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100,000 Poets for Change Reading

2011-09-27T11:57:00.001-07:00

Here are some local (Minneapolis) videos that include poetry reading and commentary on change for the big event:

http://spareroomseries.wordpress.com/

You can also check out the larger site at:

http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/

The Uncertainty of the Poet

2011-07-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

This image echoes some of the early ideas I was made in the “OFWGKTA” post. It is, of course, a now ‘classic’ image from the surrealist school by de Chirico. I would have to invert the image though—the banana-cocks should be going in the same direction as the train (as industry) as they spew forth from the hermaphroditic body so ineffectually (cheering on the train from a distance).

White House Poetry Media Cluster Fuck

2011-05-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

UNIVERSAL MIND CONTROL

I was clicking through some of the links I’d missed on Silliman’s blog in regards to the poetry reading at the white house. I take the whole event as being one that tows the line in a non-threatening way; but then, that seems to be the case with most contemporary poetry. The fact that Common coming to read at the white house is something worth discussing at length in the media in regards to some political debate is sad. There is an element in distraction in all of this. Goldsmith could have taken the event as an opportunity to state something that didn't just buy in, but he didn't. It makes me think that Kenneth Goldsmith is made of the same sort of clay as Billy Collins. This is not something I want to think.

All of this hubbub about Common and Kenneth Goldsmith is its own sort of distraction. The stuff about Common is manufactured by a conservative, capitalist media corporation. Even if the Daily Show (or whatever) points this out, they still simply create a debate that dwells in the pundit echo chamber.

The whole thing makes me deeply sad. Poetry is in its own anechoic chamber within the larger chamber of the bottom line. Drill baby drill.

I also thought this Lihn Dihn quote was great:

"As Obama fizzles out, as he loses legitimacy, the power brokers will come up with other figureheads and slogans for American liberals and conservatives to become passionate about. These candidates will jabber, jab and insult each other. As in professional wrestling, the battle will appear fierce. Barack, meanwhile, can look forward to a lucrative memoir and six-figure speaking fees. Even that man of malapropisms and snafus, the much despised Bush, is getting $150,000 each time he opens his mouth these days."

Poetry on capital hill fizzles and jabbers.

ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL

2011-03-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

“everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered” –Barthes

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA) feels like an appropriate topic given that the Poetry Foundation posted a blog on the group a week ago. Yet, unlike Bethlehem Shoals' effort to speak to their “work’s” “universality” by comparing different aspects of their oeuvre to Mayakovsky, Marinetti, and the like, I want to speak to what the texts accomplish out of their cultural setting. It is troublesome to find the worth of these texts in the fetishistic relationship their audience has to them. They're doing much more than creating simple sputters of disgust in their viewers. The Shoals article, titled “Odd Futurism,” goes through the perpetually re-ingested action of attaching the energetic aspects of the texts to Marinetti's fascist excitement. This is the most blasé historical approach to the variety of contingencies that led to futurism and ignores a plethora of manifestos that sparked up after that. It is a trite stance that can only be deadening to contemporary poetics. We, as readers, should be sick of it.

Further, the general notion that we should relegate certain “works” of “hip hop” outside of the realm of “poetry” is mindless, ahistorical cock-jocking—there is poetry that entwines me in its complexity (both in and outside of itself) and there is poetry that promotes conformity—that is, poetry that levels, flattens, deadens. The manifesto writers who, supposedly, cock-jock, at present, dwell out of and create in an apocalyptic landscape filled with anthologies of manifestos and the sense of flattening their position takes within a field. In a field of cocks, what's one more cock?

The cock unto itself, like the work unto itself, takes no stance and participates in no dialogue. If we want to speak to what leads to fascist aesthetics one might just as easily posit this lack of dialogue. It is also worth pointing out that poets who engage in manifesto-like activities tend to be the most engaged in democratic dialogues on the ground level (See the coverage of the Wisconsin Protests on the Montevidayo blog, for example). Death to pressing art into platonic archetypes. Death to barring some things from “poetry.” Death to poetry as a category. Categorization and poetics are antithetical.

I am, I admit, an I, an I that is a letter that is pointing out some of the key conceptual flaws that underlie most articles that persist on the Poetry Foundation blog. I do appreciate that this article was there, and I like some of the things that it said. It was refreshing to see this sort of coverage of hip hop in such a venue, as opposed to the typical, decidedly relegating selections that flit into reductive dialogue by considering the subject only in passing without delving into the poetry itself. Whole articles on whether hip hop is poetry or not, or stilted comparisons to Robert Browning, are not appealing, and they fail to take hip hop seriously as poetry. Shoals' article does fall into this at its base, but when it situates itself within the music of the group it tends to be lovingly generous, and this is an approach that I welcome. When Shoals calls OFWGKTA “goofy, inventive wunderkinds” or “high-concept subversives” I'm right there with him, when he starts to read them only through how they are consumed by the wider readership, I lose interest. OFWGKTA may come out of skater culture, but they're also twisting hip hop into something refreshing and new by up-taking a vast field of references. This failure to understand the group’s motives happens primarily because the texts are being widely (/tritely) misread. To quote Tyler, the Creator, himself: “and we don't fuckin' make horrorcore, you fuckin' idiots/ listen deeper than the music before you put it in a box.”

So, why has this group been endorsed by the likes of Kanye West and Mos Def? I don't want to get into the a discussion on the reliability of Kanye West's statements, although I, at times, enjoy them for their blasting honesty. Mos Def, on the other hand, has a history of being a vicious critic of mainstream hip hop. He doesn't regularly jump on convenient bandwagons—in fact, he tends to slander them. And, in terms of Mos Def's own work, it seems strange that he would endorse something that partakes in rape, forced-abortion, pentagrams, and swastikas for shock value.

Notice the radical political stances he takes:

And his respectful, albeit sexual, portrayals of women:

Mos Def is not just noticing a trite surface appeal in OFWGKTA; he is noticing a deep relation to the tradition of hip hop. OFWGKTA’s lyrics and images relate back to hustler rap, MF Doom, the Wu Tang Clan and so on.

MF DOOM:

WU TANG CLAN:

They also reaches further back to elements of experimental jazz; here, I'm thinking especially of the stranged work of Miles Davis in the '70s and '80s.

OFWGKTA uses appropriation and masquerade—that is to say, they breathe hip hop. Their violent presentations come from stage personalities, and their work is in conversation with a history of “Sean Carters” pretending to be “Jay-Zs” on the stage, a stage that is in all of the texts, including both the music and the public persona. The self and the performance are both removed and intertwined. What is key to OFWGKTA is that their work uses its shock elements for things that reach beyond easy connotations. Their entire oeuvre is aimed at taking many of insidious but slightly veiled elements of rap to an absurd extreme within the lyric in order to direct it at the self-segregating, aesthetically-dead elements of American culture. Murder the white bourgeoisie, quit school because school makes citizens that buy in, and do and say things that will make white evangelicals uncomfortable. The performing personae uptakes violent and sexually troubling stances only to splay those stances out and make them ironic. If the reader goes “past the music” like they’re told to, he/she ends up with a vibrant, youthful critique that stabs deep into the shared cultural gut and twists the blade. The reader also gets an entrance into a shaky self that is, as Shoals describes, “undeniably funny, sad, and, somehow, devoid of moral gravity in a way that’s both silly and nearly surreal.”

This art produces twisting, vibrating, lyrical performance out of a series of historically grounded microcosms that overlap and aggregate. It is an art, in its best instances, where the image causes the meaning in the lyric to swell—visual and textual aesthetics become subsumed by a thing-less poetics, a language of being, a world inclusive inter-textuality. And while attributing mystical vibrato to such splayed out, meat-hooked, rebellion-infused griminess with all of its carelessness and misogyny is likely to cause pause, the culture that swells within the text of this poetry denies reductive readings. The trite, stilted approach to reading that relegates these texts to surface level concerns, and only surface level concerns, is indicative of the culture the texts are debasing. The text moves in the veins of Du Bois' double consciousness the way most hip hop does—it's a rebellious work that questions white bourgeois society while presenting an appealing, consumable face to its mostly white, suburban audience (and the urban gentrifying derivatives thereof). Here, however, the consumable face is taken to extremes and into a biting, politicized irony.

While there is content within the text that can be read, indeed, read deeply, the surface operates as a fetishistic veil for a consumptively consumeristic audience seeking out the socially estranged and the culturally weirded—like most presentations of hustling within hip hop, the surface creates a package gleaming with an exotic aura that is designed to elicit a comforting appeal to the established norms of the purchasing audience. There is a certain level of honesty in the lyrics as hustling rap implicitly comments on racial segregation that still exists, to be successful and to flash a diamond-studded watch in the face of those groups that can afford to consume the music is its own triumph. There are countless examples of hustler rap acting from a space of commentary, but I want to turn, briefly, to a video released a week ago by Pusha T:

The first verse is particularly indicative:

I went ahead and asked God for forgiveness
So now I’m just asking you to listen
I’m living in a World (in a world) where my truth can be my lynching
Last words “fuck you all” feel the ropes tension
I’ll never compromise, in it ‘til the powder dries
Best friends drowned in quick sand and help you cowards rise
I floss in their honor, their legacies in bottles
Make them walk like their 30 years is right around the corner
We was all fucking Shawna, you and ‘e’ was fucking on her
I was jealous when you both said her mouth was like piranha
Yea-ugh, spend money like we print money
Buck fifty on the car, that’s little dick money
The AC is forever broke, that’s vent money
Cocaine snowballed from gambling my rent money
Everyday struggle get money, get the crown 4
Always thinking big now they praying for my downfall

This verse partakes in skilled lyricism and is complex in its content and imagery. It also operates within a deep running context of inter-textual signifiers that swell the poetry outside of itself. Yet, it is a beautiful, sad confessional that partakes in violence to attack that which allows for violence. Here any inkling of success, by whatever means, is to be cherished because that success is always hard-won. The lyrics “I’m living in a World (in a world) where my truth can be my lynching/ Last words ‘fuck you all’ feel the ropes tension” are powerful. Though, this verse still partakes in paradigmatic themes of this sort of hustler rap—it is a man on the battlefield obtaining money in spite of the dominant culture that relegates him while taunting him with seemingly unattainable objects in the form of advertisements. Anything that person gets becomes a “fuck you all” directed at the system. Obtaining money and illustrating sexual prowess (although, here, that prowess belongs to male friends of the voice) are key elements of this—to delve into the full extent to which this type of rap tends to objectify and relegate women, and how that connects to social conditions on the ground level is quite complex and beyond my direct concerns here—what is of interest, however, is the way in which these elements of tradition get ripped out, reformed and deformed by OFWGKTA. The stances that hip hop takes become an extreme version of themselves that only exist as a mutated, surreal performance. The original, coded stances become their own leveled field of writhing cocks, but one where the new doesn’t spark up; a field with no fluid fireworks. The “Odd Future” swallows and becomes that present field—a field of writing, glistening complexities—and by doing so, it forces us to dive down into the mess.

On one level, those same tendencies from the Pusha T video are pushed to the limits in order to plow through a storm of competing, exceedingly strange internet culture in order to gain an audience. Given this, the zealous themes of rape and violence against women are troublesome and need to be considered. While the group has female fans, and there is a female member in their collective (their stage engineer, Syd, who also appears as a mental patient in the Jimmy Fallon performance), that doesn't mean the work itself isn't infected with misogyny. I think Tyler, the Creator's video “VCR” does a great deal to start to explain how this work is using rape within the context of performance, and within the context of performance only, to take a stylistic stance. There is still a troublesome core to the culture's stance on women. Yet, it might be less troublesome than the given, immediate reaction to such content our critical dialogue tends to have.

The text goes deep into the basement of debauchery before pressing deeper into the supporting soil, from there it confronts the audience. I won't go into a close reading of this piece, although I think there is enough complexity in it to warrant one, but I do want to note some key elements. The video goes over the edge into the point where it can't be taken as anything but performance—the thing being raped is a plastic, white, blond blow-up doll, and it is being raped in a basement decorated with video tape and grime. The group, with nine male members—that is, “nine cocks, who cock nines”—also has a lesbian in its ranks (Syd, who is mentioned in the song). In an article in the New York Times, She says they “treat [her] like an equal” and that “actions speak louder than words.”

A black artist performing in a dungeon full of swastikas can only be taken as ironic. It reminds me of Dave Chappelle’s popular sketch about a blind white supremacist who doesn’t realize he is black.

Further, it is worth noting that these artists are speaking out of a culture that has been raped both literally through the heinous genetic genocide of slave masters, and culturally through the systematic capitalization of human flesh that drove the triangular trade. The act of letting their performative-selves rape blond, (all the way through) plastic, white women is a declaration of rebellion against an oppressive aesthetic that imitates from an oppressive system (or, here, the system’s history). It is to be a destructive beast that rips at indestructible walls, because it is all one can do.

It is to spray graffiti over helvetica. It is to rape a metal shopping cart. It is to face-fuck a Ronald McDonald statue that tricks children into ingesting derivatives of petroleum products fronting as food. It is to violently reject the religion of your imperialist colonizers and their white ‘g’od. It is the twisted, punk-infused Tupac-ness of OFWGKTA.

Notice the t-shirt:

Again, murder the white bourgeoisie, quit school because school makes citizens that buy in, and do and say things that will make white evangelicals uncomfortable.

Now, I want to turn to Tyler, the Creator’s video “Yonkers.” It is the swelling visual and lyrical complexity of works like this, by OFWGKTA, that makes them worth considering. I hope I can make it do something, I hope its texture can have an effect.

Tyler’s upcoming album is titled Goblin, and the video starts with a splash of text acknowledging this. One can’t help but relate this to Lil’ Wayne—the lyric is actually taken from one of his most popular songs off of the The Carter III:

He’s a beast, he’s a dog, he’s a muthafukin’ problem
Ok, you’re a goon, but what's a goon to a goblin?
Nothin’, nothin’, you ain't scarin’ nothin’

Lil’ Wayne, like Odd Future, pushes past the traditional modes of hustler rap into something else, and Wayne reflects on that in this lyric. Tyler, the Creator’s work is in conversation with Wayne’s work, although Tyler, unlike Wayne, grinds away any sense of the authentic from the surface of his beastly persona that is a performance all the way through. There is also a connection to Wayne, I believe, through the imagery of tattooing. The upside down cross and the word “KILL” written in Sharpie on Tyler’s hand speaks to the fact that this persona can be easily removed. This is a stark contrast to Wayne’s own tattooing:

Wayne’s tattooing has powerful connotations within gang culture, hip hop, and—one might even conjecture—American tradition. I can’t help but think of Queequeg from Moby Dick—that a friend’s coffin carved with a friend’s experience becomes a raft, even out of a stagnant, doom-ridden fate. Tyler’s audience doesn’t get that satisfaction. His tattoos are sharpied on his hand, or in the form of asemic markings on a shirt, a shirt that is easily removed. And when he removes that scripted enculturation at the end of the video, under it are goblin eyes and gold chains of his deformed, performative self. That solid self at the beginning of the video is a thin layer over the performance—the reader has to go through the performance and out to the wider culture beyond the text to capture meaning in a widely-stitched net.

