Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation (Part One)

 

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part One

Following a recent controversy in the small-press publishing community, I reached out to Mark Wallace and asked if we might have a broad discussion on the issues and hand towards potentially avoiding an ugly repeat. I knew Mark and I did not totally agree, which is why I reached out to him. We also looped in Susan M. Schultz, editor and publisher of Tinfish since 1995. -- Carol Mirakove

Susan M. Schultz: Thanks for asking me to speak to the issue.  I blogged about the particular controversy when it first hit the airwaves, here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-blazevox-and-other-publishing.html. I read blog and facebook posts by Johannes Gorensson, Craig Santos Perez, Amy King, Reb Livingston, Matvei Yankelevich, Shanna Compton, and probably others, as well as many of the threads written about the controversy.  But of course there's much more to it than whether or not one press asks its authors for contributions toward the publication of their books.

CM: Absolutely, but a point of clarification was not whether or not a press asks authors for contributions but how and when.

How do we distinguish critical discussion from destructive attacks? Name-calling seems to always reflect far more poorly on the insulter than the target. Why does this happen in our community? How can we criticize practices constructively, without personal wars being waged?

SMS: I've worked in an English department for over 20 years now, and if I knew the answer to that question, I'd be a lot happier there.  We could create a forum to discuss these issues and put out a list of rules and regulations, beginning from “no name calling” and continuing with “keep it civil,” but I don't know that that works either.  Such discussions happen rather organically (good to remember that many poisons are also organic).  Part of the problem is that, name-calling aside, we all take our own and others' practices very personally, indeed. 

CM: You make excellent points -- we certainly don't want to regulate speech. But, it seems to me that we take some others' practices very seriously, notably others we know, and other others' practices and positions are met with hostility.

SMS: Even apart from overtly personal attacks, every conversation about contests, prizes, subscriptions, funding drives, how many books we publish in a year, and so on, is implicitly personal.  One of the uncomfortable values of this discussion is getting out in the open just how vested we are in some practices, and how hostile we are to others.  I'd rather see us moralize less and encourage each other more.  Or make the rhetorical point that we do not like certain practices, but do not condemn others for using them.  Tinfish does not have contests, for example, because I find them an odd mix of revenue enhancement and the promise of cultural capital, but I know full well why many presses run them.  Cash flow. 

Mark Wallace: Distinguishing critical discussion from destructive attacks seems easy enough. The focus should remain on the ideas in question, not the personalities or behavior of the people expressing the ideas. It’s a matter of tone too. Hostility or dismissiveness, even when focused on an idea, quickly moves into the personal, since the more one’s tone highlights emotion, the more people become emotional in response to it.

Still, to say that it’s easy enough, in general, to distinguish between the two, doesn’t change the fact that in practice, there are many murky situations in which the boundaries get blurry, especially since, as Susan says, people take their ideas seriously. We can’t help but have an emotional relation to them.

The Enlightenment, of course, invented most of our contemporary ideas about the value of dispassionate, rational discussion. But the very belief in it brought in whole new waves of irrationality, not just in all the ways that people continued not to behave rationally, but also in the ways that many notions of Enlightenment rationality were nothing more than new ways of being irrational.

I’ve always appreciated what Dostoevsky said relative to the Enlightenment (if you’ll excuse but also note the way it’s gendered): “Men are so necessarily mad that imagining them sane must be another form of madness.”

I’m not sure much can be done to change the nature of public discussion. People come from so many backgrounds and ways of understanding words that standards for discussion vary from context to context. Professional and intellectual and literary discourses do have defined social standards, no matter how fuzzily followed, but it shouldn’t be surprising that not everyone has absorbed or respects them.

Public language has always involved murderous hostility. Right now, we’re in a moment when the unfounded hostile accusation has tremendous power in U.S. politics and culture, as just one for instance (I don’t say “more power than ever” because I don’t think that’s true). Hostile lies and accusations, if there’s enough power behind them, can force individuals and groups to spend most of their time defending themselves regarding things they didn’t even do, and explaining and even confessing the things they actually do. In fact, this current discussion of publisher’s financial practices is happening mainly because of the power of such accusations.

I don’t believe, by the way, that there’s any such thing as “our community” of writers. Sure, those of us who have been writers for a long time are likely to have some (many, in my case) trusted, respected, and  loved comrades, but even the small world of experimental/alternative etc etc etc poetry and poetics features a constantly changing list of active participants. Look at the names of who is publishing in any literary magazine that you like now as compared to 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, and you’ll see how fast the participants change. None of us know more than a portion of those people, and it’s an open question about how well we get along even with those we do know. Certainly our feelings of community towards and with others are real, but I don’t think that there’s any stable entity there that belongs to any of us. Community is established through ongoing interaction and is always fragile. It can’t be relied on too much.

That said, I do think individuals and groups can and do influence the nature of public conversation in limited contexts. I’ve long been interested in fostering friendly but open intellectual discussion among the people around me, and I think I do it well, and I’m hardly the only one who does it. Still, hostile or irrelevant commentary can’t be avoided entirely even in the best conditions.

