you want to recreate such an effect in a different medium, you can't just try and recreate each of its parts -- you have to recreate it in its entirety.)

I only claimed to offer a crib in my last post, not a translation. And yet...

In his translator's note to Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (Mal d'archive), Eric Prenowitz makes a cheeky claim: Being the reader of a translation is like being a little Jewish baby boy receiving his circumcision.

Or at least, if the translation is from a language that you can't read. Because, as Derrida points out in the book (which, it turns out, is as much about Freud's Jewishness and his circumcision as it is about archives), the circumcision is contract entered into by someone who is not able to sign his name, who doesn't have the ability to evaluate what he's getting into. Likewise when you read a translation, "you read something you cannot read, in any case something you will not have read once you are done reading. Like an infant who can neither comprehend nor respond." (106) And yet there is something authoritative or authoritarian about the translator, foisting this upon you...

Actually, you know what? This analogy is pushy, strained, and flawed, and it places the translator in the role of G-d in an egregiously tacky way. We had a fun few seconds with it, but maybe let's pretend this never happened. (Even though, you who perhaps have read the book will notice, I am archiving that it did happen. Teehee!)

vir facie, mulier gestu, sed crure quod ambo,
jurgia naturae nullo discrimine solvens,
es lepus, et tanti conculcas colla leonis.
--Ennodius, c. 500

So, I cannot make sense of this poem. Or, I can make sense of it. It seems totally clear. I feel like I "understand" it. I think about it. I tell people about it, and have done so for the year or so that I've known about it. It stays with me, and makes appearances in my life at the nicest moments. It is a good friend. But I don't really have a context for it, and I don't know how or why it was written.

Also I can't translate it. I can crib it, and I can point out some of what is going on in the poetry, but I can't reforge it in English. Except I'm pretty happy with "You're a rabbit" for "es lepus". So, two words down. (Update: Although technically a lepus is a hare, not a rabbit. I was always told they were the same thing, and certainly Bugs Bunny cartoons agreed, but apparently not.)

Ennodius was a Gallo-Roman bishop around 500 and is mostly remembered for some theological writing and for leaving a bunch of letters that offer historians information on some of the political and religious issues of the time. And he wrote some poems, including some Martial-like epigrams, and I suppose this poem is one of them. I found it in Thomas Stehling's Medieval Poems of Male Love and Friendship, though you could argue that this poem maybe doesn't strictly fit that title. Stehling also published a translation, but it was really a crib.

(There's a nice comment on that Amazon page, by the way.)

Here's my stab at a crib:

A man in your appearance, a woman in your gestures, but in between your thighs, a bit of both, / resolving nature's quarrel by ignoring any distinction, / you're a rabbit, and you trample the throat of such a big lion.

One doesn't expect sixth century bishops to write epigrams praising the ability of hermaphrodites to destroy gender binaries and overpower nature itself! And I might be too stuck in my twenty-first century mind, but poem seems entirely positive about it! This is what I don't understand.

Anyway, I'm going to think about this for a few more years while I'm in grad school. I should go look up a few more of his epigrams. Or more references to rabbits vs. lions in late antiquity/early medieval times. Hey, let me get back to you.

Narración

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(¿del mismo qué?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Narrazione

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(di quale stesso?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Berättelse

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(av vad?)
(?!?)
(!!)

-=-=-

敘事

<什么东西?>

-=-=-

Spanish. Italian. Swedish. Chinese. More info.

Narration

(!)
(!)
(!)
Et qu'a t il donc fait ? Eh bien !
(!)

-=-=-

Нарратив

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(чего?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

French. Translator: M. J. Roy. Russian. Translator: unclear. More details.

Narrative

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!?)
(?)
(??)
(what same?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Erzählung

(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(!)
(?!)
(?)
(??)
(wesselbigen?)
(?!?)
(!!!)

-=-=-

Taken from the parenthetical comments of Karl Marx quoting Wilhelm Roscher in Das Kapital, vol 1. Translated into English by Ben Fowkes (Penguin, p.314, n3).

(Any significant updates are in this color.)

