Thinking Again: Original Mission Statement

In June 2006 I began the notebook of reflections that eventually turned into this blog. At the time I had no intention of doing a blog. In fact the original goal of the notebook had to do with processes of thinking on my part that were perhaps best left as private reflections.

Living in North County San Diego, having few people to discuss poetry with after years of constant conversation in Washington, DC, I began to be more attracted to the idea of creating a blog that I could use as a forum for conversation and as a way for me to generate writing. And I feel like it has been a helpful experience for me.

Below, I’m pasting the first notebook entry, from June 13, 2006. Obviously, this blog has become something very different than the notebook I was imagining at the time, and this piece wasn’t written with the idea of putting it online. Nonetheless I think this first entry still captures some of the spirit of what I’ve been trying to explore in this blog: a way of thinking.

06/13/06

Imagine for a moment a perfect society. Then imagine what would be wrong with it.

Many discussions of poetry and the world come out of the first of these two possibilities, but many less out of the second. The first appeals to hopefulness, to a desire for justice. The second appeals mainly to shortcomings in trying to understand what it is that’s being hoped for. A poetics of complicity and the failure (or refusal) to understand.

What does one say about the failure or refusal of understanding in the lives of those who seem committed to understanding?

One could write a whole lifetime of poems without ever raising that question. There is after all a whole world outside ourselves, beyond what we have done, and one could comment about it with righteous anger, genuine hurt, or precise analysis, inexhaustibly. There will never not be something to be angry about, and rightly angry as well. There will never not be something to expose, and rightly expose.

But what kind of poetry could emerge from the attempt to engage with what the writer doesn’t understand? Would it be simply an attempt to understand, one more way to replace the failure to understand with a process of understanding? Would it simply be a display of confusion? How to write about not understanding in a way that is neither an attempt to turn it into understanding or an attempt to acknowledge, expose, or even celebrate misunderstanding?

What it would it mean to write a poem that attempts to engage, but not to resolve, the problem of what it means to not understand? Especially if one really does (but also does not) understand many things.

Further, why write about what’s not understood? Maybe this: to return us to a world that’s larger than human understanding. I do not necessarily mean by this anything having to do with any notion of god.

That the world has to be larger than what we know of it sometimes seems to me the only thing left to hope and work for.

And so this notebook: an attempt to explore what I don’t understand.

Mark Wallace Never Commits Himself? Part Four: Thinking the Fray

Hey Joe:

Your response here definitely helps move this discussion in the direction of what Thinking Again is about, and here’s why: we need to Think Again about your vision of the culture of poetics.

You characterize me as “above the fray.” The culture of poetics, I guess, is the fray. Then, quoting Dorn, you seem to suggest that there are two main moves that one can make in the fray: disagreement/debate, or blind obedience.

Let’s see what’s wrong with these ideas.

It’s funny to quote dictionary.com, but here goes. Fray:
1. a fight, battle, or skirmish.
2. a competition or contest, esp. in sports.
3. a noisy quarrel or brawl.

In other words, your concept of the culture of poetics is that it’s a kind of war, with different groups struggling for supremacy. At times it may be closer to sport, a ritualized and refereed game in which in theory no one gets hurt, but at times the stakes are far more serious. Also, the institutional framework of the sporting event perhaps represents the dangers of conformity, which are best replaced by the unregulated bar room brawl. And apparently there are two main moves one can make in this brawl: fight, or succumb.

That seems to me frankly a sad view of what poetics, and the poets who engage in it, are up to. And despite your wish to get gender out of the picture, it’s a view that remains immersed in male warrior culture, which it takes to be simply the way the world is. There’s a working class liberating edge to the idea of the barroom fray, I can grant, but it’s still obviously male, and only liberating to those who feel liberated by a gloves-off fight, which would be, of course, fighters. And yes, women hit each other too sometimes, but I don’t think that fact makes the fist fight an ungendered activity. And your reference, by the way, to “precious sensibilities” feminizes emotion in a troubling way: Masculine Idea and Feminine Emotion. You might want to rethink the relationship between ideas and emotions.

While debate is important, and the role it plays in resistance can be crucial, it’s hardly the only reason for having a conversation about poetry, and it’s hardly the only way to talk to other people about it. I wonder how many poets would not be interested in poetry at all if poetry were nothing more than a debate involving nothing more than assertions made for reasons of seizing power of some kind or other. Still, nowhere in anything I have said have I rejected the idea that debate and dissent have value. But it’s true, there are many current debates about poetry which I find deeply uninteresting, with people endlessly asserting cliched positions that it seems very tiresome to refute and refute and refute again. I’ve been interested, on this blog, in trying to come to a greater level of understanding about issues that are on my mind. The goal is to achieve a kind of insight, maybe even a greater level of wisdom, and certainly I’ve been trying to look past typical poetry world debates to find some type of connection among positions that often think of themselves purely as opposites. For instance, my post on the notion of self in poetry was designed to point out that people who assert the value of personal narrative poetry and people who reject the idea of the personal in poetry share one thing in common: they actually don’t have much idea of what this self is that they’re trying either to assert or reject.

So yes, on most of the posts here on Thinking Again I muse, and think through problems that are on my mind. The posts show the process of what it means to think through something. I come to many conclusions, something you seem not to have noticed, and many of the musings contain implicit critiques of other positions, which you also seem not to have noticed. But I’m also using the blog as a forum for conversation and I’m often trying to find out what other people think. Isn’t that funny, that I’m actually curious what other people are thinking instead of only wanting to know how they respond to my own ideas?

Even though my blog is something I use to create conversation, that doesn’t mean that I think the culture of poetics is a conversation any more than it’s a fray. It’s too divisive to be called a conversation, too generative and sustaining to be called a fray. It can be one or the other at times, or both, and many other things as well. There can be as many different types of exchanges as people can invent. People involved in the culture of poetics can be mean-spirited or generous, power hungry or self-deprecating, funny or long winded and dull. Much of the time—like in most of this discussion—they have a poor conception of who they’re talking to. Maybe speech act theory would be helpful in analyzing the way talk develops in the culture of poetics. I’ve written about this subject before in my essay “Haze,” which among other things discusses the role that misunderstanding plays in all attempts at understanding.

As to your assertion that poetry can take on important issues in the world, whoever said it couldn’t? I can’t think of a single poet who has ever made such a point. In order for a debate to exist, they’re actually have to be two sides.

So while we may disagree, I disagree with your interpretation of what we disagree about.

To sum up: 1) Your comments about my blog are based on a misunderstanding of what I’m doing and why. 2) Although it embarrasses me to say it, I am and always have been contentious, both in writing and in person, at work and in my private life. I’m a man who likes nothing better than a stupid argument like this one, and therefore I spend a lot of time trying not to give in to that pathetic, needy tendency, the feeling that nothing real is happening unless some guy is throwing punches, verbal or otherwise. Therefore 3) your charge that I’m afraid to state my opinions, or perhaps don’t have any, is ludicrous. In fact, and I mean this quite seriously, I challenge you to find a single thing regarding poetry about which I will not state my opinion.

That’s all I have to say on this subject. If you’d like the final word, please send another post and I’ll put it up. I’ve appreciated your willingness to make public your claim that I refuse to take stands in public, and I appreciate your willingness to hear my public answer to your criticism. I’m prepared at any point to shake hands and move forward.

All best,

Mark

Mark Wallace Never Commits Himself? Part Three: Above the Fray

Joe Safdie writes:


Mark,

Thanks for this long and thoughtful post; I guess we'll see how large the poetic blogosphere attention span really is.

Let's take it, as they say, point-by-point. I don't really want to talk more about your comment about Kenny's post, because frankly, even after your explanation of it, I still don't understand it. Playful is always good, to my mind, but we disagree about the word "relevant" - I think poetry can still be relevant . . . and current, and topical, and pointed, and political. And playful. And I think poetry that does all that would be highly relevant. Maybe we can get into cases a bit later on. (By the way, Kenny looks a lot like me in that video - does he, really?)

In fact, the only reason I mentioned that comment at all was because I thought it represented a tendency I've observed in your blog writing (whether your own or in comments): that is, you go all around the subject - you summarize the various perspectives that might possibly be entertained about whatever issue you're writing about without ever really adopting any of those perspectives: instead, you're "above the fray." That might be one way of defining what "thinking through" an issue is - and if that, and that alone, is the intention of your posts on this blog, then we can stop the conversation right here - my bad.

