That's Entertainment

When I’m speaking with students, I always try to point out how much more than entertainment is at stake in a work of literature. Literature, I suggest, can deal with the whole range of human complexity, all possible ideas and emotions, and therefore can do a lot more than briefly entertain us. It can help us better understand and engage with many elements of our experience in the world, and I suppose beyond it. And while it can certainly give us pleasure, there’s a lot more going on in that pleasure than simply a momentary distraction.

Yet sometimes, when reading the work of poets or listening to them read, I wish they had considered the value of entertainment more. There’s a dullness to the lines, or to the way they’re being read, that suggests the writer or performer hasn’t made enough effort to be entertaining: that is, hasn’t attempted enough to make the work engage not just the writer, but the reader or the audience too.

I’m not talking here about a self-consciously flat reading style, a la John Ashbery, nor do I think it’s fair to suggest that poets (writers) must necessarily be good live performers of their work, although I wish some of them had thought about performance more. Nor am I suggesting that most poetry readings are boring. I find poetry readings fascinating, and I love going to them.

Besides, these days the world of avant literatures at least is full of performance elements, from lively reading styles to acting and sound and visual effects, etc. Sometimes I’m even wary of these performance elements. If it seems, for instance, like a writer has tacked on these elements just to keep us from being bored with the actual written words, I can be skeptical. It can seem like the added performance elements serve as a cover for a lack of liveliness in the writing itself, or are pandering to the audience in the general belief that everybody finds poetry dull. In cases of this kind (I’m naming no names on purpose here, obviously), I find myself distrustful of the way that the entertainment seems to be a kind of apology. Poets already apologize too much for poetry. So I think it’s also true that a poem or a performance can try too hard to entertain, and in so doing neglect other important elements.

What do you think about the significance of entertainment in literature or performance? Is the whole concept of entertainment too degraded by its association with the idea of mindless entertainment, which suggests that entertainment is no more than a frivolous distraction from the world’s serious business, and one that usually reinforces harmful social norms in the balance? Or can the concept of entertainment be seen more constructively, for instance in its potentially complex relation to pleasure? Do you as a writer or performer wish to entertain your readers or audience? Do you as a reader or audience member wish to be entertained? Is the concept of entertainment degrading to the importance of literature, or one of the key elements of that importance?

just wondering about desire, sincerity, and language

I'm wondering what poets these days see their poems as sincere expressions of their own desires (as authors, as people) and what poets believe that, in a poem, the voice of the poem has its own identity, separate from the author in some ways (in however many ways it may be connected).

I think that a lot of the discussions and debates going on in contemporary poetics turn out to hinge on this particular issue, a fact that often surprises me. So I'd really like to know what people think.

Do the poems you write express your desires? Or does the use of language become a mediating condition that creates a distance between your desires and the desires expressed in the poems that you write?

poems about credit cards

My credit card company tried to steal $39 from me today, but I caught them and they're giving it back, which they'll do sometimes if you catch them. But you have to keep your eye out. I've written only one poem I'm immediately aware of that references credit cards, from my manuscript Belief Is Impossible. This poem and many others from the manuscript have been published in magazines but the manuscript itself has never been published:

Between corporate downsizing
and rampant part-time underpayment
a group of people wander, silent
in halls that separate them.

If I wanted to be a hermit
high in the hills above Los Angeles
sooner or later credit companies
would steal the wine from my bamboo hut.


Anybody know any other poems about credit cards? Please send one that you know of, or if you don't know of any, write one yourself and send it to me.

excerpt from Things I Don't Know

"Some Things I Don't Know: Reflections on Process in Politics and Literature" was a talk I gave at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver on May 13, 2007. The piece features a series of associatively-connected paragraphs written between November 2006 and May 2007.

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I tend to consider process-oriented writing differently than texts created through more conventional methods of authorship. Without getting into all the judgments involved in deciding what’s “better,”if it remains true that when we're looking at process-oriented work, we know it's process-oriented work, then that means we continue to see that work as categorically different and so are likely to consider it by different standards. Much though not all processual work tends to highlight concept and performativity more than close attention to line by line reading (though of course conventional writing is still a kind of performance). Is that difference a problem? Sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. Depends on what you've gone to the work for. As Roland Barthes would note, none of us ever read every line of a text anyway. But how does it change our habits of reading that with many process-oriented texts, we know there's no real point even in trying to read every line? In a certain scenario, we would begin to decide that any given line of a text doesn't really matter that much—which of course is only true, in some sense, and unfortunately inattentive in another. We would dip into the text here and there, picking out lines and moments of interest, without assuming that its totality was relevant except as concept. But does such a notion do away with problematic Modernist dependence on totality or simply encourage readers to care less about the specifics of a text and more about its conceptual framework and aura?