0 First off, I want to thank the people at Lewis & Clark and at PSU who made this weekend's poetry symposia happen.

0.a (For those who didn't attend, they featured some "big names" in experimental poetry: Lyn Hejinian, Hank Lazer, and Joan Retallack, as well as one of the biggest "names" in avant-garde literature/poetry criticism, who was, as we were reminded a few times, until recently the president of the MLA: Marjorie Perloff.)

0.b Poetry is not rare in Portland. Experimental poetry is no longer rare in Portland. Extended events involving experimental poetry are still a little too rare in Portland, but there are one or two each year. Poetry criticism is extremely rare in Portland, and mostly consists of Rodney. But famous experimental poets still rarely read in Portland.

0.b.1 No, really, I might be the second most active poetry critic in Portland. Please prove me wrong. This is a bit of overstatement that I might write about soon. But I still encourage you to prove me wrong.

0.b.2 It's possible that by "famous" I mean "the kind you have to pay traveling expenses for to get them to Portland".

0.c "Experimental" is a problematic term for poetry, but I'll use it for now to refer to a group of poets who have been clustered together for whatever reasons, and who may or may not be distinguishable in a blind taste-test from poets who are not "experimental".


1 One of the nice things about these events was that, for almost the entire time, I was paying full attention to the readings.

1.a My friends who don't attend poetry readings regularly mention that they lose focus during readings, that their minds wander. They think this makes them feel like they are bad audiences for poetry readings. My mind wanders all the time at readings. It does not seem like a bad thing. Drifting off can allow the text to work on other levels, and where your mind wanders off to might meet up with the text in unexpected and delightful ways. Nevertheless, it sure can be nice to find yourself actively engaged with someone else's mind for an extended period.

1.a.1 It is even nicer what that someone has the sort of mind you enjoy being engaged with.

1.a.2 But the frustration of engaging with a mind that you find all wrong can sometimes be nice as well, in its way, in how it provokes you to shore up your own thoughts.

1.a.2.a They are so wrong, which just confirms that you are so right.


2 All of which is meant to serve as an opening move in untying myself from the knots of anger and vitriol that Marjorie Perloff contorted me into this weekend. Without, perhaps, disturbing the sense of calm, delight, and excitement about what poetry can be that Joan Retallack (in particular) inspired or reawoke in me.

2.a Poetry as a systemic, organized, semiprofessionalized force.

2.a.1 Poetry as "the poetry community".

2.b "Methodical doubt", as Retallack said, and as I wrote onto my too-small paper coffee cup.

2.c "Ontological poof", as Maryrose misheard, and as I considered txting to Seth.


3 If Marjorie Perloff recommended a book to me, it would be a good book. If Joan Retallack or Lyn Hejinian recommended a book to me, it would be a good and surprising book.

3.a Marjorie Perloff has been reading The Arcades Project and the controversial new translation of War and Peace.

3.b Lyn Hejinian has been reading up on late nineteenth century technophobia.

3.b.1 The doorbell: Dangerous new technology that will startle people and cause heart attacks and will disrupt and tear down the family.

3.c Marjorie Perloff reads strategically. She hedges her bets.

3.c.1 With the exception of a single Japanese-German writer, I knew every one of the cultural touchpoints that Perloff touched during her two papers and two panel discussions, during over two hours of motormouthed namedropping. I had not read all of them, but I knew of them enough to know when she was getting the names wrong.

3.c.2 I knew them enough to know that she could have come up with better examples from her own reading to illustrate some of the points that she wanted to talk about. If you want a modernist predecessor of a person who writes in a foreign language to estrange themselves from their text, you do not turn to the Cantos, as Perloff did, you turn to Beckett.

3.c.3 I do not actually consider myself all that well read in poetry. I am better read than your average so-and-so on the street, sure, but I spend time with David, Maryrose, Rodney, and others who have read far more of this stuff than I have. I am a dabbler compared with them. I do not read the journals, I do not know that poet who did that marvelous book of translations in the 60s before taking her life, I do not try to keep up with such things. My interest in poetry is no longer in the system that is called poetry, so I don't keep up with it. Nevertheless, Marjorie Perloff, famous critic, alleged expert in the field, made me feel phenomenally well read.


4 Obviously it is not what you read that counts, but what you do with it. One thing you could try doing is to construct some sort of historical narrative out of it. You could try to explain why poetry styles change over time.