But thinking, for me, also includes judgment and decision . . . and, yes, assertion. I think it's possible to be assertive without descending into calcified clichés. Can't someone assert his or her opinion about poetic matters without intimating that the people who don't agree suck? I agree that any assertion is a "questionable half-truth," as you have it, merely a way station along the road. But a thoughtful or provocative one might provide an occasion for refreshment, for nourishment, for conversation - for thinking - before setting off again. In the best of circumstances, that's what any poetic assertion or manifesto has always done: "make it new"; "the musical phrase, not the metronome"; get the breath in; call the blonde (not LeRoi); fishes and bicycles.

Boring is boring is boring, Mark, but the mere act of debate, or asserting claims and counter-claims, can never be boring in and of itself: it's the foundation of argument. I don't know if you ever have to teach argument, but I have to teach plenty, and I take things like logical fallacies and evidence and persuasive rhetoric seriously, as building blocks to thought. And the last I heard, poets can still think, although I wouldn't want to make that universal.

And yet, we're living in an inconvenient time for that to be true. I've always valued satire and sarcasm and harsh irony - modes of implicit judgment, by the way - as valuable poetic techniques, but as I wrote to you back-channel, it seems as if cultural relativism (or, sigh, "political correctness") is the only game in town these days, so that anyone who's alarming or provocative or insinuating is immediately guilty of insulting somebody's precious sensibilities (I'd like to keep gender out of this, by the way - I'm sure you're right that men exhibit more jackass behavior on blogs and listservs than women, but surely both sexes are capable of it).

Other people will obviously have to be the judge of this, but as a careful writer, I always try to avoid clichés and conventions and calcified thought - wouldn't any writer worth his or her salt do the same? (Actually, I'm a fan of the outrageous, which is one reason why I like Nada's writing so much.) But even if your characterization of my writing as "old school, sixties assertive leftist reportage" is completely off base, there IS one thing that marks me as thoroughly 20th century and a member of the derriere-garde - and it gets back to that idea of relevance, or reference - I like it. I dig it. I think poets can, and should be, "the antennae of the race," and also be investigative journalists, as Ed Sanders argued in an essay 30 years ago. I most value the poets who have been. (And by the way, I've liked, a lot, all the posts of Mark Nowak and Linh Dinh that I've seen on the Harriet Blog.)

Language poetry as "challenging assumptions"? Please. "Moral didacticism"? The most recent example of that I know is your post here, even if I was afraid of the word "moral," which I'm not. "Limitations of the language"? Possibly, if one indulged in revolutionary clichés of one sort or another, but I've already said that any serious writer can't do that.

So where does that leave us in this Southern California wasteland? I've already told you that some of the language in my first e-mail to you was not only intemperate, but contemptible (and if you think that was contemptible, you should have seen what I said about Ron Silliman on Patrick Herron's listserv six months ago). But the fact remains that you and I have serious differences about what poetry can and should be. And I think that's great - I think people SHOULD have these differences, and talk them out, exactly as you've given me the opportunity to do here.

Anybody who knows anything about me knows that Ed Dorn was an important friend and influence on my life. One of his pieces in Abhorrences is called "The Protestant View" -

that eternal dissent
and the ravages
of faction are preferable
to the voluntary
servitude of blind
obedience.

I'm Jewish, but I agree with this pro-TEST-ant view, and always will. And what I most value is clever, witty, intelligent, gorgeous and graceful writing that somehow asserts something . . . and I always will.

Mark Wallace Never Commits Himself? Part Two

Hey Joe:

First, thanks for reading my blog and other comments and taking them seriously enough to be irritated. On one level, I do appreciate it: us bloggers have to take the readers we can get. I wish that I could appreciate you reading it well, but sadly I don’t think you’ve done that.

Re my two-line response on Harriet that prompted your irritation, it’s true that it was playful, not exactly the developed poetic “stance” that you seem to wish it had been. A lot of people make playful blog comments, and it’s worth trying some time if taking a stance ever gets dull for you. But you seem to have missed that it was also serious. That could be partly my fault because, simultaneously, I was responding to something happening on Nada Gordon’s blog, which was a videotaped bar discussion between Kasey and Kenny on the concept of “relevance.” I’ve critiqued the concept of “relevance” on my blog before, and in fact you commented on that particular blog post. I think Kenny’s concept of relevance is weak, and on Kenny’s post I was making that point, albeit in an ironic way that I hope both mirrored and undercut his position. If you got from it that the relevance/irrelevance binary is a false dichotomy of experience, and that the result is nonetheless money, then you got what I was aiming for. But I don’t know why you seem to think that I should have been the one to deliver a comment in the way you wanted it delivered. Isn’t that your job?

Which leads me to a second point: what my blog is. Notice, if you will, the title: Thinking Again. The blog is hardly a reflection of everything I do. I’m also publishing essays, reviews, poems, stories, and doing serious revisions on a novel I have coming out in 2010. I’m attending conferences, participating in discussions, teaching classes, and giving readings. The blog, like my other writing, is its own discrete project. Like with many of my projects, it develops out of a particular relation between structure and content. On the blog, I often think through what I take to be issues that need further consideration, often and especially ones around which discourse has calcified into the cliches of poetic, cultural and political debate that I believe people, including myself, need to think through and past. I ask questions and try to find out things I don’t know and encourage discussion and sometimes even get some. I don’t want my blog to be another blog where people (and of course, mainly men) assert questionable half-truths in the expected “I know and they suck” format. I don’t think we’re suffering from any shortage of that approach. Do you?

On September 20, Nick Piombino wrote a fascinating blog post asserting his final annoyance with the sword-wielding male hysteria blogosphere (that’s my phrase, not his). In that post, he said that he felt that debates about schools of poetics, although it had been important for awhile, had nothing of value to say anymore and it was time to be done with it. I don’t entirely agree with his conclusions, although I share his frustration. But debate is an element of discussion, and at times can be a worthy one, even now, although the naturalness with which many men assume that it’s the only way to speak is tiresome. But I was also struck—and I don’t mean this as any huge criticism of his few casual blog paragraphs—that the structure of his post shared many of the “I assert and they suck” elements that it was critiquing. My goal, in Thinking Again, is to lead by example, not accusation, in exploring other ways to think and write critically (and Nick’s books by the way, especially Theoretical Objects, have been some of my main influences on how to do that). And I have to admit it’s disheartening to try to avoid cliches and be told, “Hey, your blog is irritating because it doesn’t repeat the cliches I’m used to.” Things like that happen all the time, of course. A common example occurs in my creative writing classes, where you can be sure that most of the students will dislike the best student line of any day. So I think you need to reconsider the limited perspective that suggests that people are only saying something definitive and important if they do it in conventional assertive language.

Of course, what’s equally surprising to me is that you don’t seem to know how much conventional male head-butting and stance-taking I do. I’ve made all sorts of points on my blog about what I think of as important issues in culture and poetics. I haven’t written as much recently about poetics as I would like, but that’s because I’m busy teaching and helping develop a creative writing program at my university and sadly don’t have much time for reading theory and poetics. But it’s also because in the weeks leading up to the election, I made a conscious decision to write about political/cultural issues that I felt were of some importance and that offered something other than the usual liberal worrying about Republicans.

Besides, I’m not sure you’re reading the blogosphere as thoroughly as you think. I’ve had, in the last few months, a good round of head-butting on Stan Apps’ blog with Joshua Clover, whose idea of the “totality” is to my mind a will-to-power political obfuscation, though it can have its uses. I’ve had any number of back and forth disagreements with Johannes Goransson, whose blog I enjoy very much, and on the Harriet blog I’ve several times questioned Linh Dinh and Mark Nowak on some of the excesses of their usually fine thinking. I participate in a music discussion blog in which men insulting men over very detailed points about the history of music is the accepted order of business, to the tune of a hundred comments a day sometimes, and I do just fine. So I don’t think I need any lessons in how to assert myself in a conventional male way, and I certainly don’t need them from someone who doesn’t have his own blog and therefore doesn’t have to make decisions about how to write in public on it. It’s pretty astonishing that someone who asserts himself so rarely in these public discussion forums should accuse me of not asserting myself when I feel sometimes that I’m doing it constantly.

