Nada Gordon's Folly

Nada Gordon’s Folly may be the most essential theoretical statement of what the flarf aesthetic might be said to be about and include. Given the flarf groups’ resistance to the creation of conventional manifestos to explain their intentions, this point may seem paradoxical, but paradoxes present no problems for the author of Folly. With all its whimsy, winking, flirtatiousness, porousness and irreverence, there’s finally a very steely center to this book, even while that center is in many ways the opposite of what we usually mean when we say a book has a center.

The concept of folly, and the way that concept plays out through the poems and dialogues and poetic plays collected in the book, reveal that Gordon has a convincing theory of folly that links the often disparate strands of the marvelously energetic writing she has gathered here. If her book is not a comprehensive elucidation of all the possible elements of that theory, that’s mainly because folly laughs at the idea of comprehensiveness (or maybe just giggles) while at the same time implying how much strength there is in its own breadth. Gordon’s earlier books of poetry had an often scattershot yet compelling structure and energy, as if always threatening to fly apart. While Folly has a similar feel, everything here seems more thoroughly grounded in a sense of why it all belongs together.

As a word, folly was originally named folly by reason, of course. Everything that reason considers not to be itself it considers folly, whether it considers the folly in question disastrous or merely silly. The idea of folly contains not just playfulness, artifice, the slothful, the ornamental, the excessive and the wasteful; that is, not just the daily behavior that always sober seriousness rejects as extreme. It also includes marginalized cultures, histories, and genders, as well as everything that reason, and the various types of reason that pass as reason, tell us can’t or shouldn’t be said. When no longer seen from behind the veil of reason, folly turns out to be no fool, to know that in the moral realm reason is not often reasonable, that much of the time what gets called wisdom is not. Folly wants payback for the fact that reason named it. A payback party perhaps, but payback nonetheless.

In another essay I once called the concept of the avant garde, at its most progressive and least static, “the rejection of Western cultural rejection,” not an affirmation, although sometimes it contained an affirmation, but a double negative. A refusal of the historically acceptable standards for Western Art in a way that also refuses to accept the desire of Western Culture to determine who can be part of it and in what way, who is outside of it and not able to reap its benefits, who must work in poverty so that others can prosper, who must die so that others are allowed to live the way they want. But also a refusal to create even a new, rewritten centrality, a new canon, that would return us once more to the old game of folly and reason. It’s remarkable that Gordon’s Folly manages to refuse to rewrite centrality while at the same time highlighting a concept of what that centrality might be.

The poems in Folly often depend on incongruity, placing together things that, according to reason, ought not to be placed together. The book is full of unexpected juxtapositions, whether between vulgarity, satire, and lyric gracefulness, or between images of older and more contemporary outcasts, shapeshifters, jokesters and freaks. Vocabularies, histories, mythologies and much else are shaken loose from their expected contexts and interact with each other. Charles Bernstein’s back cover comment is exactly right, I think, when he says that Gordon is “on her way to inventing a new type of poetry in which Pre-Raphaelitism meets Zeppo Marx while doing the hokey pokey in a fox trot beat.” Right also in saying “on her way,” since the goal is not to determine who can or can’t belong but to fight back against, and laugh at, all those moments that readers might want to say “you can’t get away with that.” The result is not a coalition but a carnival.

Essential to Gordon is playing around with, and unraveling, the often assumed dichotomy of feminine and feminist.

Lovetta: You look real cute in that ninja getup.

Brianna: And may I say you look delicious in that sari, you wicked thing. The original exposed midriff, how very charming indeed.

Sheptanya: This makes me look like Queen Victoria on a bad day.

Lovetta: Are you kidding? You look totally shaggable in that. I mean, you look cute in that “OMG, that girl has got some BALLS to wear that in public” way. At least you didn’t have to wear elf ears.

Brianna: Does this make me look fickle? Or versatile?

Lovetta. Versatile. Does this make me look two-dimensional? Or careerist?

Sheptanya: Careerist. Does this make me look gelatinous? Or like slightly less of an awesomely intimidating authority figure?

Brianna: I think it makes you look “published.” (38)

There’s play here with the implications of clothing, obviously, and the social roles regarding sex, gender and power always implied by it. Certainly Gordon takes the supposed feminine/feminist dichotomy far beyond early evocations of the feminine as a set of traits revealing powerlessness and the idea of feminism as an assertion of group or individual action (whether separatist or assimilationist) designed to take power back. She goes past the step beyond as well, the idea that the feminine is or can be powerful, a discourse that can not only change in and of itself but in relation to others, spinning magic circles around conventional masculinist notions of power. Instead there’s a flamboyant game playing in Folly that suggests identity and relation and power and sexuality are found in how all of us play together, play even with the idea of playing. The characters note how quickly their relation to the game can change and how easily such changes can be signaled. In Folly the feminine and the feminist turn out to be interconnected roles that players might take up, both for the revel and the sheer pleasure of play as well as for the power at stake. Not so much play as a way to obtain change, but change as a means to more enjoyable playing.

That said, Gordon consistently signals her awareness of the sociopolitical conditions that not only limit choices for behavior but make play seem at times an impossibility, as in “Viagric Importunings:

God: For fuck’s sake, I despair at some humans, I really do. Gods, I am so angry. I wish there was something to be done, I feel so impotent.

A star-shaped pillowcase: I am able to convey so many things through nonverbal communication, why is it that I feel so impotent using tools that others use with ease?

Fat Thing: And the worse part is that I cannot do anything about it—except go on being a part of it. My god, why do I feel so impotent? When will we ever learn?

Rusty helmet: I’m scared. Everything has changed. I feel so impotent. There’s nothing that can be done but to sit here and watch.

