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.

Poetry The Way They Teach It at Iowa

As many readers of this blog probably know, the University of Iowa MFA Program is considered by many people, for better or worse, as the premiere creative writing program in the United States. But what exactly would you learn as a student at Iowa?

In his August 8th post, Johannes Goransson discusses what he learned at Iowa as a student there a few years ago, and it's fascinating. For better or worse.

What do you think about it all? Leave a comment on his blog or one on mine.

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.

Technology: From Worst to First

Most technology is ambiguous in its effects, creating or furthering both opportunities and problems. As Raymond Williams pointed out a long time ago, I believe in The Politics of Modernism although I could use help on that, technology itself causes no necessary effect. The question is how it’s deployed, although of course how it is made depends greatly on what its makers imagine its deployment might be. Of course we’re living in an era (and have been for awhile) when the overwhelming presence of technology leads to perhaps ever greater levels of problems as well as fascinating new options for problems.

I’m nowhere near any final conclusions just yet, so I hope you’ll check in with your own thoughts. I’m listing here what constitute to my mind major technological developments, mainly in the 20th century but a few from earlier. I don’t claim that this list is exhaustive and would welcome additions. I’m concentrating on widely available technologies though and not, say, developments in fields like medical technology that are used only by a specialized group of people or affect only a small group of people.

What I’ve done is listed these technologies from worst to first: from most purely harmful to those that seem, on balance, most helpful and least harmful. None is without negative effects. A few seem without positive ones. I know the idea of lists is always partially absurd, but the list is helping me compare effects across different kinds of objects. I’m most uncertain about the ones in the middle of the list and how they compare to each other.

Since my thinking about this is only beginning, you’re extremely welcome to critique my order here. Even better would be if you’d supply your own list. My point scale for five most harmful technologies will be 20 points for a first place vote, 10, for second, 5 for third, 3 for fourth, and 1 for fifth. If I get enough people to make a list, I’ll call a “winner.”

For now I’m not going to give my explanations of why I’ve ranked them this way. Except perhaps for one, just so you can see how I’m going about this. I’m ranking machine guns as more purely harmful than nuclear weapons. It’s at least possible to say that nuclear weaponry has had some effect in deterring the kinds of large scale destructive warfare that existed before them, even while they’ve caused mass death and have enabled new forms of warfare. It’s not an argument I would make, but I can see how it could be made. On the other hand I can’t think of any even remotely positive argument that anybody make about machine guns (and other rapid, multiple round guns) except that they kill more people more rapidly than earlier guns could do. And in fact, am I right that machine guns have killed many more people than nuclear weapons? I’m not sure, but I think so.

Machine guns (and other rapid, multiple round guns)
Nuclear weapons
Tanks
Artillery
Cars
Television
Airplanes
Radio
Air-Conditioning
Trains
Home Phones
Cell phones
Films
Computers
The Internet
Refrigerators

Where I'll Be This Weekend

Saturday, I'm headed to L.A., for a reading at 7 p.m. at Betalevel (pictured above) featuring Michelle Detorie, K. Lorraine Graham, Amanda Ackerman, Vanessa Place, and Carribean Fragoza. That's quite a lineup. If you're in L.A. you should go.

Click here for directions and more details.

I hope to see you there, but if not I hope you're doing something equally enjoyable.

Borges Takes the Bronze. Is There Partisan Outcry?

Because I’m teaching it in a short story class this fall (advanced undergraduate, but not that advanced), I’ve been re-reading Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. It has been a long time since I’ve read Borges and it was certainly a pleasure, although how well I’ll be able to get that pleasure across to students is one of the issues I’ve been considering in relation to this book.

It’s clear to me why he’s compared so often to Poe (who I’m also teaching in the class) and Kafka (who I’m not, in this class anyway, mainly because his work doesn’t highlight any key shifts in the development of the short story). As much as I love the work of all three, I think that at least on my personal list, Borges may be third. He’s a much more profound philosopher than Poe, of course, although that has something to do with his writing a century later. He shares with Poe an interest in bifurcations of identity, but doesn’t offer that much insight into character or the social dynamics that might underpin such bifurcations, while Poe’s extreme flights of fancy nonetheless point to real problems in the history of power, wealth, history, love, guilt, and families. Not that Borges doesn’t raise those specters too. But he’s not very interested in character, not that for me he has to be automatically.

Characters, for Borges, when he bothers with them at all, are much more purely part of a philosophical game, one in which opposites are often revealed as two parts of the same thing, or there’s an absolute rift between what is said about an event and what actually happened, or multiple narrative possibilities create instability in any notion of fact or truth. The idea of character is therefore on some level simply deceptive. Any sense we have of our own uniqueness as individuals is mainly illusion.

The literary games that Borges plays are based in a genuine dread of the endlessness of time and space and a wise skepticism, but for the most part that dread happens on the level of ideas and not in the narrative itself as such. Even when Borges’ characters are experiencing or expressing dread, the tone of the story doesn’t create dread. Instead, the dread comes from contemplating the philosophical puzzle the stories present. Although his writing style is often stunningly sensual, in total opposition to Poe he doesn’t allow much in the way of passion into the stories or the characters. In the stories that do more highlight emotion at the center of passionate events, like the need for revenge in “Emma Zunz” and the rage at cowardice in “The Shape of the Sword,” the narratives may be less than fully convincing on the level of emotion. More often though, his characters exist in a state of passive contemplation. I can see why some people might prefer this, and at moments I do too, but the feeling of removal and distance in Borges’ work remains consistent.

And while he shares with Kafka a love of the parable, Borges’ parables aren’t necessarily quite as compact, even while compactness is one of the traits his stories are famous for. The just slightly meandering quality has something with the level of learning that most of his stories display (even when the texts he’s mentioning are game-playing inventions) and which is certainly one of the pleasures of reading his stories, although I imagine it would be a pleasure mainly for other lovers of books and learning. His constant references to books and writers and historical contexts might be tough going for some people. There’s something more insular about a Borges story, even while he’s a much more detailed historian than either Poe or Kafka.

But these are just a few casual impressions as I think about which of his stories to teach and which not. My longtime favorite, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” may not make the cut. One of his most fascinating puzzles, the story definitely relies on the idea that literature itself is fascinating. I agree that it is, of course, but I’m not sure how well the story will work with people who are not yet convinced that there’s any value in literature. The story relies on a belief that literary minutiae is a subject worthy of discussion, even while it shows, of course, the way that literary minutiae can be a gateway to much grander problems of time, history, and identity.

Have any thoughts on Borges? I know the issue of his politics (not in the stories, but as a man in the world) is complicated, but I’m not enough of an expert to have any insights on the subject. Any experiences with teaching Borges, at any level? Is it just possible that in a context like this class, his work might fly like a lead balloon? The other writers I’m teaching are very different (I’m pairing him with Sandra Cisneros in a section on postmodernism and multiculturualism) so I’m not worried about the course overall. But I have the feeling that he may be the toughest sell of anyone I’m teaching this semester, and I don’t want to scare students back into realism before they’ve had much chance to know what else is out there.

[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.