Po-Mason Handshake

these are the examples of impervious writing that houlihan holds up:

No, dirt aliens: don't waste good mascara, fiber gives you confi-
dence. Spin doctors vs. gravity, do you spandex wooden leg plus spaz
hemp tempi seize the fey crawlspatiality creatures peel off. Barbie pro-
tons slobber the manual seedling wrapped in human skin. Happy puppy
preconscious vouchers don't brownnose your pal's girlfriend, a swagger
unanointed affect in its gob phase. Automated preparation H—a non-
goosing, a midriff melody—stir the rack up…mere child has her
permit.


Bruce Andrews, “from Dang Me”


And:



Stacked circles (rain down) say green it releases nothing. Bundled
wires. Ellsworth Kelly strides from one red iceberg to the next. Each face
projects onto antennae forging a domain expressed as a skewered pod.
Transparency behind a desk elusive plunge. A dissection of thought into
its components the weight of meat up the wrong street the wrong
backdoor. The blazer missed too as the wiry one observed. Someone
slipped him diet Orangina and he went ballistic. The whole staff cray-
oned their names onto the good luck card while unwitting partygoers
waited for the elevator. Mogul and musician separated at birth one
suggested. Hubris. The directions very specific and yet so many stood
idle. She ravished in black. He charmed in lime.


Mark Bibbins, “from Blasted Fields of Clover Bring Harrowing and Regretful Sighs”

like i said, the "intelligble" poetry that she describes (as well as the contents of the magazine she edits, perihelion) is among the most boring shite i've ever read. but simply because her taste is crap doesn't mean her point isn't well taken. what do you do with this stuff? do you, as hejinian does, reject the very idea of quality? or, as john cage would have it, in this passage:

when richard kostelanetz interviews cage, he asks him if some theatre pieces are better than others; cage dismisses the question: "why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgements? don't you see that when you get a value judgement, that's all you have? they are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

there is something seductive in this idea, despite the fact that cage himself makes a value judgement (ie, that the question is a "bad" one - which automatically reminds me that duncan insisted that sonnets where a valid form, which olsen, in his open field statements, rejected. duncan would call it just another form among forms). I am truly sympathetic to these ideas, but their egolessness is, to me, not verified by my emotional experience. in a sense, poetry is judgement. it is not eliotic, and it is often a way of judging other judgements (that's trash, that's cool), but to insist that such poems exist in a vacuum is an unconscious reification of the same old "well-wrought urn," an object that exists outside of time.

so, it seems to me, that this whole point abut denaturing the poem (despite the specious metaphorics that assume that english is 'natural' -the president just said "the good lord"-what's more denatured than that?-) means to me that it does not exist in commerce with a particularly wide world. i like these andrew's poems, but they're one-dimensional, and i will insist that a poem has to insist on multiple readings, ya know?

steve, i know what you mean when you say that critical practice hasn't kept up with poetry, and i heartily agree that poetry should be in the lead. i also tend to agree with you, upon, further investigation, that this "resistant to criticism" stuff is a way of whipping anyone who gets outta line, and that sucks. I've been able to think a little bit more about the question, and i think, truly, that my concern is for the reader, way way more than for any possible critic. the question is, because readers nowadays have no vocabulary (or interest) in the traditions of poetry, that proceeding with the kind of ghetto-ized work that andrews seems to be doing here is essentially a work on nihilism, and negation. and that, is truly ok with me. "NO" is one of my favorite words. but it's only part of what the poem should do. It's got be "yes" AND "no" at the same time. this is the only way that a poem won't be denatured. like atoms.

So, thanks, stephen, for the corrective. my initial post was quick, and i think your post reminds me that, really, critics are an awful bellwether, but that too much of the time, fashion (or at least "cool desires") takes the place of any weather at all. oh.

hi everybody.

lauren, i called ya, but got tony. i think we should change the name of the blog to That's Trash, That's Cool.

cat, i owe many gratitudes for attitudes. HELIOS!

Ropes Course

You were all in my dream last night -- Lauren and Cat, you both got transported to a soggy lawn here at Earlham College (I'm in Richmond, IN right now). I was working on some collagey-ass poem and the two of you just weren't having any of it. I remember you, Catherine, especially making a scrunched-feline face of dismissal when I wrote the first line, "The canyon is great for conversation." Soon after that, you pointed your finger, Lauren, because Jared was walking toward us across the grass, and even though he was tiny with distance we could see he was wearing a long rainbowy scarf.