But just in case you still think I’m avoiding some poetics issue, here goes. First, have you read my essay on Kasey’s Deer Head Nation? If not, I’ll help you get a copy. On the current question, I think the Kasey-Kenny Flarf/Conceptual debates are only half serious, although at times that half is quite serious. I myself don’t see any hugely important differences about which I feel that “taking a stance” is essential. Flarf is looser, less absolutely methodical, more flexible to poetic game-playing in the moment of composition, while Kenny’s idea of the conceptual (and there are many other ideas) is more stark and tight, although both involve numerous levels of artifice and authorial intervention. Loose or tight compositional methods; now there’s a distinction that I personally can’t get that worked up about. I suppose my own tendency is towards the loose, but I can’t see any essential value in sticking a right/wrong distinction on the problem or imagining that either approach is going to save the world, or the world of poetry, from anything, or ruin it either for that matter. I think Kasey’s Deer Head Nation is a great book, probably the best single book out of the flarf collective (that assertive enough for you?) while I think a number of the other flarf writers are putting out work I like a lot. Nada, Gary, and Drew are the ones whose work I know best. Nada, I think, is at work on an interconnected project extending beyond the individual book that I, at the distance from it that I am, am only beginning to understand. I like Kasey’s new Breathalyzer less than Deer Head, though it’s a strong, tightly wrought collection, and often hilarious. It seems to corral a little more tightly what he has elsewhere called “the messiness of the results,” and resolve a little more thoroughly into a voice, and I’m not sure that the range of cultural issues it raises is quite as impressive. Kenny’s work comes alive best through performance and not in book format. Most of his books tend to have that “first thought/last thought” element of conceptual writing: grasp the concept and move on without getting too involved in the words themselves. But he’s the most successfully professional performer of his work that we’ve currently got going in the avant context (and I use “professional” here purposefully, with awareness of its positive and negative elements), and his performances can be amazing. I’m less enthusiastic about his theorizing, which strikes me as (on purpose on his part, I know) one dimensional and flat, though his recent posts on Harriet have been really funny.

Thanks also for reading my book. I don’t necessarily feel that it’s in good taste to debate somebody else’s take on one of my own books, but you seem to want assertive bluntness and so I’m going to take the issue on. Your reading of Felonies of Illusion is unsurprising. In fact it’s exactly what I would have expected you to think, and furthermore it’s a reaction that the book is specifically designed to elicit from those unwilling to challenge their own assumptions. I know you prefer an old school sixties assertive leftist reportage (“realist?” I actually don’t think so) that to my mind takes little account of the limitations of the constructions of language that it uses, and I can’t tell whether you know why some people might find moral didacticism both dull and not really capable of handling some of the complexities of the world we live in. You may more or less think the whole phenomena of language poetry was a mistaken sidestep. On the other hand, some of the more purely language poet/poststucturalist theorist people might find the descriptive minimalism of my book’s first long poem too visceral or imagistic, or something like that which I can imagine Bruce Andrews complaining about. For myself, though, I find value in both approaches, depending on the circumstances, and furthermore the goal in the book is to collide the two approaches against each other in a jarring way. Of course neither the imagistic or the anti-representational sections are pure in either their approach or their opposition to each other, since the first set of poems also concern how “the clear image” evaporates in our political climate and the second set how emotion and a sense of loss can come not only through image but through connotation. In any case, you’re welcome to prefer the part of the book that appeals to the values you favor. For me, the frustration created by the difference between the two sections contributes to making it a genuinely avant garde book, one designed to make all lovers of singular approaches sorely annoyed. I think it’s as avant garde as what Kasey and Kenny are doing, and I wrote every word of it with my own two hands. But again, I understand that trying to talk people into liking your own book, especially if it wants them to think against their own grain, is unlikely to work. And obviously I can’t rule out that maybe those poems do suck, although other people have seemed to like them.

It’s uncomfortable to begin a dialogue under the sign of an accusation. While frankly you’re right that I don’t have any responsibility to answer to your concerns, I’m glad enough to take them on. It gives me something to do with what little spare time I have. Besides, the degree to which you don’t appear to understand what I’m up to seems to call for an explanation. You’re welcome to like what I’m trying to do or not, but please try a little harder to understand what I actually am up to before deciding that I should do things in a way that would better appeal to you.

It could be, at a certain point in time, that I’ll feel done with the Thinking Again approach. Although I’m not at all saying that it’s your letter that did it, I have to thank you, quite seriously, for giving me through this discussion a new idea, a blog called Asserting Again, in which I simply cast my own half-thought assumptions out on the world without either considering the evidence or bothering to think through why I think them. I really do mean it: I like this new blog idea. But I’ll have to figure out a way to do that that’s not exactly like what we already have.

There’s a lot more that’s worth saying, particularly on the issue of what it means to commit to practices of poetry and poetics and poetry communities, for which I feel like I’ve done a fair amount. But maybe, for now, I’ll throw that as a question to you and to any readers who may have gotten all this way. I’d like to hear more about what you mean by commitment in this context, and I’d like to know more about why you think “taking a stance” will lead to it.

Mark Wallace Never Commits Himself? You Be The Judge

This post is going to be the first in a series between Joe Safdie and me, each one of us trading off responses, with Joe going first. Please join us by commenting if you're so inclined.

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Joe writes:

"Last night, while on an occasional and sporadic journey through several blogs I've bookmarked, I came across a post of Kenny Goldsmith's on *Harriet* -- not really a "post," it showed the picture of a dollar bill crumpled up so that the words "United States of America" read "Tits of America" -- the caption underneath it was "Flarf"; underneath that, the same dollar bill was elongated to its normal length -- the caption underneath that was "Conceptual Poetry".

My immediate reaction, after laughing, was to commend its brilliance. But before posting that to Harriet, I saw a comment that had already been posted from Mark Wallace, who's become a friend since we both moved to San Diego four years ago. Mark wrote: "Very relevant, in a way that sits right at the relevant/irrelevant nexus in an irrelevant way that's somehow relevant. And the other way too, of course, and not quite. Show me the money."

I interpreted this post of Mark's as similar to some recent posts he's made on his own blog, as well as comments to others' -- as an indication that he was somehow avoiding taking a stand, one way or the other -- and that this was irritating. So instead of posting to Harriet, I wrote him an e-mail:

Mark . . .

Hi. Too long a time for neighbors.

But listen . . . I now monitor the blogs, including yours, and I can't help but notice that you NEVER seem to take a stand about anything . . . I mean, really! You're obviously a very talented writer, certainly enough to present an engaging paragraph or three, but you never state any *poetic* opinions -- I mean, I take it back, you did urge your readers to vote for Obama, but you never seem to go out on a limb and COMMIT yourself to anything, in any of your blog posts, in any of your comments on other people's blogs -- and for this reader, it gets irritating after awhile. You categorize and classify quite well, but even when presented with an engaging choice like this latest one from Kenny, you just seem to weasel out.

Since I never want to be like Pierre Menard, I'll say that I thought Kenny's post was pretty brilliant, and that I'll take the elongated dollar bill every time . . . "realism" . . . for all the post-structuralist-modernist critiques that can ever be marshaled against it. But for what it's worth (probably not much), I really did want to register this deeply-felt critique -- for me, the second half of your latest book was forgettable -- while the first had real possibilities.

I'm never gonna be part of the echelon, partner, but I did want to register this personal critique -- which, of course, you should feel free to ignore.

Regards,

Joe

P.S. I just got tenure -- you too, right?"

Literary Magazines??? and The Capilano Review

I don’t think I’ve ever had my writing published before in a Canadian literary magazine, and that’s why it’s an extra pleasure to have some of my poems out in the latest issue of The Capilano Review. But there’s a lot of other excellent work in the issue as well.

Anybody have any thoughts on the state of the literary magazine relative to avant/experimental/innovative poetry these days? Is all going well, with the addition of many web magazines that can reach a broad readership when there’s a readership to reach? Is the print journal dead or withering or doing just fine? Has the increase in fuzzy middle ground poetry completely blurred the distinction between what is or isn’t avant literature, or between what is or isn’t a journal devoted to that literature? To what extent do you read literary magazines at all when there are so many other ways to get a poetry fix? Has the post-Ron Silliman blog discussion universe changed the value of the lit magazine? These days I live too far outside most of the larger urban avant poetry communities to know how much of a role literary magazines are playing in any of them in the last few years, although small press publication in Los Angeles has been an important factor in my recent reading. Who reads any of the magazines that are out there, if they’re out there, and what magazines do you read, if any?

In any case, some of the highlights of the fall 2008 issue of The Capilano Review:

–An interview of Louis Cabri by Roger Farr, featuring among other things a discussion of the relationship between poems and commodities, as well as a discussion of procedural elements in contemporary writing. Cabri and Farr are both excellent poets and theorists, and while the interview may not be raising particularly new subjects, their discussion of some well-known problems in poetics is very informative, with many references to useful other texts. The interview is followed by a set of new and worthwhile poems from Cabri.

–Roman Korec’s poem “Ode To a Plastic Shopping Bag” is an entertaining novelty number which in a light fashion explores the problem of the commodity fetish and the detritus of its plastic side effects. I wonder if this piece might be best performed.