4.a I mean, I might recommend that you start by showing that poetry styles in fact do change over time, and that it isn't just what we talk about when we talk about poetry that changes. No, really. Try. I'd be curious to see if you could get anywhere with that project.

4.b History is, perhaps, not as good at showing continuity over time.

4.c Either way, your job as a historian is to show, discover, invent, whatever -- to note potential paths of causation between one thing and another.

4.d So, Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project.

4.d.1 It mostly consists of clippings, lifted whole, with minimal connective critical apparatus!

4.d.2 Many of those clippings are in French, while Benjamin's text was in German, and it switches back and forth between the two!

4.d.3 Benjamin ties together different parts of the text together using set-off keywords, through which you are encouraged to jump to another related section!

4.e So, what does this remind us of?

4.e.1 Clippings? Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, in which he retypes a Sunday New York Times in its entirety! Or maybe sampling!

4.e.2 Languages? Poems written in more than one language are "on the rise", we were told repeatedly throughout the weekend!

4.e.2.a The proof of this goes something like, "Well, the poets in In The American Tree (an early 80s anthology of language poetry) weren't writing in multiple languages so much, whereas the poets who would be in a similar anthology today would be more likely to write in multiple languages."

4.e.2.b This proof, of course, asks that you take In The American Tree as representative of all the poetic activity that was going on in the late 70s/early 80s, which is a mind-boggling proposition.

4.e.3 Keywords sending you to other sections? It's hypertext! Click!

4.f Perloff spent maybe twenty minutes explaining 4.d.1-3 and 4.e.1-3. This was the centerpiece and culmination of her hour-long talk on Saturday, which was part of the introduction of a book she's writing on "unoriginal genius" or something along those lines. An expansion on Kenneth Goldsmith's ideas, it seems.

4.f.1 No, really, like twenty minutes to explain what I explained in a dozen sentences.

4.f.2 Was she drawing a historical connection between The Arcades Project and Day, and sampling, and polyglot poetry, and hypertext?

4.f.3 Well, no. I mean, you should probably hope not. The Arcades Project wasn't published in English until 1999, a little late to influence hypertext, sampling, and polyglot poetry. And anyway, there are clearer precedents for all of these.

4.f.3.a Especially for sampling, ffs.

4.f.4 There are also precedents for The Arcades Project's use of all these forms.

4.f.4.a The sampling is far closer to a daybook -- or, lets say, to a historian keeping files of the source materials that he's going to use as a reference -- than to musical sampling as it's been developed in the past few decades (which is perhaps closer to how Biblical quotes are used in medieval European writing, though not historically related, of course).

4.f.4.b The polyglot aspects are not remotely remarkable for a work of European scholarship in the early twentieth century.

4.f.4.c The hypertext elements are like encyclopedias and Bible concordances.

4.f.5 Let's not forget that The Arcades Project really was just a guy's notes and initial stabs at a standard critical thinkpiece that ended up getting published as is.

4.f.6 So it would be difficult to prove a historical connection between The Arcades Project and the works that Perloff points out are similar to it. And there are works that share these features that The Arcades Project probably does have a historical connection to, and works that share these features with the more contemporary works that they do have a historical connection to, but none of that is what Perloff wanted to talk about.

4.f.7 Marjorie Perloff is not a historian.

4.g Well, OK. Perhaps she never claimed to be. (Although I am told she claimed as much more than once during the symposia.) After all, she's primarily identified as a critic. Perhaps she is highlighting the similarities to suggest that reading strategies that are typical for one of those texts might be useful for reading the other texts. Polyglot poetry is kind of like The Arcades Project, and we can read polyglot poetry like we would read The Arcades Project, or vice versa.

4.g.1 [This is where I would summarize what she said along those lines, had she said anything at all along those lines.]

4.g.2 [OK, I guess she suggested that The Arcades Project is funsies for employing these strategies just like Day or polyglot poetry is funsies for employing these strategies.]

4.g.2.a [It is hard to imagine a more surface reading of these texts, one which would fail to point at what is actually funsies in them.]

4.g.3 She did a close reading on a list of shop names, and was convincing enough in her theory that the list was organized suggestively and poetically, that items in the list were not arbitrarily put one after the other but were done so to be suggestive. This is a good example of using a poetic technique to pull meaning out of what might be considered, at first, a nonpoetic text.

