ooples and boonoonoos

i've been enfeebled by a flu - no thoughts of my own on voice or on much.

but i have a library book on paradox i'm supposed to be starting, when well (e.t.a tomorrow)

will report back for the conversation -

in the meanwhile, this alice notley part struck me as abt voice as the association of quirk/surface with innards/behavior.

"I touch the purple petals
She says Hey!

The flower says, we are purple
together
they touch purple it keeps purple
purple means us, here.
The air moved a person. I like people
because they're as serious
as I am. Being purple is very serious.
It's dense and still.
It's a matter of fact
but light seems it.
I seem the light
makes me feel purple.
A petal is crumpling I've done
before
I sleep in the bulb.

Being purple is long.

Crumpling is not as serious
as being purple

(I may disagree.)

I'm not not serious not smiling.
I'm smiling
as crumpling
only a little now.
I'm mostly staying seriously purple now."

here's jessica stockholder on surface (talking abt paint on her objects in her installations:

"...the painting also draws attention to surface - to skins over objects and skins of objects. The surface is simultaneously rested on and poked into. It is treated as a flat weightless, almost abstract or not physical area; at the same time it is an extension of an object and is treated as such. The paint functions both to alter existing surfaces and as a very flat object in its own right placed over or along side other objects. The surface of the object conceals the mass of the object from us; it is also the part of the object revealed to our sight, it is an area where we are vulnerable to deception and also a site poignantly ripe for the development of fiction. The surface becomes a tenuous site where fiction and reality struggle with notions of subjectivity and objectivity to find boundaries or to determine difference."

to me this has become about voice - maybe not anymore tomorrow, when i will be willing myself to no longer have the flu....

something about berkeley

yeaH

i love it. 3 immediate questions to ask while i await a student in office hours.

1. rhetoric is voice?
2. voice encompasses everything in the poem?
3. voice is the thing which goes out and returns, boomerang-esque, with pieces of the world to eat?

much of the thistles of love,
jared

another shibboleth

i'm abt to run off to work, but hearing j's actual voice (very welcome and cheering) makes me think on 'voice' (cue thunderous music). jared said off-handedly at one point that talking to catherine helped clear up voice, or tone for him. i would like to be cleared. could we pursue another such grand retreating topic?

or maybe rhetoric?

It has come to objects and space.
No argument arrives to justify,
From the blue north as a gust,
Any will outside variety
Itself, a body’s laugh for
Sheer abundance. What.
Comes to never changing?
Orbis. A thing unlike others
To examine, and especially
To turn away from and grin.
Covetise has a warmer eye.

January 22, 2006

THERE

have been 145 posts on this blog since we started. this'll be 146.

yeah!

From My Brother

hash browns and bacon strips,
I love the way you lick your lips

[...]

shag the pony, extra pepperoni,
just pick up the bone


just a couple of lines from Motorhead's "Eat the Rich"

great.


Zac Stanley
GIS Specialist
Stetson Engineers
2171 E. Francisco Blvd., Suite K
San Rafael, CA 94901
415.457.0701 ext. 27

Jean Racoonsong, You're OK!

Here's a poem that I have strongarmed Jessica Daniels into letting me post here for you lovely people. Jessica, would you like to say anything?

Actually, it's Patrick Swayze who would like to introduce you to two new special friends, Samuel and Jean Racoonsong!!! Working for "TOAST"
?

Much love to all of you
Jessica

**** * *** * *** * ** * ***

the dying arrangement as a living being


it is dying and animate
to direct light, or to create privacy
gouache as the undercoating


the passage, musical and something too to follow with the eye
in the lovely dying arrangement, grasses and lights forming the hut
a living death
the way we admire art, not this only-death

but the taking apart of anything, this is living




material

a 1723 earthquake which happened soley in a forest
with no human despair of buildings
decorum to the event meant a whole flock of leaves coming up
just the odd branch of a clutching jaw
and the goldish blood on the living trees not pollenous dust
washing is kill
and let-breath



the dying arrangement is a living being

* *** *** ** *** ** * ***

Here's another one, something about a killer from New York?

on the arena
snow is so heavy on the roof
but the breath of all the people and the horses inside
make this avalanche
ice falls from the arena
and each of us from his horse

my spooked horse and
my helmet was cracked

**** * *** ******

Metallica!!!!!!!!!

planned failure

more art 21 interview-ese (this time from artist mike kelley):

ART:21: What about the idea of beauty?