–Some color paintings by Damian Moppett, and an interview of Moppett by Sharla Sava. I was intrigued to discover Moppett’s work, and the interview taught me a lot about the visual arts in Vancouver.

Sina Queryas’ poem “The Endless Path of the New.” A poem in four parts with wide historical reference and a bold use of line with inventive rhythmic variation.

Andrea Actis’ poem “choose your toast & publish post” may be my favorite piece in this issue. The poem weaves several simultaneous and reoccurring strands: pop culture, politics, feminism, the life of post-post-post young women. Consistently funny, lively, insightful.

M.W. Miller, “A Far West Commentary on the Diamond Sutra.” A rollicking new adventure in the life of the Excluded Middle. What is it about writing that takes literary or theoretical concepts and turns them into characters that I find so pleasurable? Or is it just that Miller does that here in a funny and thoughtful way.

And now, back to grading all those final projects.

Coming Soon to a Location Near You: Pompous Moral Judgment

Following is the talk I gave at the LA-Lit Clouds Conference last weekend.

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There may be no more common move in the history of public discourse than the pompous moral judgment. I can’t identify the first time it was used, or detail the historical ebb and flow of its popularity as a language game, but the world we live in is unthinkable without it. Baudelaire, for instance, identified it in the early 1860s as the unifying link between French bourgeois literature and its socialist opposition: “Moralize! Moralize!”

I also can’t identify my first own uses of the game. Generally speaking it’s less essential to children than to adults. Children are more blatant about their desire for power over others. They want it and see no need to hide the fact. Later, when they become ashamed of the naked desire for power, which is to say when they become old enough to be subject to moral judgments and learn to submit to them, they play the game of pompous moral judgment with youthful fierceness, subjecting adults and especially each other to a series of often quite vicious judgments. The judgmental naivete of those approaching adulthood can be remarkable for its fervor and absoluteness. As their ability to make judgments becomes more refined, they might be said to have learned to speak like adults, although many adults remain overwhelmed by the urge to judge.

The goal of the pompous moral judgment is obvious enough then: power. Yet its remarkable attractiveness doesn’t come solely from exercising or fantasizing about power. Instead it comes also from the feelings of satisfaction and security that result from believing very deeply that one has the right to use this power, that one uses this power over others (or would if one had it) in order to make the world better. The pompous moral judgment suggests that if we control others, we do so only in the name of the good, both theirs and ours.

Surely most of us have felt the power of pompous moral judgment at some time or other, even if only in minor ways. For instance, the sheer pleasure of judging people, often but not always those who are not present, is a common feature of almost all social occasions.

I say “pompous moral judgment” as opposed to “moral judgment” because of the element of self-satisfaction. It’s possible to judge other people without feeling better about oneself, but that’s a very rare behavior nowhere as common as pompous moral judgment. And the role of the concept of truth is of course crucial here. The vast majority of pompous moral judgments are untrue. Stereotypes, generalizations, cultural biases, and willful obfuscation of the details are common. Still, some pompous moral judgments are more accurate. These judgments are only pompous to the extent that they make the self-satisfaction or power of the speaker their main goal. The pompous moral judgment doesn’t wish to make positive change so much as it wishes to be identified as the voice of such change.

Without tracing the history of the development of pompous moral judgment, I can still clarify several of its key features.

The conservative version of the pompous moral judgment almost always involves the casting out and destroying of evil. All values and persons who seem opposed to the values and interests of the conservative individual or group get cast in the role of evil and are subject to whatever penalties are deemed proper for the evil they are accused of causing. As a social category, “evil” might be defined as any thought, behavior, person, culture or nation (to use just some likely examples) who deserves punishment. One of the pleasures of the conservative pompous moral judgment is the conviction that one has the right to decide and impose what form this punishment will take.

Unfortunately though, especially for those of us who would like to feel that empathy and sympathy can be connected to significant action, the pompous moral judgment is also a common feature of leftist rhetoric. The usual form taken by the pompous leftist judgment looks something like “I pass this judgment on you because your behavior causes suffering to others,” or even more stridently, “I pass this judgment on you because your behavior doesn’t actively alleviate the suffering of others.” Or, in short, “I pass this judgment on you because you are not doing enough to stop other people from suffering.”

It is not the fact of the suffering of others that makes this rhetorical move a pompous moral judgment. I’m hardly denying that others are suffering. Maybe even we ourselves are suffering, although the fear of pompous moral judgment may make us hesitant to say so, because one main element of the leftist pompous moral judgment is that it is always being made in the name of someone who is more vulnerable, and suffering more, than you—and such a person always does exist. What makes this leftist form a pompous moral judgment is not the fact of real suffering but precisely the degree of self-satisfaction one takes in being able to accuse others of failing others who are suffering.

The fabric of a great deal of public political discourse is often little more than the endless clashing, by day and night, of pompous moral judgments. The right judges others as evil as a way of insisting on their right (and acting on it) to power over them, while the left, acting always in counter-judgment, asserts that the right is, at best, callous, and at worst evil. Because the implication of evil remains possible even in leftist discourse, the conservative and radical modes sometimes become confused, and the leftist form of pompous moral judgment can bleed into the rightist one. In fact the difference between them is often less about content than positioning. The conservative pompous judgment is the voice of power; the radical the voice of resistance to power. And this is true even when the voice of power is conventionally considered leftist, such as when, under authoritarian communist states, it seems radical to insist on the right of the individual to economic or aesthetic self-determination.

Not doubt much that is politically worthwhile does get done by leftist activism, but it is not the pompous moral judgment itself that gets anything done. The pompous moral judgment is never more than a cover story for activities which may be beneficial or harmful. At best, the pompous moral judgment becomes an enabling rhetoric for worthwhile change. At worst, it simply brings another pompous moralist into power.

As might be clear then, one of the ironies of the leftist version of pompous moral judgment is that saying “Your behavior does nothing to alleviate the suffering of others” also does nothing to alleviate the suffering of others.

While the history of the avant garde is at least as fraught with pompous moral judgments as the cultures from which it comes, one key element in that history has been a rejection of the tone of pompous moral judgment, a tone often described as “serious” or “mature,” since pompous moral judgment usually claims that seriousness and maturity belong to itself alone.

It is not, for instance, a lack of pompous moral judgment that makes Duchamp’s urinal almost the essential avant garde gesture. The implication that all art is no more art than an urinal if one calls the urinal art certainly contains within it the violent glee of pompous moral judgement: “I could just as well piss on everything you call art.” What is different about this gesture (and here I’m also noting the maleness of the gesture; it’s a urinal we’re talking about) is the openness of the glee, the childish flippancy of the judgment, and the way the flippancy is linked to a crucial insight. It acknowledges the game element of pompous moral judgment and that art too is a game.

In Umberto Eco’s novel Name of the Rose, it turns out that what pompous moral judgment, and the power it supports, fears most of all is laughter.

Laughter, flippancy, childishness, the gleeful acknowledgment that the game is a game: a critique of pompous moral judgment that doesn’t deny the real consequences of judgment but denies the seriousness of that judgment. It is laughter that insists that the real consequences in question are not the consequences of seriousness but of folly.

There’s danger in laughter too, of course. Laughter can all too easily forget the realness of consequences. The acknowledgment that the game is a game could easily lead someone to keep on playing while being less concerned with the consequences, simply because it is “only a game.” Such a person could easily attempt to return to the child’s naked desire for control with the ruthlessness of an adult. “Power is only a game we play”: a phrase worthy of the mythological Caligula. Who but a desperately pompous adult could play the game with that level of willfully childish viciousness?

As anyone can see, especially those more willing to laugh, my critique of pompous moral judgment contains a new layer of pompous moral judgment in its pleasurable feelings of superiority (which I hope you are currently sharing, along with a bit of discomfort) to the rhetorical game of pompous moral judgment. Even the phrase “Saying that ‘Your behavior does nothing to alleviate the suffering of others’ does nothing to alleviate the suffering of others” does not alleviate the suffering of others. Yet with any luck, I’m playing the game of pompous moral judgment here with a difference. In knowing that the game of pompous moral judgment is indeed a game, and laughing at its foolishness, I’m trying to suggest that it might be worthwhile, sometimes, to play so many other possible things.

LA-Lit Clouds Conference: Where I'll Be This Weekend

If you're anywhere near Los Angeles, come out and join us for what should be a series of entertaining and insightful events. If you're going to be somewhere else, I hope that'll be interesting too.

