Buggeryville

1. Yeah, it's the end of the semester! So I don't have time to write here. But I'm not dead yet.

2. I make it a rule to befriend all the poetry people who want to my friend on Facebook. I am a friend to the poetry people. If you read this, and want to be my Facebookfriend, go for it. Or you can join that weird Facebook blog-following thing for Buggeryville... or don't, either way. It's just a website, and I'm not doing anything particularly poety on Facebook. Still, it could be nice and friendlylike.

3. I might be trying to set up a few readings this summer/fall for the greater NYC-Toronto corridor, with a possible stop in PDX. If you are somewhere in that world and want me to read for you, drop me a line. This also means I'll be writing some new stuff soon. Gasp.

4. There's a button now that suggests I could "monetize" this website, which I doubt would really work. But nice try, Blogger. Don't stop believing.

First, if you're curious and haven't heard the news through other channels: I have been accepted into the PhD program here. Rah!

Second, someone forwarded me this unexpected bit of "bad" writing, and it's a treat to read, but of course my response was largely different from the responses of the LJ commentators. I come from a context where people active attempt to write texts that are that disruptive, and would just as soon discard the rest of the "novel" structure, instead of excising this passage from the novel. (And that's why I study medieval stuff, and not poetry; it seems redundant to bring my "largely different" point of view to poetry! And yet, this very blog...)

So, Lytton Smith wrote an interesting post about negative reviews and the purpose of criticism, centered around a particular very negative review by Michael Schiavo that is maybe getting discussed a bit in the blogs. So maybe, go read it, or read them all; I pick more nits in the comments of that last link. I want to jump on one particular bit that bugged me about it, but I still think it's worth reading. It's actually from the original review, but he quotes it approvingly:

"Name-checking the states of the Republic does not make your poetry Whitmanic. Shoveling pop culture references into sloppy lines does not transform your poems into Frank O’Hara’s."

But, doesn't it? Of course it does. These are specific features that the poetry in question shares with Whitman's and O'Hara's poetry. Because they share features, we can talk about the one in terms of the other. That is how such comparisons work.

So, what's the problem? Well -- and yes, I suspect this is all fantastically obvious -- Whitman's poetry and O'Hara's poetry and the poetry under question all have all these other features. And these other features don't match up. So a reviewer can say "this poetry is Whitmanic" without articulating in what way it's Whitmanic -- which of Whitman's poetry's various features it shares. Because Whitman's poetry has so many various features, saying another poetry is Whitmanic doesn't let you know which features are shared. It becomes an inane comparison.

But, of course, that isn't what Schiavo is complaining about. Schiavo is complaining that for a poem to "be Whitmanic" it must share more than this one feature of Whitman's poetry. It has to share in a significant number of features of Whitman's poetry. Or, what I think is really going on: It has to share in all (or a significant majority) of the features of Whitman's poetry that Schiavo finds salient. I suspect that Schiavo that if he found a poem that shared in a majority of the features of Whitman's poetry that he finds salient, then he could call the poem "Whitmanic" without qualification -- but I might be putting ideas into his head there.

I worry that Schiavo is upset that these reviewers are thinking of Whitman in terms of specific features, rather than appreciating him as a complex whole. But this might be my own resistence and discomfort with the idea of Whitman-as-a-whole. I think Whitman's symptoms are stable enough to merit discussing, but the holistic Whitman is a kairotic assemblage constantly being reformed and discarded. Or, I'd rather push for that, for us to not "decide" upon Whitman-as-a-whole, but to keep him (such as there is a him; to keep the "totality" of his poetry, anyways) as potential, as occasional, as tentative.

Which is to say, I'd prefer for "Whitmanic" to mean "name-dropping American geography" or "writing slobbery poems about young soldiers" or "using a whole lot of exclamation points", rather than trying to point to some totality about Whitman or Leaves of Grass.

