Buggeryville

Is an ethics centered around one's behavior to an Other located in language (rather than an Other who is another person) a dehumanized and/or alienated ethics, no matter how socially constructed that language may be?

I mean, I suspect it is, but I might be wrong.

In which I provide some end-rhymes, so you can work them into doggerel.

...Barack Obama
...an Oxford comma

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.

(Well, OK, no one involved is a moron, not even Ron, whose take on this situation is abhorrent. I just liked the pun. So sue me.)

Collecting a few of the comments I've made on other blogs:

I respond to Kasey, who is worried about being irritated by Issue 1:

Yeah, what about those of us who aren't irritated, but pleased? Can we be irritated at Ron's post instead, which at least on the surface seems to be anti-free speech, anti-art, and pro-capitalism?

I respond to Rodney, who does a nice reading of the texts that goes beyond what is, by now, obvious:

Would it be too much for me to suggest that those who didn't realize that the connection between poem and name was more-or-less arbitrary basically don't know how to read 21st century poetry?

Well, of course it would; but there is perhaps some truth to it. (Would it be too much for me to suggest that Ron Silliman's reaction to these poems places him closer, politically and artistically, to his beloved SoQ than to anything I'd recognize as belonging to the experimental traditions of poetry?)

Your post here comes closer to what I've been waiting for (read: too lazy to write): An analysis of how the attachment of people's names to poems serves as a force that guides your reading of the text, impelling you toward reading a bit more of an otherwise self-similar text that seems immediately understood (i.e., "conceptual") (i.e., "read") upon "getting the gimmick"; but looking up and analysing the poems with one's friends' names attached brings you back to actually reading the text, actually thinking about what is going on in the text (as a text) rather than referring back to your pat conceptual understanding of the text. This motion, which undermines our sense of how a "conceptual" text operates, is what I'm really digging about Issue 1 right now.

What would be really brilliant: If they had someone actually write their own poem in the style of the other poems and insert it amidst the 3000+ poems. Who would find it?

Somewhere, I think, I also point out that Ron calls for suing these "perps" for fraudulently presenting work as his own right after explaining how it is entirely clear from the text that the claims of authorship are undermined by the text, that no barely skilled reader could possibly mistake the poems in question for Ron's, whether they knew his work or not. This might undermine his potential lawsuit, though IANAL.

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.

Also, for those of you in Toronto, I'll be performing tomorrow (Saturday) night at 10:15pm or so as part of Nuit Blanche. I'll be part of "Fantasia Salon" at St. Thomas's on Huron with a few other local poety types. I am not going to tell you anything more until it's over.

I am proud and honored to announce that I have been included, along with a few thousand other people, in a new and exciting anthology of poetry. Issue 1 is available for download here.

Like all the contributors to Issue 1, I did not write the poem with my name attached to it. (It's on page 3017 if you want to skip right to it.) Unlike some of them, I couldn't be happier to my name attached to this work.

I have been reading Pseudo-Cicero's Rhetorica Ad Herennium for a class; I might have some quotes from it to share with you all soon. But I've been talking about how delighted I will be if someday there are Pseudo-Piuma works. That that day would come so soon was not expected however. (I knew I was being included in this project from the initial announcement, but I assumed it would be a process text based on my blog, or something to that effect; this seems to be a computer-generated text that is independent of me, beyond having my name attached.)

Anyway, kudos to editors Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter and thanks for including me in this memorable project!

Results 1 - 10 of about 61 for fuckgasm. (0.27 seconds)

Piuma, Chris. [On January thirty-first...]. (Crane Paper No. 7). Albuquerque, N.M.: Crane's Bill Books, 2008.

A few copies of this thin, slight, ephemeral book of ten thirty-one word pieces arrived today; more will arrive later. It is handsomely made and probably ticklish.

If you would like a copy: I don't know how many copies of this I will have, but I will trade some for other pleasant ephemera, or I have a few copies of my first chapbook left and would offer both for a more substantive trade, or whatever. Drop me an e-mail. My first name, then my last name, with no spaces or punctuation between, at Google's mail service.

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.

The only thing worse than a fetish for innovation is a fetish for tradition.

This is very unbloggy of me, but I'm reposting a response that I made all of ten days ago to a blog post on another blog. Because one of my plans for this blog was to collect some of these wayward comments, and because I'm too useless in this humidity to write a proper post. Anyway, go read the original and the follow-ups, which make some good points to temper what I write here. This has been slightly edited for recontextualization and clarity and regret.

I have some issues with Guy Davenport's idea that "the purpose of poetry is to teach". Not that it isn't true, but that, in most cases, it isn't helpful.

After all, you could argue that pretty much everything is to "teach". The purpose of breaking up with your boyfriend is to teach him that he is incompatible with your life. The purpose of mainstream television (in the U.S., at least) is to teach you to be a lazy, content, and unparticipating citizen (or, so you could argue).

This conceptualization of poetry's purpose also presents itself as a sort of litmus test, a sine qua non, and a way of judging poetry. "Did I learn something from this poem? No. Thus it must be a bad poem." I'm not sure it works like that, or has to work like that.

Also it puts a terrible strain on poets. Although this might just be a personal preference: When a poem reads as thought the writer had something important to teach me, I am more likely to be, well, turned off. "Why didn't you write a self-help book, if that was your purpose?", that is the sort of response I am likely to have.

But, that might be a personal preference. Your mileage might, and probably does, vary.

I think the idea that the purpose of poetry is to teach is a tempting idea for those of us who enjoy poetry and who enjoy learning. But I think ultimately it falls into a trap: It tries to justify poetry, which I don't think needs to be justified, which I suspect should adamantly not be justified. I can talk about the benefits I've gotten from reading and writing and thinking about poetry, as I'm sure you and many others can, but...

