{Long Overdue}
S . A . T . U . R . D . A . Y NIGHT
at sixty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(for Dan Bouchard)
I spent Saturday afternoon grading utopian/dystopian fiction written by Gloucester High School juniors. (Some of it was quite good.) But as a result I missed the late morning and afternoon readings. All apologies to the readers. I have heard from the afternoon attendees that I missed some great stuff. Those same attendees plan to send me a few words about the Saturday Day readings. I'll post 'em as soon as I get 'em.
~
Nick Moudry, a resident {I've heard} of the sleepy west of the woody east, batted leadoff Saturday night. His poems reminded me of the exquisite corpses the staff of my college lit mag {Gangsters in Concrete} used to write at meetings. Nick's corpses were consistently more interesting though. Something conversational would be followed by something surreal. A $.50 word would be followed by "huh" or "ha ha". There were self-conscious moments like "Gee does that sound sappy/Yes it does." And elsewhere a few variations upon "I miss your pussy" (which I'd like to spell "I miss yr pussy"). Bric-a-brac like "high around 50" {weather} & Seinfeldian observations like "there's no market on Market Street" also found their way into these speech based corpses. Let it also be said that Nick's introduction was met with thunderous applause.
Christina Strong hit in the number two spot Saturday night. {I've always been partial to players who hit in this spot in the lineup. As a kid Marty Barrett, who played second & hit second, was my favorite on the Red Sox. #17 often finished high in the league in sacrifice bunts, a big plus for a player in the two spot.} I wrote so much about Xtina's reading I'm not sure where to begin. I know ... I'll begin with sincerity.
On Friday night, Jack Kimball commented on Mark Lamoureux's earnestness. From "earnestness" I began to think of something along the lines of the American Heritage definition "showing deep sincerity or seriousness". This got me thinking about Pound's gloss on the Chinese ideogram for sincerity : "the sun´s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally." This led me back to thinking about Mark's work in which there is play but a play that is never its own end. There is always--it seems to me--something he is trying to get at, a truth dare I say but one which is fleeting {arrived at but then moved away from}. This description is not completely satisfying (certainly not finished) but it recreates a bit of my thinking about "earnestness" and Mark's work. {For the sake of accuracy I should say that I believe Jack Kimball's comment to and about Mark was in reference to his reading style not his poetry.}
Back to Saturday night: When Christina read "I hate having to say what's true" and then "would it still survive irony or pretention [?]" My mind leapt back to the question of "earnestness" and "sincerity" in post-post-language/post-post-post-Black Mt.?/X Generation NY School work.
Christina's poem with the passage "we got knocked down to yellow" {as in "ELEVATED: Significant risk of terrorist attacks} "and I don't look good in yellow" seemed to offer an important critique of the current mitilarized-consumerist ethos in the US. The passage quoted is, of course, ironic but the effect of the irony heightens the power of the critique instead of diffusing it. Much contemporary irony--in poetry & out--tends to function as meiosis or "lessening" {see Gerrit Lansing's essay in A February Sheaf on Tom Clark's Olson biography The Allegory of a Poet's Life}. Meaning & critique are often undercut or lessened by irony: the ironic use of pop culture, the ironic juxtaposition of the banal & pseudo-sublime, the ironic juxtaposition of outrageous & boring statements, etc. I don't want to criticize what I don't understand, so I'd like to let the observation stand: irony & sincerity work in Christina's poems; there is an accumulation of sense, say, in her poems. But I'd also encourage other bloggers & emailists to take on the question of the meiotic function of irony in contemporary poetry & the culture at large. I'll keep at it too.
"Batting third, playing thirdbase, number three...Mitch Highfill...Mitch Highfill": Late Sunday morning while waiting for the readings to begin, I met Mitch in the smoker's courtyard just outside the reading room at MIT. After a time the conversation turned to poets we were surprised to either enjoy or learn something from. After Chris Rizzo brought up learning a bit of prosody from Auden after being forced to read W.H.A. {a member of Derek Walcott's pantheon} while at B.U., Mitch talked about reading & enjoying Auden's plays. I plan to dig in sometime this summer.
In his reading the night before Blaise Cendrars--far from Auden--seemed to be Mitch's muse. "War is the perfect shovel" is a sentence that stood out & demanded noting in the li'l green book. I was also interested in hearing some "flarf" poetry. Mitch obliged. The "flarf" work seemed to be of a kind with his presumably non-flarf work. The poems seemed interested in exploring different combinations of the evocative, the odd, & the cliched & in exploring different combinations of syntactical units. One wordstream from a non-flarf poem went "verb; adj-noun-verb; adj-noun; interjection," etc. {Halfway through the reading I became interested in recording the parts of speech rather than the words.}
Phrasing (as opposed to--or as a midpoint between {?}--both "feet" & "lineation") has been bouncing around in my head since reading Gerrit's essay (also from A February Sheaf) about translations of Nerval's Les Chimeres. Duncan's translations succeed on the level of the phrase. I could go on here about what Gerrit says about this and what I've thought about this (and have tried to do with this while translating Lorca's "Suite de los Espejos") but I'll leave the work (Nerval's Les Chimeres, Duncan's translations, and Gerrit's essay) to speak for itself. Just think "phrases" while rereading.
Tracey McTague batted clean up in the first superset Saturday evening. I found it interesting to hear Tracey's work after Mitch's because Tracey's strings of syntax and logic seemed a bit longer than Mitch's. {Is this a place for a meiotic [or tapinotic] joke to lessen [or demean] the seriousness of the observation? Doesn't the blog form nearly oblige me to joke--or to be aware of not joking--here. As you can tell I'm not very funny.} Memorable were punchlines such as "bad timing is everything" & the inverted "lockdown for the grid." Even more memorable was the language poem for her canines--"Come" "Go" "Give me that stick" etc.--that compelled Tracey's dog to meet Dan Bouchard, the same Dan Bouchard whose email compelled me to get back to posting on the blog.
