silent teacher/remembered sequel

If there's anything more worthless than a poetry magazine from 10-15 years ago, it's a book review from 10-15 years ago. But I recently came across this old review of mine and wondered if anything of it might be salvageable with some editing of sense if not of original context.



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Hannah Weiner's silent teachers/remembered sequel teaches that history—by which I mean not the past itself, but accounts of people's lives and interactions—always involves the struggle between contrasting and conflicting voices. The book continues Weiner's concern with poetic representations of multiple voices that has been central to her work at least since Clairvoyant Journal (1974). The book provides a broad and sweeping, but also tense, historical context for understanding the significance of those voices that have been of particular importance to her.

silent teachers/remembered sequel documents the continued poetic power of Weiner's psychic state in which words and voices reveal themselves to her in often unexpected apparitions of language that she then tries to write down. Although the facts of her schizophrenia should never be downplayed, Weiner's claim that she literally sees words stand out on people's foreheads, or other surfaces, finally shouldn’t seem strange to anyone who recognizes that the fact that language is material means that we live our lives among the physical manifestations of words. Weiner's relation to language might therefore be considered no more than an intensification of an ordinary condition. She understands that language, literally, is almost everywhere. silent teachers/remembered sequel pushes that recognition deeply into the past, and stretches it along the surface of contemporary social relations, in order to reveal a history of how words have come to her.

At the heart of the book are two long poems, "silent teacher," and "remembered sequel," which are bridged by a set of discontinuous historical struggles under the name "we must integrate into the next generation" and framed by two opening pieces that introduce us to many of the key voices of the book. The history revealed in the book is, to a significant extent, Weiner's own. This point is established immediately by the picture of her as a student at Radcliffe in the late 1940's that opens the book, and by the voice of her grandfather that in "dedicatio" insists on the importance of the family history that’s caught up in Weiner's desire to become a poet. If the book concerns her own autobiography, it’s an autobiography composed of the other voices that have shaped her.

In a note that appeared in Situation #4, Weiner writes that silent teachers/remembered sequel "explains teaching, and names those poets who were teaching during the period I wrote it." Weiner's teachers write their voices into her words--"who is writing/ this goddamn manuscript anyway ron hints." Voices suggest, argue, crash, and careen throughout these poems—voices of contemporary (frequently male) poets like Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Peter Inman, and Andrew Levy (and, in one case, the son of a male poet), voices of Weiner's mother, sister, and other (frequently female) relatives, other voices rising haphazardly from the street. These voices all struggle to be heard; they don’t emerge cleanly or clearly or necessarily on friendly terms, but often fight with each other, sometimes desperately. Weiner has no sentimentality about multiplicity. The many voices of her text are frequently framed by conditions of power and their desire for it.

In such a context, language becomes a hesitant, embattled, sometimes obscure and always resistant medium. The magnificent poem "remembered sequel" particularly highlights that the issues she is exploring are political. Paradigmatic of these struggling voices are the immigrant, black and Native American voices that throughout the poem insist on defining experience in their own terms.

What the book finally shows is that the need to be heard cannot be separated from the need to hear. Speaking at the complexities of experience doesn’t do enough. Instead, Weiner suggests, we must speak with others by letting them speak back and through us. But by letting that happen, or being unable to stop it from happening, Weiner pays a high cost. To hear so much at such high velocity and intensity is overwhelming to her and clearly has often caused her pain.

The autobiography of silent teachers/remembered sequel is not a story of triumph, of social conditions overcome by living the life of the poet, or casting that life into words, or finding a political position in which all contradictions can be resolved. There is no saving mastery of language here, in which one's life can finally be recollected in tranquility. The success of silent teachers/remembered sequel is that it returns its readers to the condition of their own lives and languages, not that it offers any way beyond them. It is one possible story of one possible life. Its power, in speaking of that life, always includes the refusal to say more than can be said.

Saturday 2/16 launch for Area Sneaks

Area Sneaks, a new journal edited by Joseph Mosconi and Rita Gonzalez, is another in the list of excellent publications coming out of the Los Angeles poetry community these days. The first issue is quite a treat, with visual art and poetry in equal mixes. One of the goals of the editors is to create further contact between the worlds of visual art and poetry, which as we all know can tend to keep to their own little corners of production.