Absent Magazine and the Youth of Today

Issue Two of Absent Magazine is now available online:

http://absentmag.org/issue02/

featuring poetry by Jasper Bernes, Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, Jack Boettcher, Tim Botta, Julia Cohen, Shanna Compton, John Cotter, Shafer Hall, Lisa Jarnot, Pierre Joris, Joan Kane, Noelle Kocot, Jason Labbe, Kathleen Ossip, The Pines, Matthew Rohrer, Kate Schapira, Mathias Svalina, Kathryn Tabb, Allison Titus and Betsy Wheeler.

in translation with Sergei Kitov and Octavo Paz.

musical work by Aaron Einbond.

prose by Joe Amato, Peter Ciccariello, Simon DeDeo, Adam Golaski, Kent Johnson, Amy Newman, Davis Schneiderman and Tyler Williams.

edited by Elisa Gabbert and Simon DeDeo; with great gratitude to Irwin Chen and his class at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

work solicited for issue three: please read guidelines at:
http://absentmag.org/issue02/html/guidelines.html * letters to the editor solicited: please read http://absentmag.org/issue02/html/letters.html

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Absent seems to me one of a number of intriguing online magazines (Melancholia's Tremulous Deadlocks is another) being edited by young writers. Magazines published by up-and-coming writers provide excellent insights, I think, into the ways a new generation of writers sees both themselves and their relationship to the larger environments of poetry--and often to the environment of their predecessors in particular.

I remember the combination of interest and suspicion that publications I was involved with through the 90s received from writers both of my own generation and of previous generations. Some of you may recall that conversation could be pretty intense and heated. One of the things I remember deciding for myself at that time was that when I was older, I was never going to become one of those "What's All This Then?" people who seemed to come right out of a Monty Python skit. I thought, when it's my turn to be an "older poet" (and we'll leave aside the problematics of that term, or not, as you will), I'm going to do my best to be interested in what comes afterwards, and not to try to force it to be like what me and my own generation were engaged in doing.

So, anybody have a good reading of the area and range of interests being traced in a magazine issue like this issue of Absent? What exactly are the Youth of Today up to?

Answers to this question should begin with phrases like: "When I read this magazine, what I see in the Youth of Today is..."

Or, if you are one of the Youth of Today, things like "Speaking as one of the Youth of Today, I can really relate to this magazine because..." or "As a proud Youth of Today, I have to say that this magazine in no way really represents the interests of today's youth because..."

My apologies to the editors for putting it this way; my own giddiness is no reflection on their work. It's just that the first week of school makes me feel like (as they used to say in my neighborhood when I was still a Youth of Today) "someone has just gone upside my head with a board." I am genuinely interested in people's takes on this issue.

the Sunday night of the Sunday night of the year

For may people, especially but not only those of us who teach, the weeks leading up to Labor Day are like the Sunday night of the whole year. The hard work hasn’t started but the shelf life on good times is running out. There are a few days to take a final short outing somewhere, put a final touch on those summer projects, stash your provisions or otherwise get prepared, whatever you do on Sunday night to convince yourself that you’re ready for the next morning, which of course you never are.

And now here it is, the Sunday night of the year, and it’s also Sunday night. I’ve got a full 14-hour day tomorrow.

In terms of its structural relationship to the society I live in, for me the kinds of writing I do break down pretty blatantly into a shape like this:

bureaucratic/official writing — critical writing — fiction writing — poetry writing

When I’m working, critical writing is sometimes most possible, when I have any time at all, because it’s most like the kind of writing I have to do for my job. Fiction is more difficult, and poetry almost impossibly strange.

I don’t mean to say though that I don’t write any poetry during the regular university semesters, just that writing it requires a painfully conscious effort to twist my brain into a shape entirely unlike the shape it has during the work day. In fact for many years I’ve made a huge effort to write at least some poetry during long work days (all of Party In My Body was written that way; one ten line poem a day from Monday to Friday whether I wanted to or not, and I almost never wanted to) because it’s so much unlike everything else that my life is about that it takes on a kind of talismanic power. It’s a source of something that I need to get back to if I can, especially at those moments when it most feels like I’m about to have to abandon it for good.

I was finally able to write quite a bit of new poetry this summer, but only after I wrote some critical pieces and some fiction, as if I had to write all the way through the distance between myself and the possibility of poetry. It was as if writing the fiction actually allowed me to feel comfortable (some level of comfort anyway) writing poetry. I liked the effects it had. And now that it’s all drifting away, I’m gearing myself up for the effort to try to get back to it again.

But how do you get it back again, when you feel it going? I’ve managed it repeatedly, but I still don’t understand how. Anybody have some good techniques to keep it all from drifting away for good?

Renaissance Man for the Dark Ages

When I was in Vancouver in May, I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to a reading by Clint Burnham, a writer now based in Vancouver whose work I had known something about for years, but whose work I’ve only read in-depth for the first time this summer.