Earthquake: I feel so impotent when I can’t think of the right words to describe the sound of an individual band or maintain an erection. (59)

It’s not surprising that feelings of helplessness are common in the face of the foibles of human behavior, the power of contemporary social institutions and the conditions of complicity that come with being inevitably part of them or at least subject to them, as well as the frantic pace of change that often overwhelms individual and even group response. Still, what this particular short sketch also shows is that the feeling of impotence has itself become a ritual, a social game people play in relation to each other. It’s a ritual that’s both ludicrous and paradoxically energizing. In “Viagric Importunings,” while reflections on impotence might in private doom us, the ritual of displaying it to each other comes with a sexual energy that must certainly be the ground of getting beyond it. Not that we will necessarily get beyond it in this or any other given instance, just that if we could, that would be where the impetus would have to come from. No resistance without sexuality.

In fact, Gordon also wants to make clear that the ultimate human folly is human belief in our own centrality in the universe, as in the opening to the poem “Nothing Is Untitled”:

Dear universal hominid ancestor:

Do you think you’re special because you have
A DIRECT LINE
TO THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE? (91)

It’s not easy to mix an often harsh critique of contemporary social conditions and human limitations with a good time party, yet Gordon manages to do just that, as in the two poems entitled “Why America Sucks” and elsewhere as well. Much of the book’s satire comes with a lush, sensual prose that certainly recalls 19th century verboseness without ever seeming actually retro. The book is a carnival of real and imaginary animals, human beings in strange, voluptuous costumes, sadness and cheerfulness and a thrilling celebration of the perverse in character, sexuality, and language.

The dialogues and poetic plays present characters expressing a wide range of emotions: depression, ecstasy, embarrassment, loathing, longing, horniness and many others. But Gordon doesn’t use the poems in Folly for direct confession or blatant exploration of her own subjective state, at least beyond the fact that the totality of the statements in the book might be said to map a whole arrangement of thought and feeling that’s uniquely her own. These are impersonal poems full of personal revelations, and also the opposite: personal poems displayed through the impersonal methods of characters and role players who serve as objective correlatives of emotions and social conditions. The poems refuse conventional notions both of subjectivity and objectivity, revealing both to be a play of physical surfaces while never turning the point into a purely theoretical suggestion. In fact another remarkable thing about Folly is that the poems never seem controlled by the idea of folly or written with the advance intention of proving a point. Instead they seem to revolve around and return to key ideas without seeming pre-mapped and while still coming together in a way that feels convincing as theory.

Saying that Folly is a central theoretical statement of the flarf aesthetic isn’t to suggest that the book can account for all the different types of writing that the flarf group has produced. The flarf group has usually resisted defining themselves through manifestos or other statements of its own importance, replacing such statements with ironic, self-undermining commentaries meant to make fun of the manifesto-issuing tendency while simultaneously turning the manifesto into another flarf game. Gordon herself somewhat notoriously refuses to define the flarf aesthetic, sometimes claiming that flarf is nothing more than a particular set of writers working in all their various ways in attempts to instruct and delight—the kind of claim that can make stance takers white-knuckled with annoyance. All that said though, the concept of folly that plays out in Folly seems to me a crucial ground for understanding the flarf group’s essential obsession with impropriety, with doing in poems all sorts of things that others say they cannot and should not do. One of the things that makes flarf so controversial is that it doesn’t just explore the improper as it’s defined in mainstream capitalist culture. It also takes on the improper as it appears in the tightly-interlocking social mores of the world of poets themselves who, in an age when society-at-large doesn’t pay attention (although if it did, it would inevitably disapprove), seem to make a tremendous effort to tell other poets what they shouldn’t do. If the world will not police our work, we will do it ourselves.

Frankly, I doubt that Folly is going to convince people who dislike flarf that they should change their minds. Though the book seems to me a statement of purpose, it hardly proselytizes for its cause or attempts to win converts across any of the well-worn aisles of contemporary poetry debates that one can read about every day on the Harriet or Ron Silliman blogs. It has more of a chance perhaps to reach some readers of mainstream verse who are trying to look beyond the most commonly asserted divisions in contemporary poetry. Gordon picks and chooses from various literary and cultural traditions, avant garde and otherwise, and restlessly unsettles many commonly accepted critical distinctions about literary language. In fact the book seems very connected to Arielle Greenberg’s ideas about the gurlesque. Still, Folly isn’t any kind of middle ground poetry. The poems never reach to define a middle but celebrate and juxtapose extremes. There are no linear narratives, no concluding lines of heightened emotion for lovers of traditional lyric, no descriptions of current events for those who like relevant of-the-moment protest poems. Folly is an important book not because it doesn’t offer such moves but because it shows us that all sorts of things which people think should not be part of poetry are actually crucial to it: all the impurities we’re always trying to cast out in order to remake the universe in our own image.

Where I’ll Be This Weekend: Tucson, Arizona

POG presents:

Mark Wallace, K. Lorraine Graham, Lisa Cooper

January 31, 2009. 7:00 P.M., The Drawing Studio

33 S. 6th Ave., Tucson, AZ

I’ve been in Tucson only once before, on a driving trip across the country while I was a teenager that I took with my father and my brother (one of about ten such trips I took between 1969 and 1980, when I went to college). I don’t remember Tucson at all and am looking forward to seeing it and to being in the actual desert, something I haven’t done much of since moving to San Diego. I’m also looking forward to seeing people that I know (Barbara Henning and Renee Angle) or have met (Charles Alexander) or have heard about (Tenney Nathanson), as well as some I know nothing about yet. But this trip to Tucson and a recent blog post by Rodney Koenoke about the thriving, if hardly huge, poetry community in Portland reminded me again about some of the things in the world of alternative poetries (or whatever you want to call it, okay?) that has changed in my years as a writer and is continuing to change.