And this is what I want from my poetry reviews, as well. I don't want them to try to lay out the totality of a poem, or of a book, or of a poetics. I want them to open a few doors into the tangle, so I can wander indecisively. And I worry that Schiavo's use of "Whitmanic" (which, to be fair, he only sorta uses in that review) is, in fact, more closed than the obviously facile uses found in the reviewers he rants against. After all, the next time they talk about a "Whitmanic poet", they'll probably be referring to something like the length of his beard.

L'aspect subjectif de la chanson (le sens du je qui la chante) n'a pour nous d'existence que grammaticale. [The chanson's subjective aspect, implied by the singing I, has no more than grammatical existence for the modern reader.]

[Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, p. 192]

That's Prof. Oddfellow's response to my minisurvey about the parts of speech; Geof Huth has just posted a long and detailed response to the question, which I encourage you to read. I've gotten several other responses, and they've all been interesting; I encourage you to send me your thoughts on the matter, if you haven't yet. (chrispiuma at google's mail service)

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...)

I was reminded today of just how goofy Shakespeare's 135th and 136th sonnets are, with their incessant pounding punning on the word "Will", as volition, as desire, as schlong (your willy), possibly as lady-bits, as auxiliary verb, and as Shakespeare himself. Many of the Wills were apparently italicized in the 1609 Quarto edition (and we all know about Italian Wills, knowwhatImean?).

Sonnet CXXXV.

WHOEVER hath her wish, thou hast thy Will
And Will to boot, and Will in over-plus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.
  Let no unkind ‘No’ fair beseechers kill;
  Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

Sonnet CXXXVI.

IF thy soul check thee that I come so near
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;
Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckon’d none:
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy stores’ account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee:
  Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
  And then thou lov’st me,—for my name is Will.

I'm not saying "Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love / Ay, fill it with wills, and my will one" is a bad couple of lines -- but it is the sort of aggressive wordplay, the sort of relentless silliness, the sort of excessive disproportionality that usually gets supressed from the canon. I am glad Will willed his wills into his work, so they might willy-nilly get preserved, when surely hundreds of similar poems were relegated to the dustbins.

Exercise for the reader: Rewrite the sonnets as if his name were Richard Shakespeare.

Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City, the oldest gay bookshop in the US, is closing.

Bookstores are an infrastructure for the cultivation and dissemination of ideas. They work in ways that other infrastructures -- the internet, say, or libraries -- don't quite work. But they're also not as profitable as they are necessary. I've been thinking about this, in terms of Obama's plans to improve the US's infrastructure; some sort of bookstore subsidies seem in order. Though how that could be fairly implemented, I don't know.

I went into the Oscar Wilde Bookshop maybe twice in the decade or so I lived there, even back when I was a bookish gay teen who spent all his time in both halves of the Village and who thought reading up on queer stuff was urgent, and I doubt I ever purchased anything from them. It seemed to be, maybe not a relic, but certainly something irrelevant to my life (even as it was so clearly positioned to be part of my life), but still something I was glad was there, in some abstract sense. So I'm not that affected by losing this bookshop on a personal level -- yet, like with most bookshop closures, it still seems tragic.

Everyone has blogged about bookstores closing, and I don't have terribly much to add, I suppose. We all know that the disappearance of bookstores isn't quite made up by the abundance of the Internet. We all know publishing and bookselling, when done properly, isn't a sustainable business model, yet they seem to improve lives and to create opportunities and potentials in society that far surpass their costs -- much like, say, highways. But, as they say, everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Is there leadership on this issue, is there a plan, or do we have faith that the internet (or some other structure) will replace the bookstore network's various roles adequately? Or is this a structure that has lost its energy, which no amount of regret and wild gesticulation will restore? (I lean towards thinking, well, we should at least try to salvage something, perhaps something exciting will come out of it.)

(Thanks to LH for tipping me off to the news, via Facebook.)

I am conducting an informal survey for what might turn out to be nefarious (but are probably just para-academic) purposes. Please participate, and please pass around.

1. Rank the eight parts of speech, from favorite to least favorite, or from most "vital" to least "vital", or however you want to think about it.