Saturday night part two will have to wait until later. My bus is leaving in fifteen minutes & the Gloucester High School is about ten minutes from where I catch the bus.
Slainte.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Thursday, May 01, 2003
~Interlude~
I’ve made quite a few errors with homophones, punctuation, and the like since starting this weblog. It usually happens when I type directly into the blogger page instead of using a word processing program first and then pasting the text onto the weblog page. I’m wondering how other bloggers compose their posts?
Also, my wife (ironstonewhirlygig.blogspot.com – the name inspired by a Jim Behrle painting; thanks Jim) knows a bit of HTML and so I hope to have links to other blogs and sites perhaps this weekend. I read quite a few. Some consistently. Others sporadically. But generally I have found reading blogs to be generative and nourishing so long as I get off-line before I try to cram too many arguments and/or poems or too much whimsy and/or high-mindedness into my post-teaching afternoon. I still prefer talking with poets in person. (Many thanks to the poets I know up here in Gloucester and down in the Boston-area.) But if it came down to poetics blogs or poetics lists. I’d side with the former, though at first I was quite skeptical. In fact, I was a non-card-carrying member—but a member nonetheless—of the Blogs Are Highly Solipsistic {BlaHS}—a.k.a. “jism and self-splatter”—school of blogcrit. In practice, though, weblogs are actually often quite *open* with bloggers publishing emails, poems, announcements, etc. from other people and *talking* to and about each other & the world beyond. Also there are quite a few different approaches blogging—and healthy arguments about the politics inherent in these approaches. I expected reading and writing weblogs to be like commuting by car, but it's more like commuting by bus or train.
I’m not ready—as others might be—to announce the death of the listserv. {The death of heavy metal was recently announced to my wife by a boy she babysits for.} But (perhaps this is a question for bloggers or a conference on blogging) what do you see as the possibilities and limitations of blogs and lists?
~
The old gods are gone. What lives on
in my heart
is their flesh
like a wound,
a tomb, a bomb.
from John Wieners’ “Billie
~
S . A . T . U . R . D . A . Y NIGHT at MIT
& Sunday morning (& afternoon) coming down at MIT
soon to come
~
I’ve made quite a few errors with homophones, punctuation, and the like since starting this weblog. It usually happens when I type directly into the blogger page instead of using a word processing program first and then pasting the text onto the weblog page. I’m wondering how other bloggers compose their posts?
Also, my wife (ironstonewhirlygig.blogspot.com – the name inspired by a Jim Behrle painting; thanks Jim) knows a bit of HTML and so I hope to have links to other blogs and sites perhaps this weekend. I read quite a few. Some consistently. Others sporadically. But generally I have found reading blogs to be generative and nourishing so long as I get off-line before I try to cram too many arguments and/or poems or too much whimsy and/or high-mindedness into my post-teaching afternoon. I still prefer talking with poets in person. (Many thanks to the poets I know up here in Gloucester and down in the Boston-area.) But if it came down to poetics blogs or poetics lists. I’d side with the former, though at first I was quite skeptical. In fact, I was a non-card-carrying member—but a member nonetheless—of the Blogs Are Highly Solipsistic {BlaHS}—a.k.a. “jism and self-splatter”—school of blogcrit. In practice, though, weblogs are actually often quite *open* with bloggers publishing emails, poems, announcements, etc. from other people and *talking* to and about each other & the world beyond. Also there are quite a few different approaches blogging—and healthy arguments about the politics inherent in these approaches. I expected reading and writing weblogs to be like commuting by car, but it's more like commuting by bus or train.
I’m not ready—as others might be—to announce the death of the listserv. {The death of heavy metal was recently announced to my wife by a boy she babysits for.} But (perhaps this is a question for bloggers or a conference on blogging) what do you see as the possibilities and limitations of blogs and lists?
~
The old gods are gone. What lives on
in my heart
is their flesh
like a wound,
a tomb, a bomb.
from John Wieners’ “Billie
~
S . A . T . U . R . D . A . Y NIGHT at MIT
& Sunday morning (& afternoon) coming down at MIT
soon to come
~
Monday, April 28, 2003
60 at MIT
It's Friday people
“It was the most
honest sound in our ears”
This from Jim Dunn. A man on the move. A man spending a last night in Cambridge, his city of many years. Before heading up 95/128 & the Rockport/Newburyport Line into Behrle Country.
I was happy to hear Jim read again so soon after hearing him at WordsWorth. It's quite pleasurable and useful to hear the same work more than once especially if the work has not been seen—or, especially, read carefully—on the page. One, of course, hears the poems quite differently the second time. New words & phrases catch in the mind. New words & phrases connect up with others. One’s heard-readings of the poem are separate but linked. Serial hearing? The second (or third?) hearing also leaps across the intervening time interval, often making the past present in the mind’s ear.
“The ship docked slowly,
time was slow and sweet”
Yes it was Jim!
~
My wife and her sister often exchange spontaneous poems in the local (Gloucester) dialect, often about gossip. It’s a folk art, I’d say. The poems begin the same way each time: [insert title here: “Joey Sanfilippo” or “The Riggah” are two examples], “a poem by Liz Grammas, fawmahly known as Liz Pawtah” or [insert title], “a poem by Amanda Cook, fawmahly known as Amanda Pawtah.” Characteristically, these folk poem end with “the end,” usually followed by finger-snapping by those in attendance (often gathered around a dinner table). Like Alan Lomax attempting a folk song of his own, I will attempt a poem in this tradition.
