Beyond Baroque Presents Rod Smith, Mel Nichols, K. Lorraine Graham, and Mark Wallace: Saturday March 13

I'm very happy to be part of this hometown Washington, D.C. lineup that will be reading in Los Angeles on Saturday night. Now that Lorraine and I live in southern California (the very deep south of California, that is), we get up to L.A. more often. But west coast sightings of our longtime friends Mel Nichols and Rod Smith are much more rare, so if you're anywhere nearby, I hope you'll come out and join us.


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Beyond Baroque Literary Center presents Rod Smith, Mel Nichols, K. Lorraine Graham, and Mark Wallace

Rod Smith is the author of Deed, Music or Honesty, Poèmes de l'araignée (France), The Good House, Protective Immediacy, and In Memory of My Theories. A CD of his readings, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. He is editor/publisher of Edge Books which has established an international reputation for publishing the finest in innovative writing. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press. Smith is a Visiting Professor in Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for the Spring 2010 semester.

Mel Nichols is the author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (National Poetry Series finalist), Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha 2008), The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6 (Edge 2007), and Day Poems (Edge 2005). Other recent work can be found in Poetry, New Ohio Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches at George Mason University.

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take-Home Project. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Area Sneaks, Foursquare and elsewhere. She currently lives with her partner, Mark Wallace, and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. You can find her online at spooksbyme.org.

Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a short story collection, Walking Dreams (2007), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). Forthcoming in early 2011 is his second novel, The Quarry and The Lot. He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, California 90291
Phone 310-822-3006

March 4 Teach In/ Rally at CSU San Marcos

CSUSM March 4th Teach-in/Rally

Classes too large, tuition hikes, jobs at risk, poor course selections, reduced services -- what's next?

Teach-in:

Come to a teach-in and discussion addressing these and many other questions about California's plan for higher education, and the difficulties facing the CSU during this budget crisis and beyond. Four distinguished faculty members will start the discussion, and then will answer your questions.

When: March 4, 2010, 10:30-11:45

Where: ACD 102, streaming live in UH 100 and in many classes, simulcast and discussion participation from www2.csusm.edu/cfa/.

Rally:

After the teach-in, join us for a rally in Library Plaza (noon - 1 PM) in support of publicly-funded higher education!

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Although more attention has gone to the University of California system, the California State University system is under similar pressures and in many ways worse ones, with overly large classes, overworked and underpaid faculty and staff, and a lack of basic resources. As just one example, in recent faculty meetings in my department we have been discussing removing the phones from our offices because we simply may not be able to afford them. I hope you will join us in a day of meetings and solidarity with UC and CSU colleagues and students to protest worsening conditions for public education in California.

The CSU system serves many financially-disadvantaged students or students who for many reasons need to go to college in the area where they live. But with repeated tuition and fee hikes, as well as artificial caps that limit the students who can attend to a smaller number than the students whose record should allow them to attend, the CSU system is getting increasingly blocked from meeting the needs of students in California. Instead of grades being a guidepost to who should enter college, simply having enough money has now often become the more crucial criteria in California of who can attend college, and that’s a situation which needs to change.

A state that cannot afford to educate its children is a state whose financial (not to mention intellectual) future is in serious danger.

Whether you live in California or not, I hope you will support the faculty, students, and staff at various University of California and California State University campuses in their goal of maintaining affordable, accessible, and quality education for the citizens of California.

Monsanto, Portugal

Some images from Monsanto, where I'll be hanging my hat as a Writer-in-Residence in September. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to it.

Bug Man (sleeplessnesss scene continued)

Just a further outtake from my now unlikely to be completed novel Bug Man (although I'm trying to save key scenes from oblivion).

This one follows directly from the first part of the scene that I put up earlier on my blog.


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“Goddamnit, no,” he shouted, threw the covers off and sat up. “Anything’s better than this. Maybe I’ll try to read.” He got out of bed, went into the living room and sat on the couch. He felt unable to turn on the light.