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from the conference website:

LA-Lit: Clouds

form-body-surface-material-method-growth-sound-mass-condensation
atmospheric-nebulae-clarity-reveals-recreation-currents-groundless-texture
connectivity-dense-manifest-rhythm-decenter-collaborate-surprise-confer-disperse

LA-Lit: Clouds :: November 21+22, 2008
at Betalevel and Center for the Arts Eagle Rock

Come celebrate LA-Lit’s three year anniversary on Friday November 21 at Betalevel and on Saturday November 22 at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. For over three years, LA-Lit has developed a new space for the literary culture of Los Angeles to develop and exhibit itself. Reflecting the shifting nature of Los Angeles, LA-Lit has conducted well over thirty interviews with poets and writers who have lived in LA all their lives as well as writers who have visited LA for only a few days. Please join us for LA-Lit: Clouds :: a two day conference in Los Angeles connecting the decentered literary culture of LA in an effort to investigate its current manifestations and to develop a sense of LA’s inherent literary spontaneity.

LA-Lit: Clouds :: Schedule
Friday November 21:
8:00pm-11:00pm:
Perform and Celebrate at Betalevel
Stan Apps, Teresa Carmody, Amarnath Ravva, Lisa Samuels, Christine Wertheim

Saturday November 22:
Confer at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock
12:00pm-1:30pm
form-body-surface-material-method-growth-sound-mass
condensation-structure-elements-foreground-background
Panelists: Stan Apps, Guy Bennett, Christine Wertheim, Ara Shirinyan

2:00pm-3:30pm
atmospheric-nebulae-clarity-reveals-recreation-currents
groundless-textured-visible-droplets-interstellar-crystalline
Panelists: Will Alexander, Teresa Carmody, Amarnath Ravva, Mark Wallace

4:30pm-6:00pm
Perform at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock
Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Will Alexander, Guy Bennett, K. Lorraine Graham, Sawako Nakayasu, Ara Shirinyan, Mark Wallace

Betalevel – in the alley behind 963 N. Hill St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Center for the Arts Eagle Rock – 2225 Colorado Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041

Poet, Rate Thyself: Respect, Prestige, Finances

Stan Apps asked the following question on his blog the other day:

"A reputation economy--no $$$, only R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Is it a utopia? (And if it is a utopia for some, does that automatically make it a dystopia for others?"

And here was my answer:

"I think many poets are familiar with a respect economy, which of course shades very quickly into a prestige/reputation economy, and is therefore also related to a financial economy. Although none of these three economies is the same, they're pretty closely linked.

I think poets should rate themselves on a scale of one to ten how they think they stand in these economies.

I'm giving myself:

Respect 7
Prestige/Reputation 5
Financial 4

Of course, it's easiest to rate oneself on the financial economy, second easiest to rate prestige/reputation, and hardest to rate respect.

Which suggests therefore that a pure respect economy, which doesn't exist of course, could nonetheless not be a utopia for one simple reason: any time something important depends on what other people think of you (which is, of course, most of the time), there's no end to trouble."

---------------------------------------------------

So, poet or whatever you are or do, here's your chance to rate yourself on the scales of respect, prestige, and finances.

And of course it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on these (slightly tongue in cheek but not entirely) ideas.

Doomsday Is At Hand

Among the many remarkable and ridiculous things about the last two weeks in American politics, I noticed an absolute explosion of Doomsday Rhetoric, beginning with George Bush’s Chicken Little “The Sky Is Falling” speech and the chorus of rhetorical doomsaying that followed.

While a significant portion of what remains of your money is being handed over to the same people that took the rest of it, I thought I’d say a little bit about Doomsday Rhetoric and why Americans love it so much.

I haven’t done any research into the historical origins of Doomsday Rhetoric, but its history is undoubtedly quite ancient. Indeed I can imagine the opening sentence of a typical student paper reading something like the following and not being too far off the mark:

“Since the beginning of time, humans have prophesied about the end of time.”

Certainly the origins of the United States are thoroughly soused with Doomsday Rhetoric. One of the first works written in America that might have been called, by the standards of the day, a best seller, with over 1800 copies delivered in its first year of publication (1662) alone, the Puritan poem “The Day of Doom,” by Michael Wigglesworth, through 224 grinding stanzas described in pleasingly dark and repetitive detail the destruction of human life because of its sinfulness and the tortures of hell that followed. Over the next several decades “The Day of Doom” became a standard work found in many New England homes. It's important to recognize how much fun this poem must have been to read at the time in order to understand how Doomsday Rhetoric works.

Hundreds of years later, Americans continue to be very excited at the thought of Total Destruction, or some especially thrilling degree of it, and flock to movies such as Independence Day and countless others that show destruction at the hands of meteors or monsters from outer space or nuclear war or climate change, anything really, as long as it brings us to the verge of Total Destruction and in some cases takes us over the edge.

Of course, the biggest difference between watching the world end in a movie and watching the world actually end is that if you watch it in a movie, you can come out again next week and watch it again.

For awhile, after September 11, there was a temporary moratorium on films featuring end of the world thrills, since such films seemed, for a little while anyway, to be in bad taste. But there was nothing like Bush’s mantra of “weapons of mass destruction” to get Doomsday Rhetoric on the road again, and in recent years it has been going strong. The absolute flood of it we’ve seen in the last week or two has reminded me once more how much so many Americans love the idea of Doomsday.

Some points though. The Doomsday Tale is always, at its base, a religious tale. Doomsday comes because Human Sinfulness has brought it. We need to understand that a religious thrill underpins almost all Doomsday Scenarios: the great pleasure we take in seeing the sinful (however we define their sin) getting what they deserve.

This fact is important because the use of Doomsday Rhetoric by conservative politicians always taps into the American religious desire to punish the guilty, even as it also taps into the desire to save the righteous. Of course, George Bush’s recent speech had more of the latter than the former, since he hardly wanted to punish the Wall Street players who his policies have been enriching for years. But you can’t evoke Doomsday without the specter of punishing the guilty rising very quickly, and the outpouring of rhetoric that followed tried instantly to find the sinful, an easy enough task in this case: the “Wall Street Fucking Fuck Fucks,” as someone I know likes to say.

But I want to be fair, at least a bit, and acknowledge that the left also has its own versions of Doomsday Rhetoric, coming out of issues like globalism and climate change and many others, each of which similarly, although in various degrees perhaps, looks to uncover and punish the sinful. Remember, “Soylent Green is People.”

Part of the reason that this rhetoric becomes attractive even on the left is that conditions in the world really are frequently as awful as can be imagined and in fact worse. War, starvation, massive capitalist piracy: these aren’t conspiracy theories but social realities, even as none of them really indicate with certainty that after centuries of being prophesied, the Day of Doom is finally at hand. Or as I once put it in one of my books, the problem with Total Destruction is that it happens to someone somewhere in the world every day. Apocalypse is ordinary.

Still, I think we need to be cautious about Doomsday Rhetoric because of the way it plays so easily into a conservative, fear-mongering view of the universe, one in which each of us gets to play the hero by punishing the guilty and saving the righteous. I think it plays into that world view too much even when it comes from the left.

There may be moments, I suppose, when Doomsday Rhetoric might be useful from a leftist perspective, although I tend to be skeptical of it whenever I hear it. On the whole Doomsday Rhetoric remains an obfuscation, one that lends itself not to an understanding of political realities so much as to a titillating religious mythology, one that no doubt even has exciting sexual undertones. Face it: somewhere in the desire for Doomsday is the desire for The Final Orgasm.

Is poetry work?

Do you think of poetry as work?

If so, do you think of it as a particular kind of work?

If not, do you think of it as another kind of activity (that is, other than just poetry)?

I’m influenced enough by Wittgenstein that I don’t think of poetry inherently as work. Instead I’m interested in what happens to poetry if we define it as work, and what happens to it if we don’t. Thinking of it as work or not might change, and probably does, how we write poetry and how we feel about its importance.

There’s a long history, both in what became the United States and elsewhere, of distrusting poetry. That distrust has often been based in thinking of poetry as something that is not work, or as work that may not be all that valuable. Puritan culture, for instance, often looked skeptically at poetry. As one Puritan divine of the time put it, “It is as if words should elect to dance and caper, instead of to speak plainly.” In this view, poetry is playful and wasteful and an inappropriate manner of celebrating. The Puritans were no simpler than we are though, and one of them, Edward Taylor, wrote poems full of ornate artifice and linguistic playfulness, dancing and capering with quite marvelous results.

If we consider poetry to be work, is it possible that we’re looking to justify it by giving it the dignity of labor, dignity that perhaps we feel that poetry simply as poetry doesn’t have? When we use the phrase “work of art,” have we, in a subtle fashion and perhaps even unknown to ourselves, sought to justify art through the productive aspects of it as labor?