“Airin* Kiley” [*an acceptable internet variant of “Aaron”]
a poem by James Cook,
fawmahyly known as Jamie Cook:
___
“smahmy men wi’ boats”
ah aw-ways in Glo’sta
HAHbah drinkin’ beah
‘n pissin’ me off. I too
hope to be released
from thee’ah law.
Let fuckin’ AC/DC
& red paint reign!
~
It's Friday people
“It was the most
honest sound in our ears”
This from Jim Dunn. A man on the move. A man spending a last night in Cambridge, his city of many years. Before heading up 95/128 & the Rockport/Newburyport Line into Behrle Country.
I was happy to hear Jim read again so soon after hearing him at WordsWorth. It's quite pleasurable and useful to hear the same work more than once especially if the work has not been seen—or, especially, read carefully—on the page. One, of course, hears the poems quite differently the second time. New words & phrases catch in the mind. New words & phrases connect up with others. One’s heard-readings of the poem are separate but linked. Serial hearing? The second (or third?) hearing also leaps across the intervening time interval, often making the past present in the mind’s ear.
“The ship docked slowly,
time was slow and sweet”
Yes it was Jim!
~
My wife and her sister often exchange spontaneous poems in the local (Gloucester) dialect, often about gossip. It’s a folk art, I’d say. The poems begin the same way each time: [insert title here: “Joey Sanfilippo” or “The Riggah” are two examples], “a poem by Liz Grammas, fawmahly known as Liz Pawtah” or [insert title], “a poem by Amanda Cook, fawmahly known as Amanda Pawtah.” Characteristically, these folk poem end with “the end,” usually followed by finger-snapping by those in attendance (often gathered around a dinner table). Like Alan Lomax attempting a folk song of his own, I will attempt a poem in this tradition.
“Airin* Kiley” [*an acceptable internet variant of “Aaron”]
a poem by James Cook,
fawmahyly known as Jamie Cook:
___
“smahmy men wi’ boats”
ah aw-ways in Glo’sta
HAHbah drinkin’ beah
‘n pissin’ me off. I too
hope to be released
from thee’ah law.
Let fuckin’ AC/DC
& red paint reign!
~
Sunday, April 27, 2003
{Note to friends: This blog has been outed. Please don’t be offended that you didn’t know about its existence, dear friends. For days even Amanda didn't suspect. (See her ironstonewhirlygig weblog for confirmation.)
I spent a few weeks trying to work out a sort of “columnist” approach. I wanted to see what style(s) of writing would work in this format, how often I would be able to post, etc. I’m still working those things out. As of now I plan to post two columns a week. One by Wednesday and one by Sunday morning. Please send comments to my ombudsman-self at jcgloucester@hotmail.com.}
I spent a few weeks trying to work out a sort of “columnist” approach. I wanted to see what style(s) of writing would work in this format, how often I would be able to post, etc. I’m still working those things out. As of now I plan to post two columns a week. One by Wednesday and one by Sunday morning. Please send comments to my ombudsman-self at jcgloucester@hotmail.com.}
Notes on 60 at MIT
Opening {Friday Night}: Part Two
I was not a reader so I may thank Jim Behrle with impunity. Also, I am permitted to spell Jim’s name correctly. Yesterday, I joined the illustrious company of a good (here unnamed) friend who misspelled Jim’s name publicly. Upon rereading my first attempt at a first night post, I switched the “r” and “h” back to where they belong.
Here are some observations on the rest of the first night of 60 {what was the final tally?} at MIT.
David Perry was the first poet to take up Jim’s offer to write the best poem using the words and/or diagrams on the MIT blackboards. “Bad for turbine.” Later these lines seemed to indicate various techniques on display in David’s work (more of which can be found in Poker 2. “I’m serious asshole.” “under the gun” “trigger is squeezed.” “Art of War starring the Hardy Boys” “I can relate I’m a woodpecker and I have one on my head” Seek out the poems. Make your own gloss.
Mark Lamoureux read next. He opened his set with “Elegy (Spring) for Rachel Corrie” which will in appear in a forthcoming spring anthology edited by my wife, Amanda Cook. {Do not look for a May Day release of the anthology. Look instead for it to appear on a day in May.} Here are words from the poem’s volta:
“& now you are the spring; the plants that bow to the sun
will put the sun in a lovely box & lay it below fecund trees for you,
your name is a flock of magpies bigger than the earth,
poxed by lies and murder, let your murder murder the bastards
who murder the truth & who would murder the spring,
but the spring cannot be murdered as it does not die
& you are the spring now & will not die again.”
“No repetition only insistence” as Mytili Jagannathan, I believe, pointed out on day three, though in a different context.
Based on the reading list, Caroline Crumpacker read next. {I enjoyed often not knowing the reader’s name until later. No judgments could be made. I couldn’t even confuse the person with someone else. (More on that in the Day Three Round-up.) Here’s what I wrote about Caroline’s work which began the second “superset” of the first night: “imaginative: analogies: sliding metonymically (?)” “uses analytical tropes” “ironic + sincere use of analytic tropes” …
Miles Champion read very fast. This was effective as performance. “duets soloing” “English not to know what to do with oneself. French not to know what to do with one’s skin.” Made reference to “our sponsors” and held up his ginger ale. Canada Dry was it? {I recently had my students at GHS make poems made chiefly of brand names: Joy, Gap, Tide, etc. Some very good poems came of it. Some students—tenth graders taking a short break from MCAS prep—experienced a “hidden” or “secret” language when reading their friends’ and peers’ poems.}
Cole Heinowitz read a “word poem” [built on words without clear place in a sentence] as if a speech act. I wrote, “narrative is hidden by formal lang[uage] +/or fractured” … She read “nothing every happened again in the gripping weight of expectance” … and “began to crave pizza at an inopportune time” These “sentence poems” [built on “sentences” without a certain relationship with the surrounding sentences] of course need context—as would the “word poem” I did not quote from. Then vis-à-vis “Showdown: A Melodrama” I have written “characters”. “Character poems”? {Without a clear relationship to a narrative in which they figure.}
Brandon Downing was or was not “caught” while taking text. “I vibrate my revenge into a wing.” That should settle all rumors. The text in question was from a Victorian novel. Actually to be fair the issue of ratting on thieves did not come up until day three, as far as I know. But in my narrative it first arises here.