KELLEY: This was a really big topic in contemporary art. The so-called “new beauty” camp—art becoming beautiful again. I think they’re talking about conventional ideas of beauty and I’m more interested in the sublime. I think it’s a kind of neo-conservatism that fits right in with Republican ideology. It’s backwards-looking and I’m not interested because the New Beauty is old-fashioned beauty as far as I see it.

ART:21: What do you think is beautiful?

KELLEY: I think what I make is beautiful. I think it’s beautiful because terms, and divisions between terms, are confused and divisions between categories start to slip. That produces what I think of as a sublime effect, or it produces humor. And both things interest me. When you use the word sublime, traditionally it’s associated with metaphysics. It’s a nineteenth century usage, like the sublimity of a mountain that becomes like nature and God. I don’t mean to evoke it in that way. I’m interested in a less elevated beauty.

ART:21: Can you say a little more about the sublime?

KELLEY: Well, like I said, I think that kind of discussion of the sublime is a nineteenth century metaphysical discussion, like Edmund Burke or the American Transcendentalists. And of course, that’s not where I’m coming from. For me psychedelia was sublime because in psychedelia your worldview fell apart. That was a sublime revelation, that was my youth, and that was my notion of beauty. And that was a kind of cataclysmic sublime. It was very interiorized, it wasn’t about a metaphysical outside, it was about your own consciousness. That’s my starting point of the sublime and I’ve had to take that into a more conceptual sphere, which is perhaps an analytical sublime, like how do you produce a sublime effect? Preaching is a production of sublime effect. Poetry is a production of sublime effect. Hypnosis is the production of sublime effect. And those are all examples of it produced through language. I think you can also produce it through image—image clash, image resonance—things like that.

ART:21: When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

KELLEY: I knew by the time I was a teenager that I was going to be an artist, there’s no doubt about that. There was nothing else for me to be. I didn’t even want to be the other things that at the time were outside general culture. I didn’t want to be a rock musician; I wanted to be an artist. And I think the reason I chose it was that at that time it was the most despicable thing you could be in American culture. To be an artist at that time had absolutely no social value. It was like planned failure. You could never be a success. And the fact that I’m now a professional artist? At that time it seemed like a contradiction of terms. I came from a milieu in which artists were despised, whereas rock musicians and drug dealers were—you know—hipster culture heroes.

Pound

oh yeah, vis-a-vis pound, he had a knack for juicy qoutes, which means he gets quoted all the time by writing teachers (anyone ever hear marvin say "make it new?" it was the moment i turned decisively toward decoration).

also, the prose pound refers to is, like, flaubert. and, i imagine, houlihan reads new yorker stories only. i mean, the sense of inevitability in faulkner is so overwhelming.

anyway, i thought nothing of it. people like this like to pull out pound because it makes them look "edgy."

was that an ad hominem attack? (people like this).

Eagles Mate in Freefall -- What?! (--That's Gross! --That's Cool!)