If we consider poetry to be work, what role does humor, feeling, playfulness, ornamentation, and artifice have in the poem as work?

If we do not consider poetry to be work, what role does effort, thoughtfulness, difficulty and developed skill have in whatever kind of activity we imagine poetry to be?

Which is to say, I wonder what aspects of poetry become more emphasized or more forgotten when we consider poetry as work or as something that is not work. And when we consider poetry as work or not, I think that probably changes the relation of poetry to the kinds of work we’re doing, work we may have to do or may want to do. Does poetry become less important or more important to us as we imagine it as more work or as something other than work?

And by the way, I’ve been working a lot these past few weeks. If you haven’t heard from me recently, that’s why.

Vancouver and the Positions Colloquium: Where I’ll Be And Why

My last blog post for a bit as I get ready to head for eight days nights in Vancouver, five of which will be spent at the Positions Colloquium, a schedule for which I’ve linked to here. I won’t be back until the Sunday night of the Sunday night of the year, with classes starting the next day.

A month or so ago, Ron Silliman blogged about the many literary conferences and festivals happening this summer, and how he saw in them some basic blueprint about the main current directions in alternative poetries (not so interested in a nomenclature debate right now, thanks). His schematic for looking at the conferences was full of generalizations (some at least partly illuminating), as perhaps is befitting of the Gateway Drug aspects that his blog often takes on, but he also raised the worthwhile question of exactly what the point of these conferences is and why they take what shape they take.

Of course, trying to define what actually happens at a conference by some definition found in poetics or other theories is bound to generalize. Even talk about “a community of interests” is too general and on some level an obfuscation. Conferences happen because particular people make the effort to make them happen, and because those people are able to access resources that can help such events happen (and the degree of available resources certainly varies). Then (in most cases) they have to issue invitations or calls for proposals, and writers have to decide whether they can accept those invitations or come up with a proposal. Then, when decisions about participants have been made, schedules of events and writers are published. Following that, others who have not been invited, but who may feel interested in the writers or events, make plans to attend also. Those others may wish that they had been invited (feelings on the subject can be complicated, to put it mildly) or just feel interested in being there to see what’s going to happen. All these decisions are certainly based in standards of ideology and taste but don’t necessarily result from those standards in any one-dimensional way, and what actually happens when the conference gets going certainly doesn’t. The unexpected and the random remain features of every conference. Of course, the more narrowly defined the subject matter of a conference is, the more narrowly defined the potential participants are. This summer’s flarf festival, for instance, implied by its title a fairly definite sense of potential participants. Not so the conceptual poetry conference though, despite what might seem at a quick glance a similarly narrow focus, because what the idea of conceptual poetry includes turns out to be much broader and more debatable.

All that said, for me the Positions Colloquium expresses as significant a sense of the writers to whom my own work is most immediately connected as I could probably imagine. There are many writers to whose work I feel a close connection who won’t be there, of course, just as there are many other kinds of writers whose work I like who won’t be there either. But those kinds of limitations seem to me only obvious even as the specifics of some of them are always likely to be vexed. Still, who actually will be there is a set of people that it makes me happy to be part of.

The actual work of the writers in question varies quite widely. What I think is shared is not so much answers as issues and questions. Finding the right balance of similarity and difference of concerns at a conference can be tricky. Invite a wildly divergent set of people and they may find it difficult to be able to talk to each other about any issue in any depth, although the advantage is that people will learn at least a bit about things they didn’t already know. Invite a more close knit group and the already developed conversation between them will certainly be more in-depth, at the same time that differing perspectives might be overly neglected.

Here are some of the issues that I think connect the Position Colloquium writers.

One is the interrelation between aesthetics and culture. Aesthetic decisions always take place in culturally specific contexts, and use culturally specific techniques. But culture is not simply the ground for aesthetics, because aesthetics themselves are crucial to what culture is. But that’s only a bare starting point for the issues in question. How is one’s literary aesthetics interrelated with the culture(s) one is part of?

Another issue that connects most of these writers is some concern with globalist political and economic issues. Along with the local specificity of aesthetic and cultural forms and contents comes the issue of how these specifics relate to overarching world scale concerns with capitalism, war, poverty, nationalism, The Spectacle. The Local Picture and The Global Picture and the connections and tensions between them.

In relation to these questions, the status of poetry as a political act related to other political acts will certainly be an issue. Some writers at the conference are likely to think of their work, in writing and otherwise, as direct political engagement. Others will be more concerned with exploring theories of politics or of working with ambiguities and complexities whose elaboration may involve attempts at understanding only tenuously tied to specific immediate action.

Also, identity. The identity that is imposed on one from without which one decides to take on, or not, in various degrees. Not only essentialist identities or constructed identities or fragmented identities but identities that are always in play in the act of working with anyone. Identities as an example of specific negotiation with others. The value of groups and the limits of groups.

Also, issues of transparency and mediation, the visceral and the theoretical. Writing about how one feels or thinks while being aware that feelings and thoughts themselves are always partly social constructs. Maybe I really can say what I mean, but maybe what I mean is caught up in a history of learning to mean and what it means to learn to mean. Are emotional power and honesty in one’s writing and a complex understanding of emotion necessarily opposites? What if at their best they go hand in hand?

Skepticism and awareness of limitations. The recognition that everything is not possible. A concern about the value of the simple righteous statement, or perhaps the sense that the simple righteous statement may be the right thing to do sometimes. More importantly though, an awareness of contextual limits, of thinking through what is or is not possible to do and where and why.

Humor, playfulness, pleasure, parody, satire. Are these the opposite of serious literary work or an often essential feature of it? To what extent is laughter a necessity? If literature is a kind of game, aren’t parts of it fun? Aren’t fun and pleasure also social concepts that need considering?

These issues, and many others, not to mention performances, visual poems, casual conversations, friendship and a good old time, are some of the reasons I’m pleased to be part of these events.

Any thoughts on what you go to conferences for, or what you like or dislike about them? I’ll be on e-mail only intermittently (at best) until August 25 but I’ll put your comments through just as soon as I get them.

Welcome To Your Own History: Brief Thoughts on Writing Doldrums

(The following is a rewrite of a letter to Elisa Gabbert, whose excellent recent book co-authored with Kathleen Rooney, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness, has been out for a few months now, and is reviewed here.)



Hi Elisa:

Your comments on your writing slump made me think of a few things. I don't know if they'll be helpful or not, but they're things I consider whenever I feel like I’m in a slump.

I commonly go through periodic writing doldrums, although the good thing for me is that I've been at this long enough that I always have something unfinished I can turn to when new writing feels impossible. I also think (and please don't take this wrong, because I'm the old old person here and always will be, compared to you) that it comes from being a little older and a little farther along in your own development as a writer. It does get difficult to maintain enthusiasm at times, especially as life becomes, if not more complicated, more requiring of a consistent daily effort to maintain jobs, love relationships, families, friendships, social or political commitments and so on. I think there's a lot of thrill that comes from those first few years of writing and publishing success: "I can really do this, I 'm really good at this, other people think so too," and all that goes along with that feeling. But then, for the first time, you get to a point where you have to do it all again. You're always starting over but it doesn't feel like a start because it feels like you've started before, and how is it fair to always have to be starting again? A great Elvis Costello line: "I had 20 years to make my first album and six months to make the second." From your letter it almost sounds like that's where you are, at the start of the second (major) push. I know we have many phases and many pushes, but it's probably true that you've never been at the point where you've been a successful writer before (chapbooks, the collaborative book, so on) and now have to try to be a successful writer again. Congratulations: you've reached that great moment when you have a public writing history and it has the chance to burden you.

If you're at all like me in this regard, adrenalin is important when it’s time to write. Feeling and trusting the energy is important. But how to get to that energy when it seems like other things are taking it away? I don't even have a good answer for myself, but asking yourself that might come next. It's weird what things will work for me: somebody gives me a writing assignment, or I pick up a wave of energy from something I haven't finished, and that speeds me into something new. Those are the good ways. Sometimes I’ll get a surge of energy from internet annoyance that’ll pick up my pace. Anything to avoid the leadenness, the feeling that I just don’t give a damn about my writing or anybody else’s. It may be that some writers can work within that leadenness, but I can’t, at least not often or well. I need to believe that I care about what I’m saying and might say, and it can be hard to convince myself of that.