Jim Dunn & Aaron Kiely capped off the evening. More tomorrow: FridayNight. Day 2 [the evening only]. Day 3.
slainte & paz.
Opening {Friday Night}: Part Two
I was not a reader so I may thank Jim Behrle with impunity. Also, I am permitted to spell Jim’s name correctly. Yesterday, I joined the illustrious company of a good (here unnamed) friend who misspelled Jim’s name publicly. Upon rereading my first attempt at a first night post, I switched the “r” and “h” back to where they belong.
Here are some observations on the rest of the first night of 60 {what was the final tally?} at MIT.
David Perry was the first poet to take up Jim’s offer to write the best poem using the words and/or diagrams on the MIT blackboards. “Bad for turbine.” Later these lines seemed to indicate various techniques on display in David’s work (more of which can be found in Poker 2. “I’m serious asshole.” “under the gun” “trigger is squeezed.” “Art of War starring the Hardy Boys” “I can relate I’m a woodpecker and I have one on my head” Seek out the poems. Make your own gloss.
Mark Lamoureux read next. He opened his set with “Elegy (Spring) for Rachel Corrie” which will in appear in a forthcoming spring anthology edited by my wife, Amanda Cook. {Do not look for a May Day release of the anthology. Look instead for it to appear on a day in May.} Here are words from the poem’s volta:
“& now you are the spring; the plants that bow to the sun
will put the sun in a lovely box & lay it below fecund trees for you,
your name is a flock of magpies bigger than the earth,
poxed by lies and murder, let your murder murder the bastards
who murder the truth & who would murder the spring,
but the spring cannot be murdered as it does not die
& you are the spring now & will not die again.”
“No repetition only insistence” as Mytili Jagannathan, I believe, pointed out on day three, though in a different context.
Based on the reading list, Caroline Crumpacker read next. {I enjoyed often not knowing the reader’s name until later. No judgments could be made. I couldn’t even confuse the person with someone else. (More on that in the Day Three Round-up.) Here’s what I wrote about Caroline’s work which began the second “superset” of the first night: “imaginative: analogies: sliding metonymically (?)” “uses analytical tropes” “ironic + sincere use of analytic tropes” …
Miles Champion read very fast. This was effective as performance. “duets soloing” “English not to know what to do with oneself. French not to know what to do with one’s skin.” Made reference to “our sponsors” and held up his ginger ale. Canada Dry was it? {I recently had my students at GHS make poems made chiefly of brand names: Joy, Gap, Tide, etc. Some very good poems came of it. Some students—tenth graders taking a short break from MCAS prep—experienced a “hidden” or “secret” language when reading their friends’ and peers’ poems.}
Cole Heinowitz read a “word poem” [built on words without clear place in a sentence] as if a speech act. I wrote, “narrative is hidden by formal lang[uage] +/or fractured” … She read “nothing every happened again in the gripping weight of expectance” … and “began to crave pizza at an inopportune time” These “sentence poems” [built on “sentences” without a certain relationship with the surrounding sentences] of course need context—as would the “word poem” I did not quote from. Then vis-à-vis “Showdown: A Melodrama” I have written “characters”. “Character poems”? {Without a clear relationship to a narrative in which they figure.}
Brandon Downing was or was not “caught” while taking text. “I vibrate my revenge into a wing.” That should settle all rumors. The text in question was from a Victorian novel. Actually to be fair the issue of ratting on thieves did not come up until day three, as far as I know. But in my narrative it first arises here.
Jim Dunn & Aaron Kiely capped off the evening. More tomorrow: FridayNight. Day 2 [the evening only]. Day 3.
slainte & paz.
Saturday, April 26, 2003
Notes on 60 at MIT
Opening Night: Part One
I arrived a bit late having decided to take the commuter rail from Gloucester to North Station and then having decided to take the Green Line to Hynes/ICA so I could walk across the Mass Ave bridge to MIT. I arrived in a good frame of mind so I suppose the decision was a good one. {Pre-reading habits for readers and listeners might be the topic for a future column at Polis is Eyes. The subject came up twice last night: first with John Mulrooney [reading Sunday the 27th at 2:45] and then with Aaron Tieger [Sunday 3:15] and Michael Carr [Sunday 2pm]. For me it is best to take the train and walk as much of the way as possible. It is also best to eat something small before the reading and to avoid too much coffee, though a few pints before hand is often helpful.}
Bill Corbett gave the invocation, so to speak. Having arrived in the middle of his talk I decided to wait until he had finished. On the outside of a classroom door with a translucent window, I saw the shapes of the audience and listened to the characteristic rhythms of Bill’s speech though I couldn’t make out any of the words. After the invocation Bill left through the very door I entered. {Such passings always put me in mind of Ulysses but particularly so last night since I had recently purchased a little book of photographs circa 1960 of Joyce’s Dublin. I’ve finally seen the railing of 7 Eccles Street. I’d also been thinking of rivers while crossing the Charles. I’ve lived within sight of four: the Fore in Weymouth, the Jones in Kingston, the Charles in Boston, and the Annisquam in Gloucester.}
Mike Chiumiento was the first reader. It wasn’t until the third reader that I decided to take notes for a column so my recollection of Mike’s reading will be shadowy at best. Mike’s poems as I recall were held together by anaphora and epistrophe. The repeated phrases gave my mind a place to alight for a moment before being pushed on by one perception leading on to another. He finished by reading a song by the wonderfully eccentric singer-songwriter Vic Chestnut. (The couplets of his The Salesman and Bernadette are worth a listen for their haunted charm.)