One of the things that marked my generation (always a questionable notion, but let’s say people who published first books between about 1985 and the later 90s) of North American writers interested in poetic innovation was that we were more diffuse geographically than earlier generations of such poets had been. Not that many years earlier, there had been sizable communities of such writers mainly just in NYC and the Bay Area, although there were smaller but still significant groups in a couple other places. But by the later 80s and early 90s, and certainly far more so by now, there were significant communities centered around alternative poetries in many other places too. I’m going to list them, mainly because I’m pretty sure at least some reader of this blog is going to point out that I’ve missed a place somewhere: Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Tucson, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans (maybe something in Kansas?), Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Durham, even to a smaller extent Richmond and Atlanta. Where else? I don’t claim to know the histories of all these communities, so if you have pertinent additions or corrections, please chime in. (And let me footnote here that the relatively separate histories of Mexican, Caribbean, and South American poets are very important but I just know too little about them).

To me that’s rather a remarkable change. Not that many years ago, the idea of a Surrealist in Minneapolis could be the subject of much wit (“Why did the Surrealist go to Minneapolis? To get to the other side.”). Now, many places you can go, there are some poets there to greet you and talk at least a little bit of your talk, even as, from their individual and regional perspective, what constitutes the environment of alternative poetries always varies to some degree, while at the same time there’s usually significant overlap.

Of course, maintaining life as a practicing poet interested in taking risks with literary norms ( not to mention maintaining life period) is often difficult and at the present capitalist economic moment likely getting more so. The relation between a growing number of poets and changing economic, educational, and social conditions hasn’t been sufficiently accounted for in any piece of writing that I’m aware of. And as might be expected, in all of these places there are poets whose work one likes better than others, or whose personalities are more or less appealing. I can imagine someone saying that this growth in geographical diversity has no automatic connection to the creation of worthwhile literature, or even perhaps that this greater diffusion is a problem because of all these people in all these places taking up, abandoning, or changing literary traditions in just whatever haphazard way they feel like. But for myself, I think this regional expansion might be considered, both sociologically and aesthetically, as a crucial issue regarding what poetry and poets are at this moment in history, one that needs further exploration. With some many poets in so many places, the singularity and cohesion of literary traditions gets challenged. The idea that poetry is only written by a great few and published by one or two presses in one or two places gets replaced by an idea of poetry as part of the daily lives of often relatively ordinary people who nonetheless are writing fascinatingly (sometimes) about their lives and times.

The price, I guess, is obscurity for almost everyone, although most of us were always going to be obscure anyway. And how these circumstances will change in a world of diminished resources is uncertain, at best. But the potential gain—that more people have at least some occasional access to the genuinely exploratory elements of a life devoted to literature, and that possibly that access may expand—seems to me very worthwhile.

Fiction International Issue #41: Freaks

Fiction International Issue #41, Freaks, is now available, containing my short story "The End of the World" and many other works of innovative and non-mainstream fiction. If the freak who is the main character of my story is certainly not the most obviously freaky freak in the collection, he may very well be a more common type than we are all comfortable recognizing.

Fiction International is perhaps the main, if not quite only, model for what I called "Submodern Fiction" in the three issues of the fiction magazine of that name which I co-edited along with K. Lorraine Graham. FI features work by writers who are in the main not household names and whose work puts most of them outside the industry of realist fiction that along with genre fiction still dominates American literary culture.

I'm reprinting, here, my introduction to the initial issue of Submodern Fiction in 2003. The environment I describe has changed somewhat since then, especially in terms of community in fiction, but much of the rest of it remains quite similar to what we see now.

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Why publish a small magazine devoted to alternative forms of prose narrative?

Anybody who has followed the condition of published fiction in the United States in the last decade knows how bad that condition is right now. Major publishing houses have narrowed the range of the work they will publish, kicking many of the best writers off their roles. A few well established writers of non-traditional narrative, most of whom are nearing the end of their admittedly impressive careers, find their books labeled “postmodern” and mixed with novels highlighting themes well-connected to the niche market that fiction publishing has become--a market that features realism almost exclusively

Of course, the variety of such realism niche markets has grown considerably. Along with upper class realism of manners, realism about urban professionals looking to make a career of love, and realism about steadfast rural families, there are now niches for most major recognizable American cultural categories: a market for the African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American realist novel, a market for realist novels about the urban and rural poor, a market for gay and lesbian realist novels, realist novels about people struggling with illness or disability. And there are markets also for international identity niches as well, and sometimes, as in the case of magical realism, these niches allow for different ways of writing. In and of itself, this variety is a great thing: we certainly need subject matter that challenges the dominance of white heterosexual capitalist culture, and the best of these novels provide complex and important critiques.

At the same time though, too many of these novels, in order to get published, follow not only the dullest of story-telling norms but replicate the central theme of capitalist realism generally: the story of an individual or a family overcoming great obstacles in order to live a successful life, or at least to come to a better understanding “of the vagaries but resilience of the human heart,” as one professional book review after another tells us. These days, everybody can have heart, and that’s a great improvement over eras that believed that heart belonged to some people and not others. Most radical cultural critiques and non-realist forms of writing, however, still get lost. Unfortunately, if there are more cultural categories, there are less things possible to say about them, and less possible ways to say them.

But perhaps these facts are not so surprising. It is capitalism we’re talking about, after all. Can we really expect Random House to come to the rescue? Besides, when thinking about capitalist publishing houses, fiction can hardly claim special levels of persecution. In many ways, it still remains privileged. Most of the best imaginative and critical writing has long since found itself in smaller presses, and obviously much of the most challenging fiction has been doing and will have to do the same.