4.g.3.a But, then again, it has nothing to do with the points of similarity outlined above.

4.h Except that, ultimately, the point seemed to be that The Arcades Project could be profitably read using poetic strategies. Also, it employed these strategies that contemporary things labeled poetry employ.

4.h.1 Perloff spent most of her time suggesting this rather than doing this.

4.h.2 But all texts can be profitably read using poetic strategies. That the nature of poetic strategies is to render profit. Poetry is the irrigation of dry fields of text.

4.h.2.a Though I'd love it if you would show otherwise.

4.h.3 So why this text? Why in relationship with these other texts?

4.h.4 It seemed like she was using one set of texts to validate another set, but whether The Arcades Project is supposed to be validated by being like Day, or Day is supposed to be validated by being like The Arcades Project is unclear.

4.i What is clear is that both are supposed to be validated by being liked by Marjorie Perloff.


5 Marjorie Perloff said on Saturday: "I like to pick winners."

5.a Perloff is not terribly interested in providing critical or historical context or understanding to poetry. She is interested in promoting what she likes and ignoring what she does not like.

5.a.1 She said she doesn't teach work that she doesn't find interesting.

5.a.2 There was some interesting discussion, especially by Retallack, about what pleasure is and how it functions as a tool to keep you engaged with the world. I am still thinking about that. It is an issue.

5.a.3 If you find someone's poetry interesting, that is one thing. If you want to say something about why it is interesting, that is another thing. If you want to place it in some sort of historical, cultural, and critical context, that is yet another thing. And to do that last thing right, you are going to have to rub up against the various things that were going on around the place and time that the text came into being. And much of that will probably not be all that interesting to you.

5.a.3.a If someone writes a poem you find interesting to react against poetry that the poet found not interesting, then you as a critic or historian had probably study both pretty carefully.

5.a.3.b This seems obvious to the point that I don't feel like going into it, but it might not be that obvious to others, and I will try to explain it further if asked.

5.a.4 And it is your pleasure in the interesting texts that should drive you to investigate the texts that you find less interesting. In this way, pleasure increases your engagement with the world.

5.a.5 Perloff uses pleasure as a buffer to keep herself from engaging with the world.

5.a.6 Perloff is not a historian and is barely a critic.

5.b Perloff said that she is upset that there is a "glut" of poetry these days, thanks to the internet, thanks to what is sometimes called the increased democratization of publishing.

5.b.1 It is hard to keep up with.

5.b.2 There is so much of it.

5.b.3 Perhaps: How can you know who the winners are when you can't keep tabs on the races?

5.b.4 Perhaps: How can you pick the winners when people are running so many races that you can't be involved in all of them?

5.b.5 Perhaps even: How can you have a democracy without a centralized authority?

5.c I live in Portland. Portland is not central to the scene that is considered the poetry scene, and yet here we are, writing poems, reading them, having a poetic discourse, running what you could, if you felt the urge, call a race. And Marjorie Perloff was only just invited to town! But she was not invited to talk about, look at, investigate, or judge our race. She was invited to talk about the "big race". The one that, by and large, we are not participating in, here in Portland, except, perhaps, at the margins.

5.c.1 OK, races don't have margins. Do they?

5.c.2 Also, there are many races going on in Portland.

5.c.3 Isn't it amazing that so much poetry could be going on in Portland without Marjorie Perloff being aware of it!

5.c.4 Perloff mentioned that Yeats wrote, in his autobiography, that at some point in his life he had met all the poets of his generation. She believed him.

5.c.4.a Surely there was some person roughly contemporaneous with Yeats, some woman who wrote little bits of poetry for her friends, nothing innovative, perhaps clunky, with rhymes and poor scansion and tired metaphors, but still recognizable as poetry. And whom Yeats never met.

5.c.4.b Perhaps, because the writing was nothing innovative and was clunky, it doesn't count as poetry.

5.c.4.c Perhaps, though, we don't know how to read clunkiness; we are raised on sophistication and urbanity, and cannot pierce the veil of clunkiness.

5.c.4.d Perhaps it does not count as poetry because we don't like it.

5.c.4.e Perhaps it does not count as poetry because it was not part of the system that is called poetry.