CM: Mark, you foster open discussion exceptionally well, which is one of the reasons I approached you about having a discussion amidst a very heated debate.

You reveal that the two of us have defined community differently, and while multiple definitions are “correct,” you explain that community is established through ongoing interaction where I imply earlier that it is defined by a common interest, in this case an interest in small-press poetry.

However community is defined, my concern with the hostility of late is this: the way we treat individuals in our microcosms, especially in the microcosms we choose (e.g., small-press poetry), informs the way we act in the world at large. If we aspire to a global respect and peace then we have a golden opportunity to hone those practices amongst our friends, and friends of friends, and strangers who share interests in things about which we are most ardent.

SMS (interrupting): I'd suggest that we stop trying to define what community is, and simply act as if we are members of a community.  Enact community rather than sit back and try to figure out who's in and who's out.

MW: With apologies for being contrary and insistent, Susan, I don’t quite agree with that approach. I think we often need to act as if the people we’re dealing with in the world of poetry are strangers—which, much of the time, they are, at least to some degree. I think we need more awareness of the fact that other people, even if they’re poets, don’t share our values or assumptions. Precisely one of the reasons that this issue became controversial recently was that a lot of people discovered that they didn’t understand each other, which came to them as a surprise because they had assumed a lot of mutual agreement. Many people involved assumed that they knew what a poetry press was… except, as it turned out, they didn’t share the same assumptions at all.

Our responses to people in the world of poetry would probably change if we went in with the recognition that community can’t be taken for granted or assumed. Like any relationship, it has to be worked out. Speaking just for myself maybe, even with my close friends I’ve often become most frustrated when I assume, in advance and unintentionally, that because they’re my friends, we agree about things and understand each other. As it turns out, we often don’t.

I would have no problem with calling such interactions instances of community, I suppose, if we described “community” as a group of individuals interacting because of a shared interest even when they might not have much otherwise in common.

(End of Part One)

San Diego’s Social Geography in Innovative Literary Aesthetics

If you're in or near the San Diego Area, I hope you'll head out and join us at the &Now Literary Festival on the UC San Diego campus, from Thursday October 13 to Saturday October 15.

Here's the panel I will be part of, along with a great group of other writers, and I'd love to see you there.

San Diego’s Social Geography in Innovative Literary Aesthetics

featuring talks, readings, or performances by:

K. Lorraine Graham, Bruna Mori, Jeanine Webb, Mark Wallace
Thursday, Oct 13
11:30 a.m. to 12: 50 p.m. 

&Now Literary Festival
on the University of California San Diego campus
DeCerteau Room
Literature Bldg.


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Original full text of the panel proposal:


"The Aleph?' I repeated.

"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are-seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending" (10-11)

…"Then I saw the Aleph…. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?" (12-13)

-Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph"

This panel will highlight innovative literary approaches that engage with the social geographies of San Diego. Los Angeles is often the social, critical and artistic space in which writers explore literary geographies. In "Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography," Edward W. Soja asks, "What is this place? Even knowing where to focus, to find a starting point, is not easy, for, perhaps more than any other place, Los Angeles is everywhere" (222). While Los Angeles might be everywhere, San Diego often seems like the nowhere which desires but has never developed the cultural projection and ideological reach of Los Angeles. Yet because of this, the social geography of San Diego is a fruitful space in which to explore how American spacial and temporal fantasies about play out.

We take the phrase "social geography" to include issues of natural landscape, human created landscapes (rural, suburban, and urban, and all other ways in which humans shape the environment), and the political, cultural, and psychological goals and effects of human interaction with the physical world. By positioning textual worlds as spaces which exist in creative tension with the material spaces in which readers and writers live and move, engagement with social geography can extend conventional understandings of literary art's social consequence.

Borges noted that language and description tend to be linear and sequential. However, attention to social geography allows us to envisage and describe the simultaneity inherent in all landscapes. This discontinuity both separates and links time (history) and space (geography). In Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Soja notes, "Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us" (22). The spaces of San Diego are particularly adept at hiding consequences.

While the methods of describing landscape and environment in conventional poetry and fiction are well known, how do writers working with more innovative literary structures approach the problem of describing, or otherwise engaging with, social geography-especially in the spaces of San Diego which are so adept at hiding consequences?

Lyn Hejinian's phrase, "We are parting from description," articulates how some innovative literary approaches of the past twenty years have been resistant to the idea of referential social realism in description.  Yet many innovative writers in recent years have been considering non-conventional ways of engaging with specific social geographies. Bhanu Khapil's Humananimal and Allison Cobb's Green-Wood, for example, consider how ideology is embedded into social-geographical forms that are commonly understood to be "natural" or transparently factual.  As opposed to more conventional notions of writerly description as removed, unbiased, objective, and totalizing, these more experimental approaches engage with social geography in ways that are fragmentary, partial, ruptured, oblique, subjective, or layered, while recognizing that any form of description intervenes in and shapes the environment it engages rather than standing impartially outside it.