The first visual image after the album title is a simultaneous reference to of Rodin's The Thinker and the silhouettes of Kara Walker. This rings of double consciousness in the most powerful way, and speaks further to the historical relationships I intimated earlier. There is, even with regards to these images, an inversion taking place. The initial silhouette is a standard image in the history of European art, while images of Tyler's lived-body become “chitlin' circuit theater”—his performance splays out its guts and organs through irony and self-debasement. The irony is that the body is always seen through the flickering lights of the screen, and is never a “real” body. Again—look past the music, look past the image. The shadow of the thing, the Rodin, is the bronzed and marbled height of thought this work reaches at, but when that abstracted thought reaches into the lived performance itself, it causes spastic barfing. Thinking with history in mind leaves a foul taste in the mouth—and the lyrics begin to reflect that mouth rot, as the silhouette becomes a possession that covers over the eyes (the gateways to the soul).

For a view of all that rotting inter-textual gunk, go here:

[Yonkers Lyrics]

The visuals, of course, saturate those lyrics with another layer of meaning.

There is a psycho-sexual complexity in the lyrics, as Tyler jumps around between different preferences and levels of femininity and masculinity. I don't want to get into all of the complexities of gender confusion in this video, but take note that it is varied and in conflict with itself. The beginning of the video is self-referential and always confused in the double and triple meanings of its lyricism, that in turn play off of the visuals. The second half of the video runs along the same lines—the lyrics of the goblin possessed self are confused, and shift in meaning from line to line, often directly contradicting themselves.

The conceptual distinction that goes along with the shift of the blackness from the inside to the outside through the ingestion, regurgitation and possession by a solipsistic cockroach echoes the artist's place in society. That placement is a cockroach fed the internet challenge of eating a tablespoon of cinnamon, that is, a pun on “sin I'm in,” that is, poison to a bug. When culture is swallowed it spews back out and turns teeth black.

Those same oppressive cultural contingencies lead to the deformed, possessed performer's death by suicide, which simultaneously evokes a death by lynching. The cultural negativity can't help but become a part of the personality, and that personality is destructive to itself. By turning this out towards white society in a packaged, purchasable form that is consumed as shock-porn, Tyler shoves the darkness in their faces and tells them to swallow it. He doesn't care if they realize what they are swallowing—this is an aesthetics of just retribution and just revenge. It takes its revenge in the only space it can without contradicting its own motivations, in the space of performance. The text makes a strange commentary on the strange commentary that is hip hop—it is a performance all the way down.

Poetics:

2011-03-18T20:25:00.001-07:00

also:

Macbeth at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis

2010-04-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

I saw Macbeth at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis weekend before last. It was an interesting presentation. It was definitely a ‘modern’ (not modernist, per se) production influenced by kitsch and pop culture. It was explosive and action packed. It unfolded like a stock psychological thriller staring Anthony Hopkins or Morgan Freeman. And, based on traditional method-acting standards, the actor playing Macbeth did a wonderful job. There were also some scenes that took great advantage of lighting and choreography—the vision of Banquo (seen here in a painting by Théodore Chassériau) was delightfully successful as were many of the battle scenes. At the end of the movie as they strung up Macbeth by his feet (while feeling somewhat interested in the physical requirement this demanded of the actor) there was a sense of triumph over an oppressive and misguided ruler. Hail Macduff! Fuck you Dick Cheney (or whatever).

What I found most interesting, however, is the way in which the play turned most of the discomforting and violent elements into garish kitsch. It was simply marvelous. The blood on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s hands was nearly up to their elbows and looked more like red rustoleum than real blood. Lady Macbeth retreats from the stage in order to dispose of the daggers and strangely returns with her hands dipped as deeply into the king’s paint bucket as Macbeth. Many of the people in the audience laughed uncontrollably at this failure to obtain realism; but the red paint was so much more than that. It wasn’t blood it was the color red. This is especially important given the level to which Lady Macbeth is made into a sadistic propellant of Macbeth’s actions more so than the text of the play necessarily implies. This video, I think, shows the style of Lady Macbeth in the play quite well:

The play uses this, in part, to deconstruct the notion of the femme fatal. Lady Macbeth is complicit in dipping her hands into a bucket of red paint and little more. Unlike the promotional video the actual play was little more than the color red. That red paint mimics the color of her seductress dress and the color of her hair (which was died red for the film in contrast to the above video). The spectator never sees the murder of the king despite the generally visceral and action packed style of the play. The murder itself is a cliché that is unimportant to the presentation. This element takes place off stage because Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are to confront the fate of the color red itself. A particular sexualized instance of the color red.

The witches in the play also mimic this theme. They have dreadlocks and dance around in sequin covered ball grounds. They call forth kitchy-spasmodic horror movie children from a square shaped box in the floor that soon transforms into a light box that one might picture on the floor of a disco. Fate is technicolored and hilarious.

This carries throughout the play as well. Macbeth seems to be fighting for a position in a bad Nazi movie. The king and all of the Thanes wear indistinguishable military outfits from cliché Hollywood movies in the post-WWII era that rehashed the boogie-man of fascism to the effect of great profits. It is like Macbeth is fighting to control his place as the head Nazi in Tarantino’s _Inglorious Bastards_. The power structures are so cheesy and clichéd that they too fall into the background. Macbeth falls into the background. This is Lady Macbeth’s play with all of her glorious red-ness.

What the play does with that red I haven’t fully worked out. But red as red is an important statement in and of itself. That is to say: red as an individual instance of red rather than some ideal of red. Red is only red where red appears. The red of this particular seductress and the red of this particular blood are entertained and intertwined only to give way to Lady Macbeth’s madness in the face of her paint colored hands. This might be a feminist untwining of the femme fatal or it might be something else. The gaudy isn’t necessarily turned into something ‘negative’ in the play. Indeed, I tend to think that it is celebrated. She can’t get the paint off of her hands and to do so is to cease to exist. She is always on the sidelines of the colorful wheel of fate—the wheel of fortune, if you will—but she spins the wheel and claps joyously because it is her turn to spin the wheel. One might even call her a spindle on the wheel that Macbeth spins (but even then the spinner as an embodiment of will can be questioned—the wheel calls out and demands to be spun). The same might be said of the witches. Lady Macbeth is trying to wash herself of all that colors her and in doing so she becomes another unfortunate casualty to the force of nature that is Macbeth ‘proper.’ But Macbeth hardly feels willful. The witches have already predicted his folly.

As vain and self-important as Macbeth may be his central position in the play (the spectator is surely happy to see him overthrown), he is subverted by the outwardly under toned performance of Lady Macbeth. In her involvement with the red kitsch-murder she doesn’t simply take on the role of the tragic agent that causes the ‘gangster’ to meet his downfall—she takes an active role and burns up in doing so. While she might be the typical femme fatal on one hand, she is completely in control on the other. She undoes herself in a disdain for her vanity. It is Macbeth who seems totally out of control and at a loss to the movement of the play—Lady Macbeth may become ‘mad’ but she has better sight into the irrationality of being.

[Edit:]

After writing this I’m not sure it feels quite right. The ideas don’t come full circle at the end and I don’t quite know what I (or the play) was making as a cohesive statement. I think this due to the collaborative un-authored nature of a play. Who makes the play? It is hard to say it is the director or the lead actor or the choreographer. The author is dead. The costume and set designer may have somewhat subverted what might have been a rather straightforward and boring presentation. I hope I, at least, got that across.

As Sartre points out (which Merleu-Ponty then re-appropriates and turns into a serious phenomenology) when he references how Matisse paints a red carpet—the color is not some abstract quality, but is a concrete aspect of a tactile thing: what he paints is not just the color red, but a specific instance of “a woolly red.” It is something like that.

Examples:

Also, see this David Shrigley Photo:

[/End Edit]

The New Nihilism

2010-04-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post about the production of Macbeth I saw last week (and I’m now entirely unhappy with the observations I made, eh). I then got caught up in a week of art history exams, projects that culminated in me catching the flu. I finally regained relative functionality late yesterday and was forced to then speed through my weekend art assignments. They actually turned out good—deadlines can be a good thing.

What got me thinking about posting was this scholarship application I am currently working on. I realized how little time I have spent volunteering since my days in Florida. In part, I think this is steeped in the general disillusionment that we all felt with the horrid (and traumatic) Kerry election. It was truly dis-heartening. It created a deep cultural nihilism. This stopped somewhat with the election of Obama. But I also think that people have now thrown their progressive hopes into the establishment with the election of Obama. The grass roots of liberal progressivism are dead/dying.

I wonder how the hipster and pseudo-hipster connects to all of this? The hipster is definitely of this same period. I guess the hipster is of a vague liberalism that is steeped in commodity culture. Maybe this has something to do with the belief in the political establishment that seems to be prevalent. An acceptance of the slightly-progressive status quo as one goes about in expensive flannel shirts and vintage clothing while texting on an iphone. The wars are now status-quo. They don’t shock people into thought or political interest. The whole debate is framed by a circus of teleprompter monkeys paid by huge media conglomerates. The whole debate is just more irony for the hipster. Irony may very well be a disease--we're just too caught up in it to see it. The technological culture that creates this disease can be seen clearly enough. That said, it is the lack of meaning within the technology that causes the disease--not necessarily the technology itself.

Let's un-explode time for a moment and get back to some Heideggerian Care-Structures and so on.

Update

2010-02-27T08:31:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of posts I’m toying with that I’ll probably get up (or drop) in the near future, including a reflection I wrote after spending a great deal of time with Sylvia Plath. It does need to be re-tooled a bit before I post it, but at this point all I can say is that coming to Plath as a slightly older individual (than the typical undergrad/teenager) was quite an interesting and wonderful experience. It wasn’t quite what I expected coming from a “confessional poet,” and given that she is considered a part of that tradition is probably why I avoided her. I’m not a Robert Lowell ‘fan’ (whatever fandom means when attached to poetry… probably not much).

I also may post the Francis Bacon/Paul Cézanne papers (well, not the papers themselves but reflections related to them) I’m working on if they turn out to my relative liking. I always dislike it when papers don’t quite coalesce the way they should. That coalescence is usually as much a part of the text on the page as it is on the author’s authority. I’ll probably have to shelve them for a later date if they don’t work, it happens. At least I have Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty to call on for guidance as I work through the Bacon and Cézanne, respectively. Or, should it be called anti-guidance. I like the way that sounds.

In terms of graduate admissions I’ve heard positive news from one school so far:
Wait-listed at Minnesota’s MFA

According to the website: “We received a record number of applications to the MFA program this year: 443 applications for 13 seats in fall 2010. Applications are now under review. Applicants will be notified in mid-March.” Minnesota’s MFA definitely leans toward innovation. I’ll be happy to attend should I make it off the wait-list. I still do have a few other schools to hear from; I suppose I’ll see.

This post is getting a bit to self-reflective and journal-like for my taste.
So, Zizek:

Madison to Accept less than 1% of MFA Apps (in fiction, this year)

2009-12-20T19:55:00.000-08:00

I just read that Madison’s MFA program accepted less than 1% of its fiction applicants this year. Crazy stuff. This doesn’t affect me (as a poetry applicant)—I couldn’t apply there this year because they alternate genres each application cycle.

I hope this increased level of selectivity has more to do with the new rankings that came out in Poets & Writers (and Madison’s place in those rankings) than to do with some massive jump in applicant numbers this year specifically due to factors like the economic recession. The later makes me slightly worried. I’d love a chance to learn with some of my favorite contemporary poets but many of them are at highly selective programs. I suppose I’ll see when schools get around to sending out decisions in a few months.

I did apply to the other big research institution in Wisconsin (Milwaukee) for an MA. They have a great program in 20th century and contemporary literature and were one of the pioneering schools for bringing 20th century continental thought into the US (among great company like The New School and Berkeley). I guess a lot of people are set on the “MFA” degree, not that it tends to equate to much employment wise. I’m quite sure that the acceptance rate at Milwaukee is much better, although it is probably rather challenging to get into their PhD program. I also applied to some MFA programs (obviously, why else would I be contemplating admissions statistics) that have quite amazing and exciting faculty. I wonder if the spike in applications is a general trend? I personally thought I was taking a bit of a risk by applying to MFA programs as there are few jobs in the area and the economy is in a horrible state right now.

After I finish up the rest of my applications, luckily, I have quite a few other things to keep me occupied over winter break so I won’t be overtaken with application anxiety. Besides, there are lots of things I can do if I don’t get in anywhere (I’d just love to be in a challenging and fruitful learning environment again… I guess I’ll see).

Anyway, that 1% business does not look promising, that is, if it is more than a localized thing. I do wonder if it says anything about the current economy and the massive unemployment that everyone has felt on some level or another. Really, there is no way to know. As more schools publish application numbers I suppose a general picture will emerge. I wouldn’t be surprised if the poor economy equated to a spike in MFA applications, as I’m sure there are many people who see it as a way to ride the hard times out. It is just a conjecture.

Given that I am applying to programs and all, I do feel somewhat intrigued by a program that accepted less than 1% of applicants and what that might imply for the general state of MFA programs (if anything). I think that puts Madison’s numbers at the top of the selectivity charts historically. Although, there might be a general spike in applicants this year as I already intimated. Also, selectivity data is published so sporadically that such information may never come out in any real way (and other schools may have received greater numbers of applicants in past years without reporting it to the general public).

Nicki Minaj

2009-11-22T20:03:00.000-08:00

I don't think there has EVER been a female rapping at this level. Each bar is a double or triple entendre. Well, not the last one: "I'm killing these bitches/ Mike Vick'n it up!" But: HA!

This is how one stuffs tennis balls down the throat of the referee with lyrics. The referee is white, rich and racist. He'd rather you weren't 'balling,' or using that word to describe a sport that obtains its ad revenue from products that normal people don't even have on their radar (Rolex, Mercedes and any number of absurdly expensive clothing lines).

This barbie doll comes with a warning label stating: "Warning: if you pull the c(h)ord on the back of this doll it will spit fire."

That fire burns apart the purchaser's face and the plastic box the product came packaged in.

The Internet and Care

2009-11-15T11:47:00.000-08:00

This video is worth watching. The style of the lecture is a bit strange and classically rhetorical. This soap box rant does illustrate what I like about the internet—the radical democracy of the whole “mosh pit.”

The internet (and the collections and interactions of data there-in) creates a flux where people are asked to radically reconsider what they care about and how they care about.

Our trite mindless goings with our sad little ifs (could haves and should haves) get broken apart by the internet. Expensive possessions, violent leanings, illiteracy and sexually repression get thrashed a bit… even if only slightly. I guess this might be grasping at straws… but things like blogs, youtube and pornography (although this is often horribly reductive and objectifying) don’t cost money to use… and they open people to seeing different perspectives (or hold the possibility of this).