Beth Woodcome, whom I’d heard read before but to whom I hadn’t been introduced until last night {thank you Jim Behrle}, read second. Beth’s poems intrigued me because of my recent involvement with the poetry of Heather McHugh and Seamus Heaney. Heaney—I’ll get into this more in a later column—seems to evade some of the limitations of the confessional-romantic tradition by centering many of his poems around the self’s relationship with history and landscape. From a romantic rather than projective position he seems interested in what Olson calls the “secrets objects share.” He digs into the mystery but doesn’t quite enter the objects to do so. He is locked in the self, locked within the romantic tradition. This has many implications and raises many questions. {Is it possible to leave the self? Or since there are multiple selves—and/or consciousnesses—can one leave any of these? Can one invent knew ones? Aren’t these then anchored still in our limited experiences? Can the poet transcend the limits of the person in whom the poet resides? What are the resources in language itself—which is beyond any self—that aid creative acts beyond one’s individual limits?} But back to Seamus (and then finally to Beth’s poems) the romantic selves of his poems exist within a context and so he avoids mere solipsism. Another limitation of many romantic-confessional poems is their use of poeticized narratives. These are convention memoir-narratives that have been written using language that gropes in the dark as it were for radiant metaphoric-imagery. I say “in the dark” because the radiance is not found. I say “gropes” because the poet seems involved with a kind of “irritable reaching” perhaps not after “fact and reason” but after “P=O=E=T=R=Y”. Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” comes to mind. There are images in that poem—a poem that I like for its familiarity and for what it attempts—that seem groped for in the dark, lacking radiance. Or to put it another way Lowell seems not to have transformed bread of the commonplace—back to Joyce again, from his epicleti letter to Stanislaus—into a Eucharist of art. {Biographically the image of transubstantiation is apt: one lapsed Catholic writing about another and a convert.} In Beth’s poems the (fictional?) confessional-narratives are fragmented. This often allows the images to have their say as themselves instead of trying to radiate, to be important or meaningful. Also Beth bends language. Nouns are used as verbs. And abstractions like “a persuasion of doctors” appear. The poems then are not about the narrators, the narratives, and the resultant ruminations. The poems instead have what could be called a shifting surface.
Opening Night: Part One
I arrived a bit late having decided to take the commuter rail from Gloucester to North Station and then having decided to take the Green Line to Hynes/ICA so I could walk across the Mass Ave bridge to MIT. I arrived in a good frame of mind so I suppose the decision was a good one. {Pre-reading habits for readers and listeners might be the topic for a future column at Polis is Eyes. The subject came up twice last night: first with John Mulrooney [reading Sunday the 27th at 2:45] and then with Aaron Tieger [Sunday 3:15] and Michael Carr [Sunday 2pm]. For me it is best to take the train and walk as much of the way as possible. It is also best to eat something small before the reading and to avoid too much coffee, though a few pints before hand is often helpful.}
Bill Corbett gave the invocation, so to speak. Having arrived in the middle of his talk I decided to wait until he had finished. On the outside of a classroom door with a translucent window, I saw the shapes of the audience and listened to the characteristic rhythms of Bill’s speech though I couldn’t make out any of the words. After the invocation Bill left through the very door I entered. {Such passings always put me in mind of Ulysses but particularly so last night since I had recently purchased a little book of photographs circa 1960 of Joyce’s Dublin. I’ve finally seen the railing of 7 Eccles Street. I’d also been thinking of rivers while crossing the Charles. I’ve lived within sight of four: the Fore in Weymouth, the Jones in Kingston, the Charles in Boston, and the Annisquam in Gloucester.}
Mike Chiumiento was the first reader. It wasn’t until the third reader that I decided to take notes for a column so my recollection of Mike’s reading will be shadowy at best. Mike’s poems as I recall were held together by anaphora and epistrophe. The repeated phrases gave my mind a place to alight for a moment before being pushed on by one perception leading on to another. He finished by reading a song by the wonderfully eccentric singer-songwriter Vic Chestnut. (The couplets of his The Salesman and Bernadette are worth a listen for their haunted charm.)