This brings me to two things. First, what's this bullshit about putting off grading, Jared? Am I mistaken or did you not just teach the tiniest writing class in the long and esteemed history of UC Mer-Dead? Yeah, that must have been brutality... (Wow -- I think I just dialed in the classic snotty-sarcastic po-blog tone for my first time ever (and the crowd goes wild...))

Second, I haven't checked out those essays yet, Jared, but the excerpt below is food for thought. I can't help but wonder what kinds of poetry people would hold up as being somehow impervious to criticical analysis. Personally, my criticism of a poet or poem usually grows out of an initial reaction to the work, and I can't think of too many reactions, even indifference, that aren't developable. And this was one of the beauties of the Iowa City-era reading group for me -- even if my thoughts were cloudy or muted at first, hearing what others had to say usually helped me to focus in a productive way. I'm hesitant to make many suggestions for group activites here -- last time I suggested something I left everyone else holding a stinky RoJo bag -- but it might be interesting to post a few criticism-resistant things and give them a shot. Hard to imagine a collection of words on a page or glowing screen that we as a group would be completely stymied by.

It could just be that critical apparatuses haven't shifted alongside recent poetry and now there's a bit of a lag in the ropes. There have historically been numerous occasions when poets themselves led charges or gave good sharp tugs, and who's doing that now in a formal, well-distributed way? Not many avanty poets that I'm aware of (as if I would be if there were). I mean, sure there's blog-world, esp. Sillomancer, but much of the back-and-forth here seems to be about stoking one's friends for all to see and read. (Maybe it's all secretly going down in the bowels of the Buffalo listserv, I'm not a po-Mason so I wouldn't know...) The current climate does blow sharp and shrill -- it's understandable that few brace themselves and actually step outside. Reading the intro to Messerli's anthology a few weeks ago I hoped for some kind of critical discussion of the book's content and how it's distinct from, say, the Norton. Sadly, there was nothing of the kind, just a ramble about the difficulties of anthologizing poetry...

Thus a national flailing-about happens! So much writing, with little or no discussion to follow, keep company, etc. (This is likely my mistaken thinking, course, because I baldly refuse to read the things that would prove me wrong.)

that's trash, that's cool

says a sign in le bon temps (new orleans club josh and i went to last night, to hear the soul rebels). that motto was printed on some kind of big cardboard (?) leopard-printed mock-up of a guitar, above the stage.

an interesting series of essays

uh, it's a critique of contemporary poetry, that, while it shares some generalized gripes about mfa-land, goes into somewhat greater detail about problems/questions about contemporary poetry. no one gets off lightly in this one, which is part of it's charm. the exemplars of good writing, are, as far as i can tell roethke and dorianne laux. it's kind of mysterious, especially when she says what constitutes good poems. i'm generally pleased to read critiques of 'avant' writing, cause that particular world has the funny situation of being more full of shit AND good writing at the same time. anyway, this is the part that really gets up my butt:

Whatever else can be said of them, the first-person-anecdotal-narrative-confessional (aka "mainstream") poems that have been outnumbered in this volume by such writings as the above, can at least be critically sorted (some are clearly better than others, regardless of whether or not they fit a particular editor or critic's "taste"). Basic standards relating to the craft of writing in general, such as non-cliched phrases, use of momentum and pacing, lack of unintentional ambiguities and other grammatical problems, as well as evidence of an organizing intelligence, a sense of inevitability, a convincing and/or compelling style and voice and so forth are at least available to the reader in, for lack of a better word, the "mainstream" poem.

i'm ok with most of it except for:

"lack of unintentional ambiguities and other grammatical problems"

and "...compelling style and voice"

cause, i do think lots of avant-ness is impervious to criticism. tho, i think that it just might be bad writing, a possibility that the writer never acknowledges.

as for "unintentional ambiguities," she sounds like an elocution teacher, and an imperalist elizabethan, and must hate german poetry. which is cool, but real narrow. she kind of denies that grammar has any part in making a multilayered poem. sheesh, i'm not a radical, but that's just plum crazy. how does one determine the intention of ambiguities? i kind of like not-knowing. (which reminds me, metaphor is not about familiarity, as the artist roni horn would have it.)

and the whole compelling style and voice. i was talking to theis about "voice" the other day, and she cleared it up for me some, but i still think it's vague. and, you know, stylelessness is just bad poetry, just as it is bad shoe designers. like steve madden.

i mean, it's not not-being coopted to think rools sukk.

anyway, shouldn't i be with family celebrating baby fart face?