It is strange that this radical network is based off trite binary codes and logical if/then structures. As interesting and powerful the internet is, it is also troubling—things get reduced by logical systems and whatnot.

Example: people spend hours upon hours on facebook—a medium of interaction that favors trite reductions. There is a whole set of phenomena that can be described in relation to facebook but that isn’t my goal here—I just want to point to the tension between the reductive aspect of the internet and the radically democratic aspects.

The reductions prevent people from taking long term (prophetic) stances within the medium. I have a nostalgia for the newsgroups and discussion groups I used to participate in on my 14.4k modem back in the day—but I think the inclusion of more people in the discussion is wonderful (even if a large portion of these people are just in the discussion to go on youtube and call things “faggot-y”).

Poet as Platypus

2009-11-02T16:45:00.000-08:00

“The analysis of motor habit as an extension of existence leads...”
–Merleau-Ponty

For as long as I can remember, whenever I came across a survey asking “What’s your favorite animal?'” I’d write in, “Duck Billed Platypus” (supposing that one is supposed to have a favorite animal, which is itself a strange supposition). Likely, the rebellious child in me wanted to stick it to the “man” (often a female grade school teacher) by picking the weirdest animal I knew. And what is weirder that the platypus? In time, the platypus became my go-to animal. Not necessarily an existential commitment, but, the commitment I made to the platypus, came to function as a minor ‘myth’ to my childhood self (and now, through this essay, my current self). This version of ‘myth’ is not to be taken in a stagnated (or harmful) tone, but in the sense of a perspectival pocket of meaning that takes hold.

The sources of these ‘meaningful-myths’ become further varied and sporadic in the sped up domain of modern information consumption. It does get harder and harder to create these from exceedingly less complex sources—as one experiences more, the metaphors presented become proximally dead. The way one engages these words then changes: I turn on Vh1 to die (and, after a long day, I enjoy that death).

To pause, for a moment, it may be representatively beneficial to sparse the above sentence: “In time, the platypus became my go-to animal.” Although the sentence could be presented as the creation of the author of this text (by that perspective ‘me,’ which strangely ‘I’ now, itself, reads as ‘me’), at a certain point their has to be a renunciation of authority. So, if we take the text of the above sentence as text what does it illustrate? The modifier “in time” frames the rest of the main portion of the sentence with temporality. The subject, “the platypus” is a “go-to animal,” though not in terms of an actual animal—here, the platypus is text used to fill in a blank on a questionnaire. The reality that a textual element is adopted as a “go-to” serves to illustrate the ‘always occurring’ nature of text: text is action. Action framed always, meaningfully, by temporality (using the widest definition of meaning).

“Platypus,” written, is a word-action, and while that is important, it does not express a reason to equate the platypus to the poet. What the platypus does do (as a word) is defy categories and break apart assumed truths. It is an anomaly. Statistically? I’d guess that it falls somewhere on the edge of a normal distribution curve, yet, the specifics aren’t as important as the idea here. What is important is that there is a supposed ‘truth’ that sets this particular animal outside of it. A quote from the Wikipedia entry on the platypus says it all: “The bizarre appearance of this egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it.” Indeed!

The blatantly European cold-objective qualification that relegated the Platypus to categorical obscurity is particularly important to some of the recent online discourse on “poetry and relevancy.” Explicitly in the terms used to explain the structure and nature of relevance and its connections to different poetry movements—there is, among many participants a blatant disregard for the cultural weight that many words bring with them. If anything is to be gleaned from the last half-century of theoretical discourse it is that the very words we use are full of theoretical assumptions. We all fall victim to this, but we should also all actively engage the words, not disregard such actions as post-modern/structural. We should take what the post-modernists have given us seriously, because the disregard of the theoretical being used to disregard their line of thought is, in reality/discourse, a disregard of a particular theoretical stance via the assumptions of another particular, yet unacknowledged, theoretical stance.

There are no words that connect directly to objects in a metaphysical escapism from a particular perspective. And, as politically convenient as it may be, there is no “humanness.” Nor can we escape theory by defaulting to the unexplained practical or pragmatic (and, I tend to think that Dewey bridges into post-structuralism more than many are willing to acknowledge… though, that is better left for another day). Practical and pragmatic are themselves weighted words.

Words are always referent to other words—I do not think I have seen a platypus to this day (possibly in a zoo, but not that I remember). If I look up Platypus in the dictionary, I just get a series of references to other words, and in turn to other words and so on. It is not a new thought, but it is important to remind oneself when looking at a dictionary that the words are endlessly self-referential within that particular text. In turn, to point out one of my own pet peeves about contemporary poetic discourse, one cannot use a word like ‘aesthetics’ to describe poetry without being connected to the Enlightenment, and then imperialism. This is why the idea of the anti-aesthetic became popular in post-modern criticism; though, more properly, the term should have been tossed off completely and replaced with ‘meaning’ or ‘care’ (or some more specific term related to those).

However, I hold back from applying this directly to the act of writing poetry—these ideas do shape my perception of the world, but the artistic act needs not comport directly to a line of thought—one can try very hard to achieve this, but, likely, one will produce a poem that is both uninteresting and a failure in terms of one’s prescribed theoretical ‘goals.’ A poem seems more apt to swerve around and fail or not fail in the presentation of a word-action/idea-action. That does not imply that theory should be avoided completely—only, that to solidify a poem around a particular conceptual framework is near impossible, and poetry is better off keeping this in mind. Charles Bernstein's poem “thinking I think I think,” from his collection With Strings, does a wonderful job of engaging in this self-questioning multiplicity directly in regard to the word ‘aesthetic.’ Take the lines:

What are aesthetic values and why do
there appear to be lesser & fewer of
them? Quick: define the difference
between arpeggio & Armani. The baby
cries because the baby likes crying.
The baby cries because a pin is
sticking into the baby. The baby
is not crying but it is called
crying…

Enjambment and the resulting half-meanings are more prominent in this poem than are the originating sentences themselves. In fact, so much so that it was hard to choose the point at which to stop quoting—the poem works like a mechanism that clicks and turns at each line break. One can sparse each line into a thorough meaning. It makes the poem a mental delight to read. Here, I want to focus on the first few lines of the above quote for my purposes. “What are aesthetic values and why do” applies the word “aesthetic” to action (all words are actions), and then through the next line “there appear to be lesser & fewer of” implicates the traditional “aesthetic” with a productive/generative imagination. “There” becomes a general place that is appearing less frequently, and a place which connects to the half-meaning produced definite pronoun “them?” (it is ironic, here, that a definite pronoun has a question mark). The line “them? Quick: define the difference” has three apparent meanings (and possibly even more): first, it applies a quickness (acceleration) to the other (or “them?”) through the question mark which creates a strange interconnection between the two. That syntactic block as a whole, “them? Quick,” is then applied to “define the difference” which likely is referent to Derrida’s dual meaning wordplay on that very word, which, in short, implicates a holism in the space between sign-meanings; second, the line creates a tension between itself and the whitespace past it—is there a difference between “I” and “them?”; third, this line’s meaning runs down into the half-meaning of the next line declaring that the defining space “between [the words] arpeggio & Armani” (which have sound alignment on their first-consonant) as a delicate thing full of potential: “The baby.”

Like I said, there are probably even more possibilities of meaning one can stretch out of this (as well as the original sentence meanings)—but that is just it, what is most interesting here, is the possibility of infinity within the finite and, in turn, the opposite. The word “aesthetic” is engaged as a question and not a solidity, and this ties to the point I made about poetry and the theoretical—poetry need not be confined in the ways prose often needs be, as the poems tends to fail at directly stating its theoretical purposes. Yet, here it is taken even further—as a way to crack open an idea into multiple meanings. This infinite and the finite tension of each line (or syntactical phrase, prose poetry is also very capable) ties back to the nature of the dictionary—a physical object with obvious limits, yet, an object that is internally, endlessly self-referential. This also reminds me of Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse:”

It is true, what the master says he picked up from Confusion: all the thots men are capable of can be entered on the back of a postage stamp. So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?

The specific word choice of ‘PLAY’ may be off-putting to some, but it is the function of challenging the status quo within the scope of the finite. For the human life is as temporally finite as the dictionary is objectively. Bernstein’s baby, here, “…cries because a pin is/ sticking into the baby. The baby.” The baby sticks into itself in an internal recurrence—the tension between the finite and the infinite placed into the temporal meaning of a life. The amount we press against the leveling deadness with a miniscule bit of infinitude becomes our myth-meanings, but always within that backdrop of finite sameness. There is no metaphysic to that sameness, it is just the line of meaning that draws our chaotic, often untold (/untellable), narratives together.

Existence and thought become coextensive within discourse. Existence is finite and thought is infinite. There is a contemporary truth at that point in the Phaedrus where Socrates points out the etymological similarity between the word ‘prophecy’ and the word ‘madness.’ The prophetic is that inkling within discourse which always looks forward, and to look forward into an infinite scope of possibilities is to invoke a madness in the face of the finite.

The highly contrived list of wonder that is Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, is a great example of madness in the finite (a poem we ‘grown’ poets don’t seem to spend enough time talking about, given its influence, as we are caught up in the pedantry of our Pound fetishes… though, no doubt, Pound is a wonder-full fetish). The title itself is evocative—for what is a howl coming from human lips but a mad cry both against and within language. Within the screach of the howl, the poem in its pressing together of words, explicitly culturally ‘high’ and ‘low’ words, utters its cry. Its a poem you can’t stop reading as the rhythm draws you on through and onto line after line—and, as such, is a singular howl (the first section, at least). It references Blake and finds the religious (the prophetic) in the smallest aspects of the everyday. Howl is a poem brimming over with so little.

Speaking of Blake (who, quite poignantly, was considered a madman for half a century after his death), I was recently thinking about the small poem “The Clod and the Pebble” as the snow began to melt the other week, and what showed up was sticky Wisconsin farm clay (do to the fact that our driveway needs another layer of gravel). Honestly, we should start a “Tuskegee” type institute and have poets build structures from scratch by making bricks from the clay on the property. I like to imagine the possibility anyway. Lisa Fishman’s Orfordville farm comes to mind—what a wonderful poet, and what a wonderful idea. Though, I doubt they have the clay problems we have here being down in the southern part of the state. Anyway, returning to Blake’s poem:

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

This is particularly poignant on the backdrop of the Phaedrus—it is the division between the two versions of love (the capricious sort, and the ‘mad’ prophetic sort). But it is also an apt demonstration of how the finite and infinite can be applied to perception (or the ‘subject,’ if we choose to refer via stale, philosophically out-moded language) and perceptions interaction with its world. The infinite expanse of the clay clod who loves out into the world, and the pebble who loves into the finite—these are two sides of the same coin. A coin on one side “builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” and on the other, “builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

So, where does the Platypus (as a subverting element) come into this? I think, at the point where the finite and infinite meet—a myth that binds the infinite into a finite context. That holistic wire that is hard to balance on as feet trod forth in the dirt. Yet, in the standard language that assumes the stagnated theoretical, it is OKAY that the platypus (by their very genetic composition) takes a different stand on truth—they’re platypuses (or poets, or artists), that’s what they do. As long as that myth making remains relegated to an obscurity it remains ineffective and irrelevant. Here is where the question of poetic relevance rests!

To avoid taking any hard stance on contemporary poetry that makes this discussion divisive between experimental and traditional camps, I will make my example of bad poetry Shel Silverstein (though, I do very much enjoy reading his poems to my younger relatives with much hyperbole: “You'll see catsandratsandelephants, but sure as you're born/ You're never gonna see no Unicorn[!!!!]”) When I read his poetry to myself I often die in the same way I die watching vh1 (though, not always, as some of it contains personally referenced meanings, as does vh1 from time to time… well, rarely). Poetry shouldn’t make the present die. If poetry has any relevance it is in that.

On MFA Rankings

2009-11-01T15:13:00.001-08:00

I am applying (again) to MFA (poetry) and PHD/MA (theory) programs this fall (I attended Colorado State’s MFA program for a semester several years ago), so, I thought I might chime in on this rankings debate. It seems to be a bit out of control and I found some of the comments on BOTH sides to be rather distasteful. Though, I do feel a certain interest in the debate as I go about putting together applications. Rankings _ARE_ interesting and important to those teaching in MFA programs as well as to those applying to them. In fact, the lack of rankings and useful information on the theory end of my applications likely means that I probably missed several schools I would have loved to apply to. I do read a lot of contemporary theory, I suppose, so I did have a decent idea… but if not for preexisting knowledge in regards to this area, it would have been much harder to find programs to apply to. I would have been limited to a few rather cursory and useless lists. The US News list of theory programs is completely useless. There are a couple other lists floating around that are more helpful but they are FAR from complete. There is nothing like Seth’s rankings available in terms of programs that favor theory. There is a philosophy ranking to this end… the philosophical gourmet report breaks down rankings into specialties but this does not extend into English programs that favor theory. There is nothing that breaks down funding and selectivity. It is a shame, really.

[Aside: I’ve had a few exchanges with Seth Abramson in the past and while we don’t agree on much ‘conceptually’ or ‘aesthetically’ (well, we are fond of many of the same poets… except out of the middle ground I lean more towards the post-avant side of things) I think most of his rankings have the right thing in mind. Not because they are rankings per se--they have the right thing in mind because they are filled with useful information.]

The two primary aspects of the rankings that I found the most useful were the selectivity and funding. I think Seth is right to privilege funding. If I can’t go to graduate school with a relative level of funding, I might as well return to truck driving. The selectivity ranking helped me to check my list and make sure that I didn’t only apply (on accident) to schools that only accept some minuscule percentage of their overall application pool.

In terms of the MFA applications, my first and foremost concern in creating my list was the faculty. Which poets I know and enjoy are teaching in MFA programs? Who do I think would be exciting to learn from? And so on. I then factored things in like teaching opportunities and literary journals. I then cross-checked this list with the information Seth compiled on rankings and selectivity to make sure I had a solid and diverse list. By looking up some of the programs on the list, I even found a school where I was extremely fond of several books of poetry by the faculty that I for some reason managed to overlook. This process also led me to read poems by poets I wouldn’t have bothered to look at and to order several collections. I even found a couple of poets who publish in journals and presses that I don’t keep up with, which legitimately excite me from what I’ve read so far. Aspects of the rankings are useful. (And until someone else comes along and creates something new and more comprehensive) I think we need to take them for what they are.

That said, it should be okay to criticize them. I definitely think some of the points made against the rankings are legitimate. This debate shouldn’t have turned into a shouting match.

Knowing which schools provide funding is important. Having an idea of how hard each program is to get into is also very useful. The AWP is a wonderful organization but their information on MFA programs is dreadfully inadequate. The criticism they leveled, to me, seemed rather moot—if they decide to step up and create a more widely available (and actually useful) collection of data, more power to them. I hope they do. Or, I hope someone does. It doesn’t make sense to lump low-res programs with regular programs—there is rarely significant overlap between the two types of programs in terms of applications aside from local oriented applications by people who can only afford to move so far way from a certain location. From everything I have read, the 13,000 figure is probably the total number of applications. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems more logical to me, since most everyone seems to throw an application at Iowa. Iowa only gets 1300-1500 applications per year. If many applicants apply to several schools (many applying to upwards of 10) then that would put the figure around 13,000, I think.