Beth Woodcome, whom I’d heard read before but to whom I hadn’t been introduced until last night {thank you Jim Behrle}, read second. Beth’s poems intrigued me because of my recent involvement with the poetry of Heather McHugh and Seamus Heaney. Heaney—I’ll get into this more in a later column—seems to evade some of the limitations of the confessional-romantic tradition by centering many of his poems around the self’s relationship with history and landscape. From a romantic rather than projective position he seems interested in what Olson calls the “secrets objects share.” He digs into the mystery but doesn’t quite enter the objects to do so. He is locked in the self, locked within the romantic tradition. This has many implications and raises many questions. {Is it possible to leave the self? Or since there are multiple selves—and/or consciousnesses—can one leave any of these? Can one invent knew ones? Aren’t these then anchored still in our limited experiences? Can the poet transcend the limits of the person in whom the poet resides? What are the resources in language itself—which is beyond any self—that aid creative acts beyond one’s individual limits?} But back to Seamus (and then finally to Beth’s poems) the romantic selves of his poems exist within a context and so he avoids mere solipsism. Another limitation of many romantic-confessional poems is their use of poeticized narratives. These are convention memoir-narratives that have been written using language that gropes in the dark as it were for radiant metaphoric-imagery. I say “in the dark” because the radiance is not found. I say “gropes” because the poet seems involved with a kind of “irritable reaching” perhaps not after “fact and reason” but after “P=O=E=T=R=Y”. Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” comes to mind. There are images in that poem—a poem that I like for its familiarity and for what it attempts—that seem groped for in the dark, lacking radiance. Or to put it another way Lowell seems not to have transformed bread of the commonplace—back to Joyce again, from his epicleti letter to Stanislaus—into a Eucharist of art. {Biographically the image of transubstantiation is apt: one lapsed Catholic writing about another and a convert.} In Beth’s poems the (fictional?) confessional-narratives are fragmented. This often allows the images to have their say as themselves instead of trying to radiate, to be important or meaningful. Also Beth bends language. Nouns are used as verbs. And abstractions like “a persuasion of doctors” appear. The poems then are not about the narrators, the narratives, and the resultant ruminations. The poems instead have what could be called a shifting surface.
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
LangPo?
romantic-confessional & the projective/surrealist poems about language
Heaney & McHugh
On the recommendation of a friend I sought out some Heather McHugh among the anthologies on my shelf. I found three poems in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, editors Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone. At the end of the brief introduction to her work by the editors, Seamus Heaney gets the last word, quoted as having said something about “impulse and energy” in McHugh’s work. I felt little “energy” and felt no urgency or propulsion that might be characterized by “impulse” but whatever Heaney meant by the phrase I think his admiration for McHugh is itself instructive. Heaney’s presence—which I hadn’t considered relevant at first—loomed large once I read “I Knew I’d Sing,” the first of the three poems.
In the poem, words from McHugh’s youth are the matter at hand (from the beginning stanzas):
A few sashay, a few finagle.
Some make whoopee, some
make good. But most make
diddly-squat. I tell you this
is what I love about
America—the words it puts
in my mouth, the mouth where once
my mother rubbed
a word away with the soap. The word
was cunt. She stuck that bar
of family-size in there
until there was no hole to speak of, so
she hoped. But still
I’m full of it—the cunt,
the prick, short u, short i
the words that stood
for her and him.
McHugh’s treatment of language as physical and with consequence is not unlike Heaney’s approach in many of his reflective, wordsworthian narratives that turn on words from his Derry youth. “Fodder” begins by revising the title: “Or, as we said,/fother . . .” Heaney often uses first lines to tune our ear to the speech-images of County Derry. “The Singer’s House” begins with “When they said Carrickfergus I could hear/the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.” Later in the poem Heaney muses on another word: “So I say to myself Gweebarra/and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite.” In Heaney, language, like history and the natural environment, are sites for, as his first mature poem attests, digging. There are many other Heaney poems in which particular words and their associations figure prominently—“bog” in “Kinship” for instance—and many others in which the language and accents are commented upon though some specific word may not be. His prose, too, is often obsessed with language-as-issue. Even his translation of Beowulf is marked by Derry speech (as his introduction brazenly reports). Heaney clearly still takes Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads proto-manifesto quite seriously.
McHugh’s “I Knew I’d Sing” is a reflective narrative in the romantic-confessional tradition. Like many poems in this tradition—Heaney’s included—the poem finds its roots in childhood. The poem begins by musing—somewhat playfully—on certain American colloquialisms. The poem does not use them as speech, but rather views them from the outside. To be more precise the words don’t seem to figure in the poet’s—or poet persona’s—own speech but rather seem to belong to some absent, previously observed Americans. Later, the word “cunt” becomes the source of the narrative’s conflict. “Cunt” is the poet’s word: “After my lunch of Ivory I said/vagina for a day or two, but knew/from that day forth which word struck home/the more like sex itself.” The poem is in a sense about the poet choosing her language, and her public stance toward the world: “nothing would be beneath me.” The poem is even in some sense about her choosing to become a poet: “I knew when I was big I’d sing/a song in praise of cunt.” It is therefore firmly within the romantic tradition of autobiographical revelation, a public declaration—performance even—of the revelation of the self to the self. (The poem makes the personal revelation—epiphany—a public one. The original Christian epiphany was, of course, itself a public showing forth. )
Language Poems in the Romantic Tradition: subjectivity & certainty
In Heaney’s work language induced epiphanies abound. These epiphanies are not, however, Joycean. Words do not show their (objective) whatnesses. Words cause subjective experiences in the poet. The poet hears things in words and names them:
“When they said Carrickfergus I could hear/the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.”
“So I say to myself Gweebarra/and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite.”
Except, it seems to me that Heaney does not hear the words so much as he hears through the words to something else, the echo of picks or water striking rock. Language is physical but transparent. Likewise, McHugh is not so much interested in “cunt” and “vagina” as physical signs—or even in how they operate in a broader context—as in what the use of the words say about her, who she is, and what she stands for. In the “I Knew I’d Sing” the words “cunt” and “prick” stand for “her and him” which leads to these lines:
. . . I loved
the thing they must have done,
the love they must have made, to make
an example of me.
She sees through the words to something else, the lovemaking that made her and her own liberation as poet.