But fiction, novels especially, presents a different set of problems for the small presses than, say, non-mainstream poetry. It takes a lot more time and money to publish a novel than it does a collection of poems, and few small presses have the necessary resources. Furthermore, the fact that marketplace success remains a possibility for novelists that it is not for poets means that, as Ron Sukenick once said to me after giving a reading, “Most novelists are still invested in the idea of going it alone, because big breakthrough sales are possible for them.” Fiction writers, that is, have not automatically been forced to develop community in the way that non-mainstream poets have: there’s still the sense (which is some combination of freeing and selfish) that it’s possible to succeed on one’s own terms without the help of other writers. As Sukenick pointed out too, though, such a possibility seems increasingly false. These days, writers of alternative narrative need community easily as much as poets. Maybe more so, because right now, those communities don’t always exist.

These problems of community are made worse by the attitudes of many non-mainstream poets, who might seem obvious allies but don’t always think of themselves that way. Most such poets read fiction only for fun, if they read it at all, which many don’t. Poetry, theory, and criticism seem the important work: fiction gets critiqued, even resented, for its continued ties to capitalist production, and not everybody pauses to make distinctions, either on the subject of specific fiction writers or ways of writing it. The fact that the last 20 years of avant garde poetic theory have often labeled narrative as an essential enemy of socially engaged writing has hardly helped matters. There are of course many exceptions to this social division, writers whose fiction moves close to poetry or whose poetry uses alternative ideas of narrative, readers whose eclecticism undermines the self-protection of genre. But however unfortunate and unnecessary it may be, the division remains real.

Even given all these problems, though, it also remains true--importantly--that alternative fiction is far from dead, even if its public profile is lower than at any time since the 1950s. Some structurally challenging writers still manage to find major publishing opportunities: Lydia Davis, Richard Powers, others. Magazines like Conjunctions and Fiction International provide opportunities to publish short alternative narrative. Presses like Fiction Collective II, Burning Deck, Asylum Arts, and Avec Books with its Pivotal Prose series have published excellent books of very risky fiction in recent years. But these worthwhile efforts, surviving however they do, and all of which deserve more critical attention, stand also as examples of how much more can be done. Right now, many writers of alternative narrative have very few places--sometimes none--to publish their work in a country in which hundreds of trash novels are produced yearly.

Of course, a little magazine like this one, featuring a few stories and a few pieces of criticism, can’t do much to change these broad social realities. But my hope is that it can provide at least a small forum for communication among at least a few writers who don’t have such a forum at this time. It can provide an example of what, on a larger scale, there should be more of. Even if this magazine can create nothing more than a conversation and a sense of community between a few friends and anybody else who would like to be interested, I think it can also help create a new model (along with those existing publications that already do so) of what alternative fiction writers might do to survive as creative thinkers.

Poet Rod Smith has been talking for a few years now about his idea (taken in part from Guy Debord) of “submodernism”--the notion that writing in the traditions of modernist experimentation has been surviving in the most recent decades of international capitalism primarily through small publications that cruise underneath the radar of capitalist oversight, even as they remain subject to capital’s power. I think of this magazine, then, as a call for alternative fiction to go submodern, for writers of such fiction to recognize that for most of us, we’re going to survive this way, or not at all. Try to get under the radar, folks, and cruise.

Some New Multiplicities: A Conversation

This is the first round of a conversation with myself, Joseph Mosconi, and K. Lorraine Graham about new directions and multiplicities in poetry and related arts among younger writers.

Joseph lives in Los Angeles, where he works as one of the co-organizers of the Poetic Research Bureau and co-edits the literary and arts journal Area Sneaks. Lorraine lives in Carlsbad, California, about two hours south of L.A., and not very far away from where I live at all, as it turns out. Her book of poems Terminal Humming is forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009, and she’s one of the co-organizers of the Agitprop Literary Series in San Diego.

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Mark Wallace: Joseph, in a conversation we had a few weeks back, you claimed that one of the things that was interesting about poets of your current, up-and-coming generation is their use of multiple artistic traditions and cultural contexts. I wonder if you could elaborate on that point. Whose work in particular were you thinking of? Did you mean poets specifically in L.A., or elsewhere as well? The point is similar to one I made in my article "Towards A Free Multiplicity of Form" which discussed among other issues the way poets of our present moment seem to think of themselves as working in (or playing around with) multiple literary traditions rather than belonging in a singular lineage of poetic practice. But my sense was that you thought that this issue was being taken up in new ways at the moment among a crowd of younger poets whose writing you're perhaps more familiar with than I am. Can you give me some examples of how this issue is working itself out at the moment?

Joseph Mosconi: My sense is that there are a number of poets and prose writers from my generation for whom literature, and poetry specifically, is one among many disciplines from which one might seek to build a poetic practice. In this sense we are un-disciplined. I do not use this term pejoratively. It is not an extravagant and promiscuous practice. It is deliberate, considered, and partly a result of our media literacy. Our books are only one form of media. Many poets are well-read in classic, modern and contemporary literature, but some may be even more literate in cinema history, art history or perhaps even (due to the way we were raised) television and Internet history. These various media disciplines inevitably find their way into our work. In Los Angeles there are several young writers whose work crosses these various disciplines. Marcus Civin is a poet who has transcribed Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy's War and Peace into extremely detailed visual poems. The poetry and essays of Stan Apps draw as much from the bathos of television sitcoms as the speculative prose of Montaigne. But I don't think this is necessarily a Los Angeles phenomenon. Poet David Larsen's neo-benshi performance Paris of Troy (in which the poet reads an original text over an excerpt of Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film Troy) might be his greatest triumph so far. New York poet Brandon Downing's book Dark Brandon is categorized as Poetry/Cinema Studies.