The fact that UCSD is hosting the 2011 And Now Festival makes the 2011 festival a perfect occasion for highlighting recent work that has engaged specifically with the social geography of the San Diego region and Southern California more broadly. San Diego has never been a significant center of literary activity in the U.S., and even to the present day, investigations of the San Diego region in literature remain relatively rare. At the same time, the social geography of San Diego is a complex, troubled one. Urban and suburban expansion, border culture and politics interact with fragile local ecosystems in a way that leads to a variety of unique social and ecological problems, but problems that are also indicative of larger global changes.

In keeping with its focus on the innovative, the panel is open-ended in terms of genre. Participants may give readings of their poetry or fiction, or present a brief paper, or work in a genre that mixes "creative" and "critical" elements.



Details about the participants:

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming, (Edge Books), and her visual work has appeared in the Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium, and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels. She has a BA in East Asian Studies and Chinese from George Washington University, an MA in English from Georgetown, and is currently a second-year student in the writing MFA program at UCSD. Her artistic and research interests include performance and embodiment, hybrid genres, poetry as pedagogy, and multilingual texts. She is at work on an obsessively-cited, partially-collaged text called White Girl, and Ostrich Play, a performance text in two forms.

Bruna Mori is a writer and educator, preoccupied with peripatetics and process-obsessed. Her books include Dérive (Meritage Press), with paintings by Mathew Kinney, and Poetry for Corporations (forthcoming from Insert Press), as well as the chapbooks Tergiversation (Ahadada Books) and The Approximations (Second Avenue Poetry). She relocated to San Diego over a year ago, where she has taught in the writing programs at the University of California at San Diego, Woodbury University's School of Architecture, and New School of Architecture + Design. She also writes for design + research firms and on behalf of cities, and is Lucien's mom.

Jeanine Webb's work has appeared in many journals, including the West Wind Review,  ZYZZYVA, The Antioch Review, the San Diego Writers' 2010 anthology A Year in Ink, and is forthcoming in Lana Turner. She is one author, with Brian Ang, Joseph Atkins and Tiffany Denman, of the poetry pamphlet Poetry is not Enough. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at UC Davis, where she taught a workshop in Making Poems. She is currently working to assemble a collaborative Durutti Free Skool for radical poetics in San Diego for spring 2011.

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 novel, The Quarry and The Lot (2011), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). He teaches at California State University San Marcos.

&Now Literary Festival 2011: Tomorrowland Forever, at UC San Diego Oct 13-15

The complete program for the &Now Literary Festival in San Diego is now available here. An event like this doesn't happen often in San Diego, and is not to be missed.

Area college students should bring their I.D. and can attend the conference free of charge.

&Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever!

OCT. 13 – 15, 2011 @ UCSD

&NOW is a festival of fiction, poetry, and staged play readings; literary rituals, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects; and intergenre literary work of all kinds, including criti-fictional presentations and creatively critical papers.

Brief Reviews: Three from Burning Deck (Howard, Dubois, Doppelt)

The weight of the terror and loss of 20th century European history hovers—nearly unspoken—in the background of the prose poems in Isabelle Baladine Howard’s Secret of Breath (Burning Deck 2008, tr. Eléna Rivera), all of which explore communication, miscommunication, and the limits and end of communication. The pieces are divided between sections in italics and sections not in italics, which seem to sustain a dialogue between them, although no stable identities are maintained by the marked divisions. Instead, the attempt at dialogue constantly breaks down, or open, because of a social landscape of uncertainty and horror: “the earth is plundered and the bodies abandoned./They changed the names of countries,/they no longer even know from what.”

If one senses, in these prose poem dialogues, the lurking presence of more specific details of European history (“here we are at the gaping borders” brings to mind many possibilities; I thought for instance of Walter Benjamin’s suicide at Portbou, but many other implications are possible), those details rarely emerge; this is a book whose power comes from suggestiveness rather than direct treatment. That technique leads to a few lines whose heaviness seems more posture than profound (“the talking of everything and of nothing,” or “The tires scream as though someone were insane with pain”). For the most part though, Secret of Breath is an unsettling book, one providing no clear answers to questions which can never quite be raised.

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The group of serial prose poems that make up Caroline Dubois’ You Are The Business (Burning Deck 2008, tr. Cole Swensen), all revolve in strange circles of displacement around the idea of the double, of split identity. Each of the seven individual prose poem series latches onto a specific set of names/characters around whom to spin their tight, often funny permutations, with some of the names drawn from the history of film.

In one of the serial sets, Simone Simon (the French actress perhaps most famous to American audiences through the evocative Val Lewton horror films The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People in which she stars) becomes, with her human/jaguar split identity and her neatly split female/male name, a perfect site for a set of twisting reflections on gender identity and more: “Or Simon name of daddy so slightly exceeded because I’m a girl inscribed inside with the silent and so that I Mmm there name of Daddy in my own”

The poems in You Are The Business are tautly constructed, often lasting just long enough to turn in a new direction off the previous poem in a way that makes the serial aspect clear; each poem seems to think again on the one before it. The result, over the course of the book, is a kind of gleefully paranoid hall of mirrors in which viewers, thinking they are watching the spectacle of the world, end up often seeing only their own projected distortions–which, to some extent, is what Dubois suggests makes up the spectacle of the world.