This weekend I'll be at the Area Sneaks Launch Party for issue #1 in Los Angeles, and if you're anywhere nearby, come on out and join us for what should be a fun event. If you can't make it, I hope you're doing something similarly enjoyable. Here are the details just in case you don't have them:

From the swell mob, we diverge to the kindred topics of cracksmen, fences, public-house dancers,
area-sneaks, designing young people who go out 'gonophing,' and other 'schools.'
—Charles Dickens

Launch party for ISSUE ONE of AREA SNEAKS magazine

Saturday February 16, 2008
7 - 9pm
LAXART
2640 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034
www.laxart.org

Featuring readings and performances by:
artist STEPHANIE TAYLOR
poet ANDREW MAXWELL
musician PETER KOLOVOS

The historical relationship between art and language has often occasioned lively and compelling work. AREA SNEAKS, a new print and online journal, seeks to touch the live wire where language and visual art meet.

Gertrude Stein's Paris artist salon, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Tatlin's constructive collaboration, Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci's editorial partnership, Augusto de Campos's concrete engagement with Brazilian modernism and Mike Kelley's interest in systems of literary knowledge have each provided potential models of positive exchange between artists and writers. AREA SNEAKS hopes to maintain this dialogue by creating a fellowship of discourse within an open community of contemporary artists and writers.

ISSUE ONE Contents

Essays by Stan Apps on "social art" and Daniel Tiffany on "infidel culture and the politics of nightlife"

Interviews with artists Stephanie Taylor (conducted by Kathryn Andrews and Michael Ned Holte) and Scoli Acosta (conducted by Joseph Mosconi and Rita Gonzalez)

Artist projects by Marie Jager, William E. Jones and Christopher Russell

Poetry by Sawako Nakayasu, Mark Wallace, Andrew Maxwell, Therese Bachand, K. Lorraine Graham and Ian Monk

The first appearance in English of Emmanuel Hocquard's long prose poem "The Cape of Good Hope"

Visual poems by Ben & Sandra Doller

Stephanie Taylor received her M.F.A. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2000. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally and is represented by Galerie Christian Nagel, Germany and by Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles. Her book, "Chop Shop" was published by Les Figues Press in 2007.

Andrew Maxwell is a poet, linguist, translator, lexicographer and former bullfight promoter. From 1997-2004 he co-edited seven issues of the occasional poetry journal The Germ, directed the Poetic Research reading series out of Dawson's Bookstore in central LA, and was drummer for the experimental music ensembles The Curtains and Open City. He currently DJs the show "The Dream of Harry Lime" Wednesday nights on KXLU. His poems, essays and translations can be found in Fence, Jubilat, The Hat, Arsenal and Poésie.

Peter Kolovos is a free sound artist from Los Angeles, CA. Over the last decade he has developed an intensely personal sound vocabulary based on raw texture, volume, and duration. The result has been physical, abstract work that constantly shifts and evolves in real time. The mechanisms of impulse, memory, intent, restraint laid bear. He has performed throughout the United States both individually and as part of the group Open City. He has also released vinyl as well as CD recordings through his Thin Wrist imprint. His first solo LP will be released later this year by the Belgian Ultra Eczema label.

www.areasneaks.com

Editors: Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi

one more type of political poem

As you can see, I'm still working this through.

The poem of witness:
This poem describes a historical situation, usually a crisis, that the writer has directly seen and been involved in. Similar to the investigative poem but requiring that the writer was actually part of the situation in question. I’m borrowing this concept from the anthology Against Forgetting: A Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche.

political poetry

One thing I note in many poetics discussions regarding political poetry is that the idea of what might be political about a poem rarely gets examined in more detail. Instead the argument is more likely to take the form of ought to be political/ought not to be political. Given that so many poems are already political, to say that they shouldn’t be is perhaps a little irrelevant, since political poems are unlikely to go away just because some people would prefer that they not get written. But what kinds of political poems are there, and in what ways are they political?

I’m hardly any kind of pure taxonomist, since I think Derrida is right that the infinite divisability of the trait means that categories inevitably collapse if we believe in them too firmly. But relative categories can still be very helpful.

I’m still building my own casual list of types of poems that might be said to be political, so if you have any others to suggest, please do. And of course I understand that many poems mix these categories or fit uneasily between them.

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The call to action/exhortation poem:
Including both protest and pro-war poems, this poem demands that something be done now, or is written to support an action in the world that is occurring simultaneously.