1b. If that request made no sense, let me know that instead.

2. Are you a poet?

E-mail your answers to chrispiuma at gmail dot com. No answers will necessarily be kept confidential. You can post your answers to the comments here, but I'm hoping to minimize thought contamination. (That's why I didn't list the eight parts of speech -- if you can only remember some of them, just include the ones you remember.)

Thank you!

I posted this over at Gary Barwin's blog, but I'll repost it here, with the same sheepishness about how the anecdote is structured as if I'm some kind of sage dispensing wisdom (gag):

Maryrose Larkin told me the other day that she had at long last finished her latest collection of poems, but she still needed to go over them to make sure they work. "Go over them and make sure they play," I told her. "They're your poems, not your slaves."

Over here (especially in the comments) I'm talking about greatness and disposability with Mark Truscott, and over here Rodney Koeneke said some stuff about the Spare Room Centenary and wrote a cento from it (and I'm a fan of his recent use of color-coding), and here Johannes Göransson quotes a nice bit from Lyn Hejinian in an ongoing conversation he's having about translation which I find problematic but provocative, and here Sina Queyras talks about all sorts of interesting things which have led to a commentsplosion that I have not yet put my unequal e-quill onto.

So that's a lot of nice talking.

Unrelatedly:

When I was in Portland people kept asking me if I'd been asked to read in Toronto yet. And I had to explain that, in Canada, I seem to be known more for writing criticism than for writing poetry. Which, all agreed, is insane, but then I think it's insane that I might be known at all. Anyway, outside of the little twitterms on the side of this blog, I haven't written any poetry in Canada yet, which is fine, since they have enough poetry here. You'd think they'd have enough criticism here, too, but perhaps not. Well, on we go, trying to perceive the bigger potholes in the road and to fill them in as best we can.

The ten poems I selected for the Spare Room Centennial, five of which I read:

1. Jackson Mac Low, "3RD DANCE -- MAKING A STRUCTURE WITH A ROOF OR UNDER A ROOF -- 6-7 February 1964", from The Pronouns.

2. Tina Darragh, the first five sections (A-E) of on the corner to off the corner.

3. Thomas A. Clark, Larch Covert.

4. Hannah Weiner, "Silent History", published in Hannah Weiner's Open House.

5. David Melnick, the first five pages of Men in Aïda.

three of which others read:

6. Ted Berrigan, "Ann Arbor Song", from In The Early Morning Rain.

7. Joan Retallack, four pages from Errata 5uite (but not these four pages).

8. Lyn Hejinian, a section captioned "The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically." from My Life.

and two of which were projected instead of read:

9. Aram Saroyan, "REMIEIMBER", from The Rest.

10. Donato Mancini, "The Sorrows Of Young Werther (Goth Phase)", from Æthel.

(For whatever it's worth, people afterwards were asking me most about the Darragh poem. It is one of my favorite chapbooks, and if you read this blog and haven't yet, follow the link and read it. It is dictionarylicious!)

It was nearly seven hours long! Many highlights (at least half of which involve mARK oWEns or the performers he drafted, though of course the sound poetry is going to be more exciting from a performance stand-point) (but needless to say I hope that the recording of mARK and Leo Daedalus's remix version of the Ursonate came out -- zounds!) but mostly a feeling of fullness, and a sense of happiness that such a thing could even happen, and a delight at the connections and threads that emerged (as of course they would). I'm glad I was able to be part of it. More later, perhaps; I'm in an airport right now, heading back to Toronto.

Rodney Koeneke has posted a very sweet note about Spare Room and its upcoming 100th reading, and I am biased in this but I agree completely with his assessment.