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Suzanne Doppelt’s Ring Rang Wrong (Burning Deck 2006, tr. Cole Swensen) fascinatingly combines visual images with prose poem paragraphs that appear at first to be explanations of, or at least reflections upon, the visual images but turn out to be no such thing. The black and white images, all in rectangular frames, are mainly abstract textures divided into two contrasting halves, though the occasional insect or pair of human hands enters either directly or in distorted silhouette.

But it’s in the prose poem commentary that surrounds these images that Ring Rang Wrong comes most alive. The commentary seems at first to be notes for some kind of explanatory lecture, yet the notes veer off quickly into obviously nonsensical statements that still have a metaphorical, even symbolic, resonance (“The sun is as wide as a man’s foot”), or similar statements that, while seeming ludicrous, are actually quite exact (“To experience imbalance just spin around for awhile and then stop, you get the vertiginous sense that it’s the earth that’s spinning, a rotation—swirl and vertigo”) These statements show, quite often, how a very precise specific can seem almost too weird to be true.

Within the commentary, occasional sections of pun-heavy invented or borderline pre-existing language strings sometimes take over (”Orclôsśorambĺocha” begins the start of one such string, which includes multinational or just plain invented typograhical marks that I can’t recreate, while some of the language seems vaguely French or else unlike anything I can recognize).

The result is a funny, precise, ambiguous set of often dissociated reflections that bear many resonant implications for the surrounding images, while neither explaining or exhausting them. Ring Rang Wrong is a book operating on multiple levels of oddity and precision, and is well worth returning to more than once.

Brief Reviews: Donato Mancini and Benjamin Friedlander

Donato Mancini’s AEthel is a focused, nuanced, and frequently minimalist book of concrete visual poems that gain power through Mancini’s use of repetition and engaging variation. The visual poems are split into two basic series. One consists of letters constructed from different typographical systems that have been combined, melted together, and stretched in ways that make the original letters usually (though not always) illegible. The other juxtaposes visual images of hands, similarly melted and blended, that at the same time are both clearly hands and yet not-so-clearly different from each other.

The titles of each piece, placed beneath or beside the images, are poems both in themselves and in their resonant, never precisely defined relation to the visual details floating above or alongside them. Each title (such as “Xxtreeme Author-Function,” or “I Think Therefore I Am Not Sure”) intriguingly and often satirically twists and combines phrases, some of which are recognizable in the history of literary and cultural theory, and others of which come from some of the oddities of ordinary daily language.

Both the visual poems and their titles reflect back on and alter each other, as well as the proceeding and following pieces, through these different interactive serial changes. While each piece, on its own, has a unique visual interest, where AEthel most excels is at showing the interconnectedness of language and visual systems and, by implication, the interconnectedness of human bodies that both deploy and are deployed by those systems.

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If it isn’t already, it should be a truism that literature developed through procedures that take language from outside the author’s subjective vocabulary is no less free of the marks of an individual writer’s concerns and obsessions than other kind of literature, though it may distribute those marks in ways different than the poem fundamentally attempting to express a unique subjectivity.

Given that, I was eager to read Benjamin Friedlander’s Citizen Cain, a collection of flarf poetry by a writer who has neither been stuffily dismissive of flarf or whose work has been significantly defined by it. For awhile now, Friedlander has been one of the most inventive contemporary poet-scholar-critics, able to write game-playing critical work that is literature in its own right, while he has also written understated, subtle lyric poems that recall at times the poetry of Robert Creeley and at times a graceful, thought-provoking European lyric influenced by a broad array of poets and philosophers, including Emmanuel Levinas and many more.

Of the Friedlander whose work I have encountered over more than a few years, I was curious to know what echoes would still remain in the context of the crude reveling in the contradictions and incoherence of contemporary Internet speech for which flarf is either reviled or loved. And Citizen Cain didn’t disappoint: although its gleeful vulgarity is not much different from a lot of flarf, there’s a greater range of historical reference, both cultural and literary. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and long historical mistreatment of Jewish people and culture are just as likely to appear in Citizen Cain as “Hugs, Fudge, and 41 Cellphones,” the title of one of the poems here.

Of course, flarf has always been at least partly an investigation, purposely irreverent, haphazard and slapstick, of contemporary cultural conditions, but Friedlander writes flarf that has a larger and more explicit sense of history than most other flarf attempts, although it resembles some of the historical sense of one of the first and still most crucial works of flarf, K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation. The opening to the poem “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” among many pieces, makes this larger historical context clear:

The Chinese cantos are about a girl
who lived in the Song dynasty
about a thousand years ago.

The girl was not only poor but crippled. Happily,
there was a Shriners Hospital
in Louisiana

with free orthopedic care.