And, it is right to worry about the fact that the reputation ranking is based on polled students. Ignoring the fact that the poll was done on Seth’s blog (and on the PW forums as well I believe, though I’m not sure), I think that students don’t know enough about schools to make a judgment about their reputations. Faculty and current/past MFA students would be better fit to make judgments like this. This is how the philosophical gourmet creates its reputation based list. I do like that Seth mixes reputation with factors like funding and selectivity. I do like that the student has a voice in the rankings—it is a good way to counteract favoritism. That said, a reputation ranking IS needed. I also know that a lot of students would like information on GRE scores and GPA (as some schools privilege this more than others, or require a certain GRE/GPA for funding)—this isn’t something that should factor into rankings, mind you. Based on what I have read, some schools don’t even look at this information at all.

From personal experience I think that a ranking system based on which schools students are applying to the most is troublesome and I think someone needs to compile and updated reputation ranking based on faculty, current students and graduates. What the applicants have to say does have its place as it gives following applicants a sense of what students in previous years discovered in their application efforts. Yet, the students applying, generally, don’t know enough about the contemporary poetry landscape. Hell, I read a lot of poetry nowadays, and I don’t even feel capable of giving and informed ‘vote.’

Mind you, I can only speak to the poetry side of the debate as my knowledge of contemporary fiction is limited (especially in terms of how it extends into the academy)... but some of the lists students compile are strange to me. There are lists of schools put together by students that I find completely confusing and cannot see how they could possibly be interested in both school ‘A’ and school ‘B.’ Well, I do see why, but not in terms of students creating informed lists of schools that jive with their interests/styles. Both school ‘A’ and school ‘B’ are ranked high and have good funding. There are some schools I know I have little chance of being accepted at simply by reading poetry by the faculty (or through a preexisting familiarity them). Further, there are some schools that I am fairly sure I have no interest in aside from having time to write and study. It is good to know which schools have faculty that excite you, or, at least, faculty that might be willing to work with your particular style (it will save a lot of application fees, at least).

That said, it is hard to expect this from you average MFA applicant. Given the wide extent and availability of quality education, I’d suppose there are plenty of blossoming poetry students in all sorts of nooks and crannies who have little knowledge of the poetry community at large. These students are going to apply based almost solely on rankings and online word of mouth. This is what I did when applying a few years ago with an education from a small-upstart-public-liberal-arts-college. There were no poetry readings on campus. My contemporary poetry knowledge was limited to whatever random books I scooped up at Barnes & Nobel. Mind you, there were no poetry readings on campus. I made due with what I, seemingly, had. So, I can see why I students put together lists directly taken from Seth’s rankings (almost randomly). I did a similar thing using forum and live journal posts last time I applied.

I can also see why certain programs fear/dislike these rankings for the wrong reasons. If you have bad funding poor selectivity, though, I think it is fair. That said, the reputation side of the rankings is a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy as students apply to the highest ranked programs on the list over and over again. Schools with horrible funding are surely likely to fall in rank (as I think was the case with Columbia and a few other schools)... but those schools with decent funding are never going to be judged reputation wise by anything but the whims of students who, proximally and for the most part, don’t know what they are getting into.

I also don’t like the fact that this ranking isn’t willing to submit query letters around to schools to get up to date information. Any fully and professional effort would do this, if schools choose not to reply (as many seem unwilling to do) that is their prerogative. I know there are some schools (Rice I believe) that opt out of participating in the US News undergraduate rankings, that doesn’t stop them from contacting all of the other schools that do want to contribute (though, I suppose there is a lot more money to be made here, so they can fund such an effort). I already brought this up with Seth somewhere on his blog, mind you.

Anyway, the information that is in P&W is worthwhile, though it does have some obvious flaws. I’m glad it exists. Better than having piles of students applying randomly to schools that will put them horribly in debt.

[Now, a list of suggestions:]

1. Send a reputation query to all schools to be distributed to all faculty to let them pick the schools other than their own in descending order that they like. Or, something to this relative end.

2. Send query letters to schools asking for general up-to-date information.

3. Create some special rankings created by panels of faculty for different types of poetry (Post-Avant, Experimental, Hybrid, Native American, and so on and so forth).

4. Query schools for faculty statements about things like teaching method and the faculties favorite poets/influences [I think this would be wonderfully helpful to many applicants: if they don’t know much about the contemporary landscape at least they can find someone who jives with the same varieties of poetry that they are familiar with.]

5. Have information about average GRE/GPA available (not in ranking format). This could be troublesome though--someone is likely to go ahead and rank it anyway online. Still, I think the information would be valuable.

My goal here is to be productive, not to cause trouble.

So Wonder/full:

2009-10-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

~

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme

~

First Snow of the Year

2009-10-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

"hands clap/ invoking warmth/ beating time to/ a slow snow." -Cid Corman

Obama

2009-10-09T19:16:00.001-07:00

There is something completely suburban (and implicitly imperialist) in the criticism of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. It is extremely inconvenient in terms of the in-house political debate, as the same blatantly racist tendencies that bring firearms to presidential meetings are going to jump on this like it is going out of style. Yet, those who are so quick to question it really do fail to understand what a symbol of hope Obama is to our world (of people of mostly darker skin tones). After hundreds of years of racist military imperialism (followed by another 50 or so years of oppressive racist capitalist hegemony) a brown skinned brother is the leader of the free world. It is astonishingly wonderful.

In the Favela’s in Brazil… In the slums outside of Cape Town, South Africa… In all the brown skinned places of the world they can now scratch “Obama” on the wall next to the likes of “Tupac” and “Jay-Z.”

Act with Tech

2009-10-07T16:46:00.000-07:00

The following thoughts are fragmentary and train of thought. That is how they were written. They have not been edited (yes, ‘I’ often write/think/text in parenthetically… a sort of flesh like variegation, maybe… maybe my flesh hasn’t yet figured out the bracket…).

There is so much upheaval about where we are and what label we should put on the current modes of going on the forefront of the poetic. This is usually referred to as ‘discourse’ and that ‘discourse’ is then posited as having moved somehow into the post-post-modern period. To be a bit ironical—“po po mo,” to my body (that flesh that is always already my own), sounds like more police. It is also said that we have moved back to (regressed maybe? not being sure what those who posit this mean…) what they call “modernist tendencies.” I often wonder how much of a conceptual revolution has/can take place after Nietzsche. That seems like the re/volution—ever since, we’ve been inflecting on it. Husserl (who I haven’t read enough of), Heidegger, and the whole series of students they influenced them inflect upon his destruction of both the self and metaphysics. The ‘NEW’ as it goes is an always already.

How we interact with technology and the sort of objective mindsets that allow for the technocratic state (since it is the most powerful narrative controlling out systems of meaning) seems like the largest question of our time (still!), as it inflects on how we treat other parts of the world and if we how we live (deeply into our ecology?)… STILL, most of the arguments in this realm are rather reductive. Academics feel comfortable in the rhetorical structures of a two camp system—a division that is as uninteresting as it is meaningless. Each camp has its variety of inflections and different theoretical bases—they are all boringly in the comfort of their place as a part of whichever camp they fall into. This is NOT a musing in and about a third way or a middle ground, but simply a call for complex and joyous interaction within living (free from easy answers).

Take my fruit juicer—it is marketed on the television in strange ways that remind me very much of ‘infomercial’ products. It seems like a disposable product that one just HAS to have based on the mystique created by the consumerist directed myth that surrounds it. One gets it, and then the myth wears off when one realizes that there is actually quite a bit of work involved in actually juicing piles of fruit and then cleaning up the rather out of control mess that the machine creates (despite advertising the opposite). There is no instant gratification (aside from grinding out random whole fruits, which is both exciting and relaxing at the same time in a strange way).

This is why the machine gets stuffed into a closet/cupboard and becomes a totally wasteful piece of the consumerist/technocratic narrative—a boring and useless appurtenance that has little to nothing to do with what the living body actually cares about. Indeed, left in the cupboard the technology is little else.

When ‘I’ take that technology out of the cupboard and use it for the sake of some greater care, it then begins to have deeper and more complex relevance. The fresh organic garden vegetables grind and juice become part of my flesh as I ingest them, and they are out of the soil I worked, and extend out in significance to the relationship I have with my local, national, and international community. The technology was in this case (as I am able to enjoy the products of my local environment more fully, without negatively affecting outside of it) have been appropriated for the sake of a ‘care.’ That care then inflects within my comportment to the world. The juicer no longer grinds up vegetables that have been turned into a sort of organic “vitamin water,” the act of grinding the vegetables becomes something sumptuous… the ‘flesh-y’ of the tomatoes shows forth. There is something ‘dirt’ about the tomatoes/carrots/flesh. By dirt, the dirt as something going; something lived.

This lived flesh is quite a different thing from the technological thing that the juicer is when I see it simply as some stale object that dissects the tomatoes and extracts nutritional facts and ingredient lists. The care allows this. It is a much harder thing to care out into something like the political landscape without relying on trite concepts like ‘human nature’ (which is the sort of totally boring rhetoric that is often defaulted to), but to care out into that is an interesting complexity that is a challenge like no other (no other thing that one can care about). Though, it is not proper to simply still call it ‘the political,’ it is better to move to call it something more like ‘community.’

Forward Directed and Prophetic

2009-09-26T13:18:00.001-07:00

A while back (see a few posts below, since I haven’t been keeping up on posting…), I posted a collection of quotes from contemporary poets, and the mass of ‘guilt’ they have collected in regards to what is expected of them.

I think this guilt is a rather ubiquitous socio-cultural trend, and, a troublesome one at that. It is a way of going that is completely devoid of joy, and it is a way of going that attempts to still the going in an abstract flesh clot of morality.

The reader’s typical and expected response here is ‘Why not morality?’—and, indeed, our legal system and our discourse we abstractly refer to as the social contract necessitates our thinking in this way. Every revolution of thought that has taken place in the last half of the 20th century should give us an inkling of another direction (at least in the Anglo-American tradition of theory; not to say that such thoughts were not already prevalent on the European continent, and it some literature… as well as Asia, though, dealing with all the hubbub of cross cultural discourse is a whole notha’ bag of cheat-toes).

‘care’ is fundamentally different than MORALITY, though, MORALITY may be founded on ‘care’ on some level. Not a big revelation, but I had an experience recently (which I don’t feel like ranting off here, mind you) that necessitated my need to rant off a couple of paragraphs of text to this end.

Joyous care does not attempt to stop or turn back the abstract clock… it is forward directed and prophetic. It is not an overlay. It IS flesh.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

2009-09-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite late-20th century artists; check out the vid...

The reason I'm posting this is because I just watched "Downtown 81" ...a wonderful film, if a bit raw; but that would fit his style.

Iran

2009-06-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

I won't post a series of links, as they are circulating everywhere online. I do think that it is important to post this particular video, though, as is shows the often horrific costs that are undertaken for the sake of freedoms we so often take for granted (also, the video is being censored from many sites because of how shocking it is):

A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a Basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight [at] her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim's chest, and she died in less than two minutes. The protests were going on about one kilometer[] away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gas used among them, towards Salehi Street. The film [was] shot by my friend who was standing beside me. Please let the world know.

SEE THE VIDEO HERE
(warning: it is VERY graphic)

Something powerful and important is happening in Iran, presently.

'Auteur' Kanye West Deconstructs Celebrity

2009-05-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Being of B/itch (an incomplete reading of the word in hip hop 'poetics')

2009-05-06T12:07:00.000-07:00

The Story of English by McCrum (which I read just recently; it leans a bit more towards being a popular history of the English language, but in doing so, ends up being a hell of a lot more readable than some of the alternatives I have encountered) ends its chapter on the appropriation of Black speech styles into the overall language with a Whitman quote that posits that English is not “an abstract construction of dictionary makers” but a language that has a “basis broad and low, close to the ground”. The chapter, at its end, also emphasizes the oral aspect urban hip hop culture. The text associates this modern tradition with the mnemonic oral tradition of epic poetry, specifically, by referring to a skilled freestyle MC as a “ghetto homer” . However, the texture of the orally presented language produced by rapping is quite different—it has an apparent relation to the written text by being produced within a generally literate society. It would be false to call the culture either oral or literate, and it may be said that the existence of a functionally oral medium within a generally literate society subverts the very division between orality and literacy. Indeed, if this is extended to the practice of the language, the punning and figurative language used in the creative medium of rapping seems to point to a dwelling in an in between of meaning, and this, in turn, extends to the words used by those evoking the creative style of the culture. Beyond simply a tradition of orality transplanted from African traditions, the oral styles of hip hop are created within a culture that is very much aware of the written word. Being capable of both orality and literacy, and being a part of a cultural other (the African-American sub-culture) the language is in a special creative place. What I am interested in, here, is a brief exploration of what effects this oral creativity has on what the French feminist theorist Helen Cixous refers to as the stagnated “phallocentric system,” and how that is enacted through the use of the word “bitch” in modern urban language.

The word “bitch” is used with a general idea of its etymological origins; most people who use the word, if asked, seem to be aware that it came from a slang used to refer to female dogs. Of course, its meaning has expanded out from there. There are currently four meanings listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1.the female of the dog or some other carnivorous mammals

2.a: a lewd or immoral woman b: a malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman —sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse

3.something that is extremely difficult, objectionable, or unpleasant

4.complaint.

Given the generally negative connotation that is ascribed to the word by the dictionary, there is no question that this is a term that finds its origins in a male perspective. And, there is no question that this negative misogynistic usage is present in the language of hip hop artists. Jay-Z, one of the genre's most highly regarded lyricists (who is subversive in his own right) is capable of appropriating the term in quite offensive connotations. In his single “Big Pimpin’” he laid out the general mindset of objectification that embodies much of the use of the work 'bitch' in male dominated hip hop. The lyrics state, “you know I thug ’em, fuck ’em, love ’em, leave ’em/’cause I don’t fuckin’ need ’em,” and then that extended into, “me give my heart to a woman?/not for nothin’—never happen/I’ll be forever mackin’/heart cold as assassins, I got no passion.” This was followed by a single on The Black Album titled “99 problems,” the chorus being, “If you havin' girl problems, I feel bad for you son/ I got 99 problems, a bitch ain't one.” This is then structured within the traditional definitions of womanhood as defined by the didactic division between the “loving mother” or the “seductress.” Jay-Z lays out the specificities of his own division in his song “Bitches and Sisters:”

Sisters get respect, Bitches get what they deserve,

Sisters work hard, Bitches work your nerves,

Sisters hold you down, Bitches hold you up,

Sisters help you progress, Bitches'll slow you up,

Sisters cook up a meal play they role with the kidz,

Bitches in the street with they nose in ya biz,

Sisters tell the truth, Bitches tell lies,

Sisters drive cars, Bitches wanna ride

...and so on and so forth. These are the same presentations of womanhood presented in the traditional Hollywood narratives from the 'age of censorship,' which seems to imply a level of appropriation (and possibly amplification) of the same structures presented to the general public. Even after being married to Beyoncé Knowles and declaring to a packed Madison Square Garden that he can tell the difference between a “B and a Bitch,”Jay-Z still is inhabiting the same traditional dichotomy of female representation. Yet, given the prophet like status someone of Jay-Z holds in urban youth culture this was noted to be a progressive step. As hip hop journalist Kris Ex points out: “However you slice it, Jay sacrificed himself for love. He realized that Jay-Z without objectification of women is like 50 Cent embracing Buddhism or a happy Fiona Apple.”.