But perhaps, in our original conversation, I was remarking on a phenomenon I've observed in the fields of both poetry and visual art. The installation artist Stephanie Taylor works with a variety of materials and media, but one of her greatest influences may be the OuLiPo and their predecessors, such as Raymond Roussel. She has even begun to give readings at poetry events. Artist Marie Jager appropriated some aspects of a late Victorian science-fiction novel by M.P. Shiel called The Purple Cloud in order to create her beautiful collage video The Purple Cloud (2006). The Orange County Museum of Art even published a poem-sequence by Jager to accompany the video; it is a work of erasure drawn from the Shiel novel, similar to Ronald Johnson's Radi Os.

How all of this differs from previous generations' engagements with various disciplines—what this phenomenon means today, how poets and artists conceive of their influences and traditions, and why they've turned away from "pure" disciplinarity—remains to be theorized. It's not as if this phenomenon is new, exactly. Many of the Surrealist poets were integral to the development of avant-garde film. Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers famously cast his final book of poetry in plaster and exhibited it as a sculpture in 1964. Then he turned to film. "For me," said Broodthaers, "film is simply an extension of language. I began with poetry, moved on to three-dimensional works, finally to film, which combines several artistic elements. That is, it is writing (poetry), object (something three-dimensional), and image (film). The great difficulty lies, of course, in finding a harmony among these three elements." Maybe younger poets today are looking at the freedom of form, discipline , and materials that visual artists have enjoyed for so long and are saying, "Hey, why can't we do that." Whether this is harmonious for poetry or not remains to be seen.

MW: What’s fascinating to me about your response is how you highlight mainly though not exclusively what used to be called “multi-media” work, and especially work that crosses text with film, TV, internet and related influences, that is, artistic media that, visually, moves. Certainly, as you point out, this confluence is hardly new in avant garde contexts, and in fact it’s right at the historical heart of the emergence of avant garde practice in the early part of the 20th century. And it’s absolutely true that such work is hardly localized only here in Southern Calfornia, with Hollywood and that history close at hand. I’m thinking for instance of New York City filmmaker and poet Abigail Child and her genre-crossing work and interest in feminist theory. Still, I wonder whether your focus on those particular kind of multi-media or multi-disciplinary (and we’ll have to talk about the ramifications of multi- vs. un- more in a moment) forms, as opposed to say, work that crosses into realms of music or works with multiple linguistic traditions, does highlight something specific about the nature of current developments in poetry (or work, let’s say, that calls upon poetry in some degree) in this part of the world.

Lorraine, as a poet and visual artist who has recently relocated to Southern California, how do you see these kinds of multi-media, multi-disciplinary approaches in relation to the work of writers “in your generation”? If it’s even relevant to put the question that way. And what do you see as the value of this kind of crossing? What are some of the advantages or pitfalls, in your work or that of others?

Lorraine Graham: Hi Mark and Joseph. My response to you both is now so late that it is absurd, maybe, but I still feel this conversation is relevant, so I hope you're still interested in talking. I've just emerged from a fairly significant period of general malaise (don't call it depression) initially brought on, I think, by not just our no longer recent move to San Diego but also a feeling of frustration when interacting with writers in “my generation.” I love the fact that there is a proliferation of form, discipline, and materials in contemporary poetry right now, but I also feel that having a satisfying and productive conversation about contemporary poetic practice with my peers is incredibly difficult: such conversations require all the participants to have a certain degree of shared interests and the ability to agree on terminology. I guess I mean a discourse.

Obviously, no discourse (especially an interesting one) is static. Shared interests and terms shift and change, participants come and go. I'm certainly not arguing that everyone should refrain from making poetry or talking about it until they are familiar with every element of all poetic traditions. That would be ridiculous and very uptight. But I do think that the agreed meaning of certain terms I was accustomed to using in conversation like "avant-garde," "language poetry," "form," and "content" are a bit more up for grabs.

That's exciting, but it's also confusing. Certain conversations are probably perennial: I'm tempted to see the recent interest in procedural work and Oulipo as well as continued debates about Flarf as part of a fairly constant debate over the relative values of form and content in experimental poetry.

Joseph, I'm struck by your use of the phrase "media literacy" to describe the fact that some poets are perhaps more literate with cinema, art, television, and the Internet than classic, modern, and contemporary literature, or the fact that many are literate in all these media. I spent a substantial part of my life overseas or in Maine with access to only two TV channels, one of which was French-Canadian, so it's not surprising that TV used to freak me out or that my interest in film has come late. I'm literate in new media, certainly, as is most of my (our) generation, but I suspect that this literacy is uneven. While I'm increasingly comfortable participating in conversations about poetry via virtual networks, I'm still getting used to it—especially the pace at which such conversations move and the way they expand horizontally. My point, which is obvious, is that in order to become literate in any form of media, you need to have access and exposure to it so you can develop or become part of discourse about it. It s a cliché to think about New York and LA as a print versus celluloid dichotomy, but I think there is something to that. Perhaps it's not a dichotomy, but more of a continuum that could be useful for thinking about the history of innovative art and media discipline in the United States. What I mean is that geography still does matter, and art and writing communities function differently in different places.

In LA, the visual art community really does feel like it’s the center of the entire art and writing community. In San Francisco, for example, the feeling is completely different—there are plenty of visual and multimedia artists and writers doing interdisciplinary work associated with the Bay area, as you’ve noted. However, the art community there just doesn’t have the history and international reputation and connections that the writing community does. So, given the history of art and media in LA, it’s not surprising to me that so many writers in LA might feel a kind of kinship with Oulipo or conceptual writing.