People who hate flarf on sight will not give a pass to Citizen Cain. Friedlander fully indulges himself in the pigfuck grossout bathroom humor fests that give fans of flarf giggles and enemies conniptions, which the book’s very first poem, “Biological or Social Female Parent of a Child or Offspring and Its Poetry,” hardly allows readers to avoid:

Kangaroo poo eaten by a kitten
made you into a “back-up” turkey,

in case my bird flopped. Mom,
you are simply red-

faced professor made up scary story
about moms and their poo

which, in consequence of Section 3
of this agreement, the turkey baster

can eliminate Eve’s curse with a flush—
and now there’s nothing new to eat!

Whether one finds Citizen Cain tough to read through, or not, depends on one’s ability to enjoy lines of this sort. For the most part, the book doesn’t add much that’s new to the most recognizable aspects of the flarf tone.

Flarf though it is, Citizen Cain is also unquestionably Benjamin Friedlander’s flarf. The book consistently and fascinatingly combines flarfy obsession over the detritus of contemporary culture with a larger contextual exploration of European and global history. Although it’s no doubt consciously ludicrous, Citizen Cain thus takes its place in the history of a writer who has matched tremendous critical and philosophical sophistication with constant undercutting of any too settled way of approaching literature or the world.

The Washington Review (old reviews): Jennifer Moxley and Jacqueline Risset (1997)

 

I published many reviews in The Washington Review, the fine D.C. arts and literary magazine that thrived through the 1990s and even, I think, into the early 2000's before finally succumbing. I’m going to reprint occasional reviews from that era on this blog when I have the time, because other than being in the old print issues of TWR, these reviews are probably no longer available. I’ve edited them a bit for style and phrasing, but otherwise want them to reflect the time and place of their writing.

It’s interesting to me how these old reviews show not only the different ways I thought about poetry some time ago, but show also the era of their composition, and the questions about poetics that were abroad and in play at that time.

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Jennifer Moxley
Imagination Verses
Tender Buttons Books
P.O. Box 185
Stuyvesant Station
New York City, NY 10009
90 pgs., $8.95

Jacqueline Risset
The Translation Begins
Burning Deck Press
available through:
Small Press Distribution
1814 San Pablo Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702
96 pgs., $10.00


In contemporary avant garde poetry circles, very little can cause such extreme disagreement as a discussion about the value of lyric poetry. Is lyric poetry by definition the singing of a solitary voice which takes its own problems to be central? Is lyric poetry based on the idea that the human being is an autonomous, free individual who always has power to choose, and who forms all meaning, a notion that would imply that social power and cultural history play no major roles in who we are? Or are there ways of using lyric that suggest that people are formed as much in the connections between each other as in their solitary wills?

Such questions are very much foregrounded by Jennifer Moxley's excellent first collection of poems, Imagination Verses. When Moxley writes, in her brief preface, that her poems are "written out of a desire to engage the universal lyric 'I,'" readers need to understand that she is not reasserting the idea that lyric poetry consists of a series of isolated individuals singing their own lives. Rather, she is engaging the cultural dilemmas that such a notion reflects and creates. In so doing, Moxley strikes at the heart of the conscious ambiguity that lyric poetry can suggest at its best; that we are both isolated and connected, that we are not simply individual but nonetheless cannot speak for others. In Imagination Verses, Moxley struggles with the problem of how to find a perspective from which to write. Who is she when she writes as "I"? Her poems seem to ask who she is in relation to others, and how a lyric poem can help her understand that.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure of Imagination Verses is the way the ironic ambiguities of these problems reveal themselves in the crafted twists of her lines, as in the opening of the book's first poem, "Home World":

    I will say what the register calls forth,
    the range of the heart
    a journey in the strap of speech,
    unrealized, failing to grapple
    with even the first word,
    or world where I saw humans
    in the shadows of buildings
    unable to speak at all.

Here, the "range of the heart," which might seem a conventional lyric positioning of the individual as central, is ironized by the way the heart can speak only from the "strap of speech," from what "the register calls forth." Rather than speaking simply as herself, the poet can speak only from what the "register" of this speech will allow; by thinking of herself as centered on a metaphor about her "heart," the narrator is aware of how much she is leaving out. She has already assumed something that cannot be assumed, and she knows it. But she still wants to speak from the heart, however much she is aware of the limitations of doing so, and however much she has already failed. Not to do so would be to suggest that there was some other, less located possibility from which she could speak, and she knows that's a falsehood also.

What's remarkable about these poems is the way their sophisticated intellectuality is, in fact, so located. They don't read like a theoretical discussion of the problems of lyric poetry; Moxley is not simply investigating the history of the lyric, or analyzing the problems of language from a safely contained distance. Rather, her poems read as lyrics of moving personal intensity that nonetheless consciously embody theoretically sophisticated investigations of lyric. These poems show the poet living a life, but one in which thinking about what she is doing is as crucial as doing it, as she reveals in "Night Train to Domestic Living Arrangements":

    In my own mind you have put me
    beside compunction. Re-worked
    this mourning room where looking
    smacks of mother may I
    though to this day I'll falter
    when sleep holds sway.
    Throw me over your deep end
    with some faith next time,
    as if to lend some bother to the vex.