It is interesting to point out that the language and use of wording in his own lyrics had already been subverting and re-appropriating the definition of the objectified “bitch” prior to his own clarified realization of its failings. One of the most critically acclaimed hip hop albums of all time is Illmatic by Nas. It lays out one of the most sampled and modified lyrics in the history of hip hop in one of its most popular and memorable tracks “Life's a Bitch”—those lyrics being, “life's a bitch and then you die, that's why we puff lye/ cause you never know when you're gonna go.” To limit the colloquialism “life's a bitch” to the lived part of life, specifically, is an interesting and creative move. It associates the world with a femininity and a textuality while simultaneously referring to how hard life had become in urban ghettos after the Reagen years and the crack epidemic. To “puff lye” not only refers to the temporary escapism of drug use, but also refers to the culture's textual meanings that supposedly burn away at the lungs if inhaled. It seems to refer to the necessity of living in a subversive style while dealing with the hegemonic meta-narrative of a white male dominated capitalism.

Jay-Z sampled this lyric into his debut album Reasonable Doubt with the lyric, “on my back the fliest clothes lookin ill and shit/ transactions illegitimate cause life is still a bitch/ and then you die, but for now, life, close your eyes and feel this dick” (from “Feelin' it”). In this case, the word “bitch” is associated with something for a phallocentric egotism to press against (both figuratively and literally), and, in that, it doesn't seem to point to a poetic that undermines stagnated forms, yet, that would be somewhat of a misreading of the cultural complexity of the statement. As Cornel West points out, in reference to the flipped meaning of words like “bad,” that “[bad] is good not simply because it subverts the language of the dominant white culture, but also because it imposes a unique kind of order for young black men on their own distinctive chaos and solicits attention that makes others pull back in trepidation” and “this young black male style is a form of self-identification and resistance to a hostile culture.” A tension exists between the patriarchal masculinity of the positioning that is implied by the word “bitch,” while, at the same time, the metaphoric content of the idea subverts the norm—as Cixous states that “...writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death.” Admittedly, this change of word use among male rap artists is a vertical one—the positive change of meaning presses against the already extant, totally negative, connotations of the word within the same peoples who use the word generally in such stagnated ways.

Though, there are also, among female rap artists, examples of the word 'bitch' being taken up in a positive reaffirmation of sexuality in reaction to the objectification of the female body presented within the media of the culture. It is an interesting and important move given the level to which the negative stereotype becomes an internalization. Lupe Fiasco (a male artist) illustrates how the lyrics reestablish hurtful norms in the song “Hurt Me Soul” with the lyrics:

I used to hate hip-hop, yup, because the women degraded

but 'Too $hort' made me laugh, like a hypocrite I played it

a hypocrite I stated, though I only recited half

omitting the word “bitch,” cursing, I wouldn’t say it

me and dog couldn’t relate till the bitch I dated

forgive my favorite word for hers and hers alike

but I learnt it from a song I heard and sorta liked.

This internalization of the word, and the meaning the word carries, is also carried by female members of the culture. Yet, the African-American female, and particularly the female rap artists, is directly confronted with some of the most directly demeaning images in our culture—the paradigm of the hip hop video vixen, which has now extended directly into the genre of pornography with efforts by rappers like Snoop Dog and Nelly who rap on home entertainment videos intended for adult audiences. Undermining this trend, someone like Lil' Kim, for self-empowerment, chooses to become a self-identified “Queen B,” and, in doing so, she neither subjects herself to the Victorian/suburban standard of the sexually repressed housewife (or the subservient “sister”), or gives in to letting the objectifying culture control the specifics of what it means to be authentic. As Syracuse University professor Greg Thomas puts it, Lil' Kim, ““Big Momma Queen B***h,” overturns male domination, lyrically, and rigid, homophobic gender identity on record—way more effectively than any elite Women’s or Gay & Lesbian Studies program in academia. Her whole system of rhymes radically redistributes power, pleasure and privilege, always doing the unthinkable, embracing sexuality on her kind of terms.”

The same redefinition of the word “bitch” can be found among numerous other female rap artists (Eve, Missy Eliot, Jean Grae, Remy Ma, and so on)—it seems to be another interesting and powerful example of how the language creativity of African-American pop culture lingo has been used to fight aspects of normative oppression. The direct use of the word by females can be directly empowering, and the use of the word by males within the male dominated form can go great lengths to show how wordplay undermines static theories. In the words of Kanye West, “life is a [bitch], depenin' how you dress her/so if the devil wear prada, adam eve wear nada/ I'm in between but way more fresher” (from song “Can't Tell Me Nothing”).

throw your L up and blast that shit if you're feelin' it

2009-04-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

Watching 60 minutes today, I saw a special on how gun sales are up in reaction to the Obama administration and people's ill founded fears about losing their second amendment rights.

That being said, I think we need more poems about guns. They can be ironic, or not, though I tend to think that all poems about guns have a certain inherent irony. There might be something peace-time bourgeoisie about that, since there are lots of wartime poems that make references to guns, but I still think all poems about guns are on some level ironic. Words can be like guns (in the broad sense, a technology that kills people), but, really, poems are too tame and marginal for that. Poems are like those rubberized slingshots that kids try to kill little birds with—more often than not, unsuccessfully.

O, Happy Day

2009-01-20T18:39:00.001-08:00

Some Initial Ramblings on Surface and Structure

2009-01-17T16:45:00.001-08:00

As I put the prime coat of paint on my room today, lost in the monotony of the painting action, I began to think that the distinction between “surface effects” and “structure,” within poetry (and maybe even language as a whole) makes no damn sense. I suppose there is an element of urbanity, an the inability to acknowledge the effort that went into constructing something implicit within the supposition (one is lost in the surface while one, I’d suppose, sips on a cup of homogenized teat milk with an almost unnoticeable hint of coffee, and then proceeds to some new age yoga class to hear about the transcendental light flowing through your being; zen-it-out!). Yet even this malfunction of being/ generally unaware, cannot give credence to some ‘structure’ that underlies a pseudo surface (If one denies the structure, then my marble gentiles faux painted? Honestly, I hope so—how troublesome it would be for me if they were made of actual marble.).

There is an understanding that comes with building something: a care that comes. The actual lived space is not degraded by the surface, and, often the surface can be essential to the structure. That is what I think can be gleaned from any idea of structure. And some of the more radical approaches to form, in poetry, tend down this road.

In the contemporary mode of building (and I would suppose in most wood construction) the outside shell and siding contribute to the integrity of the whole as much as the ‘structure’ of the framing itself—the plywood provides stability for the frame, and the siding protects the plywood from hitting the elements. On the inside of the house, the sheet rock and plastering go a long way to help with sealing in the structure for insulation purposes. And, you can trust that the siding and sheetrock are much, or more, work to add to a house than the framing and trusses and roof. Plus, once the house is together, life centers much more around the furniture and the like; the actual structure tends to fade into the background. This isn’t a bad thing, the only point where it becomes possibly troublesome is when appurtenances fail, and the structure stands out to perception. If one has no knowledge of how to deal with the structure, then one is left at its mercy. But is our ability to deal with this not at the very heart of community and care—if you are unable to deal with something on your own, you are able to look for others for help. I would agree that there needs to be a counter balance to hyper-specialization, yet expert knowledge, no doubt, has a place.

Of course my argument here tends to a strange blending of the physical and the linguistic—but that is what I always tend toward, because I tend to think of words as physical active things.

We should notice that the whole damn thing is part of our being: language and the physical. And given that, I find it strange that someone could posit that language poetry is limited to surface effects—it just seems like an impossible proposition to me. In opposition to that, I would say that the poetry lives a structure that is already implied. It is neat (and important) to think that the page and the text are infinitely confining formally already (and the opposite, too).

HERE COMES EVERYBODY

2009-01-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

I decided to post my responses to HERE COMES EVERYBODY. I already completed one of these survey things before, and, honestly, I was tired of it before I finished. But, comparing the vast number of responses people made to question number 6 sparked my interest again, so, I thought I'd keep up with my 'answering these things without being asked.'

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey stands out. It is the first poem, aside from childhood rhymes, that I kept reading and thinking about well past my first introduction to it. I still think about it from time to time while doing other things. Allen Ginsberg's Howl also stands out for me in the same way.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I like to read comics and Japanese manga. I also click on the celebrity news quite a bit when I am online. I have no particular reason for reading either aside from enjoying them capriciously.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I am generally reading or thinking about some philosophical text or another. So, it tends to filter into my writing.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I like German romantic poetry. And Russian novels. Paul Celan also stands out. And I do want to read more contemporary continental poetry; what I have read makes me want to seek out more.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

It seems I am always working on a collected works, as well as a few contemporary collections. In terms of my own poetry, it is no more important than any of the other media I interact with.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I don't see why they should assume anything. I have reasons why I read things; why things are excluded, rests on my finite possibility and the choices I make within it.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem treats words like moving objects, and poetry is like the game hungry hungry hippos.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I like Walt Whitman's effort. The poet is always already failing at that.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Curd

Chiseled**Tenon

I**Eye

Of**Presence

Form**Phallic

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I see no distinction between body and world, or, in turn, body and text. In my writing I tend to deal with the body in terms of how it interplays with and against subjectivity; though not always. When I write I also like to use the eraser on my mechanical pencil to retrieve the wax from my ear.

Cold Wave

2009-01-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

The sun seems such an apparent thing in Florida, yet, I think right now, here in Wisconsin, is when I notice it the most. There is a huge difference between -20 (down to -40 with wind chill) and a few degrees above zero. I can actually stand to go outside. A senior in Duluth went outside, fell down, and froze to death in less than a half hour; there have also been numerous cases of frost bite. It seems like we ride such a thin line of acceptable temperatures. Today is one of those days where you notice how lucky the world is to be able to sustain life.

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.

--William Carlos Williams

The Guilt of Poets as Readers

2009-01-15T10:28:00.001-08:00

In a continuation of my previous thoughts about Silliman’s ideas of cannon, all of these quotes are taken from Here Comes Everybody question number 6 (What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you've read but haven't? Why haven't you?). The answers generally appear as a constellation of ‘ill-automatic’ guilt. One should read thought-provoking writing with joy (be it tragic or not) and nothing less (And I do think that it is possible to have a joy for the search of truth, even if it can be a bit existentially misguided, that is, if it is an objective truth). I bolded a few quotes, or parts of quotes, that I believe ventured a bit left from what seems to be the unsavory normality.

“I've never read THE PRELUDE. I try to, almost every year. Can't get past page 1.”

“Maybe it would be assumed that I’ve read Milton or whoever that guy was who wrote The Faery Queen. I also haven’t read Lord Byron.

I didn’t have to take any pre-Romantic period English classes in college, and was not interested enough to go out of my way to do so. I was plenty taken with the Romantics and the Moderns. Then I took a class wherein we read Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley and Ron Padgett and that was just more interesting to me. And from what I can tell without actually reading a complete poem of his, Lord Byron is all in the mystique.”

“I guess, most glaring in my mind, when I think about the ways I feel my reading is so inadequate as to make opening my mouth a bit questionable, would be not reading either Hegel or Kant.

Why haven’t I? My pace through philosophy is about 10 pages an hour, with, you know, a 10% comprehension rate. Well, maybe not that low—but you get the picture. So, for the past few years I read one philosopher throughout the summer—and I choose by bliss more than duty. But I’ll get there—before senility, I hope.”

“I've only read a few Sharon Olds poems. Even though my poetry could probably be called "post-confessional," I've always spent a lot more energy reading writers such as Barrett Watten and Marjorie Perloff. I don't read in order to reinforce what I already know.”

“Wittgenstein. I may read him someday, but not this summer. And my colleagues keep embarrassing me by going on and on about all the 17th century verse they love but I haven't read since I was in college in the 70s. I nod my head sagely. I really love American poetry. Unapologetically!”

“I cannot read (Moncrieff’s) Proust. I need to get the Davis translation. I’m also unable to read Ulysses.”

“Like "Paradise Lost" by Milton. I did read a few lines when I was younger. I don't know about the "Why Haven't You?" part of the question, though. It's not like I don't keep busy. Look, I'm just now reading Evelyn Waugh. He's intensely pleasurable. I'll try to get to everything, honest.”

“There are many poets who I have a superficial sense of that I want to explore. Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer are two. I haven’t read Olson’s Maximus yet, though I’ve been obsessed with him for the last six months or so. I want to walk into that poem fully armed so I’m trying to read everything else first (almost there), then tackle the big ugly beast.”

“That’s probably a long list, but let’s say…The Secret Gospel of Thomas. I don’t know why I haven’t read it. I will read it. Life is long.”

“Coming to poetry outside of any formal academic training—in creative writing or in literature—has its advantages. The chief disadvantages are (1) the amount of time it takes to jump certain technical hurdles in the early going and (2) the shocking gaps in one’s reading. Two or three times a year I consciously focus on a poet whose work I have never read—beyond, perhaps, the ubiquitous anthology pieces—and spend a few weeks immersed in his or her works. Recent choices have included Frost, Neruda, and Max Jacob. Next up: Marianne Moore, John Clare, Vallejo, Montale.”

“No idea. I don't think anyone is thinking about what I've read. And while I've always indulged the vice of reading obscure curiosities before classics, I've read my share of the latter as well--though never a word, I have to admit, of Rabelais or Tolstoy. Let alone the Maximus Poems.”

“Chaucer, Pound’s Cantos, Blake’s Jerusalem in full . . . time, timing, possibly a sense of waiting, possibly inclination.”

“There are a lot of things I feel I am directly influenced by yet have only read glimpses of - much of Stein's work is so powerful you only need a sidelong glance, a homeopathic dose to send you on your way.”

“I’ve read in many, many books. But people might be surprised by how few I’ve actually finished. There must be nearly a thousand books on the wall behind me in my study, and I’ve read in nearly all of them. But except for some of the novels, I’ve read barely any of them cover to cover. When I was a kid reading fiction for escape, I’d bury myself in a book until it was finished (usually a matter of hours), then go on to the next one. Now that I’m trying to get more out of reading than sheer distraction, I read more slowly and haphazardly. It takes a lot of discipline for me to read all the way through something. Right now, for example, I’m reading The Cantos and writing about the experience on my blog. The reading and the writing help sustain each other. But mostly I’ve found that I don’t need to finish a book for it to be useful; I guess you’d have to call me a literary pragmatist. Which doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty about not finishing what I’ve started.”