From the easy chair that sat to his left, a voice said, “Cowardice of this kind is really unattractive. I could have expected it, but still.”

Richard stood up, stared. “Oh sit down again,” the voice said. For no reason that he could explain, Richard did. “There’s no reason to get worked up. I’m just here for a chat.”

“Shit,” Richard said. “I’m talking to myself like I’m someone else. A psychotic breakdown. Fantastic.”

“Wouldn’t you be lucky if it was that easy? I’m here all right.”

“And you would be?”

“That depends to a great extent on you,” the voice said.

“Do I go to the hospital, is that what I do? Tel them I’ve finally cracked?”

“I doubt that in any simple sense I’m a product of your mind. You’re not a product of your mind either, right?”

“What?” Richard’s heart was pounding. “I’m talking to myself and I don’t understand me.”

“Didn’t you just say a little while ago that your mind was a product of the world you’re living in?”

“Yeah, sure, fine, I did. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Some of these answers,” the voice said, “I think you can follow for yourself. I’ll help you just this once though. You’re a product of the world you’re living, so am I. Can we dispense with the introductions?”

Richard stood up, turned on the lamp beside the couch.

Sitting upright in his usual reading chair was a creature with about fifty eyes, all round and red. A bug of some kind, as large as a man. It had many little legs, most motionless, a few moving in a kind of frenetic spiral. The rest of it seemed a furry blackness dotted by circles of a muted, purplish color. Did they form the outline of wings? It was probably taller than Richard, and he guessed that the bug outweighed him by maybe fifty, seventy-five pounds. Richard nodded to it, sat back down. “Okay,” he said, breathing deeply. “This isn’t going to help my career much, is it?”

“What career?” the bug said. “Going down slow at first then picking up steam?”

“So you’re here to give me advice? Not only is there a gigantic bug in my living room, but it’s also going to tell me how to live? And in a snide tone.”

“The tone, my friend, is all yours,” the bug said. “It’s the only one you respect. Part of the problem, you know, if hardly the heart of it.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me what the heart of it is?”

“If you’d like. Fear. And weakness in the face of fear. Combine those with the genuine lack of options available to a person with precisely your social and psychological limitations, and voila. These aren’t original themes Rich, not for you, not for anybody. They’re dull. You have no idea how much of a burden it is, having to do this for one anti-social accidental dropout after another.”

“What are you, some kind of traveling good Samaritan insect? I don’t even get my own personal demon thing?”

“First of all, sure you do. I’m specifically for you, but I’m part of an interlocking species. We hear each other. It’s a kind of hum. I could explain in more detail, but the whole communal thing gets difficult for humans. Things might be different if you could hear each other’s brains. As it is, you’re stuck with empathy and sympathy, with trying to imagine what people feel like. That has positive results at times, but being stuck in your own brains leads most often to negative ones. Historically, those other forces have been much more powerful, although there’s nothing inevitable about it. But we’re drifting...”

“Why tell me? I don’t have any power. Why not go infest the President’s head? I mean, I even go to protest rallies. I vote green party when it’s practical. I don’t need lectures about human failure in our concern for others. I need a whole new reality.”

“I would suggest,” the bug said, fluttering its legs, “that a whole new reality is what you’ve got.”

Richard stared. “Okay,” he said, after a pause. “Good for me. You’re going to suggest I start a revolution or something? Tell people I met with a bug who represents some superior kind of hive mind and who’s going to lead us to a better future? Maybe see if I can find a few patrons? Some old rich folks nostalgic for the 60s and terrified by their own spiritual emptiness?”

“Not a bad idea,” the bug said, “if you’d take out the corrosive cynicism. It would be more interesting than what you’re doing now. But you know as well as I that you’re not cut out for it. I’m not sure I’ve ever run into anybody who has less potential as a prophet. Debunking is more your speed. You’ve practically debunked yourself right out of existence. The question is, what are you going to do now?”

“Go to the hospital?”