The problems that the narrator faces in these poems will be familiar to anyone well read in the history of lyric poetry; problems of desire and love, of the effect we have on others, of the narrator's limited abilities to make the wholesale social changes she often wants to make. That these themes echo the history of lyric poetry does not suggest traditionalism on Moxley's part so much as it suggests the flexibility that lyric poetry can offer in the present moment, in the hands of a writer willing to engage both its possibilities and its problems. While, at times, the twisting ambiguities of Moxley's poems feel so carefully crafted that they lack energy, even that lack seems not Moxley's unconscious failure to write with the passion of her existence, but a conscious understanding of the limitations of passionate conviction.

And there is, in Imagination Verses, a haunting sense of limitations. Much of the book confronts the very harsh reality of the world around her, with its political manipulations, legal robberies, and personal misunderstanding. Limits imposed by others, self-imposed limits, the limits of all that it seems not possible to act on--all these bring to Imagination Verses a deep sense of loss and sadness that is not quite, but just barely not, resignation. In the book's last poem, "Wreath of a Similar Year," hope emerges one more time, flitting in and out of focus among a landscape of mistakes and misunderstandings:

                As in the wake
            of awakening
        wrong attempts
            and wrongful death
        will fall adjacent
                careful Hope.

But, as the last stanza of the poem tells us, this Hope sounds "strangely of untold direction," and is "blind as/the first letter on the first stone/written down." This hope is as blind as even the first attempts to write it into poetry. As blind, that is, as any attempt to write into a poem the ironic depths of opportunity and despair that a conscious life faces when it touches the displacements of its connections.


Anyone wanting a further look at Jennifer Moxley's talents should check out Jacqueline Risset's The Translation Begins, recently published by Burning Deck, and which Moxley translates from the original French. Compared to the struggle for a fully-lived language in Imagination Verses, the poems in The Translation Begins can seem anemic. Indeed an abstracted, distanced lack of particulars, designed to resist representation and image, is at the heart of many other contemporary French avant garde poets, including writers like Claude Royet-Journoud and Jacques Roubaud. One can develop a taste for Risset's anemia, though, once one recognizes the complex shifts in her work. Although the bloodlessness is disturbing, it can be disturbing in a way that is often illuminating.

As Moxley points out in her "Translator's Note," Risset's work often centers on destabilizing patterns, patterns that often emerge from interplay with a series of "hermetic references." Moxley writes, "as soon as the significance of the pattern is recognized, the pattern itself is transformed and torn apart." Although the pattern of destabilizing patterns could easily itself become a too stable pattern, there is enough striking variance on the level of the line, and between lines, in Risset's work that one does not feel the presence of any overarching theoretical schema. There is surprise in these poems, and constant subtle ironies, as in these lines from "M.S. 1544", which do not offer anything to see, and even critique the idea that there might be a clear perspective from which something might be seen:

    the reverse--
    or the relation--
    knowing that everything--
    and if in you--
    you see--
    that seeing--

Still, in lines like "that the problem consists of/ torpid--the story...," from the end of the poem "Fiction," I find it too tempting to take Risset's comments as an accurate evaluation of some of the book. But the brilliance of her insights finally do win out over my skepticism, because Risset's work reveals a truly cunning destabilization that can even anticipate and diffuse potential criticisms of its sometimes anemic abstractions. As if in agreement with Imagination Verses, Risset's book suggests that conscious anemia is better than passionate conviction that doesn't know what it's talking about.

Imperial Feelings of Warlike Victoryhood as the Example for All Minorities: Anarcho-Capitalist Commando Mythos Force, conclusion

 

 

Part One can be found here.

Part Two can be found here.

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Anarcho-Capitalist Mythological Action Force: A Drama in Multiple Voices

Part Three

Section Leader (wheels out an overstuffed filing cabinet): Here are the brief summaries for the Section, Sir. Shall I get the raw data?

Commandant: No need.. The principles we use define the raw data, because that’s what principles do. As you see, I have no need whatsoever for data, the, as it were, facts. The facts are simply, as you know, a function of the principles.

(He takes the first folder that the Section Leader hands to him) Beautiful Object? Which of you is Beautiful Object?

Beautiful Object (stepping forward): As if there could be any doubt. Here I am, Commandant Sir. What do you think? Do I have what it takes? Am I the principle of me?

Commandant: Well, uh, yes. Quite a looker. I may have to, uh, inspect this situation later. Eh? Doesn’t it seem that a little inspection is in order? That is, take a moment, in this instance, to examine the, how shall I say, raw data?

Beautiful Object: I can be as raw as you’d like me to be, Commandant Sir.