So Earlham U. was squawkboxing announcements at me as I tried to get my plastic owl-words out last night -- "The library be closing in fift- minutes -- please bring any materials to main circulation ..." As I fled the evil eyes of the work-study stooges and crossed the grass I found myself wishing I'd had time to get a couple more things down. Here they are: first, I did enjoy, in a semi-satanic way, the Houlihan essay that horsewhipped Fence, even if the attack was again less than honorable or elegant (my impression was that it was more about rhetorical victory than meaningful investigation). Second, this is deja-vuing my socks off -- skimming through Liz's Hart Crane book the other morning, "nimble blue plateaus" reminded me of him writing prose explaining and defending his technique. I also have a vague memory of Stevens being questioned (maybe by a relative?) about his work's weirdness and responding with something to the effect that apples are always going to be puzzling to people who are used to/expecting potatoes. And it's not like these are the only two 20th century poets who've answered criticisms and accusations like these -- they're much more the exception than the rule. I guess this is the problem I was trying to get a compass of when I commented earlier on the lack of solid, careful criticism of current unconventional (that is, non-Dorianne Laux) poetry: poetry benefits from people asking hard, well-informed questions of it, and the current laxness deplored by Houlihan could be in large part due to the dearth of those questions and question-askers. And this goes both ways, of course -- think of how criticism as a whole has benefitted from having to grapple with the monsters of Modernism. It's only going to get flabby sucking down those pre-chewed tomatoes and cans of neo-Romantic Ensure! (Uh?) So in the end, what a shallow and ideology-driven essay like Houlihan's does more than anything is advance the notion that nothing "experimental" deserves to be taken seriously, which ultimately undermines poets and critics alike ("poet-critics" getting doubly fucked, I guess). Anyone who actually gives a shit about poetry and knows one nanobyte about the way it has developed since, say, 1880 would hopefully take a different tack.

One other thought from yesterday: I totally applaud your attitude, Jared, in taking this series of essays, warts and all, and trying to see how they might apply to your own ways of writing poems. I don't think "smugness" is the right word -- I don't mean for such a riptide of negative connotations -- but there does seem to be something attitudinal shared by most non-mainstream poets, an attitude that seeks to cut any perceived opposition or differing tendency off at the knees, a general inclination to hermeticize and thus raise forcefields around ourselves and our poetic loved ones, and it really contributes to the problem. ("Wait, you mean SHE's telling avant-people they're not DEMIGODS? She must be square/ on the NEA payroll/ out of her gourd! I will now ignore her completely!") Absorbing and applying as many questions as possible to oneself, regardless of their origin, seems like a good way to build a sound foundation for one's work. (It's also a good way of fucking up the American-media-advanced modes of public dialogue, which have everything to do with shrill rhetoric and dividing into opposing pods. Totally discouraging the way even smart people continue to fall into this crap.)

(Can you tell I'm typing this from a Quaker university?)

A few other thoughts from reading your post today, then, Lauren:

-- I love the quote from the Waldrop book. Brings our ghost-word "rigor" to mind. That the amount of energy required to fully engage with something on a critical level should equal the amount of energy required to produce it seems very reasonable and 2nd Law of Thermodynamics-y. I do wonder if the ascendance of Beat & NY School speedy-poetics -- those emphasizing a flash of heat and emotion over craft and intellectual Goldberg-rigs -- has really screwed everyone in the end, what with so many critics not wanting to touch O'Hara or Corso with a ten-foot sterilized pole. And if they could ignore O'Hara and Corso, it was pretty easy to ignore X and then Y who followed. Then the po-Friendster cycles started in the vacuum (less with the Beats, obviously), if only to get something going, critically -- writing about each other, appreciating the thought and energy that were steering this new work that so baffled outsiders.

-- I very much know what you mean about disliking things that you later grow to admire. I've come to think of it as getting an aesthetic splinter. I can't help pushing at it and worrying it, and eventually it seems much more important than it did at first. I'm getting better at spotting these when I first get them, although I'm still often taken by surprise... I also think that proceeding based on intuitive reactions as you describe, without falling into rigid ways of classifying or evaluating -- this is a really great way to go. My karma ran over your dogma and all that. Things feel so fluxy to me right now, too. It's a good time to be exploratory and willing to bend. (I just saw a bendy straw in my mind and thought periscope. I guess a straight straw would be a telescope?)