Donato Mancini, a brilliant young writer (and author of a first book, Ligatures, that combines concrete poems and textual process pieces in fascinating ways) who I met in Vancouver and who helped arrange several events for me there, was surprised that I had heard of Clint, and proceeded to insist how much he liked his writing, and especially his fiction, which I had never heard about. I was surprised that Donato was surprised that I knew who Clint was, and Donato was surprised at my surprise and so on. But in any case, if having heard of Clint Burnham may or may not be surprising, anyone discovering the range of his work for the first time is going to find themselves startled more than once.

Burnham is perhaps best known in the United States as the author of a book of criticism on Duke University Press, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, which made a pretty big noise when it was published in 1995. It’s an inventive combination of hardcore scholarly analysis, off-kilter mixing of pop culture and academic references, and lively language. But Burnham is at least marginally well known south of the border as a poet too, and I had certainly encountered his work in a number of publications.

Burnham’s most recent book of poems, Rental Van (scroll down the link to find the book) which was the focus of his reading, is a very complex blend of avant garde technique, colloquial vulgarity, and political outrage. Moments of overt anger tend to be subverted both by humor and by Burnham’s tendency to complicate the position of the text’s various voices relative to the problems he investigates, from the Iraq war to more local political and social betrayals. Burnham never allows the voices of his text the simplicity of critiquing some fallen other side from a position of self-righteous purity. Instead the voices are deeply enmeshed in the problems they describe; language in the poems gets thrown around as a sort of chaotic cloud that the voices are necessarily inside: Here’s the opening of “British Props”:


shovel petals fissiparous dictionary guitar neck cup holders very different

length keep the hand

piedbald dWalt culture a test she’s so on it snap-on calendar’s gone tit’s up

get up & change the pope’s upsidedown hands

spectacles canadian literature’s neighbourhood cut package illegal suites hyper trophy screw

heels into eyes kept to the forefront open to use it

my old man she rubs this ball

possible with the rise of the keyboard hold

something else inside a opium “he got for ‘er” take out

inside baby

suck embarrassment affect you?


Burnham certainly doesn’t allow his poems any simple access to representation: although there’s plenty of representation in the book, language also sometimes becomes an opaque white noise with suggestive variations, or a series of smoke screens inside smoke screens.

Speaking of smoke, though, the biggest surprise for me was discovering that Burnham is also a fiction writer. There’s no shortage of smoke of all kinds in his two books of fiction to date, the short story collection Airborne Photo (scroll down the link to find the book) and the novel Smoke Show. If Burnham’s new book of poems is recognizably contemporary avant garde in its linguistic techniques, I guarantee you that you haven’t read fiction like his before. The voices of the characters, and the stories they tell, comprise almost the whole of the narrative structure. They’re all characters from the seamy side of life in the cities, suburbs, and towns of western Canada. The unemployed, uneducated, drug addicts and dealers, alcoholics, ex-soldiers, women and men with children but no money, no future, and just about any deviance you can think of—and you can be certain that Burnham’s characters have thought of more types of deviance than you can. Everything happens in a haze of inarticulateness, yet at the same time, Burnham’s sense of voice is remarkably precise. He captures quite exactly everything his characters can’t say. Here’s the opening of the story “French Canadian Units”:


The thing is, what everyone knew was, if you talk to a buddya mine who was over there, you know, he’ll, he’ll tell ya, you know, he’ll tell ya, ya, you know he’ll tell ya, it’d get much worse. If they found the stuff, the documents about what happened, what really happened, it’d sure be a lot worse. But, you know, it’s the higher-ups.


Because of this focus on the colloquial, the structure of these pieces makes them undeniably inventive, and avant garde in a very original way. Voices ramble, break off suddenly, get forgotten, say the most banal and outrageous things simultaneously, and then just stop and that’s the story. There’s often no conventional development of any sort.

Airborne Photo, the earlier book, may have just a tinge of shock for the sake of shock, although the story “The Jesus Sex Doll Box” is every bit as funny as it needs to be in the face of that title. It’s also the story, apparently, that a Vancouver area professor was sued simply for teaching, for those of you who like to be in on the lurid details. Smoke Show, the follow-up novel (if you want to call it a novel, and since Burnham does I’ll let him), traces a more consolidated arc that nonetheless goes absolutely nowhere. The book’s brilliant concluding sections finally just fade away every bit as absolutely as the narrative voice in a Beckett novel.

So Burnham is a writer who does excellent work in criticism, poetry, and fiction, all of it innovative, some of it absolutely original, and most of it a lot less known than it might be. I guess it’s no surprise that his range of talents would appeal to me, and it turns out he’s exactly my age too.

Last e-mail I had from him though, about a month or more ago, he had little time to write, since he was buried under a mound (as they say, as Robert Creeley would say) of summer school grading. But finally that’s no big surprise either: it may just be what you earn for being a renaissance man during the dark ages.