My guess is that it’s not so much about revising your current manuscript, although I know you have some issues about it that feel unresolved, but how to take the next steps in becoming the writer that you already are. Your life is probably different than it was, your concerns are different, and that means that the likelihood is that your tone as a writer is going through changes too. So it sounds like maybe you might want to think about new ways to give yourself the energy you need. I don’t have a suggestion for that, except to ask when you might find half an hour, or an hour, in a day, maybe only a couple of times a week, and find ways to create energy for yourself. Who knows what it takes? I wrote almost all the Felonies of Illusion poems while reading Clark Coolidge’s book The Rova Improvisations and watching re-runs of the sitcom Friends simultaneously. Or not quite simultaneously. I’d read a poem on the commercials and write my poem when the show came back on. I could bounce off the language differences between the two in a way that made it possible for me to write words down on a piece of paper. So any weird habit will do (and mine are very weird) if it gets you where you’re trying to go.

I hope this doesn’t sound too much like advice. It’s not so much that as yeah, I think I know what you’re feeling and here’s how I’ve tried to think about it. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that you’ll be writing again soon enough. Easy for someone else to say though, huh? The writer herself or himself is the one who has to get geared up again to go.

Mark


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Any thoughts on how to get past the writing doldrums, yours or anybody else"s? I'd love to hear about that or anything else having to do with the issue.

[I, Afterlife] [Essay in Mourning Time]

Kristin Prevallet’s [I, Afterlife] [Essay in Mourning Time] is one of the most fascinating and powerful elegies I’ve read in awhile. Part poem, part essay, occasionally a work of visual art, I, Afterlife gathers and revises a series of pieces written from 2000-2006 as a meditation on the death of Prevallet’s father. The book engages readers on the level of cultural theory, aesthetics, and individual emotion without any of the three dominating the others. I, Afterlife succeeds both as an elegy and as a work that questions the structure and content of elegy.

Elegies are often vexed by the issue of the meaning they make of the death of the person or people that prompted the elegy. That a person in pain would look to make sense of that pain seems human and unsurprising. But as Prevallet suggests throughout the book, an elegy that wraps up the problem of meaning too neatly is less likely to be making sense of loss than to be imposing sense upon loss. Hiding loss through incantations of meaning may inflict a further sense of loss, one made perhaps more devastating because it remains unacknowledged. The attempt to fill in loss, to make the pain of absence go away by putting some kind of presence in its place, especially perhaps the presence of elegy itself, is both central to the drive of elegy and also a great risk:

“Never believe maxims because all they do is comply with a sentence structure that is formulated in such a way as to come off as assured, wise, and mentally strong; they give those looking to fill empty spaces with words something to read.

Believing that holes can be filled with language is dangerous—only space itself occupies empty spaces.

So with this in mind, beware of being absorbed by an essay that is grieving, because you will lose your place and be eradicated...” (10)

It’s easy to imagine that being aware of the limitations of elegy might lead to a distanced, purely theoretical approach that avoids the pain that prompts elegy in the first place. But while Prevallet remains committed to exploring problems in the concept of elegy, she doesn’t shy away from the pain that led her here:

“Note that because certain words are removed from view, certain words therefore appear.

The words that appear important to you are the ones you should follow.

Angles are sharp and part of the line.

Don’t turn corners too sharply or you might run over something you once loved.

I remember when my father was happy, and I remember when he began to disappear.” (8)

As involved as this book is both with theories of elegy and the real pain of recent loss, Prevallet also approaches these concerns through a number of aesthetic lenses, recognizing that how we write about loss and what can be said of it is an issue that’s crucial to confront when through writing we try to understand someone’s death. These works, mini-essays, poems, and brief narratives by turn and in combination, always show us a writer coming towards loss again, wondering how to approach it and express it without believing that the expression can replace it or make it go away.

Never is that issue made more clear than in the works of visual art and accompanying text in the section of the book called “Crime Scene Log.” The visuals are abstract, dark, murky, void of clearly seen objects. The caption-like texts that accompany them consistent of flat, practical statements from the police report of a scene of suicide, phrases such as “Fire/Rescue accessed the vehicle by breaking out the passenger door window with a spring-loaded punch’ (21). In juxtaposition, the visuals and captions release upon each other, and upon readers, interacting senses of absence amid a search for meaning. The emotional meaninglessness of the objective facts of the report cannot begin to reveal the emotional conditions that they are at least partly expected to uncover. And the palpable sense of physical presence created by the concrete fact of the visuals crumbles as one looks in them for something specific to hold onto other than shades of shades and the emotions implied by them. Facts that cannot reveal what happened; texture and mood without defined object. Both seem to promise, then to deflect, access to the truth.

When the cause of death is suicide, as in this case, the need to uncover the truth can see particularly pressing. Trying to understand the reasons that prompted suicide seem unavoidable. At the same time, those reasons are always some combination of unsurprising (depression, a reaction to the medication for depression), however troubling, and unknowable, since it’s impossible to recreate what a person must have been thinking. What Prevallet understands though is that the reasons a person commits suicide doesn’t necessarily make that person entirely different from us, but in many ways shows their likeness to us:

“I too am occupied by all the questions of my father, and like him I wonder if the void is too great, if time is too vast, if humanity is too imperfect; and like him I sometimes wonder if it isn’t all remarkably futile, if enduring the persistence of fear and disappointment in our lives makes sense in the quest for an overall purpose.” (31)

Prevallet knows that loss can also be a source of creative energy, that something will always be made of it, but that what that thing is and how the creator feels about it is related to the issue of how the creator who grieves continues to live. She explores this problem in relation to the concept of the shrine. As she notes, the concept is well known to psychologists, so much so that a handout that the police give to the grieving about how to respond to their grief features a section on shrine building “which stated that in order to get through the twelve stages of grief, with maximum efficiency, one should dispose of any shrines” (58). The implication is that a shrine holds on to grief, tries to make it concrete and unmoving in a way that can trap the person who makes it in an unchanging grief that will prevent them from engaging with other parts of their lives. And Prevallet admits that a shrine can indeed do that, while she also questions notions of progress-oriented efficiency that the idea of “twelve steps” implies; mainstream psychology seems to teach that grief, like alcoholism, is something to overcome. The question for Prevallet becomes how to acknowledge the ongoing and evolving nature of grief without getting stuck in a static representation of it. The result is that she makes a shrine, but in this case one “Which has no closure. Which is constantly being rearranged” (58).

It feels odd to review a book of elegy, even when it’s as powerful as this one. The reviewer can easily turn into a voyeur experiencing fascination at a person’s pain and extend that voyeurism by suggesting the book to others. Promoting a work of elegy seems perverse. Yet [I, Afterlirfe] [Essay in Mourning Time] is a book that has a great deal to show people, whether those who have suffered a similar loss and wondered what to do, or those who have not and for that reason may be even less able to understand how grief changes those who go on living. It has a lot to teach us about what writing is, what it can and can’t do and how it can situate itself relative to traumatic events. What’s remarkable about the book isn’t always that it provides new answers to the questions raised both by grief and elegy, but that it asks those questions so honestly and thoroughly, revealing one writer’s focused commitment to never lying to herself even at a time when she’s searching for comfort.

Poetry about Poetry

Speaking of Narcissus, what do you think about poems that are all or in part about poetry itself? I have mixed feelings and I’m trying to understand why.

Certainly there are some well-known poems with famous lines that talk about poetic processes or philosophies of composition. For instance Wallace Stevens’ “The poem is the cry of its occasion” from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” or Robert Creeley’s “Speech/ is a mouth” from the poem “Language.” Stevens of course writes poetry about poetry frequently, since his poems often theorize about what it means to construct a human understanding of the world in an age when a transcendent ground for meaning has been lost. With the idea of God abandoned but not forgotten, “Poetry is the supreme fiction,” as Stevens says in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” struggling to regain something it can’t have back and acknowledging finally that it can’t. Creeley in his poem wants to emphasize the materiality of language and how that materiality is connected to the physical facts of bodies and their histories: words full/of holes/aching.” So these are poems that deal with theories of what it means to create poems and how the creation of poems interacts with the world.

I’ve written some poems that reference the act of creating poetry. Often that’s been because writers, and writing, are part of the psycho-social landscapes I’m exploring. I want to make clear that processes of writing and the problems of thinking of oneself as a writer are caught up in other material processes and can’t really be ignored or denied if one wants to respond thoroughly to the situation at hand. The poem can’t be outside the situation, commenting on it; instead it’s caught up in the situation. But I haven’t often written a whole poem about poetry, except in my first years writing poetry when I was still trying to figure out how poems worked. I mean, I’m still trying to figure that out, but I don’t as often write it down so directly.