“Good old Rich,” the bug said. “That would be convenient. It is, I have to say, the essential middle class solution. Hospitals and jails. People like you spend your lives trying to stay out of them while secretly wishing you could go there. You’ve always been a bourgeois guy, that’s one of your problems. You’re all about consolidating your gains in order to avoid fear of loss. Regular meals and enforced intellectual inactivity form the core of your being. It’s no wonder you fantasize about a trip to the psych ward.”

“I’ve never claimed to be free of middle class drives,” Richard said, annoyed. “But I think, given that, that I’ve been pretty intellectually active on the whole. I haven’t just been sitting around.”

“Good,” the bug said. “That’s the kind of aggression I like. You should practice it, deploy it in more situations. Right now all you do is use it on your friends and repress it in front of your enemies.”

“Thanks for the insight. How much are you charging me per hour?”

“I’m here to help you, Rich. The sooner you decide to move forward with that rather than resist, the better.”

Richard shut his eyes, rubbed them, opened them again. The bug was still there. “I guess I’m not going to be able to will you out of here. Fine. What’s next?”

“That’s up to you.” The bug settled back comfortably into the chair. “There are a lot of options. The first point is simply to admit that you’re right about what you know: that the way you’re living can’t go on much longer. The second is to admit the other thing you know: that the world is going to keep going on more or less like it is, so there’s not all that much you can do about it. It’s you that has to change. You need to consider making a radical break with your life as you’ve known it up to this time. As you can see, the fact that I’m here proves the break has already started. But the point is, it’s time to take decisive action. Frankly it doesn’t matter whether it destroys you. You’re already destroyed, Rich. You can see that, yes?”

Richard gripped his own forehead and squeezed. “Yes. But I’m paralyzed too.”

“A destroyed man is a freed man. It’s a matter of courage.”

“I can’t believe there’s a bug in my living room,” Richard said, “handing me a bunch of self-help crap. All that Nietzsche will to power shit is for 22-year olds. I need a bug to talk to me about inner self-transformation and the freedom offered by existential despair? No. I need a better health insurance plan. I need a steady job and a union. I need alternatives to corporate control. I need less base level human corruption.”

“You need,” the bug said, “to take action.”

“Such as?” Richard said.

“You could kill somebody.”

Richard groaned like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Oh God. I really am dangerous, and not just to myself.”

(final part of this scene coming later)

James Sherry on Environmental Poetics (interview by Stan Apps)

I was intrigued to read this interview, up at Jacket, of James Sherry by Stan Apps on the subject of Environmental Poetics.

Some brief thoughts on a few complexities it raises:

I was pleased to see Sherry try to avoid the politics of guilt-tripping and blame laying. Plenty of blame lies all over the place, as he points out, but guilt is rarely effective as a large scale political tool because of its tendency to lead to resentment and (often passive) resistance. The issue according to Sherry is not to tell people how bad they are and make them say “Sorry” but to make them clearer about ways in which environmental consciousness is in their interest (although only by shifting the nature of what is meant by self-interest).

It’s fascinating to see the way that terms that to some extent I associate with corporate capitalism, like “risk management,” come into play in the interview. Admittedly, poetry and environmentalism are more closely related to businesses than many people are comfortable acknowledging, and certainly part of Sherry’s point is that conventional leftist oppositional language isn’t sufficient for the task at hand. But will such terminology really help more conventional environmental practices become more effective or might it not instead co-opt and ultimately misuse them? Still, Sherry definitely acknowledges this risk. He’s careful to insist that predicting what will happen is difficult.

Sherry also makes the point that significant change in environmental practices on a large social is unlikely to come until people really find themselves in disastrous circumstances. While suggesting the importance of an environmental poetics, he’s also a bit of a fatalist (or at least skeptical) regarding its ultimate use value. But like him, I like the idea of making the attempt anyway, despite necessary skepticism.

How Sherry connects environmental issues with aesthetic practice seems to me more tenuous. He tends to assert a fairly well-known lineage of consciously avant garde writers as figures helping lead towards his ideas, but I’m not sure how the details regarding these writers’ work really supports his position.