I don't know, this might be going too far, but justifying poetry is a way of incorporating it into a system of costs and rewards -- into, I guess, capitalism -- in a way that I'd rather resist. It's like talking about the benefits of religion, or love, or having a pet -- sure, having a pet might help an elderly person live a longer and happier life, but I suspect that doesn't work as well if one only gets the pet for that purpose, and I also suspect that for most elderly people, they do not keep their pets in order to stave off death! The analysis -- the act of analysis -- just seems to miss the delightfully ineffable point of it all.

Unexpected! I was certainly not his biggest fan, though I did enjoy some of his essays and some of his short stories. But I will point to that bit about the footnote that I posted recently, and suggest that, while I can't really say how successful it was in Adorno, DFW used his endless footnotes and many other rhetorical tricks to try to recreate a sense of thinking that was not one-dimensional, but constantly breaking off and curling back and doing all those fractal things that we (or, I) think of thinking as doing.

In 1974, staff at Canada Post's Montreal office were noticing a considerable amount of letters addressed to Saint Nicholas coming into the postal system, and those letters were being treated as undeliverable. Since those employees did not want the writers, mostly young children, to be disappointed at the lack of response, they started answering the letters themselves. The amount of mail sent to Santa Claus increased every Christmas, up to the point that Canada Post decided to start an official Santa Claus letter-response program in 1983. Approximately one million letters come in to Santa Claus each Christmas, including from outside of Canada, and all of them are answered, in the same languages in which they are written. Canada Post introduced a special address for mail to Santa Claus, complete with its own postal code:

SANTA CLAUS

NORTH POLE H0H 0H0

CANADA

[via]

God: "Palin? Oy! A yoni lapdog!"

[A certain newspaper that's running a "Sarah Palindrome" contest -- you google it yourself if you care -- told me they couldn't print "yoni" in a newspaper, after they asked me what it meant.]

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur'd piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife.

Wm Shkspre, R&J, prologue

This is a little complicated, so bear with me. There's a reward at the end, I hope.

Craig Conley created a terrific dictionary of one-letter words, including as many definitions as he could find for each letter. Then, through a series of ineffable events, he developed The X-O-Skeleton Story Generator. You play a game of Tic Tac Toe, alternating between Xs and Os, until the game is won (or drawn). Each X and O is connected to one of a few dozen possible meanings for that letter, drawn from Craig's dictionary. X might refer to magnifying, like a 4x camera zoom lens, or it might refer to the mark one makes instead of signing one's name, or the mark that tells you where to sign it. By the end of the game you'll have a string of up to nine different concepts, alternating between Xs and Os like the kisses and hugs at the end of a letter.

I decided to give this method a try. But I don't write stories, and I enjoy making my constraints as tricksy as possible, so I decided to write a limerick. One that gives a basic account of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, much as he himself does in the prologue quoted above. Also, like the play, the Tic Tac Toe game had to end with neither side winning, which meant packing nine different concepts into the five lines. Also I tried to work in as much internal rhyme as I could, because if you're going to rhyme, you might as well rhyme all the way.

Anyway, you can read "An X-O-gesis of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" at Craig's blog.

I strongly encourage others to give the X-O-Skeleton Story Generator a try; I don't think the possibilities are nearly exhausted yet.

So, yes, this week grad school has begun with a battery of language competency tests (which so far seem to have gone fine), but. This blog's ridiculously frequent update schedule will probably take a severe hit over the next few weeks, and then come back to a far slower trickle. Your author would apologize, but we are all probably better off for it. Have I, in some way or another, made my point, and will I not just keep repeating my point? I don't know. If you think I haven't, let me know. If you see something and feel that you know "what would Chris think?", then surely I have. And there are so many other blogs to read, and so many other voices to consider.

Anyway this is just to explain why things will surely be slowing down for a bit. But not to a complete halt, not yet.

1. Ron Silliman, in his recent linkdump, notes: "One of my favorite early poems (i.e. pre-Ketjak) is now available on the web". As if he had no ability to put his poetry on the web, as if getting one's poetry on the web was a hard-won battle. All of Silliman's poetry should be on the web! If it's juvenalia that he's embarrassed by, he doesn't have to publish it; if the poem simply doesn't "translate" into an online format, so be it; if publication rights are controlled by the publisher, oops!; if he simply doesn't have a copy of the journal that this poem was published in, or any archive of the poem -- well, that seems unlikely, and anyway he's in a good position to be able to track such a thing down. If Silliman's poetry isn't available on the web, he has only himself to blame.

2. I read this quote that I disagreed with, and wanted to write a little about it. It reminded me of a piece by David Abel. David is arguably the hardest working poet in Portland, but very little of his work is published, and there is very little online evidence of it. I couldn't remember all the details about the piece, and there was no online (nor offline) archive that I could check. When I lived in Portland, David's work (like the work of all my poety friends in Portland) was there, was present in the air; now that I'm in Toronto, it is not. Being in Portland was being in the David Abel archive, as it was continually being built and rebuilt, organized and reorganized. And now, yes, it's not as if I couldn't e-mail David and ask him for the details of the piece. But also it would be nice to be able to point to it, point others to it, and incorporate it into my thinking here, into my living/archiving in Toronto. And yet at the same time I want to resist the pull to archive everything, and I want to encourage living where you are, when you are, allowing the past to be past without dragging it to the present, allowing elsewhere to remain elsewhere, allowing becoming who you are rather than being who you have been. And yet it would be nice to have access to all this. And yet, and yet, and yet.

3. Which is to say: Is poetry a gift economy? Is memory a gift economy?

Update: I have since written a little bit about David's piece.

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.