Commandant: Very good. Shall we say 7? Ahem. I have read your Personality Profile Survey. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is this. You will move about among the populace in a way that shall cause, how do I put this, I’m not becoming flustered, I’m not losing the point, desire. You must make people believe that there’s a chance, just a chance, that if they become an example of success in the marketplace, that is a principle of success, that you may, just may, belong to them. You will serve as a principle of what the market can get for those who succeed. Ownership, sex, the ability to show off are further subprinciples of the principle you are. And last but surely not least, you will serve as a principle of love, but love, of course, understood as the combined principles of ownership, sex, and the ability to show off. Love as the Beautiful Object of the Marketplace. Can you do it?

Beautiful Object: What do you think, Big Boy? We’ll talk about it at 7, won’t we, Sir? You do like to be called Sir, don’t you? I mean, even at special times?

Commandant: Ha ha ha. Well done, Beautiful Object. I think you are, uh, well-equipped to begin your mission. Now (taking another Survey from the Section Leader), which of you is Group of Dudes?

Group of Dudes: We’re him.

Commandant: Very good. This should be easy. Your mission: make it fast but spend it faster.

Group of Dudes: Shit, man. That’s a mission? That’s, like, what I do already.

Commandant: Indeed. The logic of the marketplace is beauteous. Your indifference about how you make your money must be well-matched to the indulgence with which you throw it away. Beach vacations, resort hotels, beer bashes. You are here to party. A total, good time willingness to break down any local barriers to international trade. Are you ready to buy and sell whole cultures, rip them out and replace them with Tiki Bars and $1 Friday Night Jello Shots? Can you put a kegger in that gas guzzling SUV? Do you thrill to the idea of Inland Waterways Demolition Derby Casino Cash Giveaways?

Group of Dudes: We thirst for what I do, no doubt about it. Will we each get, like, an eight-pack of seven ouncers in our own bucket of ice?

Commandant: The Skyy Vodka’s the limit, Group of Dudes. Now (taking another survey) which of you is Grammar?

Grammar: I am the one of whom you are speaking.

Commandant: Excellent, Grammar. The market will rely very heavily on your precision. Your principle, should you choose to act on it, will be this: The marketplace is self-correcting. Every time anyone does anything that imbalances the markets, it will be your job, as a principle of the self-correcting marketplace, to correct them.

Grammar: Will there be frequent exams?

Commandant (coughing). Well uh, yes, uh, you could see it that way. The marketplace imposes tests on all of its members, and the marketplace is always correct. Those who succeed in conforming to the laws of the marketplace will do well. Those who fail to learn those laws go to the bottom—although we must remember that they will be welcome there. And you will keep watch over all this, making sure that those who conform know that they will be rewarded, and that those who do not conform always have the option to conform at a later time or, if they do not wish to conform, will be welcome at the bottom. Well Grammar, what do you say? It’s important that you give everyone accurate marks. Marketplace marks, as it were.

Grammar: I can’t tell you how pleased I am, Sir. I feel like the Marketplace and Grammar are one.

Commandant: Excellent, Grammar. And you will be zealous in your duties? You will correct everyone? You will correct any and all errors which you may encounter?

Grammar: Without fail, Sir. And actually, Sir, now that you mention it, in your speech I noticed...

Commandant: Ha ha ha. That’s enough, Grammar. When I said it was your duty to correct everyone, I didn’t mean that you were supposed to correct those in charge. Just, you know, everyone.

Grammar: But as a category, everyone includes...

Commandant: Grammar, you’re talking too much. Don’t you have some correcting to do? So, who’s next? (Picking up another survey and reading). Ah, oh ah. Fascinating. Brilliant. Unexpected and original. And at the same time, so successful in the marketplace. An example of how one can find perfectly one’s own unique niche. Which of you is Judas Priest?

Judas Priest: There I was, completely wasted, out of work and down.

Commandant: Most excellent. And then you broke the law, eh? A shining example of a successful use of failure. Impressive vandalism. Extreme forms of sadomasochistic desire linked directly to imperial feelings of warlike Victoryhood. You pummel your victim, do you not? You let them get away with nothing? You are determined to triumph? You, as it were, deliver the goods?

Judas Priest: You give me evil fantasies. You want to get inside my mind.

Commandant: Then you will have no problem, I take it, whipping up fear and rage among the masses, encouraging them to believe that war is only the natural extension of their frustrations? That individual Victoryhood is the goal of all endeavor?

Judas Priest: Sin after Sin, I have enjoyed. But the wounds I bear are the wounds of love.