I note for instance that the contemporary writers he mentions are heavily weighted towards contemporary poetry in New York City, with an emphasis on Roof Books authors. That doesn’t surprise me, given where he lives and his role as the publisher of Roof, but it doesn’t seem to me necessarily the best way to develop a list of writers whose aesthetic practices support the kind of philosophy of environmental poetics that Sherry is urging.

Where for instance are the west coast poets, in Canada or the U.S., who have specifically engaged with Pacific Rim cultural development issues? What about poetic practices beyond the U.S.? In the case of the poets he mentions, Sherry seems to be falling back more on the writers he specifically promotes and lives near than he is making an entirely convincing case for where his kind of environmental poetics might be found among writers. That’s interesting given his remarks about how easy it is to fall back into individualized self-promotion even when one is highly aware the problems of such self-promotion (and I have no intention of playing holier than thou relative to this).

With all due respect to my flarf and conceptual writing friends, I didn’t see how his repeated mentioning of them was really tying into his argument. He is making the case that it’s not subject matter, but structural developments in poetics, that most closely tie into his concept of environmental poetics. Citing Kenny Goldsmith as an instance environmental poetics struck me as off, especially given some of Goldsmith’s takes regarding poetry and politics, and I didn’t see the specifics to back it up: does it come from the way Goldsmith recycles text, rather than attempting to create new works of individual human genius to clog up our air? That seems a stretch to me, a metaphorical resonance perhaps but not much more. And while I think I can see a connection between environmentalism and some of Nada Gordon’s work, I’m not sure exactly how to tie most of the other writers of flarf into this situation, except again along the rather tenuous line of re-use of materials.

Minor note: I wonder if my friend Cathy Eisenhower will like her appearance in this essay as an example of a new generation of language poet.

Sherry himself says that he doesn’t wish to unsettle too far the relevance of earlier generations of writers relevant to “avant garde” practice, a term he uses only once though he insists on its significance, which I actually appreciate while seeing the pitfalls. He wants to rock the poetic boat but not to rock it too much, and he’s probably overly cautious here and ends up dishing out a few extra kudos to the usual suspects.

Lastly, I wondered about the degree to which Sherry insists on the rejection of most emotional, affective practices re the environment, that is, those practices that draw on emotional human responses. Sherry definitely does not favor the “we need to feel sad/mad about the dying animals” approach; he just isn’t sentimental about penguins. He notes, rightly I think, that putting individual human emotion and experience at the center of all things is part of why human beings find themselves in such a physically endangered world.

Yet the degree to which Sherry resists any return to a language involving emotion (so much so that he deconstructs Apps’ questions when Apps tries to draw him out on this and related subjects like that of individual responses) strikes me as overkill, simply too much careful theoretical and managerial distance. His attempt to refuse the value of emotion is something of a return to the blame-laying Sherry wishes to avoid, as if emotion’s frequent refusal to understand structural conditions is in fact still too much to blame for environmental problems. I’d suggest that we need a rethinking of how to consider emotion and structural understanding in relation to each other without rejecting emotional response so thoroughly.

These are very off-the-cuff (and quickly typed) thoughts, not all final versions of what I ultimately might think about all this.

Cooper Dillon Books (new poetry press in San Diego)

San Diego is one of the launching points for the press Cooper Dillon Books, currently being edited by Adam Deutsch (pictured above), who lives here in San Diego, and Colleen Ryor.

For more details, check out the Cooper Dillon website: http://cooperdillon.com/

There is also a blog which sends out announcements not just about their own books but about other presses in which they're taking an interest: http://presspresspress.blogspot.com/

Their first three titles are books by Gary L. McDowell, Jill Alexander Essbaum, and Nate Pritts.

New poetry presses are always great to find--and having one here in San Diego is especially rare. I hope you'll check out what they do and pick up a book or two.

Greatness

The You Tube clip at the following rock and roll discussion site defines greatness as well as anyone recently has defined it. Check it out:

http://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/index.php/2008/07/13/lemggreat-l-emg

Some things are just beyond articulation.