The investigative poem:
This poem explores a particular social or historical situation or crisis, attempting to bring to light untold stories, or new perspectives, or even “the truth.” I’m borrowing the term “investigative” from Ed Sanders, especially with reference to the way Kristin Prevallet has written about it.

The poem of ideology:
This poem looks not so much at particular situations as it does attempt to expose or explore the ideologies dominating a society or some portion of it. Another version of this poem insists on the importance of its own ideology.

The visionary poetics poem:
This poem, in re-imagining spiritual transformations or the future, probably also inevitably involves a re-imagining of the social.

The politics of form poem:
This poem is likely to critique, or offer itself as a counter-example to, the currently dominant aesthetics of literary creation or normative reading practices. Similar to the poem of ideology but different because it explores and critiques the ideology and powers-that-be of its own field.

The “personal is political” poem: This poem explores intimate personal relationships with an eye to the ideologies that construct those relationships. Not for instance a poem generally critiquing the institution of marriage, but one detailing a particular marriage and the ideological investments and struggles revealed between persons in that marriage. Is Adrienne Rich the originator of the phrase “the personal is political”?

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Back when I was in graduate school, it was common to say that “all poems are ideological” and that therefore all poems have political implications by definition. I still think that’s true: there’s no way to express no ideology in a poem. So one could add the category “poems that wish not to be political but inevitably are.” Still, to frame things in that way makes the category “political” so large as to be practically meaningless, so for now at least I’m going to restrict these classifications to poems that seem consciously to be invested in political, social, and ideological issues.

And finally, looking at the list above, I can imagine people saying that poems of this or that classification are not really political, or not political enough, or too explicitly political. I can imagine someone saying that right now we have too many of these and not enough of those. But those concerns would involve playing politics more specifically than this casual taxonomy can say anything about.

still thinking about AWP?

Rodney Koeneke is thinking again, and then some, about AWP over at his blog. Check it out, and add your own thoughts too, either there or here.

AWP is where it's at!

“Are you going to AWP?”

Rod Smith tells me that Kevin Thurston tells him that for writers, this question has become “the new hello.”

I’ve certainly been asked it somewhere between ten and twenty times in the last two weeks.

Actually I’ve never been to AWP, maybe partly because I’ve been to MLA a dozen times, peddling what scant resources I can offer in as many directions as I can and being so worn out afterwards that the idea of going to another professional conference is about as fascinating as dental surgery. Maybe someday I will go, but not this year.

Among those writers going to AWP, and among those not going, there turn out to be many concerns about AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the standards of the profession at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the quality of the official AWP panels.

Some writers are concerned about the ideology of the official AWP panels.

Some writers are concerned about how the problem of professionalism, as evidenced by AWP, changes what writing is, who writers are and what they do.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship between “experimental” or “avant garde” writers and AWP.

Some writers are concerned about who’s more “inside” and “outside” at AWP and they’re concerned about what “inside” and “outside” mean.

Some writers are concerned about who gets the opportunities that AWP has to offer and who does not get those opportunities.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship of the writers at AWP to the academic world.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship between AWP and larger U.S. institutional systems of power.

Some writers are concerned about whether enough of their friends will be there to make AWP fun.

Some writers are concerned about whether there will be enough interesting writers there to balance out the dull, pompous stuffed-shirts who are legendary at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the importance of being seen at AWP.

Some writers, if they are also publishers, are concerned about getting word out that their books are available at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about letting others know that they have a reading or panel event scheduled at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about letting others know that they have a reading or other event scheduled not at AWP but at the time and in the proximity of AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the distinction between “I’m going to AWP” and “I thought I’d go to AWP this year because it’s in New York.”

Some writers are concerned that other writers care about AWP too much.

Some writers are concerned that other writers don’t understand how much power AWP really has.

All of these, in greater or lesser degree perhaps, are legitimate concerns.

Are you concerned about AWP and what are those concerns? I mean, since so many writers are concerned about it anyway, we might as well discuss what we’re concerned about.

You can't handle the truth

I recently read an insightful if flawed analysis of the Iraq War and post 9-11 deployment of power in what the book suggests we still need to call “The Society of the Spectacle.” Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle In A New Age of War also talks very specifically about the condition of contemporary American power.

But as the book went on, I felt increasingly sick of the truth. I don’t mean sick of the facts, though the facts are sickening, even as they’re fascinating. I mean, instead, sick of the concept of the truth and how it gets used in the world.