Last thought: I've really been enjoying Laura (Riding) Jackson's The Telling lately. In the section about her idea of rebeginnings she drops some bombs that are, among other things, impacting my ideas concerning criticism and its function. This one blew me up two days ago, where she's taking issue with the concept of "finishing":

"What has, truly, been achieved in the progress towards fullness of knowing being is obscured by the works of the 'finishers', which crowd the historical horizon -- so that there is no just seeing to where, by truth's measurements, we have come, no just seeing where we are, in our advance as beings charged with carrying the spirit distributed to us in a point of union, of us in it, it in us."

and the fact that the poems that show up at her website violate her own criteria.

i went back to perihelion to make sure that we weren't making total fools out of ourselves, and i was reassured to find that we weren't. really, especially in the easy department, and in the cliche department. we, our barely published selves, are right about the pox of critics calling the kettle black.

see no evil

hey all,

jared, steve, thx for your recent posts - clear, thoughtful, serious, i've really enjoyed them and been turning them over. sorry for my absence - i've been in midland and new orleans, got back and right away had to teach, so i'm just somewhat worn out. sorry, too, for my bit of attitudinizing ('that's trash, that's cool') - hope it didn't seem too snide - but jared, i think you articulated it exactly right (and in a way i couldn't have), when you described the aspect of poetry that's "a way of judging other judgements". that guitar/trash slogan was in a joyous context. aka trash as a particular stance that says "i am having the life drained out of me while you, large or small authority, attempt to tell me what the good is. so instead let's have some wild drumming plus whatever is supposed to be bad." i just realized that i'm about to stumble into an uninformed apollo and dionysus comparison...help me catherine?

but anyway, i guess what gets my goat about the houlihan stuff is this idea that there are these objective criteria that one can measure poems against. things called 'non-cliched phrases' and 'use of momentum and phrasing'. ok, so a great dugan poem is well-paced, is funny, uses language in an interesting way (though that doesn't mean it doesn't employ cliches). but would i really compare it to other poems and say 'it has this proportion of pacing, yea much lack of cliche, etc.'? and a _great_ poem has so much of these stratospheric qualities and a merely good poem a quantifiable less.

i know my idea about this stuff is a truism in its own right, but i think that a poem/poet makes its own rules for the different pieces. (one's own 'form among forms'.) and what judgment entails is whether one is willing to stick around to learn the rules or the patterns. or to accept the piece with the feeling that there is a governing spirit, whether one cares to obsess or learn about its preoccupations. i think that steve and jared both make the great point that often the problem is that the rules are actually too simple, not too difficult (and that's true of so-called front and rear guards). i see that point when steve says "frequent lack of difficulty" or jared discussing the one-dimensionality of a poem of pure 'negation'.

a paraphrase of a quote from a book i'm reading (rosmarie waldrop writing about jabes):

"(interpretation) sets about the task of uncovering the meaning of a text by re-creating the whole process of the genesis of that text. The conceptual premise behind it is Aristotle's distinction between ergon and energeia: Interpretation of a work...consists in translating the ergon - the completed object - back into the energeia that brough it forth."

we've been watching art 21, and we watched ellen gallagher's segment last night. i was looking at some at her work at school, and i always liked it, but her new work seems very insane and good (tony and i were blown away watching her bejewel isaac hayes, shit!). her new stuff had a genetic resemblance to the old things - i could feel it as part of a body of work - but i wouldn't have predicted it. and i don't really understand it. but i respond to it. whereas there are other artists whose work i don't respond to. and one bangs into that thing of why - the ineffable, dum dum dum.... it's predicated on other things i've seen i'm sure. but i don't know how. and that's also why i think it's somewhat frightening to ask these big judgement questions of contemporary art or poetry - bc i wind up just doing a rorschach test on myself. usually what i don't like tells me what i am pursuing in what i'm working on (or, even more frighteningly, could alert me to problems i'm having that i'm unaware of). kind of like the point you were making about olson - that a categorical rejection of the sonnet basically is saying 'i don't want you to make me write sonnets.' whereas bernadette mayer (or laura owens, in the art world) doesn't seem to have any problem just writing a sonnet that isn't granddaddy's. but to my mind that doesn't really ruin the authoritarian anti-authoritarians, at least not as writers - it's just that kind of temperament that needs to proclaim ultimate truth (and maybe even have disciplines) to feel permitted to make up the rules.