YeaH

franz wright lost 'is marbles that silliman site. did you guys see that shit:

You're so full of shit, Ron. Are you kidding, or do you really not hear the pathetic absurdity of terms like "Gang of Eight"? It's embarrassing, & you're misleading young American idiots with no knowledge of history. There's no conspiracy – your work is just tremendously, cruelly tedious, and nobody but a linguistic technician could read it for more than five minutes without dying of boredom. You're the other pole of the formalists, an anachronism. And since you can't become Minister of Culture for Stalin or Mao, I suppose it's a good thing capitalism distributed a computer to you: it's important for eccentric losers like you to have something to do, otherwise they might actually find a way to put their "ideas" into practice, and start putting the real artists in concentration camps.

If you don't have the balls to put this in your blog (what a perfectly descriptive terms that is, don't you think?), that's ok. I am bidding eternal farewell to blogdom as of this moment, I assure you. And while you are busy writing your popular movie reviews, I'll be working on something about you for one of the publications real people actually read – it will take some work, since so few of them have even heard of you, but I'll do my best.

Like hell.

FW


i still like franz wright. but what a lil weeble-wobble. and i don't mean this as a defense of silly man. i think fw has a point about rs's paranoia and dated sense of conspiracy. but fw is just as dated - tar har.


i do, however, like his sign off "like hell" but only cause it's melodramatic.

i've been posting alot.
it's called "avoiding grading."

chipotle. my favorite pronunciation of that is "chipoltay."

also,

can i say i fuckin' love gertrude stein's oakland hating mutherfucking ass! i just got "stanzas in meditation" from the library, the public library:

there can be pink with white or white with rose
or there can be white with rose and pink with mauve
or even there can be white with yellow and yellow with blue
or even if even it is rose with white and blue
and so there is no yellow there but by accident.


AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

STOCKHOLDER

I had mentioned jessica stockholder earlier today. here is a link to the art:21 website about her. she has a wonderful interview there, in which she talks about the interrelations of pleasure and the social. at last, a beakerfull of pleasure that does not find its basis in wally stevens. i mean, i love wally's things about pleasure. but it's a maker's pleasure. it's religious pleasure, which there is, a course, but, this pleasure here, is a meander of pleasure, a rivulet of the zambezi in my cup.

let me just excerpt a bit from an interview that articulates a whole bunch of my feelings about art:

ART:21: Anything else you want to debunk?

STOCKHOLDER: People often describe my work as being concerned with trash or garbage. I use castoff things and new, bright, and shiny things. My work is not about a particular kind of object so much as it’s about stuff in general. I’m not interested in having the work be caught in one kind of stuff.

ART:21: There’s a kind of classical way all of this stuff is arranged.

STOCKHOLDER: I think my work is very classical which is sort of ironic to me. It started out as a kind of elbowing the art institution, being upset at how art’s muffled because it’s precious and packaged and put on a pedestal.
My work participates in a shared history of poking at the container of the gallery. Of course we need art institutions—we don’t communicate with one another and have a place to share work if we don’t have galleries and museums. But I think their particular nature needs to be addressed, understood, and played with in people’s work.

ART:21: Can you expand on that?

STOCKHOLDER: I think that my work is classical but also very contemporary. I do a lot of shopping at Home Depot. I don’t know how much I want to give credit to all those different big conglomerates, but stuff is cheap and easy to buy and I participate in that. I use material that’s inexpensive, readily available. It’s really a pleasure that we have all this stuff around us. I love plastic, I think it’s gorgeous and I love it. All of these objects are full of design and other people’s thinking and I ride on the backs of that. I think that my work engages the means of production that we live with even while it embodies things from a long time ago.

got

got a new poem here.

it's a thing from the new series. i think i hate it, now that it's seeing the light of day.

also, been watching 'art 21' which gave us the news of this artist called jessica stockholder, who is pretty good, and has some wild ass poems up on the dia center website

o owls

can this be a lesson for poetry?