I would also like to think that Sunday's 100th reading -- a marathon of 100 poems by 100 poets selected by 10 people connected intimately to Spare Room, which will last for, oh, five hours or so -- is going to be, shall we say, challenging in its content, but made accessible in its form. The diversity of poets, the diversity of voices reading the poems, the ability to move in and out of the event at will -- this should, I think, provide people who are not diehard poetry-reading-goers some sort of entryway (and some sort of emergency exit!) if they are curious but wary of poetry fatigue, worried of being overly bored by poetry that they are, for whatever reason, just not meshing with. But some of the poems read will be long enough to allow some real luxuriating in the bath of a particular poet's syntax. (I believe Lindsay Hill -- spoiler alert! -- is going to read a longer [ten minute?] section from Gerturde Stein's Tender Buttons, which I am particularly looking forward to; I have a similar longish selection from a challenging, ear-wracking work that I hope I can pull off.)

All of which is to say, oh just come to the reading on Sunday. See you there.

Sunday, January 25
starting at 2:00 pm
ending when we finish (6:00? 7:00?)
Free admission

Gallery Homeland (at the Ford Building)
2505 SE 11th Avenue

I am not posting to this blog so much, lately, and little longer than a quotation, because I am plunged in my academic training, and I suspect it will be that way for at least the next few months.

Nevertheless, a quick note. I am working on my selections for Spare Room's 100th reading, which will be a big hoe-down of an event featuring "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets from the Past Hundred Years". Ten people who have been involved with organizing Spare Room have been asked to select ten poems from ten poets, which will then be read on Sunday, January 25th, starting at 2pm, and going on for a few hours.

And I am flying back to Portland for the event!

Picking ten poets is not the tricky part. I quickly picked a few that I wanted to ensure were included (Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Wiener, and others) and saved a few spots to choose after I saw what others had chosen, so I could balance out the dance card. Those will be easy to fill.

But I was trying to pick exactly which Jackson Mac Low poem to read last night, and it was overwhelming. Not only because there were so many options, but also because I wanted something that would "work" read aloud, and something that would work without context (in case people didn't know from Jackson -- something that would be "self-evident", or approximately self-evident). But I also wanted something that would justify his inclusion -- a "show-stopper" -- and something that would point to all the reasons why he's such an important poet to me. But I also also wanted to use this as an opportunity to read one of his texts that I've wanted to work with for ages.

This is almost certainly too much to demand of a few minutes of text, however. Plus if everyone chooses all of their poems with this method, the evening will be impossibly ponderous, unrelentingly so, and it will reinforce the Norton Anthology approach to poetry -- that it is monumental, and that poems should feel complete in themselves in some way. And some poems do, and sometimes that is nice, but of course that's not actually what I'm interested about in Jackson's work, or Ted Berrigan's (outside of the Sonnets), or Hannah Weiner's -- all of them were interested in making a quotidian poetry, a poetry that lived with them. Jackson's processes, Ted's postcards, Hannah's journals, all point to this very unmonumental approach.

So I'm trying to recalibrate with that in mind. I will try to push the event away from "100 monuments of awesomeness" and more towards "100 years of people doing stuff" -- though the urge to show that poetry can be monumental and awesome is great, and not to be completely neglected, and I'm sure the event overall will be a mix of the monumental, the everyday, and the in-between -- and maybe the event itself will be some or all of those things.

[In] the rather frenetic world of literary criticism, theoretical speculation enjoys the same symbolic status as cocaine: one has to try it.

[Franco Moretti, "The Soul and the Harpy", Signs Taken for Wonders, p. 2]

The breakup of familial order transposes whole peoples into a sort of lifelong Toronto.

[Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era]

1. Kasey Mohammad on the holy grail of relevance.
2. You've seen this by now, but it's pretty nice.
3. The second of these meditations on the semicolon by Gary Barwin is particularly striking.
4. The Atlas of True Names, an etymological map, could be truer, or perhaps less true...
5. The last word on Žižek will probably not be the last.

I wrote three nice poety things about JonArno Lawson's A Voweller's Bestiary over at Agora. Recommended for fans of lipograms, bestiaries, and children's literature.

I guest-blogged a "three nice poety things" review of Catherine Daly's book Vauxhall over at Lemon Hound -- check it out (and the back catalog of guest reviews, the recent interview with Gary Barwin, etc., etc., etc...)!