All that said, I can see many potential pitfalls in writing a poem about poetry. It can be done in an uninterestingly insular and self-absorbed way. It could turn easily into a redundant essay or exercise in craft, the tedium of craft discussing craft. The subject matter isn’t automatically the most fascinating topic for a poem either, except perhaps to some poets and critics. Poetry about poetry may often be poetry mainly for poets, and the idea of poets writing poetry about poetry for other poets makes me a little claustrophobic. Or at least would if it was done too often. Actually that may be part of why, as impressive as he can be, I don’t love Wallace Stevens’ work, along with the fact that I’m not nearly as worried as he is about the loss of transcendent unity. Often there’s something a bit arid about Stevens’ concerns, too much worrying about the isolated imagination and not enough of the world. Get out of the house a bit more Wallace, okay?

So what makes the difference between a poem that includes worthwhile mentions of poetry and one that doesn’t? Maybe just that its insights and pleasures are intriguing? Maybe in that sense there’s no difference between writing a poem that’s about poetry and writing one about anything else, that it’s just a matter of what the poem reveals to us. But does it require worthwhile insight just into poetry itself, or does it need insight into the connection between poetry and what isn’t poetry? Does it need to show us something about how poetry interacts with the world?

I’m almost tempted to say there’s no value in asking this question in a general way, that as usual it’s better to look at particular poems and see what they’ve done. But whether there’s value in it or not it’s a question I’m still asking myself. And I think I’m asking it because it’s a question about what we want from poetry as either readers or writers. And of course about what we want from poetics, from critical theorizing about poetry.

Have any favorite poems about poetry? Have concerns or an axe to grind? I’d appreciate hearing from you because I’m not yet done thinking again about this one. But I don’t want to think about it too endlessly. A poet thinking too much about poems about poems is likely to get on everybody’s nerves.

Plug, Interview, Birthday

Jefferson Hansen has recently started an online journal/blog called Experimental Fiction & Poetry: Reviews, Interviews, Commentary. Recent posts by himself and others (Larissa Shmailo, Elizabeth Kate Switaj) have concerned Women in Jazz and writers such as Philip Nikolayev and Josh Wallaert. Here’s his call for submissions:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: I am looking for reviews, books to be reviewed, and interviews for a new blog, Experimental Fiction & Poetry: Reviews, Interviews, Commentary at experimentalfictionpoetry.blogspot.com. Send books for review to 4055 Yosemite Ave. S., St. Louis Park, MN 55416

I hope you’ll send him something.

Latest up is an interview Jeff conducted with me, which you can find here. It has enough words about my own life and writing that I don’t need to burden people with any more this week. Take a look and feel free to leave a message either here or there about what you think.

A friend who was over at dinner last night mentioned his concern from an earlier moment that blogs were fundamentally narcissistic, and if this post doesn’t confirm that, I don’t know what will. Other than that, it’s my birthday today and we’re having a heat wave, which means high 100s inland but low eighties here at the beach. I’m headed out now for some sun and fun, or in this case maybe shade and fun. But it’s funny. I’m old enough now that I don’t feel shocked anymore about how old I am whenever a birthday rolls around, and I’m not so old that I feel surprised that I’ve made it to another one. That feeling's coming soon enough, I guess. In the meantime I might as well enjoy myself, and I hope you do too.

Relevance

The call for relevance in literature always suggests that literature should directly engage some important aspect of its historical moment, whether in its content, structure, or most thoroughly in the relation between its context and structure.

Anyone who has spent any significant number of years paying attention to poetics discussions has probably noted the frequent repetition of the call for relevance. In fact I would say constant repetition if it weren’t for the fact that the call bubbles up more frequently at some moments than others. Oddly, if not surprisingly, the assertion that literature should be related to its moment is not itself related to any moment. Insistence on the relevance of the moment is not momentary but repetitious.

Given that oddity, it might be worthwhile to ask, what are the relevant issues in any call for relevance in literature?

One issue is certainly that the call for relevance to a historical moment begs the question of what are the most important historical conditions of that moment. That is, what elements of contemporary conditions are most relevant to a call for relevance in literature?

It turns out that different writers have different answers to that question. Some calls for relevance might call for literature that responds to specific historical events, most likely ones related to violence and the abuse of power. Some might call for response to the troubled and even horrific conditions in which some people live, that is, for writing that speaks directly about poverty or the appalling work conditions created by globalist political and economic operations. Some might call for a relevant address to globalist operations understood in their totality; rather than literature addressing some particular group of people or circumstances, this call for relevance asks for literature that exposes the operating mechanisms of global power. Some calls for relevance might suggest that literature, as a structure of information itself, needs to speak to changes in contemporary structures of information, with particular reference to how those structures of information restructure the lives of people using them, for better or worse. And still other calls for relevance might suggest that we need to look again at social problems whose relevance we have forgotten too quickly, for instance various patterns of systematic discrimination which we may think have been resolved but likely have not. This would be a call for writers to recognize that some issues relevant in the past continue to be relevant now.

The result of such calls might be a poem about the Iraq War, a poem for the poor and disenfranchised, an essay that critiques globalist power structures, a piece of conceptual or procedural writing making use of the structure and information found on the internet, or an essay reminding us that gender problems have not vanished just because we have talked a lot about them in the past.

There may be many other kinds of calls for relevance, but the ones above are the ones that seem to have the highest profile recently, at least that I’ve noticed, which might suggest that they are, at the moment, the most relevant calls for relevance. Certainly all of them take up issues of crucial human importance.

That said, many debates occur around the degree of relevance of various calls to relevance. Calls for relevance frequently come into conflict with other calls for relevance, with some people suggesting that their call for relevance is more relevant than some other. Yet it is also possible that all these calls for relevance are relevant, although it’s certainly not unreasonable to debate the extent of the relevance of each specific call for relevance. What all this might suggest is that there may be multiple points of relevance, multiple things about which to be relevant in any given historical moment.

Is there something to consider regarding the reactive nature of the idea of relevance? That is, the call for relevance presupposes that literature should respond to already existing social conditions and that the writer is therefore a social critic. But this fact raises the question of what constitutes a successful or at least a worthwhile response. Does a relevant work of literature prioritize describing that social condition or celebrating or speaking its outrage against it? Does it prioritze imagining another, perhaps better, possible condition? Is it a call for its readers to group together to change or even overthrow the social condition that it speaks against or to engage more thoroughly the condition that it speaks in favor of? Can it be described as successful or not in the degree to which it leads to such change?

Another issue worth taking up is the basic fact that the call for relevance presupposes that a successful work of literature is defined by its relevance. But if we look at the issue of relevance historically, do we actually find that those works of literature most defined by their relevance to the social concerns of their moment are the works that we find most relevant at a later time? It’s intriguing to consider the varying ways and degrees of relevance to their moment of, say, Wilfred Owen, Marinetti, Stein, Dickinson, Hughes, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and really anybody else. How does one measure, after the fact, the relevance of each of these writers to their historical moment, and how much that relevance is or is not related to the degree of relevance which different people might assign to them today?

And in order to be thorough in discussing the relevance of relevance, we need to consider the other side. Is it possible that an irrelevant poem, however we would know that it was irrelevant when we saw it, might still be engaging and worthwhile? Is it possible to conceive of literature as not reactive, maybe less a response to its times than a creator of its times? Or even maybe as removed from the issue of its most immediate times? Or if some of the extremes implied here may not quite seem possible to some of us, is there a possibility of worthwhile literature that is more irrelevant than relevant, more creator than reactor, more removed than engaged?

None of these issues can finally suggest that calls for relevance are irrelevant. There’s no doubt that relevance remains relevant. Yet it might be worthwhile, in calling for relevance, to consider the dynamics of relevance as part of the problems related to calling for relevance. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that many times, a call for relevance will be related to an issue so genuinely pressing that considering the issues related to the dynamics of calling for relevance will be of secondary or no importance. Yet I suspect that even when that is true, the dynamics of what it means to call for relevance will still come into play when somebody calls for it.

new blog conversation hosted by Les Figues Press

Vanessa Place and Teresa Carmody, the editors of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, have re-envisioned the goal of their Les Figues blog. The result is, to quote them, that "Considering our mission of creating aesthetic conversations, we've asked six people to be guest writers in this space for the next six months. Guest writers will be sharing their thoughts about books they're reading, or events they're planning/attending, pieces they're writing, or collaborations they're working on. Our goal is to cultivate a lively discussion about issues, practices and happenings in the world of innovative writing and contemporary aesthetics."

So check it out and become part of the conversation they're creating:

http://lesfigues.blogspot.com/

With the first guest editors including Sawako Nakayasu, Jennifer Calkins and Harold Abramowitz, as well as Teresa and Vanessa themselves, the conversation is bound to be lively, informative, and unexpected.