“A lot a lot a lot of stuff, I'm sure. There are 119,000,000 items in the Library of Congress. Something always to look forward to.”

“Shakespeare, I have read some but not allot I just find it boring I would rather read Cervantes or Dante or other Renaissance writing I find English writing in general and Shakespeare in particular a bore.”

“It’s impossible for me to know what my peers may assume that I’ve read. I haven’t read Henry James or Thomas Wolfe. Why? Because I haven’t gotten around to it yet. “

“Many many things I’m sure. I’ve never read Spencer, Virgil or Cervantes, for example because I just haven’t gotten around to them. But there are also plenty of well-established, over-anthologized, mainstream twentieth-century American poets whom I don’t read for fear of corruption.”

“I haven't read Dante because I tried on two occasions and just wasn't feeling it.”

“I haven’t read the Maximus Poems or much of Olson at all. Yet I feel he is very important to me! Why I haven’t is an interesting question. I’ve identified who I’m in the field with and it seems to come down to how I want to be influenced. I tend to want to know about their lives, their ideas, to be in communion with their poetics, what we know of their being. I feel this somewhat pleasing possibility that I could be subsumed by admiration so I tend to avoid immersion in the work. I consider Susan Howe to be an influence, not that I’ve read more than 3 of her many books; however, reading one page of Singularities profoundly shaped my poetics. Looking at one page of Non-Conformist’s Memorial, same thing - “ah, there it is, I get it, I was waiting for this.” I have a very intense internal relationship to my influences and an intuitive sense of timing – when to bring them into play. Maximus is literally on my desk waiting for me. I have a feeling Olson and Metcalf, and always, always Melville, will be important for a future work of mine.”

“Novels. Plot is boring and better left to the movies. I’m kidding here, but not entirely. In fact, I just read a really amazing novel by Aaron Kunin called The Mandarin. It was so compelling to me because its subtext, and at times not-so-subtext, is pretty much the question of what exactly constitutes a novel. It’s still unpublished, but I hope someone picks it up soon.”

“I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know why anyone should have any assumptions about my reading habits.”

“I wasn't an English major, you know, and nor have I had the vigor to become an autodidact (see above) and this is my blanket explanation for why I haven't read most of any canon of great works, be it Western, Eastern, European, Modernist, Futurist, etc. You name it, I haven't read it.”

“I haven’t read much Benjamin, I keep getting distracted by Adorno.”

“Faulkner. I can’t read Faulkner. It seems incredibly indulgent to me. And this from a poet. Hypocrite lecteur, anyone?”

“Ulysses, though I’ve read lots of excerpts and lots about it. That is probably in the category of too much information, too. Paradise Lost, as well. I’ve only read maybe half of Shakespeare, at most. I could go on. Proust… I do intend to make it all the way through Shakespeare (or The Earl of Oxford, as it were), and I plan to purchase Lydia Davis’s new translation of Proust. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Ulysses. Why? Oh, who knows. After Joyce’s letters to Nora, maybe I kind of feel like it couldn’t get any better.”

“There's something bland and incomprehensible about Wittgenstein/Derrida/Jabes/Mallarme/Lacan/etc.”

“Gaps in my reading are too embarrassing to mention. You use what you use and don't worry a lot about what you've missed. All of Shakespeare, for instance. I've maybe hit half of that. Blake ditto. Coleridge-there's more there than a lifetime can really handle.

Here's something juicy though. I only read Spicer in the last few months. No reason why to any of this. There's always too much of everything. When will there be time to finish reading Proust? Or The Tale of Genji, for that matter!”

“Oh Lord. I don’t have any idea. I haven’t read all of Shakespeare—-maybe half of the plays. Still haven’t finished Don Quixote. I haven’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, actually. I devoured Raymond Carver and Nabokov in my teens and early twenties, and then lost interest in fiction. I occasionally read a novel that inspires or intrigues me, like Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker,” or John Berger’s “To the Wedding,” but this is rare. Again, I don’t have all the time I’d like, and straight narrative usually bores me. Maybe I just have a short attention span. I’ve never read a word of Jane Austen.”

“I haven't read Descartes. Not directly. Which is amazing. I think it's because I've absorbed so much of his work second-hand, especially through all those post-structuralist critiques of his philosophy and tradition.”

“Proust. I got all geared up to finally read him when I was 28, like it was going to be this solemn occasion. Something I just hadn't ever read and always wanted to. I got so incredibly bored with the surfaces and flowery language and just gave up. It just did not hold my interest.”

“People who know that I teach 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century English literature often assume that I know something about medieval literature, or, at least, that I've read Chaucer, or, at least, that I've read some of The Canterbury Tales. I don't, I haven't, I haven't, I'm not going to. I have enough interests for this lifetime, so I try to be protective of books that don't interest me, because I don't want to read them.”

“I haven't read any Milton. I just can't stand the guy.”

“I think that people think that I've read the Language poets, but I haven't. Actually Ron Silliman sent me a chapbook recently and I read it and liked it. And I've read some Susan Howe and Michael Palmer and Rosmarie Waldrop, but I don't really think of them as language poets. I'm a sucker for a good story and a lot of emotion. I guess I'm not cool enough for language poetry.”

“These days, such breadth exists in available reading material that I doubt that anyone would presuppose a particular text or author as a staple for “one and all.” For this reason, it is difficult to answer this question. Everything that I’m aware of that I want to read is placed on the list (actual or virtual). The list is long. If I think I would benefit from something (versus the piece as a “must”), I read it (eventually). Any outside dictatorial influences need to be prepared to defend their placement of required reading lists on the heads of other readers! Each of us is independent and can benefit from being in a perpetual “antenna” state for the right reasons, not just in a genuflective mode.”

“There are many books that I should have read but haven't. The reasons are varied but mostly it's because I found the work yucky. I am like Dryden in the sense that I read for entertainment and would rather chew tinfoil than read dreary verse, and there is plenty of it around. But to be direct, it would be Yassussada's "Double Flowering" and the reason would be that I haven't been able to find a physical copy in a bookstore. And when it comes to ordering it, I am generally out of cash. God wants me to be poor for some reason and this has a direct impact on my book buying. I have read all of the online selections of Yassusada and the accompanying criticism but I haven't made it all the way through the whole, physical book. How embarrassing - don't tell Kent :-)”

“John Ashbery's Flow Chart. I've started it numerous times, but never seem to finish it. The same goes with James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover and Olson's Maximus. Maybe I have a block against 200+ page poems.”

“This could go on forever! I’ve hardly read any of the canonical novels which I feel I should have. Reading a novel, always feels like such a commitment. I have a difficult time getting hooked, and then once I am hooked I have a hard time pausing. I tend to need to read fiction for my job home-schooling a girl, so these days I don’t read all that many novels outside of what I think I might teach.”

“Pound’s Cantos. I love Pound up to the Cantos, but they go on for far too long, and the tone becomes bullying.

Finnegans Wake. Life’s too short.

William Carlos Williams. I’m sure he’s a good poet — everybody says so — but his work has never interested me. I don’t know why.”

“Umm. . .Proust, sadly. But I can't wait to read it!”

“When I was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I had the opportunity based on the course work I had completed during my first three years to become an English major if I took a few British lit survey courses and a canonical author class. At the time, I could think of nothing more tedious than having to read 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century classic British novels, and so opted to become a Humanities major instead, which had a less concentrated focus. Consequently (and this is a comment on my aforementioned public high school education, as well as my graduate studies in English literature at SUNY Buffalo), I’ve never read Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, A Tale of Two Cities, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers, Brave New World, Animal Farm or 1984, etc. I’ve never read Paradise Lost, and I’ve read only three or four Shakespeare plays. Shameful! And while I’m certainly not proud of my ignorance of these books, and would like to have been able to read them at some point, another part of me doesn’t consider it a huge loss. Not learning to speak Spanish when I was younger is a much bigger regret.”

“Oh litany of failures: I've only read sections of The Cantos and the Maximus Poems. I haven't read Zukofsky's "A." I could use some serious catch-up in Byron, Shelley, and Keats (and Milton). I need to read Alice Notley's Disobedience. I need to read more Mallarme. I need to read more Jackson Mac Low. I need to read Bernadette Mayer's Utopia. I need to read all the books I keep buying, but that end up sitting in piles around the apartment.”

“Boy are there a lot of things I could list. Recently I started reading Moby Dick, finally. Who knew how great it is?

Why haven't you?”

“Gravity's Rainbow. I have tried reading Gravity's Rainbow many times and I always give it up, because, to put it one way, it seems an over-inflated self-important bore, or to put it another way, it (in my opinion) stinks.”

“My friends shouldn’t make assumptions about me.”

“Why would my colleagues assume anything I’ve read, or not? Why would they care? I have not read all of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s probably shameful. There are two or three of his comedies I haven’t read (“Love’s Labor’s Lost” among them), perhaps three of the history plays, and “Pericles” and “Cymbeline,” too. I have not read them because life is short. I regret that life is short but, alas, it is. Life is short and Shakespeare is long. I intend to read them all, no doubt, though I keep rereading Lear. Rereading is more important than reading, just as rewriting is more important than writing.”

“People assume many things. I’m confident that there are classics of the experimental cannon that I’ve either deliberately neglected or managed to avoid out of ignorance that I may have been expected to have read by now. I can’t think what that might be. In another time I was quick to fill any glaring holes, purely from insecurity. If someone quoted Niedecker casually or asked me ‘don’t I love that bit in Oppen when’ I would feverishly read everything even tangentially related that I could get my hands on.”

“They may assume that I’ve read Proust, tho I can’t imagine why they would assume that. But I haven’t done it yet (just to piss those eggheads off).”

“The Changing Light at Sandover. I lived in James Merrill’s apartment for a year and read several sections, but never finished the entire work. It needs no recommendations from me as a brilliant, daunting poem, and of course I got a kick out of reading it in the house where those Ouija sessions occurred and where the poem’s roots were laid down. But the bookshelves in that house were overflowing with rare volumes, first editions, ancient literary magazines—too many other temptations won me over. I don’t regret my distractedness, though. It’s unlikely I’ll have nearly constant access to such a library again—not to mention the peculiar privilege of living in a kind of museum. Sandover is a book I’m giving myself at least a year to read. There’s nothing incidental about it. Every page gives me pause.”

“Tolstoy. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The sharpening instructions for my push mower. Flowers for Algernon. Barrett Watten. Also, I’ve never seen Top Gun or The Sound of Music. I guess I’m just waiting for that special someone to come along and rub my nose in these things. I wonder if there are things that people assume I haven’t read but that I actually have . . .”

“I had no idea the first time I read this question. So I asked some of them.

Anthony Robinson, poetry editor of The Canary, assumes I’ve read The Bhagavad Gita, but I haven’t. I’ve only read brief parts of it, not enough to qualify as a reading. He was correct in assuming I’ve read The Joy of Cooking, Collected Lorine Niedecker, Pale Fire, and A People’s History of the United States.

Alan Sondheim was correct in assuming I have read The Bible, my birth certificate, and the letters on a STOP sign.

Linh Dinh thinks I have read Leaves of Grass, Howl, On The Road, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. All true, with the sole exception of the latter title. I have not in fact read Kesey’s novel, but I have seen the Milos Forman film based on the novel and have read The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. However, I understand neither of the latter works shed much light on the Kesey novel.

Ken Rumble assumes quite generously that I’ve read some Georg Trakl, all of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, all of the novels of Philip K. Dick, and the Boy Scout Handbook. I’ve only read perhaps three or four Dick novels. Wyatt is simply too painful for me to read; I prefer trips to the dentist. Trakl, sheesh, yeah, I should be able to say I’ve read it all, but no, not even close. I feel poorly about neglecting Trakl’s work. I spent a summer in Vienna studying the Fin de Siecle and no Trakl? For shame!

Gabe Gudding wouldn’t be surprised if I have read The Godey's Ladies' Book, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, “swaths of the Tripitika, a book or two by Mark Crispin Miller, and, with admiration, at least some of the works of Michael McClure.” I don’t know, however, if he would be surprised if I hadn’t read any of them. I haven’t.”

“As an autodidact, there’s quite a bit that I’m supposed to have read that I haven’t read. I read what I need to feed my writing at the moment. I love Kafka and am influenced by him but I have not read his novels. Yet I reread his shorter pieces over and over.”

“Um, er, eek. I really don't know what people may assume I've read but haven't. Lemme see now - I've never read much Tennyson. And, sorry, only a 'selected' Whitman. Ah, I know, I've only ever tackled extracts from the Maximus poems (it's literally that I've never seen a full copy). But I've done most of the famous fossils - Paradise Regained, the Shepheardes Calendar, the Ring and the Book. Of course, like almost everybody, I've never read Polyolbion (only one 20 line section). I must confess I've never read the Complete poems of Robert Service too but I expect I'm not unique in that. Most of what I haven't read comes from lack of availability rather than disinclination though, I'm particularly starved of much of the new writing that comes from the US and from avant-circles even in the UK as public libraries don't stock 'em and my current poverty and lack of living space precludes me from buying many new books.”

“No idea.”

“You’d have to ask my colleagues. I’m always astounded at what I haven’t read.”

“One of my nephews gave me the novel "The Da Vinci Code" for Christmas, but the first page sounds like a treatment for a film, so immediately I thought, I'd better wait for the movie to come out, and probably won't get to the second page let alone the last page, but will probably see the movie. I always read a few pages of so many contemporary books in stores etc. and have the same feeling.”

“Although I enjoyed Charles Olson’s groundbreaking Call Me Ishmael on the sinking of the whaleship, Essex, I’ve never been able to complete reading his Maximus Poems. Each time I try, I reach a feeling of being talked down to by someone who assumes a “guru” role that I find very un-liberatory, too much to bear as a woman writer in this society. I have a similar reaction to Yeats.

Another poet I know has argued that Olson’s poems, though flawed in the way I mentioned, have made possible poets’ works such as Susan Howe. So that helps me value his work.”

“The Magic Mountain. Over the years every time I started to read it I kept getting interrupted. If I picked it up right now the phone would ring.”

“Ouch. There is no way not to get in trouble with this question. Let's just say that I sometimes have trouble reaching the last page of book-length long poems.”

“No one read everything—maybe some big name like Milton, or Ad Hope, or Whitman or Byron. Well I’ve read a few pages of all these but that’s about it. I like to find my way into readings through associative routes, through something I’m following up/through. “

“This would be a very long list if truly representative. One especially embarrassing example: there are huge chunks of Whitman I've never touched, simply because it's been so long since I first "did" Whitman that it's hard to get past the false sense that I did him thoroughly at the time, when it felt like I had just because I carried that big thick paperback around with me for so long.”