5.c.4.f But then, Perloff was willing to make fun of others for discounting Stein, Bernstein, or Goldsmith because their writings were not part of the system that those people called poetry.

5.c.4.g There is nobody unbiased, not one. When we are aesthetes, we can follow our pleasure without hesitation. But when we are trying to be good historians, good critics, good thinkers, we have to allow a wider range of possibilities in.

5.c.4.h Also: It is good to learn how to take pleasure in things. While we can't all learn to take pleasure in all things, we nevertheless shouldn't set up a methodology that ignores the unpleasurable!

5.c.5 I grew up in New York City, where the poets believed that they were deep in the midst of "the big race"; I have spent the last eight years in Portland, where poets are largely cut off from that big race.

5.c.6 The panelists complained about a lack of personal connections among poets, in part thanks to the internet and globalization; but it seems like the disconnect from a globalized "race" has strengthened Portland's poetry scene and made it more personal, more one-on-one, more "communitarian".

5.c.6.a When Lyn Hejinian said "be careful of global capitalism", perhaps what we should have heard was "be careful of canon-makers, be careful of people who think of poetic history as a, if not a single thread, then at least a single rope made up of twine, be careful of people who try to accumulate cultural capital and pave over distinctions, be careful of people who fear that democracy and autonomy will take away their abilities to accumulate that capital; be careful of Marjorie Perloff."

5.c.6.b Well, perhaps.

5.c.6.c Marjorie Perloff is not a historian and is not much of a critic; instead she is a tastemaker and a capitalist.

5.c.6.d Marjorie Perloff is a robber baron. Or, she would be, if poetry -- actual poetry, not that which is called poetry -- were susceptible to capitalist shenanigans.

5.c.6.e More than one person has suggested to me in response to this point that Marjorie Perloff is a carpet bagger. Which may be true. Critics can often be accused of carpet bagging, inasmuch as most of them talk about people who do a thing that they value but do not do. In Perloff's case, her fame and value rests not so much on the quality of her criticism but on how well the poets she picks do (Frank O'Hara, the Language poets, now it seems Kenneth Goldsmith), and how she can ride their fame, which she helps create. This is specifically how she wants it to work. So while it seems a bit much to accuse a critic of carpet bagging, which might be a function of the job, Perloff might be an egregious example of critic as carpet bagger.

5.d When someone wins in poetry, we all lose.


6 After Perloff read her paper on Saturday, Joan Retallack read a ten-minute essay/poem. Like the Perloff paper, Retallack's piece contained no content that I didn't already know. But the Retallack piece contained almost no explicit content. But I followed its twists and turns, its logic and puns, it rhythms and assonances, and I found myself tracing the paths that an engaged and excited mind had gone down. I can't explain or justify or even, necessarily, recommend it to anyone else -- I was falling down laughing with delight at parts of it even though no one else in the room was responding. Poetry, and even thought, are personal and idiosyncratic things, and just because Retallack's piece "worked" for me can't indicate that it would or should work for anyone else. I am not as interested as Perloff is in cultural hegemony, or in picking "winners", but I do want to acknowledge that Retallack's piece was a terrific path to travel down, a scenic walk through a field of wildflowers after Perloff's brass and hurried double-decker bus tour of the must-see places in Midtown Manhattan.

6.a But, yes, Retallack's piece was terrific, which has nothing to do with whether one can or should write criticism about it. Perloff wondered why Joyce had much better critical writing done on his work than Stein or Beckett did: It is because Joyce wrote the sort of work that one can write critically about, whereas Beckett and Stein didn't. This doesn't say anything about their work except about whether you can successfully write criticism about it.

6.b Yup.


7 So thanks again to Lewis & Clark and PSU for bringing Perloff, Retallack, and Hejinian to Portland. It was nice to be angered and even nicer to be pleased by the event. And while I am glad enough to have seen Perloff once, I don't think there's much to be gained by inviting her back to Portland. Retallack or Hejinian, on the other hand, should come back early and often. And while I have not said much about Hank Lazer (who only read on Friday), I enjoyed his poetry and his comments about poetry, and I thought he was a very nice and engaging person, and I am looking forward to hearing him read tonight with Laura Feldman for Spare Room.