What do “language poems” centered on subjective experience have to offer the reader? What are the limitations of such poems?
romantic-confessional & the projective/surrealist poems about language
Heaney & McHugh
On the recommendation of a friend I sought out some Heather McHugh among the anthologies on my shelf. I found three poems in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, editors Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone. At the end of the brief introduction to her work by the editors, Seamus Heaney gets the last word, quoted as having said something about “impulse and energy” in McHugh’s work. I felt little “energy” and felt no urgency or propulsion that might be characterized by “impulse” but whatever Heaney meant by the phrase I think his admiration for McHugh is itself instructive. Heaney’s presence—which I hadn’t considered relevant at first—loomed large once I read “I Knew I’d Sing,” the first of the three poems.
In the poem, words from McHugh’s youth are the matter at hand (from the beginning stanzas):
A few sashay, a few finagle.
Some make whoopee, some
make good. But most make
diddly-squat. I tell you this
is what I love about
America—the words it puts
in my mouth, the mouth where once
my mother rubbed
a word away with the soap. The word
was cunt. She stuck that bar
of family-size in there
until there was no hole to speak of, so
she hoped. But still
I’m full of it—the cunt,
the prick, short u, short i
the words that stood
for her and him.
McHugh’s treatment of language as physical and with consequence is not unlike Heaney’s approach in many of his reflective, wordsworthian narratives that turn on words from his Derry youth. “Fodder” begins by revising the title: “Or, as we said,/fother . . .” Heaney often uses first lines to tune our ear to the speech-images of County Derry. “The Singer’s House” begins with “When they said Carrickfergus I could hear/the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.” Later in the poem Heaney muses on another word: “So I say to myself Gweebarra/and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite.” In Heaney, language, like history and the natural environment, are sites for, as his first mature poem attests, digging. There are many other Heaney poems in which particular words and their associations figure prominently—“bog” in “Kinship” for instance—and many others in which the language and accents are commented upon though some specific word may not be. His prose, too, is often obsessed with language-as-issue. Even his translation of Beowulf is marked by Derry speech (as his introduction brazenly reports). Heaney clearly still takes Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads proto-manifesto quite seriously.
McHugh’s “I Knew I’d Sing” is a reflective narrative in the romantic-confessional tradition. Like many poems in this tradition—Heaney’s included—the poem finds its roots in childhood. The poem begins by musing—somewhat playfully—on certain American colloquialisms. The poem does not use them as speech, but rather views them from the outside. To be more precise the words don’t seem to figure in the poet’s—or poet persona’s—own speech but rather seem to belong to some absent, previously observed Americans. Later, the word “cunt” becomes the source of the narrative’s conflict. “Cunt” is the poet’s word: “After my lunch of Ivory I said/vagina for a day or two, but knew/from that day forth which word struck home/the more like sex itself.” The poem is in a sense about the poet choosing her language, and her public stance toward the world: “nothing would be beneath me.” The poem is even in some sense about her choosing to become a poet: “I knew when I was big I’d sing/a song in praise of cunt.” It is therefore firmly within the romantic tradition of autobiographical revelation, a public declaration—performance even—of the revelation of the self to the self. (The poem makes the personal revelation—epiphany—a public one. The original Christian epiphany was, of course, itself a public showing forth. )
Language Poems in the Romantic Tradition: subjectivity & certainty
In Heaney’s work language induced epiphanies abound. These epiphanies are not, however, Joycean. Words do not show their (objective) whatnesses. Words cause subjective experiences in the poet. The poet hears things in words and names them:
“When they said Carrickfergus I could hear/the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.”
“So I say to myself Gweebarra/and its music hits off the place like water hitting off granite.”
Except, it seems to me that Heaney does not hear the words so much as he hears through the words to something else, the echo of picks or water striking rock. Language is physical but transparent. Likewise, McHugh is not so much interested in “cunt” and “vagina” as physical signs—or even in how they operate in a broader context—as in what the use of the words say about her, who she is, and what she stands for. In the “I Knew I’d Sing” the words “cunt” and “prick” stand for “her and him” which leads to these lines:
. . . I loved
the thing they must have done,
the love they must have made, to make
an example of me.
She sees through the words to something else, the lovemaking that made her and her own liberation as poet.
What do “language poems” centered on subjective experience have to offer the reader? What are the limitations of such poems?
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
from "In California During the Gulf War"
Denise Levertov
. . . No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.
*
Now we know of course that the poem's last line is true in more than just general terms. The particular war in question, the first Gulf War, had not ended. Wolfowitz, et al. went into their think tanks and conncocted the invasion we now have. Newish thoughts:
1. Conspiracy theories make me uncomfortable unless I can be made to see exactly *how* and *why* the conspiracy was undertaken. I don't believe this is a conspiracy theory. Did Co. (& Bush) purposefully fail to win the support of the U.N.? Here's my thought.
The Bush administration argued--right up until the start of the war--that the existence of WoMD in Iraq & Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations were the primary justifications for an invasion. (They say, war.) Then the invasion was dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the administration deemphasized the WoMD & terrorist ties. "Liberation!" became the call-to-arms. Why the change?
Perhaps the Bush administration intended all along to go it alone. Perhaps they *wanted* to go it alone. Why? So they would have greater--almost complete--control over the *shape* of a post-invasion Iraq. Powell's presentation to the U.N. appealed to the domestic audience. USAmericans want revenge. Powell was able to do just enough to suggest a war against Iraq could be a piece of that revenge. He never said it. Didn't have to. & the administration new it. So w/ the homefront secure, so to speak, one would have thought that the Bush administration might appeal to humanitarian concerns to sway world opinion. If he *wanted* to win over the protesters in London--for Blair's sake--wouldn't he & his cohort have taken every opportunity to emphasize that this would be a war of "liberation". Instead he stuck to the WoMDs & terrorist ties which only appealed to the domestic market. (He only needs to be re-elected. He doesn't even need to be like in Europe to get what he wants.)
With the U.N. at home, the U.S. gets to call the shots. Consolidating power.