Overstimulated

oh shit, you guys, this is the fucking place to be. i swear, this is supposed to be just a slight report on the small press distribution reading last saturday, but the more i think about it, the more excited and stoked i am about the fact that i'm here, now. scott reading was great, and sandra lim was there. his 'dear jack' letters are really good. quite different from his work when we were in school, i think. also stephanie young, who i've been mentioning in phone conversations with all of you, is positively blowing my mind right now. for ex:

sea recedes to museumry

she has some affinities with tina celona. lots of first person hurts tranlated, and many mentions of shoe buying and sephora.

but there are just so many good writers around right now. so many series, weirdos and chances.

for example, a series called new yipes

it all sounds like hagiography, but this is the most heterodox, living feeling i've ever had about poetry. circa now circa now! you know, in iowa, there's so much anxiety about the future of poetry, of jockeying, one feels cloistered. i think of jim macpherson's concern for american culture and his 'monastic option' (ie, people working individually, like the irish monks, in order to preserve the best of the culture. i think it was easy to feel like that in iowa.) here, on the other hand, things feel much more open, public and positively not university-based. this is probably my favorite part. the institutions, such as they are, are pretty decentered.

anyway, all of it will be too social for me at some point but right now, i'm really encouraged by how many people are around, of all ages. come visit.

j

Oh No

All this talk of war, and one of the most convincing explicators of internal war dies.

"it's a bat, It's a crow" : pryor

When I was a kid, there was Eddie and Richard. Those were like, the only comedians in the whole world. There was Sam Kinison, I guess, but all the white guys acted like they were high on coke. Richard always seemed hunted when he was onstage. His monologues always felt like you were talking in an alley. (Charlie Murphy has some of that.) Eddie was more accessible, and less political. But even in the 80s, in the suburbs, Richard had a different kind of intellectual danger. Like Ray Davies, but more ferocious. Like Alan Dugan too, I think, but on TV.

Wot?

I'm questioning my particular reality today because of www.jaredstanley.com

she's / attached / to that goose

phew, i love that bob grenier!

great example of the teentsy lions. (lines.)

How is everybody today? i wrote this poem:


Presentiment,
gentian, animalistical.

Pause, the brief tilt:
microsoft word has a horrible vocabulary,
and doesn’t make the future more anxious
for tilths and tragopans?

Ars fluff.
How many pairs of shoes
damn the pavements of late capital?

How many Roman emperors does
it take to compare American Presidents
to Barbarians? How now?

Steve’s Thou. Martin Buber’s.

December 9, 2005

I'm building a house-boat in heaven

i keep intending to post - but am always rushing off somewhere - i've been typing numerology into the computer all morning and now am supposed to rush off to swim - but but but excuses excuses. on the notion of the littles, though - i was more intending to express my interest in the way catherine was discussing the micro-lines, than to imply that i was using them myself. but i thought you (catherine) were describing an attempt to handle a smallness so teensy that you can't use your normal rules/procedures/senses for it. and that reminded me of how i've been trying to cross over this number pattern, in my poems, into something visible and also related to content. the space waiting to be filled that strange forms make in your brain.

jj, i like 'dream w/the form, not mean w/it'. as duncan once said, wear a cape.

as a sideline, more on the smallness factor:

"One is brought back to the entirety of the single word which is in itself a relation, an implied metaphor, an argument, a harmony or a dissonance.

The economy of presentation in writing is a reassertion of faith that the combined letters--the words--are absolute symbols for objects, states, acts, interrelations, thoughts about them. If not, why use words--new or old?"

(Zukofsky, quoted in this book "Listening to Reading" i'm reading).

and here's something else: Grenier

i

must be insane. i have no idea what i just wrote, but it stands for fun.

infra-thin

so, i love all this return to the infra-thin - i had forgotten about that already. it's so small it disappeared from my mind. i was thinking by way of clarification. l, were you talking wistfully about the small lines? it sounded like it - like it was the formal mama of your numerology.

the post came at the same time that we were watching "rope" on dvd again. the movie, (hitchcock) was shot as a continuous scene, focussing on someone's back when they ran out of tape. but, anyway there are no cuts.

on the doc that accompanied the movie, the screenwriter, this hilarious old crank, was like "i don't know why he did that - it didn't add anything to the movie" and on and on and on, and called it a gimmick etc. and i thought, "wow, that's a screenwriter talking." cause poets (this one, at least) are(is) so much less interested in the "why" of the technique than we are in where it gets us. as duncan says, "poetry is the boat." so, i guess i'm going to form is never more (and often less) than an extension of content - if the boats made out of a house, it'll float in this or that lake, if the boat's an oil tanker, it won't fit in my bathtub. uh, wtf. uh.

i think i quote duncan everytime i post. i don't care though. as duncan say, "i don't care."

so, like the infra-thin, we can dream with the form, not mean with it.