“I only recently read a stack of the modern classics: Absalom, Invisible Man, To the Lighthouse, etc. I had to for my doctoral exams ("the novel," or a very small percentage of it, is my minor area; I'm writing a novel for my dissertation). A lot of friends I know (including an English professor of American Literature (PhD Berkeley) have never read Moby-Dick. Perhaps they've read the "white" chapter or the first line of the book. But you ask them why Ishmael slept with Queegqueg and they haven't a clue. That's a shame but not an artless disaster. One can certainly get through life without reading Melville's masterpiece. One certainly can get through life, too, with a belief that the world is flat -- common sense, after all, tells us that it is.”

“I read a lot, but there is a lot I haven’t read. Why? Because there is just too much great stuff to read.”

“The list is endless. I have read but a handful of Shakespeare plays, which is truly shameful. I have never read Pound’s Cantos. I couldn’t make it through The Aeneid. I can barely read a page of Heidegger, it’s like I’m allergic. I have read almost none of the big American white male novelists of the 20th century—no Faulker, no Pynchon, Roth, Mailer, you name it. And I can’t remember the last contemporary novel I read that wasn’t written by a friend. In fact I never know what to say when someone asks me what I’m reading. I am definitely not the kind of person who is always in the middle of a book. I tend to skim, or read a million things at once, or devour a book in one sitting then forget about it entirely.”

“There are too many titles to mention here. Somehow everyone assumes that I've read the same books they are reading. (Like I do.) I can be a pretty lame reader. Though I mostly blame modern authors for writing faster than I can read. And I blame publishers nowadays for producing too many books. There is also television, music, dance, theater, art, etc. I need another life-time, or a spare Me that can read faster. (But then, where would the enjoyment be?)”

“"The Faerie Queene". I know it is a classic. I simply forgot to read it at university when doing my BA. I think I may have to go back to that period again.”

“I really haven’t read as much Wordsworth as I should. I just seem to get a little…bored.”

“As I mentioned in my previous answer there are many I think, like Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake (I have read John Cage's 'versions' of Finnegans Wake, but not the original) or some Pound's works which are quite hard to find from here (can you believe that ?). Also most Gertrude Stein's works (this time I have read Mac Low's 'versions'), I have found only 'Tender Buttons'. This list will be very long. Mostly it is lack of time, I have had only these three years time to read 'everything important', still I have a lot to do before that work is 'done'. It is my literary gap, poetic 'black hole'.”

“I have no idea what my peers or colleagues may assume I've read, but one day I hope to get around to reading Moby-Dick. It's sitting on my shelf, calling to me, like a great white whale.”

“The gaps in my reading are enormous. I’m just getting started. I have read an improbably small amount of Shakespeare, for instance.”

“I don’t think you can assume what people may have read.

I haven’t read any poetry by Latin poets, because I loved Greek poets so much, I think.

I want to read Don Quixote and Proust.”

“Sssshh, is this private? I haven’t read every word of the most recent book I edited, An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. I’m working on it, but reading it all at once is just too rich—like eating all the chocolates in the box. So I didn’t read each word of some of the sections that I knew my coeditor Kathrine Varnes was reading; I am still saving some of them for later.”

“I have not gone deeply (yet) into The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot, read parts of it, at school, many years ago, and was not impressed at the time (don’t know why). I never picked it up again.”

“There are several novels of Jane Austen I have not read. I was never very good at reading that sort of fiction, though I certainly acknowledge her greatness. I far preferred Proust.”

“I haven't read The Sickness of the Heart and then you told me it doesn't exist.”

“I will acknowledge this for the first time: I've read very little of H.D. I've read Barbara Guest's biography of her; I've read The Gift and End to Torment, but precious little of her poetry. Why? I think it has something to do with the number of times people have said, "Of course, H.D. is one of your central influences! I can see it all over your poetry!" It's just become a little irksome, so not reading her poems became a kind of way of giving the micky to people who make those comments. It's akin to growing up in Southern California, but refusing to learn to drive until I lived in Rhode Island.”

“I haven't read Pound's Cantos---and I don't know why. I want to. I feel like I will when I'm fifty years old.

Really dough.”

“Well in light of the above: Alas, this can make for a very long list! Look at it this way: There are a lot of poets, and poetries, that I’d rather hear tell about, or read about, than tell about myself. There’s a fine book of essays, it’s published by Talisman House, it’s called The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time. I’ve been reading these essays. I recommend this book. I suppose what I mean to say is I wish I had a better command of what my contemporaries were up to, although one can never have a complete command of the situation! I spend hours online and in the journals and when I come upon something that strikes me as intelligent and attractive I’ll investigate that writer, and one thing about this is that I “discover” a lot of writers I’d love to publish in eratio! “

“Milton. When anyone ever mentions Milton, I think of Rodney Dangerfield’s line: “Milton, you’re killing me with all these angels.” I also can’t get too far into Charles Olson because I sense that the primary material was immensely more compelling and I’m not wild about the music in either Olson or Milton. Dangerfield, obviously, had quite an ear.”

“Well, I have no idea what my peers/colleagues might assume what I've read or not. There are plenty of books I haven't read and feel bad about, like WAR AND PEACE, but there aren't sophisticated reasons why I'm avoiding them. There's just a lot to read, and I'm still young. I have every intention of reading everything I possibly can.”

“Joyce’s Ulysses. I adored A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, too, Dubliners, most notably “The Dead,” but I just couldn’t get through Ulysses. I tried. It’s been well over a decade. Maybe it’s time to try again.”

“A newspaper, as often as not. Partly because I haven't learnt how not to read it *all, and that's unfeasible on a daily basis -- I just can't take that amount of absorption. (It is also assumed that one has a television, which I don't for the same reason.) If I do read the paper, a poem may start.”

“I have not read Finnegan's Wake, and I don't imagine that I will. I have started it. And started it again. And started it again-but something, maybe it's an obvious lack on my part, keeps me from continuing beyond the first pages.”

“The Romantics. They’re like this hill covered with trees and slick grass. I take a few quick steps up, then I stumble and slide back down.”

“Omeros by Derek Walcott. I've read parts of it but haven't read through the entire poem. I think the density of the poem is daunting to me. Perhaps I should try reading it aloud, in tandem with someone -- then, I'd probably hear it and find the thread to keep me moving forward.”

“I've never read Dubliners, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake. No particular reason. I haven't read Chaucer, Mallarme, or Akhmatova either. I got through Hell and Purgatory but never made it to Heaven. Life is like that.”

“Oh, the usual suspects: Suetonius, Xenophon, Chateaubriand, Hugh Walpole, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Edward Gibbon, Euell Gibbons. And: Michelet, Carlyle, Francis Parkman. Sologub’s Little Demon. I’ve barely scratched Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques. Saintsbury still eludes me. I’m stuck at the beginning of Sinclair’s Paradise volume of Dante, though I dogged my way through hellish and purgatorial predecessors years ago. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Andrew Lytle’s The Velvet Horn, and Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling remain my three most preferred imaginary novels that I have not read. There’re entire worlds of reading I lack. Anna Karenin. Manzoni, Milton! (I recall writing a paper about how Milton “cushion’d” nouns between two adjectives—an idea a friend loan’d me. He wrote the same paper, but used the word “bracket’d” in the argument.) Why my reading paucity? Sloth, a misspent twenty or so years with a bottle of bourbon for company, being a wage-slave and a father. And intangibles like ignorance, timing, a predilection for the contemporary (and the oddball) that consumed my youth. No one need apologize for what one hasn’t read—there’s too much of it. With luck and a ready curiosity and openness (and that’s something one sees frightfully little of in some corners of the poetry world), one finds what one needs. And makes space for it.”

“There are certainly plenty of such holes in my reading, plenty of such embarrassments (or books saved for later), but the reading/writing life is not some sort of pop quiz, so I doubt that there are these imagined colleagues who would care or wonder about what I haven’t read.”

“Not much of the old WCW. Just keep forgetting to do so. But also I’ve always found his poem about the wheelbarrow utterly blah. I think it’s that poem more than any other has turned kids off to poetry. If that’s a poem, why not just go for a bikeride instead.”

“I haven't read Moby Dick. Nor quite a few other canonical American Lit things. People forget that I'm Canadian.”

“Ulysses—though I have read—or “read”—Finnegan’s Wake. After it, Ulysses seems like a let down and I’ve never gotten past the first chapter or two.”

“I haven't read Finnegan's Wake because it was too much work and I couldn't see the benefit. Piers Plowman (sorry Martin). Any of Dante besides Inferno. Have not read (or only bits) HD or Ponge or Pessoa or Anne Waldman. Libraries full, I suppose because I was reading other stuff. I was feeling sort of proud at the beginning of this list and now I feel crappy. I will try harder! Or I rebel; what do I assume Gertrude Stein read? Whatever she felt like; I bet she didn't worry about it. Anyway I probably haven't read your poems and I will feel guilty if I meet you, they might be great.”

“Probably just about anything you can think of. I’ve never read in any real way the English Romantics nor the French or Spanish Surrealists.”

“I haven’t read Finnegans Wake and I’m not so sure I read all Ulysses. This surprises even me because I wrote a book about Joyce. The reason I haven’t is that I found Joyce too greedy. I have my own life to live.”

“I don't know what they'd assume I've read or why they would make such an assumption. Most of them are social scientists, qualitative research types, so maybe I should make some assumptions... HA! There's a lot of things I haven't read that I probably should and a lot of things my colleagues haven't read which they probably should. So many great books...Time...”

“I haven’t read one single sentence of Kafka. I’ve meant to. No, that’s not true, I haven’t “meant to” at all. Yet if someone I respect came up to me and said, “god damn it, Rodrigo, I really want you to read Kafka!” I might then. But as for now, as how it stands in the queue of what to read (a Samir Amin article “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World” on my lap as I type this) it might be a little while longer till I get to Kafka. Then again, by writing this, I might have already caught the Kafka Virus.”

“I have not read a lot of things. I have not read Milton or Sappho, or most ancient texts. I am completely ignorant of most Asian poetry. I do not read in any language besides English and have not made time to search out, say, the three most wonderful poets in all the countries of the world available in translation. I haven’t done any of this yet. Just the thought of how much work I have yet to do as a reader makes me nervous. Milton, however, may remain the last on my list because I developed a prejudice against the pedantics and boredom of “Paradise Lost” as a fun-loving undergrad that has yet to be replaced by an informed understanding of the text, if that’s possible.”

“This could easily be a long and embarrassing list. And while I’d like to say it’s the result of an overly electives-based undergrad curriculum, I think at this late date I had better just shoulder the blame. I have a lot of Shakespeare (going beyond the greatest hits) that I need to read, though who doesn’t? I would like to know Keats better than I do. And John Donne. In the 20th century department, I’m starting to plug the gaps (just read Roethke’s Collected Poems, now working on Berryman’s Dream Songs), but I haven’t read much Lowell or Pound. Of course, people like Donald Hall are always advising younger poets to read more widely in previous centuries’ poetry, but like a lot of people I know I don’t do a very good job of taking that advice.”

“All of my friend Charles Bernstein's work. I tend to be a fast reader and I try not to do that with his books. He's also a little intimidating and, it's weird, I feel uncomfortable reading my friend's books. If they become my friends *after* I've read their books, it's better! Of course that would presume that my friends would never write again after I've met them...I didn't say my system made sense!”

“W.H. Auden. Some day.”

“This is the game of humiliation, made famous by David Lodge's academic novels.

Goethe's Elective Affinities. Alcott's Little Women.

I expect to like them both when I actually read them.

My choice of what novels to read is always partially dictated by what I'm teaching next; I have read more American novels than British novels over the past few years partly because I've been asked to teach twentieth-century American literature several times, and twentieth-century British (other than poetry) not yet.”

“I suspect my peers may think I’ve read much of the Objectivists’ work, since a lot of my work seems reminiscent of theirs. But I haven’t. No particular reason, except that there is so much to read, it’s difficult to read it all. I think the poets I read have read the Objectivists though.”

“Anything by Dostoevsky.

Other stuff looks funner.”

“I don’t know that many poets and the few I know already are aware I read very little. I do read biographies when I want to take a break from writing. I get my ideas not from other writers but from confronting a photograph with an idea from science or biology or myth and try to reconcile the disparate, conflicting ideas. I go into this in quite detail in the essay Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet.”

“Depends on how you define peers/colleagues. If you mean people who are around the same age, education and socioeconomic level as me, the thing that pops up with astonishing regularity is people being shocked that I've never read Brave New World. I'm getting to it, I promise. And if you mean other poets, many of whom are highly-educated professors and academics (as opposed to me, an art-school drop-out and autodidact), well – I doubt these learned souls assume that I've read much of anything! And they're right, while I've read a lot, in that context I feel as if I've barely cracked a spine. If I had to pick one thing (they are legion), I guess I'd say Zukofsky's A, since it is a seminal text aligned with my tastes. Again, I'm getting to it – it's really long!”

“I never read Pound’s Cantos. I never read Zukofsky’s “A,” although I read a very interesting book about the writing of “A.” I can’t stand Auden. There, I said it. I simply haven’t gotten around to reading those works. Also, it’s somewhat of a turn-off to need a skeleton key to enter a work and really “get it.” That’s not to say that something needs to be “gotten” at first reading, however. I’m currently reading Hebdomeros, by De Chirico and that’s not something that has any real, or literal, meaning. I guess one has to consider the artist’s intent; then reconsider, and reconsider, and reconsider …

I don’t know if anyone would make any assumptions about anything I have or haven’t read. I guess I become interested in some key player and then end up reading about the whole crew eventually. For instance, someone turned me on to Frank O’Hara a long time ago, which led to my “discovery” of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, then Berrigan, Padgett, Joe Brainard, Jim Carroll, etc.”

“There's lots of stuff I haven't read, but I'm reasonably young and still have quite a few reading years left in me. I haven't read much of Pound. Years ago I purchased the Cantos, probably a ridiculous place to start, got intimidated and put it on my shelf. Someday I’ll go to back to it.”

“Given that I am a literature professor at a Canadian university, it might surprising to some of my colleagues that I have never read a Margaret Atwood novel from cover to cover. There is no particular reason that I haven’t read Atwood’s fiction. It’s just that there has always been something else I’ve wanted to read first.

Of course, now that I have said this, I will read a couple of her novels so that if any of my colleagues see this, and say, “I can’t believe you have never read an Margaret Atwood novel from cover to cover,” I can say, “Well, actually, I’ve read a few since that interview.””

“Haven't read Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past. Haven't read much of Byron and Shelley. Haven't read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance though I've attempted to twice. Really the lacunae in my reading are so profligate that it's not worth trying to catalogue. Sometimes I'll calculate my life expectancy and divide it by amount of time it takes me to read, to really read, a work of literature, and get so despondent that I have no recourse but to channel surf away the pain.”

“I could give a hang about that whole Faerie Queen (sic?) mess.”