Mark, I’m still not used to being called a visual artist, but it’s true that I’ve been making and showing visual work for a while now, in addition to making poems. I started making visual pieces shortly after I started teaching at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. The first college class I ever taught used the anthology Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, as a textbook. That course as much of an introduction to post-WWII art for me as it was an introduction to critical reading and writing for my students. I started making doodles and reading responses and other visual pieces for the reasons that Joseph suggested—it seemed fun. There was indeed a certain "freedom of form, discipline, and materials" that did make me think "hey, I'm going to try that." It's been relatively easy for me to share and publish my work in the context of visual poetry. That's been great, but at the same time I feel like I don't get the same quality of feedback on my visual work as I do my other work. Maybe that's because I haven't been doing it long, but it's also because, I think, editors are so happy to publish visual work by a woman. I haven't tried to share or show my work in any visual art networks because I wouldn't know where to begin—I'm not at those parties.

I think I've been talking about and conflating at least two different discourses relevant to me and my peers. These categories are inexact and too general, but bear with me for the sake of dialogue. 1) The multi-disciplinary or "un-disciplined" discourse that Joseph described. 2) A discourse that is primarily focused on innovative poetry without necessarily having shared definitions of what innovative poetry is, can be, or should be (Absent magazine and H_NGM_N magazine come to mind). OK, this response is long enough for now!

On Marriage, the State, and Religion (thinking again about Proposition 8)

In the U.S., absolute separation between church and state has been often more fantasy than fact. Nonetheless the principle of the separation of church and state remains crucial for any society attempting to be even slightly democratic, and it is one people should remain committed to, especially in those instances when it still remains mainly fantasy.

There may be no issue on which church and state are more intertwined than marriage. Many of the current debates we have regarding who can or cannot get married become caught in the tangled confusion between church and state on this issue.

Marriage, on the secular, public institutional level, is a contract entered into by the individuals who wish to enter into the contract. While the contract, once signed, should be enforceable under the laws of the state, the state should have no right to determine who can or cannot enter into such a contract.

It’s here that the issue begins to become confused.

For instance, the very idea of the marriage license suggests that the state has the right to determine who is qualified for that license. But I can’t see any ethical grounds on which the state has any such right. As long as the laws of the state are not violated, it shouldn’t be the business of the state to decide whether people can enter into contracts with each other. Contracts between individuals are the business of those individuals. As long as the persons entering into a contract are adults of legal age, it should not be the right of the state to determine who can sign that contract.

In fact, the state really has no right whatsoever to legislate the kind of sexual/romantic/family behavior that adults choose to engage in as long as that behavior does not harm the rights of others. So not only should gay marriage be allowed a legal contract, multiple people should also be allowed to sign such a contract with each other, whether together as a group under a single contract or in several such contracts simultaneously, as long as the terms of the contracts don’t legally contradict each other. The state’s enforcement of serial monogamy really makes no sense: you can have as many marriages as you like, but only one at a time.

Frankly, in many ways, on the secular level, the very idea of marriage is faulty. It confuses the issue of how people agree to share resources with the issue of what kind of sexual behavior they engage in. It would probably be best if marriage, as a secular term, ceased to exist, precisely because this particular confusion, as well as the confusion of church and state, is so central to what the term means. Although it’s hardly as poetic, the term “domestic partnership” seems at least adequate as a legal term to cover all contracts of this kind.

So: on the secular, institutional level, any adult should be allowed to sign a contract for a domestic partnership with any other adult or group of adults to share their resources in any legal way they see fit. As private individuals, they can call themselves married or anything else that they like. The state can enforce the terms of such contracts but has no right to limit who signs them.

Once the confused secular, institutional elements of the idea of marriage are more fairly and properly handled (not that it’s about to happen any time soon, sadly), the question of marriage and religion could be addressed—as it should have been all along—as a separate problem.

Different religions have different traditions. Those traditions, as they should be, are maintained by the religious institutions associated with those religions and by the people who believe in those religions. Such traditions have meaning and power, although all traditions are subject to change and always do change. But the meaning and power of any religious tradition should be decided by the believers in that particular religion, whether as individuals or through their institutions, and by nobody else.

Marriage, as a religious ritual as well as a religious contract, implies systems and standards of belief. As such a ritual, its meaning and power should be determined in any given religious system by the believers and institutions of that system.

If members of the Catholic Church, for instance, or its institutions (which have, inevitably, changed over time), believe that marriage in the Catholic Church means marriage between a man and a woman, then I see no grounds on which it should be my business, as a non-Catholic, to say that they have no right to such a belief or to support it through their church in any way they wish. The issue is one that Catholics should be discussing and debating among themselves.

What the Catholic Church should not have, however, is any right to impose that belief on any citizen who does not wish to believe in the Catholic Church. The church should have no right to limit the kinds of secular contracts that non-Catholics enter into (or even those Catholics who wish to enter into contracts without the Church’s approval).

It does no harm to the meaning and legitimate power of religious systems to say that they have the right to determine for themselves, but not for others, the importance of what they believe in.

Which is why there’s a pretty clear answer to those people who say gay marriage will threaten the status of their own marriages: if your marriage is threatened by what people you may not even know do with their lives, then it’s probably a pretty confused marriage.

So here’s to hoping that someday marriage will be a term that has no secular meaning. Talk about a fantasy... Then again, how many worthwhile ideas are?

lunch with Terry Winch

One of the great things about traveling, even when I'm only going back to places where I used to live, is the chance to meet up with old friends, acquaintances, or new friends, and to talk about things I don't often get to discuss--their way of seeing the world, for instance.