The Society of the Spectacle, of course, and the U.S. and international corporate and government leaders who are temporarily in charge of it, claims constantly to speak the truth. The militant Islamist vanguard, which is at war with the western spectacle and does so significantly by trying to create a spectacle of its own, according to Afflicted Powers, claims constantly to speak the truth. And the authors of the book, brilliant leftist political analysts, are also themselves invested in speaking the truth. But at least their book is a genuine attempt to understand rather than a claim about truth that doesn’t wish to understand and purposely violates understanding.

Those who think of themselves as The Left have in recent years developed a new debate about the truth. Some of them, Terry Eagleton for instance, claim that in giving up the insistence on truth, the Left lost a chance to gain more genuine authority in the world. They criticize writers like Foucault and Derrida for criticizing the concept of truth. Foucault argued that human societies don’t move forward in the direction of greater truth or an always more benevolent progress, but use the concept of the truth in order to establish and develop disciplinary systems. Derrida criticized the concept of the “center elsewhere,” which is to say all claims about truth that insist that those who make the claims aren’t the source of the truth but have seen the truth already out there (often beyond the world) and are simply relaying it to us. Both Foucault and Derrida therefore appear to reject rhetoric that claims the truth for itself. And this position seems, lately, to some on the left, an abdication of the responsibility to describe how things actually are happening in the world.

Both Foucault and Derrida are still arguing and trying to establish points, however, and in so doing there is still a claim to truth in their work (as there is in mine here). But it is another kind of claim to truth, one that critiques the rhetoric of truth.

Of course, Foucault and Derrida described a great deal about how things happen in the world. And they did it very well, although of course they were wrong sometimes, perhaps even often.

Those on the Left who criticize them often describe very well a great deal that goes on in the world, but of course they are also wrong sometimes, and perhaps even often.

Whether you feel a need to reclaim the power of the truth or to undermine the very notion of truth, you will be wrong sometimes. Which means that you don’t speak the truth.

Anymore than I do.

There are claims to truth that are transparently false, and there are claims to truth that are genuine attempts to understand, and that difference matters a great deal. Some genuine attempts to understand understand more than other genuine attempts to understand, and that difference also matters a great deal.

It’s hard to live in a world dominated by organized murder and robbery. It makes it no easier to have people constantly coming into the room, on televison, the internet, or in person, telling a truth about the world that isn’t true. A world of liars, con men, information junkies, misinformation junkies, the self-deluded, the self-serving, the judgmentally earnest, the pious, the mindless, the vicious, the kind, the wonderful, and the brilliant, all rushing around madly, trying to force everyone to listen to their mad, lying truths.

Much too frequently, belief in the truth manifests itself as a kind of insanity.

If the Left needs to reclaim the power of truth, that’s not because they are necessarily speaking the truth, as indeed they cannot purely be, but because the concept of the truth is a lie so powerful at this time that no one can do without it and succeed.

But seizing the power of a lie in order to do good is a little too much like seizing on dark magic in a fairy tale to do the same. It may give power to those who seize it, but the chance of it doing good seems much slimmer. Since it’s a lie, in the long run it’s most likely to be deadly.

(Black magic and a white lie)

There will never be a time when the truth reigns on earth. Anyone who wants to live a live worth living should celebrate that fact, since the idea of any kind of pure truth is fundamentally anti-life. But there may be a time when less lies are told in the name of truth, and less lives destroyed through its misuse.

Many will say, but how can we deal with lies, distortions, misperceptions, half-truths and much else if we have no standard of truth against which to measure and expose what’s false? A crucial question, since while there may be no absolute truth, that hardly rids the world of lies.

What we need, it seems, is a notion of truth as partial rather than absolute, as insight rather than obfuscation. Insight allows us to understand more clearly, but not absolutely and certainly not finally.

A concept of truth, then, as fundamentally situational. Not beyond conditions, but lodged in them. Not the answer to conditions, but as something that allows us to understand the sources of conditions, and where those conditions are tending.

But for what purpose?

What if we defined Truth as an insight that, were people able to act on it, social conditions would improve. Falsity would then become an insight that, were people able to act on it, social conditions would worsen. Truth would then be no more than an insight with the potential to make the world better.

But for whom, and in what way? The status of “better” remains open to question.

No matter how sick one may become of it, it seems that the problem of the truth is one we haven’t yet learned to do without. But maybe we should.