whether to steadfastedly shout that one does judge and has ultimate standards or to proclaim that one does not judge at all...hmmmm. jared, my emotional experience agrees with yours that a true 'egolessness' is probably a rare thing. for me, proceeding as though i don't know what's best seems to lead me down a better path of action than allowing myself to feel that i know what's right and what isn't. ('how to live, what to do'.) but i also know that i judge everything all the time. but even in my own tiny world my thoughts and judgements don't matter so much - i am a bad predictor of my own future, and often start out forcefully disliking things i grow to like later on.

fashion and 'cool desires' another big issue. i don't even have the strength to approach that one right now.

i agree with steve that to question the idea of the 'best' is a far cry from finding every piece of writing the same as every other piece. i personalize the whole issue by feeling that i can decry a whole array of smug 70s male type attitudes behind every 'best' and 'greatest'. ("the _femininists_ believe that we shouldn't read chaucer! the _feminists_ have ruined my appreciation of chaucer!"...etc. etc.)

i think i'm fizzling out - want to give you all a call. happy new year!...i love talking to all of you.

Yo! MTV Ropes

John Coombs and I used to have this thing where whenever someone would ask us a quick question we'd pull long faces and intone in the most funereal tone possible, "Yes AND No!" Not as good as "The answer's right in your hand," I guess, but in the same mysterious ballpark.

I only have a few minutes here. Unfortunate, because after reading several of Houlihan's essays and then your comments, Jared, I have a lot more to say than I expected to. To try to nutshell it, I think this is in large part because her fundamental charges are pretty good and frictionful, but she presents her argument, like you said, in this totally wack Fortress Bloom kind of way. And hell, at least Childe Harold pays lip service to the Ashbery he keeps in his stable. Houlihan's classico-critical course, from what I can suss of it, is incapable of swerving even so gently as to find much merit in, say, the New York School (& btw, does she really write without any consideration as to how her critical apparatus would fare in, say contemporary visual arts? Poetry Island is a show so old it's not even in syndication anymore). I mean, bagging on a painfully homogenous crew of Languagers chosen by Hejinian and claiming they represent the full range of contemporary avant-poetry (they aren't even a good random sampling from that Best Of collection (which was at least sometimes interesting) (and I have to say what the fuck when she claims that Hejinian's discomfort with "bestness" equates to a complete gutting or dismantling of poetry evaluation -- this is simply feeble thinking) (oh yeah: similarly, her bitter coinage of "the church of new writing" comes off as awfully shallow when she a) makes clear straightaway that she knows fairly little about what's actually happening out in this new cult she's so bent about; and b) never turns that phrase around -- God forbid she should rub "the [painfully existent] church of old writing" the wrong way, right?), and then giving us Dorianne Laux and "The Shipfitter's Wife" as an example of writing excellence one might aspire to -- the ship-puker's puke is more like it, dude.

(And a quick side question here: what did you make of it, Jared, when she called in Pound as an ally?)

But like I said before, I think that some of these questions are fundamentally good ones to ask. Much internal struggle as I've read contemporary wanna-be-a-poem-weirdo work has been because I've had to recalibrate my critical gauges, and there has been struggle -- so much newer experimental poetry displays both profound strength and profound weakness, sometimes in the same poem, sometimes across a range of work. Kasey Mohammed's poems in A Thousand Devils blew, but some of his collagey stuff (which raised my hackles at first, esp. in the way "flarf" and maybe "The New Brutalityismo" seems to advance or even trumpet collage as a sparkling innovation -- wow, that's like so NOW) is actually pretty interesting. It just requires some shifting. In the shift, though, things and clarities are lost, and some of those things are importent. Impotent? Imped.

(I'll add to this soon. I guess in the meantime we can table my suggestion for group icepicking of "difficult" poems. The problems with mainline Language poetry have certainly been spelled out more clearly than I could hope to do here, and classic Lang-Po slabs are hardly worth blunting our icepicks over. Isn't anything out there more "difficult" than Language poems, anyway? The problem to me is actually their frequent lack of difficulty, which often ends up coming off as anti-rigorous and even lily-livered, in the right hands...)