I'm having lunch with Terry Winch today, a great way to get in gear for a new year of poetry, fiction, and criticism. I've never written criticism as such about Terry's work, but I did once introduce him during a celebration of his work that took place at George Washington University, in early 2005, I think. Following is the introduction I gave for him that night at an event full of both students and many of Terry's local friends and readers. If it's hardly a piece of close analysis, I hope it at least says something about why so many people like what Terry does. And while I'm still traveling and won't be writing much new for another week or two, this introduction reminds me of why it's people like Terry who make the world of writers and writing seem like a pleasant environment sometimes, despite all inevitable conflicts.

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Although he’s humble enough that I hope saying so doesn’t embarrass him, nonetheless I’m pleased tonight to introduce you to a writer who has stood for several decades now as an example of what is possible in the musical, literary, and cultural life of Washington, DC. In fact I’m tempted to call Terry Winch a local legend, because he certainly deserves that status, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s something about the idea of a legend that suggests an existence primarily in the past. But while Terry’s work shows a complicated understanding of the past, especially but hardly exclusively through his interest in the history of Irish Americans, he remains very involved in the literary life of the present. Terry has encouraged the work, and paid close attention to the lives, of other DC writers, artists, and musicians. His presence in DC has helped many others in the city imagine what they themselves might be capable of if they can maintain Terry’s sense of the importance of remaining committed.

Terry is nothing if not multi-talented. He’s a songwriter, an accomplished accordion player, a fiction writer, a memoirist, and perhaps most centrally a poet whose work can be by turns moving, ironic, and insightful. But what impresses me most about the variety of Terry’s abilities is the almost casual openness with which he moves between these talents. His work never calls attention to its own range, but instead explores the possibilities in the various media he has taken on with a sense of curiosity and adventure that puts the process of creation before the self-importance of the creator. What I’m saying is, Terry doesn’t do all these things to prove he can do them, but because he’s genuinely intrigued by seeing what will happen. His work embodies a truth worth understanding for all of us interested in literature: that the goal of the best writing isn’t to show off the talent of the writer, but to be a way of living life more fully by becoming engaged with the world around us.

This truth shows itself in what to my mind is the most consistent lesson about literature that Terry’s work teaches me, which is that the value of presenting the thing itself is always the best way to present one’s ideas and emotions about the thing. There’s a kind of understatement about Terry’s writing that always seems to me incredibly convincing. The calm, matter of fact voice of his stories and poems never focuses on self-importance but on the story, the situation, the characters and the contexts of it, even when the circumstances have profound emotions attached. The quiet precision of the language allows us to feel the situation like it seems the writer does. We aren’t told of happiness, anger, despair, but instead are allowed to participate in the complex human scenes from which those emotions arise. And this engagement seems to happen without forcing it. Reading Terry’s work is not like sitting in the back of the audience while the guy on stage goes on and on about his wild experiences, although the experiences he discusses can be pretty wild. Instead it’s more like walking down the street and running into a friend who says hey, you won’t believe what I just saw, and it’s true, you don’t believe it, it seems too strange to be real, or no, that’s not right. It seems just strange enough to have the absolute conviction of the real.

Yet through this understatement Terry presents readers with an impressively broad panorama of the 20th and 21st centuries. The life of Irish American immigrants living in New York from the 30s to the 50s, with its hard work and explosive celebrations and moments of community, rage, and loss; his own life in a working Irish band on the road, Celtic Thunder, primarily through the 1980s; trips to Ireland, trips along the East Coast of the U.S. in freezing cars late at night; odd encounters with cab drivers, famous Irish musicians, famous punk musicians, with bar owners and bar fighters and troubled friends and the constant need to find somewhere to eat late at night; with street dancers and dogs on bar stools; struggles with illness and the grinding regularity of work. These concerns are focused by a tight, poetic language that never says more than it has to and always ends up somewhere unexpected, and which, perhaps most strikingly in his poems, takes on a gripping vividness, the words themselves energetically alive to the shock of experience.

I remember talking once with Terry after a reading about the risks that writers and other artists face in a current American social environment which rarely respects creative risks, how for some people it can seem easier to give up, or they just get tired. In thinking about the pitfalls one can face, Terry suggested to me that one of the reasons he himself never gave in to the many vices available to a musician on the road was his sense of always being curious about what was out there, always wanting to know more. “There are just so many things I’m interested in doing, in finding out about,” he said to me, “that I don’t want to waste any of the time that I actually have.” As always with Terry, he was making no grand claim about himself, just explaining why he keeps writing, keeps listening to others, keeps putting himself on the line. But as I’ve often found true of him and his work, it’s just that kind of casual wisdom that makes him so worth hearing and talking with. So it’s my great pleasure to introduce you to Terry Winch.

Poetry Energy Drink 2008

As the year grows short, and I get ready to head on Friday morning to the east coast and my annual winter holiday r and r in a place where there really is a winter, I thought I’d put up my own somewhat alternative version of the Best Of and Worst Of lists that one sees all over the place this time of year. This is my list of books of poetry that I read in 2008 that gave me energy for my own writing.

That’s somewhat different than the BO/WO (best odor/worst odor) list. I’m talking about books of poems that, when reading them, I feel energized about writing poems again, eager both to read the books but also to get back to my own work. Not every book I loved or liked this past year had that effect. Kristin Prevallet’s [I, Afterlife] [Essays in Mourning Time], one of the most powerful books of poems I read this past year, didn’t hurry me back to my own poetry. Instead it left me more drained, sad, stunned, and at moments awed. It did drive me eventually to write about it, but it didn’t help me write any poetry at all.

So here’s a list of poetry energy drink books for me in a year when I didn’t get to read nearly as much poetry as I would have liked. They weren’t all published in 2008, and for the most part I’ve put them in no particular order.

C.A. Conrad, Deviant Propulsion
For me, the highest energy drink poetry of the past year. Generous, furious, loving, and holding nothing back. I know that some people find CA’s online personality a bit over the top at times, but here that abrasiveness turns into an open and vulnerable boldness that for me made language seem full of possibility, even as there wasn’t anything particularly innovative about his use of it other than the display of his own original and inspiring character.

Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness
I love this book even if I did blurb it. Its co-written nature is no impediment to its churning, rollicking language. In fact just the opposite. As a collection it’s a bit shapeless perhaps, but it seems to be part of the nature of a co-written project not to have a conventional developmental arc, and each piece taken on its own terms is lively and biting. I’m teaching this book in the spring and my students are going to love it too.

Rod Smith, Deed
Am I the only one who thinks this book is a more palatable, smoother Rod Smith, full of gentle chuckles and lyrical sadness? Not lesser, by any means, just less abrasive and disruptive, though none of his always keen social insight has been sacrificed. A sort of Very Fine Rod Smith. The sense of breath and line is remarkable. A longtime close friend, he and his work have always had the same effect on me: I’m going to write poems as good as yours some time, pal, you got that straight?

Sandra Simonds, Warsaw Bikini
Just finished reading this one a few days ago and it prompted the idea of this post, not to mention a couple of pages on the long poem I’m currently writing. A zany, absolutely contemporary surrrealism with a big reach on history and global politics and a whole lotta personality. A bit first bookish in its enthusiasm maybe, but thrilling.

Gary Sullivan, Ppl in a Depot
Sullivan is the funniest British satirist ever to hail from Minneapolis, if that’s where he hails from. But who cares where he hails from? These poetic plays skewer everyone with a rigorous ruthlessness, and in so doing create an unforgettable picture of contemporary New York and arts culture and its vexed relationship to worldscale politics.

Joanne Kyger, About Now: Collected Poems. As an energy drink for me, these poems were a mixed medicine. Sometimes I could go right from them to my own writing. Other times I’d say “Well I’ll never be able to do anything remotely like that” and have to get drunk.

K. Silem Mohammad, Breathalyzer
If Deer Head Nation is a genuinely great book, this one is more barreling, high energy, and brutal, even though it’s a little less large and sprawling in vision. When I could stop laughing, I could start writing.

Gunnar Bjorling, You Go the Words
Bjorling, a Finnish-Swedish Modernist (read the introduction to the book for the politics at stake in that term), had this collection, the last of his original books, translated into English by Frederik Hertzberg and published in this country by Action Books. His writing here made me think a bit of P. Inman, even as Bjorling is more melancholy and imagistic. But the surprising twists of phrase and unexpected word combinations in an understated, minimal approach reminded me of the severity and extremism of Inman’s work. For every word Bjorling writes, I can write ten. More’s the pity for anybody who reads what I write.

Edwin Torres, The PoPedology of an Ambient Language
Typography games, verbal games, spacing games, a largeness of vision and a questioning of any notion of the regular. How does Edwin do all these things? Anybody know? Just by creating it? Can I try it too? No? Can I just keep writing anyway?

Dichten No. 10: 16 New German Poets
A politicized Surrealism on some new and very bad acid? Sort of. With some instances of distorted lyrical beauty thrown in? I don’t feel I have an adequate description of these poets representing new directions in German poetry, but they sure sent me scrambling for my pen.

Skip Fox, For To
I can’t be the only one who received a copy of this book in the mail unexpectedly. Did you? A big sprawling awkward mess of a book. Maybe the most Olson influenced work I’ve read in a while, with some grumpy fury thrown in. Probably best read by those who have empathy for his odd cultural group, but given that, a good dose of Aging-Hetero-White-Male-on-the-Fringe for what ails you. Believe me, I know what he’s talking about.

Lee Ann Brown, The Sleep that Changed Everything
This book was published a few years back, but anything that came out about the time I moved to California risked getting thrown on the back burner. But I finally got to it. Love the Sterling Brown influenced ballads, but it’s the poems with a more open, graceful, leaping syntax that had something to say to my own pen.

Ariana Reines, Coeur-de-Lion
There’s not much avant garde about this book, New Narrative or not, whatever Johannes Gorannson says. But honest, energetic, thrilling, risky, yes. Willing to expose, even champion, the most vulnerable spots, yes. Makes me determined to be less guarded in my writing, that’s for sure.

Linda Russo, Mirth
Sometimes I need to read a smart book of poems. Anybody remember smart? This is one of those books. A perceptive and very contemporary feminist take on issues of culture and language. I had to think before I could write, but I wanted to do both.

Stan Apps, Info Ration
Stan, my friend, you’re wack. But it’s a good wack. Or no, an evil wack. A beyond good and evil wack? Something like that, with a dose of capitalism to boot. Also, though you’re trying to hide it sometimes with the flat surfaces of these poems, I have this sneaking feeling that you have Something To Say.

Colin Smith, 8 by 8 by 7
The toughest, most painful book of the year for me. Shocking and hilarious and deadly. The quips will destroy you, and I mean that.

Then, I’m embarrassed to say, here’s a brief list of books I haven’t read yet but want to, soon. They’re either already on my desk or going to be there the moment I can grab a copy:

Kevin Davies, The Golden Age of Paraphernalia
Nada Gordon, Folly
Stephanie Young, Picture Palace
Cathy Eisenhower, Clearing Without Reversal
Stephen Collis, The Commons

And since I’m always in need of more books to give me energy, anybody out there have any suggestions? Given that I live in southern California, I’m almost certain to be missing everything worthwhile, so all thoughts are welcome.

And if I don’t have time to post again for a couple weeks, which I may or may not, I hope you have an enjoyable holiday season, and that if you have a job, of whatever kind, you’re able to hang onto it, and that if you’re searching for one you find it. And most of all I hope that we remember that we’re living in a world full of desperate need and that all of us can try, in some small way, to do something about it.