2. The Neocons who have been designing this war for ten years--the New American Century, Pax Americana, etc.--are true believers. But what they believe in is not democracy but market economies driven by powerful corporations. Of course they often conflate the two but the later will, for example, certainly come before the former in Iraq. No doubt.
I imagine the following scenerio (with a tip of the cap to Aldous Huxley)...
Is it not possible--perhaps the seeds of such an entity are sprouting on the east coast of China--that the new "democracies" will actually be corporate havens filled with opiated consumers, almost entirely devoid of real democratic processes (cf. a lesser Brave New World). What the neocons don't say is that the corporatation-dominated market-economies *can* exist without democracy & the people--if properly opiated (cf. US-style mass media)--won't put up much of a struggle. Of course, lots of people who resist--prideful of their home culture, etc.--will be killed.
(Sidenote: the US public is completely unable to understand that many Iraqis are cheering for the fall of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime but are **not** cheering **for** the US invasion. Will the neocons have to buy off who they can & kill the rest? Probably. That is nation building US (as opposed to UN) style. [See point #1].)
But then while on a walk or having a pint I have wondered--and a good friend has also wondered--if the neocon vision is really all that bad. I mean a comfortable (though opiated) existence is certainly preferable to living with fear (caused by Saddam Hussein) and hunger (contributed to significantly by the sanctions).
But there **must** be other options. And the educated public **must** demand that the neocons come clean about their plans now. The motives behind this first invasion are in some ways hidden in plain sight. (After all the neocon doctrine is easily available to anyone who is reading this now.) This vision--which is quite different from the isolationist one Bush ran on in '00--must be dragged out into the light of day so that its flaws might show forth.
Denise Levertov
. . . No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.
*
Now we know of course that the poem's last line is true in more than just general terms. The particular war in question, the first Gulf War, had not ended. Wolfowitz, et al. went into their think tanks and conncocted the invasion we now have. Newish thoughts:
1. Conspiracy theories make me uncomfortable unless I can be made to see exactly *how* and *why* the conspiracy was undertaken. I don't believe this is a conspiracy theory. Did Co. (& Bush) purposefully fail to win the support of the U.N.? Here's my thought.
The Bush administration argued--right up until the start of the war--that the existence of WoMD in Iraq & Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations were the primary justifications for an invasion. (They say, war.) Then the invasion was dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the administration deemphasized the WoMD & terrorist ties. "Liberation!" became the call-to-arms. Why the change?
Perhaps the Bush administration intended all along to go it alone. Perhaps they *wanted* to go it alone. Why? So they would have greater--almost complete--control over the *shape* of a post-invasion Iraq. Powell's presentation to the U.N. appealed to the domestic audience. USAmericans want revenge. Powell was able to do just enough to suggest a war against Iraq could be a piece of that revenge. He never said it. Didn't have to. & the administration new it. So w/ the homefront secure, so to speak, one would have thought that the Bush administration might appeal to humanitarian concerns to sway world opinion. If he *wanted* to win over the protesters in London--for Blair's sake--wouldn't he & his cohort have taken every opportunity to emphasize that this would be a war of "liberation". Instead he stuck to the WoMDs & terrorist ties which only appealed to the domestic market. (He only needs to be re-elected. He doesn't even need to be like in Europe to get what he wants.)
With the U.N. at home, the U.S. gets to call the shots. Consolidating power.
2. The Neocons who have been designing this war for ten years--the New American Century, Pax Americana, etc.--are true believers. But what they believe in is not democracy but market economies driven by powerful corporations. Of course they often conflate the two but the later will, for example, certainly come before the former in Iraq. No doubt.
I imagine the following scenerio (with a tip of the cap to Aldous Huxley)...
Is it not possible--perhaps the seeds of such an entity are sprouting on the east coast of China--that the new "democracies" will actually be corporate havens filled with opiated consumers, almost entirely devoid of real democratic processes (cf. a lesser Brave New World). What the neocons don't say is that the corporatation-dominated market-economies *can* exist without democracy & the people--if properly opiated (cf. US-style mass media)--won't put up much of a struggle. Of course, lots of people who resist--prideful of their home culture, etc.--will be killed.
(Sidenote: the US public is completely unable to understand that many Iraqis are cheering for the fall of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime but are **not** cheering **for** the US invasion. Will the neocons have to buy off who they can & kill the rest? Probably. That is nation building US (as opposed to UN) style. [See point #1].)
But then while on a walk or having a pint I have wondered--and a good friend has also wondered--if the neocon vision is really all that bad. I mean a comfortable (though opiated) existence is certainly preferable to living with fear (caused by Saddam Hussein) and hunger (contributed to significantly by the sanctions).
But there **must** be other options. And the educated public **must** demand that the neocons come clean about their plans now. The motives behind this first invasion are in some ways hidden in plain sight. (After all the neocon doctrine is easily available to anyone who is reading this now.) This vision--which is quite different from the isolationist one Bush ran on in '00--must be dragged out into the light of day so that its flaws might show forth.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
from "The Nine Monsters"
Cesar Vallejo
And, unfortunately,
pain grows in the world every moment,
grows thirty minutes a second, step by step,
and the nature of the pain, is the pain twice
and the conditions of martyrdom, carnivorous, voracious,
are the pain, twice
and the function of the purest grass, the pain
twice
and the good of Being, to double our dolour.
***
Cesar Vallejo
And, unfortunately,
pain grows in the world every moment,
grows thirty minutes a second, step by step,
and the nature of the pain, is the pain twice
and the conditions of martyrdom, carnivorous, voracious,
are the pain, twice
and the function of the purest grass, the pain
twice
and the good of Being, to double our dolour.
***
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