Commandant. Poetry, Judas Priest, poetry. Sadomasochistic war poetry, to be precise. There’s none like you, Judas Priest. Which brings me to an important point. You have a crucial role here. Our current Anarcho-Capitalist force is a little lacking in, what’s the word again? Diversity. By which I mean, window-dressing. You are an excellent, how shall I say it, token. There are not many minorities here on our force. Warlike sadomasochism is indeed under-represented in the culture at large. No doubt you have experienced, how shall I say it, prejudice. Everyone can succeed of course. The marketplace is never prejudiced. I mean, that is the theory. And the theory is the principle. And therefore the raw data results from the theory. At the moment, of course, there are so many, ahem, minorities, ahem, at the bottom. Of course that cannot be the fault of the market. If they are at the bottom, that can only be because they have failed to conform to the principles of the market. Eh? That’s what it means to be a minority, does it not? To have failed to conform to the principles of the market? But that can change. The market is, as we know, open to the proper functioning of the market. On our force here, Judas Priest, since you are currently the only minority, you can be an example of all those minorities not currently on the force. Eh? You have been abused. Left out. But only abused by your failure to conform to the principles of the marketplace, which is to say, you have abused yourself. It is a principle of the marketplace that the only person who can truly abuse you is yourself. That is, you have left yourself out. But that can change. You, Judas Priest, have held on to your anger, have kept your culture and everything that makes you unique. Yet you have also conformed to the marketplace, and you have been a success. Can you therefore play a role as the Example for All Minorities? The one that suggests that conforming makes success possible? Which of course it does.

Judas Priest: The truth is like a chain.

Commandant: Excellent, Judas Priest. Fascinating. Ah, the originality of Judas Priest, an Example for All Minorities Everywhere. Now (picking up another survey), where is Revolution?

Revolution: I despise you. I will devote my whole life to overthrowing you and all the principles you stand for.

Commandant: Excellent. Just the sort of revolutionary rage essential to your role.

Revolution (confused): What? I said I despise you. I won’t play any role in your system.

Commandant: Ah, Revolution. Your gumption is impressive. Your fervor. Your total commitment. Your willingness to break down all barriers in your own name. It’s just what we need.

Revolution: Are you hearing anything I’m saying?

Commandant: I can only hear you, Revolution. What else could I do? The marketplace exists to hear you. You, Revolution. Your role, should you choose to accept it, is to question, undermine, and change anything too settled. You must bring the old guard down, Revolution. You must usher in a new era. Nothing is more encouraging to the marketplace than a new era.

Revolution: I won’t participate, I tell you. I won’t do anything you say. I’m going to bring down you and the rest of the old guard.

Commandant: That’s the spirit of Revolution, Revolution. Cut the excess. Chop off the, as it were, fat. Be willing at any and all times to change everything it’s in your power to change. As you know, the marketplace has no role for the old verities. It needs the new, whoa baby. The total new.

Revolution (looking frustrated): I’m going to bring your marketplace crashing to its knees.

Commandant: Excellent, Revolution, excellent. The marketplace must be cleansed, so that it can function in the realm of the total new. And who better to do that than Revolution?

Revolution: I’ll tell you once more. I refuse to participate in any aspect of this circular logic.

Commandant: Revolution, of everyone gathered here, you feel your own role most deeply. You see limitation everywhere, you know no bounds in your desire and effort for change. You cannot pause for a single second in the restless pursuit of your path. I can only thank you.

Revolution: You’re a slave of all that’s indecent in men.

Commandant (blushing shyly): I love how you talk to me. It’s really hot. Don’t stop for a second. Right about now, the whole marketplace is turned on. Fired up by the fires of Revolution.

Revolution (looking more and more frustrated): I don’t intend to stop.

Commandant: That’s the spirit. Now (looking at Section Leader) have I missed anyone? Are there any folders left? Are we done here?

Reginald. What about me? What’s my role? How do I fit in?

Commandant (looking at him skeptically, taking the final survey from the Section Leader, looking at it skeptically): Oh. It’s you. To the extent, of course, that there is any you for you to be you of. Skills? Ah. Talents? Ah. Drives? Well yes, a few. Of a sort.

Reginald: You know I’ll do anything you ask.

Commandant (diffidently): I do see that. Well, I suppose we’ll find something. Your role, uh, how about this? Your role is to take initiative.

Reginald (crestfallen): Take initiative? Will you tell me how to do that?

Commandant: What, me? Tell you how to do something? No. Unheard of. Are you insulting me?

Reginald: Sir, of course not, Sir. All I wish to do is be like you.

Commandant: Exactly the problem. You cannot be like anyone. The marketplace demands your uniqueness. You can only be like yourself, and you can only tell yourself what to do. Your must pursue the path of yourself at all costs, even if it leads to the bottom. Can you do that?

Reginald: Are there instructions? I’d be happy to read the booklet. Even if it’s lengthy.

Commandant (sighing). Booklet? For market’s sake, he talks about a booklet. What are we coming to? Look. If you need a booklet, write it yourself. Spend all goddamned day reading it, if you want. Booklet, he says. Be like you, he says. Still (the Commandant brightens) I guess there’s room for us all in the marketplace. Even if it’s at the bottom. (Smiles, turns to Section Leader). Well, looks like I’m done here. Excellent organizational skills, Section Leader.

Section Leader: Thank you Sir, Commandant Sir.

Reginald: But Sir, you haven’t told me...

Commandant: Yes I have. You’ll have to take it from here. (Starts to walk away). Booklet, he says. See you later, Beautiful Object?

Beautiful Object: You can see anything you want.

Reginald (distraught): But wait, wait. You haven’t told me...

The Commandant: There shall be more of this masquerade (walks off stage).