Lawyers for Temperatures

Wow, it's really great to poke my head back into the owl-room and find all kinds of fascinating activities underway: Arizona on fire, Smithson on fire, Joanne Kyger reading while on fire. One thing that grabbed my attention was that comment toward the end of your last post, Lauren, where you mention (or at least hint) that your imagination works differently or less enthusiastically now than it used to. I was just thinking about something similar over the last few days, remembering a TrishCamp student named Ezra Furman (I think you might remember him, Cat) whose songs had totally blown me away, all playful and seeming-effortless -- "I Dreamed of Moses" and "The Faceless Boy," especially. It was hard not to compare the waterslide feeling I got from him with the sodden slogs I often seem to be on at this point with my own things... Last night I listened to Mellow Gold by Beck which I've never really listened to completely and I was surprised how much more I liked it than the stuff he'sdone since. It was all choppiness and weird, hot surrealism, and even if it was self-conscious it was the self-consciousness of a dirty young person walking down the street, not the self-consciousness of a world famous ironist pop-and-locking in a crowded stadium. But self-consciousness aside (or maybe not aside, come to think of it, because that might be a part of things, at least for me), it's weird to consider that my own brain is slowly pulling the rug out from under itself. I mean, fuck, the last thing I want is less imaginative energy. It's almost enough to make a guy eat THC-infused candy bars...

Even if there are compensatory payoffs, like analytical strength or whatever, I can't shake the feeling that the idea of imagination and its diminishing with age is going to sit prominently on my radar for the next little while.

(I remember reading an interview with Stanley Kunitz a few years back where he wistfully mentioned how when he was younger a new poem would appear every day on his doorstep, and now that he was older he had to wait a long time for one to show up. Hope I die before my serotonin levels match Alan Greenspan's and all that.)

(And I should add that Ezra is away at Tufts now and doing cool things, apparently, and if any of you are inclined to look him up and check out mp3s or buy CDs or whatever I do recommend it. He's really great.)

exacting unspecifications

i like thinking about the line so short you can't see it - and extending into other dimensions (the infra-thin) to grip it between calipers. out of my smithson cravings (and my formal envy of you folks), i've concocted my own little demons (protean, carried in sacks). w/the stuff i've been working on, i made this number pattern for it - seven poems, each of two pages (except the last), starting with six parts on the first page, one on the second/ then five on the first page, two on the second/ then four on the first page, three on the second/ then three on the first page, four on the second/ then two on the first page, five on the second/ then one on the first, six on the second/ then finally a one page concluding poem of seven parts. whew! part of the fun of it is figuring out how each group of however many bits is going to lie on the page - as i'm mulling and mulling, going over thinking about beginning, part of what i'm thinking about is how the shapes will constellate. i get these weirdly specific ideas that i then try to mobilize - yesterday, for the six of the one and six, i had this flash that i wanted it to be 3 groups of two, fairly long-ish lines, as close to half page for each as i could make them, so that the shapes would have a horizontal profile, but w/a very skinny column of space going down the middle to separate them. but, oddly, i haven't the foggiest _why_ certain arrangements are the proper ones, i just feel like they are, and i'm trying to create these arrangements by banging them out very sloppily on the typewriter (which sloppy jamming-together by eye i will try to then re-create when i type them into the computer).

anyway, it's funny when i do try to seperate myself and consider the why of this kind of formal mishegoss....what in the world am i thinking about when i'm writing? i can draw myself up and utter sounds about vantage point, etc. but when i tell my 3rd graders to 'use your imagination' (wearing my conventions-of-teaching hat) i think about what kind of very peculiar imagination i have apparently cultivated in myself. of the kind of imagination i tell the kiddos to use - metaphor-making, imagery, etc. - although i love it very much, i seem to have less and less of it myself. (instead i count and twist.)

in other exacting non-specifics, there is no weather in houston (and no quail neither). 'record high temps' in the 80s on saturday. and a cold front on sunday bringing cold rain! pls send escape hatch.