“There are so many I haven't read yet, or haven't read thoroughly. On my current list: Hannah Arendt, Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Weiner, Nicole Brossard.”

“So many things. I have a long way to go, fill my gaps slowly, where pre-modern literature is concerned. Getting past the first dozen pages of the Odyssey is a goal of mine. In general I’m suspicious of the motivations of a Canon and I approach “the classics” slowly and tentatively. I have a grounding in tradition, but most of my reading is contemporary work since I often find myself in conversation with those writers who are, conveniently, not dead.”

“The Bible. I'm not a devout Catholic, but everyone should read the Bible. There's too much there that cannot be (missed to) misread. Besides, isn't all of the history of religion a misreading of the Bible? That is something I've yet to be conquered by.”

“I have cracks and hollows everywhere, worse than the surface of the moon. You mention an author, and I haven’t read some particular book. Not because, but because. And I can fill pages with explanations.”

“I would like to propose instituting a weekly daylight savings time of an hour. During this hour, it would be mandatory that people read something (anything!). That would give us 52 more hours a year in which to read—yeow!”

“I’m trying to bolster my patchwork reading of the Romantics. Wordsworth right now. Shelley on the horizon.”

“All of The Cantos. Help.”

“I haven't read The Anti-Capitalist Reader or Dude: Where’s My Country or other political books because they make me feel guilty that I am not writing enough books and essays about politics and that therefore I am one with the war mongers.”

“I doubt that anybody sits around wondering (or assuming) what I’ve read! But I haven’t read Proust. Actually that’s not true—I read “Against Sainte-Beuve” and found it thrilling, but I haven’t been to the mountaintop. I don’t know why.”

“I’m not sure I’d know what those folks would assume. I haven’t gotten to these particular books because I don’t yet know what they are.”

“My bank statement. Because it fills me with dread.”

“No one has assumed I have read anything I haven’t in a long time. It must mean my affect is shrinking. In grad school it was assumed I had read a lot of James Tate and Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, although my reading of them was limited at that time to maybe one or two books each, tops. (Albeit more than once—I’m cheap.) I read much more of them, more widely, during grad school than I ever had before, perhaps because I thought I was supposed to catch up. Earlier I read a lot of Wallace Stevens, Yeats, and Williams, as well as Stephen Dobyns, C.K. Williams, Rilke, Lorca—and yet no one ever cited that influence. An editor once suggested that my poems made him think of Deleuze, in some form or other—I promised I’d check my Deleuze, though I don’t own any. And I haven’t read him yet.”

“The tags on my many patterned shirts.

I envision myself wearing durable clothing as a testament against the fashionable vestiges of poetry and therefore do not wish to have this image broken by a white square scant with words.”

“I haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Great Expectations or Beloved, and a lot of other books one was probably supposed to have read by now. (For example, I just read To Kill A Mockingbird for a course in the novel I was assigned last semester). I haven’t read Schopenhauer, Proust or most of Faulkner (outside As I Lay Dying). The fact that I haven’t read “The Bear” should shock anyone who knows my work.”

“If I haven’t read something, chances are that I’d like to…if only to, perhaps, decide ultimately that it’s not for me; but there are lots of things out there that I’ll probably never get to, for various reasons. I’ve read only small chunks of the Bhagavad Gita. I’ve read Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, but haven’t read Goethe’s Faust. I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye. I’ve never read Finnegan’s Wake. I’ve haven’t read very much of Kant’s writings. I haven’t read The Divine Comedy. I’ve read barely half of Gravity’s Rainbow, which is more than I can say for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Why haven’t I read these things? Sheer laziness, in some cases; in others, boredom, disgust, or fatigue.”

“Wordsworth. I find his aesthetic positioning abhorrent, but I still try to read him, sort of like one should take one’s medicine, I suppose, but I can’t get past a few pages.

Also haven’t read all of Proust, though I do dive in often and I have faith that I will succeed. Proust is why life should be long.”

“I am sure there are huge gaps in my reading list, where would I begin?”

“Except in brief bits, I have never read Proust, likewise my three-volume edition of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I know I’m supposed to like them, but I wear out after a few paragraphs.”

Ron Silliman, The New Pedagogical Godfather of the Great Book

2009-01-15T02:19:00.001-08:00

“You need to understand the range of poetry that you are seeking to become part of – a process that becomes harder each year as the number of contemporary publishing poets grows – and you need to be able to trace the history of this landscape backwards at least 200 years. I would go further than that myself – I’d argue that you need to know enough middle English to reach Chaucer in the original, and really grasp (a deliberately vague term) your own place within this constellation. If you can’t, you haven’t read enough, written enough, thought hard enough.”

If you haven't read the Ramayana in the original Sanskrit you haven't read enough, written enough, thought hard enough.

The idea that there are these books and movements that one is supposed to assume are worth reading based off of the choosing of academic fetishists, is steaming bullshit. Read books that are relevant to the contemporary, closely. Thoroughness is what matters. How strange that a person can point to finding the thoroughness in writing, and then point to 'scope' reading in literature. Reading should be treated with the same respect and disrespect as writing.

Scope reading is what I do with Vodka; I draw lines between potato and grain flavors—thankfully, there is no Vodka academy declaring what to drink. It would be better if academics had real fetishes; like feet or goats. Mind you, I am not against the MFA system, just those within it who buy into the whole style of academic 'English' that strives to publish (or perish) forever ‘new’ scholarship. In publishing such rubbish their minds perish.

Am I missing out on something by not reading neo-formalists? Maybe. I am going to die soon, all the same.

Ron recently posted about the contemporary survey interview, and “HERE COMES EVERYBODY” specifically. Linh Dinh wrote in response to the question 6. (What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?):

“As an autodidact, there’s quite a bit that I’m supposed to have read that I haven’t read. I read what I need to feed my writing at the moment. I love Kafka and am influenced by him but I have not read his novels. Yet I reread his shorter pieces over and over”

Amen.

But how will he find books to read?! Trial and error, the internet, and people who I trust to recommend books that might actually be worth my time.

I (sadly, for the sake of my argument, at least) have read Chaucer in middle English (and Beowulf in old), (with help, no doubt) and, honestly, I much prefer things like the Beats. I also much preferred reading Beowulf in translation. The new movie was cool, too. 3D shit rocks. Plus, there were all these random points removed from the narrative to show 3D things expand out of the screen. It seemed quite contemporary, in a wonderful way. It almost seemed like the whole screen could explode out in opposition to the stale story. The poem is also a bit like that with all the kenning and such. William S. Burroughs is even better at it.

P.S. I also really like the Beowulf movie with the anti-actor from the highlander movies; it was so horrible that it made me laugh a lot… I like that about it.

P.P.S. Poets like to think, that through their poems, they’re like the dudes in the highlander movies (immortals who only die if their heads are cut off); it isn’t true.

[Edit] (P.P.P.S.) For clarity: It is not that I cannot tell the difference between “homework and great books” in the traditional setup that treats the academy’s choices like “pseudo-bibles,” but that I challenge the very notion of ‘great books’ (there are actually colleges that teach nothing but ‘great books’). I also, equally, challenge the notion of poorly drawn divisions between high and low culture; which is why I degraded to my semi-sarcastic movie comments toward the end of the post. A reader should read for joy and thoroughness.[End Edit]

Technorati Popular Searches

2009-01-09T12:46:00.001-08:00

I was perusing the Technorati website, and clicked on one or another ‘popular’ link, and a list of the websites top searches came up. I always find myself intrigued by such lists—it is interesting to see the sporadic collection of interests that springs from our culture. Such lists always seems to be a wonderful example of how multifarious human interests can be.

The list:

Some of it almost makes me laugh out loud. Even the placement of the words in relation to each other is interesting (I particularly like the placement of “men”).

Something I do wonder, is if these represent preliminary searches, or if they are the final destinations of most people searching. Suppose I searched for “arab,” do these people then refine that to something like “arab countries” and then further refine it to find the specific thing that they want, or, are they caught in an endless cycle of the “popularity engines” that are defined by search algorithms that are, by their very artificial structures of intelligence, idiotic. I say that meaning only to point out that they are tools, and that the human familiarity with them is what makes them operate in meaningful ways. How much the machines themselves, here, are operating the humans?

Poetry and Relevance

2009-01-03T20:46:00.001-08:00

I’ve been keeping relative track of the ongoing discussion in regards to poetry and relevance (and now poetic terminology and relevance and battles between camps) taking place around the poetry blogosphere. See(links taken from Seth Abramson’s blog I (and II, and III, and IV): Adam Fieled (I,II, III), Joseph Hutchinson (I, II, III), Francois Luong, Jeff Stumpo, Johannes Goransson (I, II, III), Robert J. Baird, Jack Kimball]. Brought together (I’m assuming) by Ron Silliman’s poetry links.

Much of the discussion concerning the relevance of poetry and the significance of terms has swelled out of control into a (partial?) meaninglessness. There is a circularity about it— ‘it’ discusses a relatively meaningless term, and then gets all haughty about a particular decided perspectival position within the terminological spectrum. I say spectrum (in terms of a band or series between two oppositional points), since the terms have been, and keep being, laid out in a such a scenario… even Seth’s terms, which supposedly ‘transcend’ (whatever transcendence means in this day and age) the previous experimental/traditional dichotomy. Seth’s terms actually function, in his own use, to create a middle ground between the two previous camps. There is something good about that: shit shouldn’t be all black/white; autobot/decepticon. Yet, while he may want his new terms to escape that very spectral definition by being practical descriptive definitions he seemingly fails by falling back into an alignment with the old. Plus, such three-way divisions already exist in critical writing…

To copy a cursory set of definitions (the divisions of ethos) from wikipedia:

phronesis - practical skills & wisdom
arete - virtue, goodness
eunoia - goodwill towards the audience.

To quote Seth’s terms from a comment portion of a post:

* Pragmatics: Employed here to mean the use of language to communicate the beliefs or intentions of the speaker.
* Syntactics: Employed here to mean using words in a way that divorces them from both their dictionary and connotational meanings.
* Cognitive Semantics: Employed here to mean using words in environment/connotational (rather than direct, straight-definitional) systems which are received and processed by readers based on their own cognitive processes, to which the poet (being human) is partially but not (being just one human) perfectly attuned.

I don’t admit here that they overlay directly at all, but I just wanted to point out that they are equally arbitrary. The linguistic terms are also troublesome since they are a choice few out of a wide spectrum of linguistic divisions… if one just does a ‘quick wikipedia’ search as Seth suggests (for semantics) one immediately finds, four traditions… “the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.” Plus their are others on top of these… not to mention the philosophical assumptions within all of them (some of which probably won’t overlay with any honestly contemporary poetry).

But Seth does make a good point when he points toward a diverse current poetic community. I put my vote in for multiplicity. Always multiplicity.

Plus, this online debate is starting to look a bit too much like this:

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

Questionnaire

2008-12-24T12:32:00.001-08:00

I, randomly, felt like completing one of these semi-egotistical writer questionnaire things. I got this one from Ron Silliman’s Blog, and, he, in turn, was asked to complete it by David F. Hoenigman for Word Riot.

What projects are you currently working on?

I currently have four consecutive projects that I’m working on. The first is putting the final touches on my manuscript Compos(t) Mentis which, if all goes well, will come out from BlazeVOX in the near future. It is somewhat inspired by the Flarf Collective, but I don’t completely ascribe to the movement, and there are also elements of the existentialist tradition the work. Second, I’m working on some poems in the same mode/style as that first book. I have about 20 of them, thus far, but it hasn’t even found a line of coherency, as of yet. Third, I have a project based on a radical variation of the heroic couplet, used as a linked epigrammatic form, titled Parhessia. This is actually my 'first book,' (not that it started out as a book...) but give the nature of the project, I still have some hours to put in before it will even be a solid draft. Fourth, I’ve been writing farm inspired poems that blend the urban and rural. I mean, I do live on a farm, and I am a farmer.

When and why did you begin writing?

I remember wining some writing competition in 6th or 7th grade, but I just wrote on a whim, and somehow ended up winning. Then, I don’t think I wrote anything that I took particularly serious until the senior year of high school.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

If we’re talking about history and philosophy, then, the last year of highschool and the first year of undergraduate. Poetry, probably not until the last year or so (despite having explored it quite a bit over my undergrad years, I had a hard time, for a while, committing myself to it in the way I am now. I almost gave up poetry a year ago, and then ended up finding out that my primary interest was, and couldn’t be anything but, poetry. Odd how that worked out.)

What inspired you to write your first book?

Zizek. Heidegger. German Romantics. Flarf-y stuff. Dan Beachy-Quick. Catullus, recommended to me by DBQ.

Who or what has influenced your writing?

Poetry. See sidebar.

Aside from poetry, lots of things. Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, Pop-Culture, Hip-Hop, Internet Porn, Farming, Woody Allen and Jesus.

How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?

I think the tension between things like high and low culture, Wisconsin and Florida, farming and urban/suburban life, the internet and the open sky, and so on are huge influences in me. Though, not in such directly didactic figurations.

Do you have a specific writing style?

No. Well… [subversive, partially] / [romantic, partially]

What genre are you most comfortable writing?

Poetry. History. Philosophy. Erotic Internet Stories about Fucking Goats.

Is there a message in your work that you want readers to grasp?

Prophetic truth in hedonism.

What book are you reading now?

New Jack Spicer collection, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza by Eugene Ostashevsky, and re-reading Being and Time. Strangely, also, I’ve been reading Robert Frost for that which is modernist in him.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

There are a quite a few, and it depends on how you define “new.” What pops out off the top of my head: most anything ‘Action Books,’ some BlazeVOX, Flarf, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Chelsey Minnis, Craig Morgan Teicher, Srikanth Reddy, G. C. Waldrep… and so on.

Robert Duncan vs. Denise Levertov

2008-12-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

I truly enjoyed reading the correspondence between the two of them, and I was just flipping through it again last night to find some particular quotes. They reach out intellectually to grab the reader, and, at times, even become engaging in their emotion. Particularly in the split over sentimentality in relation to Vietnam. Yet, with all the discussions of “relevance” being bantered around the blogosphere as of late, I felt like making a point out of their “battle."

Robert Duncan vs. Denise Levertov:

We may all want to be relevant, but we do need to be honest about the extent of poetry's readership. In fact, proximally and for the most part, only poets read poetry.

Future Book Cover

2008-12-21T20:07:00.000-08:00

My artist friend is working on redoing Carrivaggio’s Love Conquers All for the cover of my first book. The image will be a blending of the organic and the mechanical. Something like Tetsuo at the end of Akira (or lots of other japanese animations, I'd suppose), or like the robot buggy-things in The Matrix. I’m excited to see how it will come out.

If everything goes well, my book of poems should be coming out from BlazeVOX this upcoming summer.

Here is the original painting:

More Poetry and Culture

2008-12-19T13:03:00.001-08:00

In regards to what ways poetry interacts with the audience, I don’t think that one can disentangle the interactions between the practical and the theoretical. Any discussion of the state of poetry isn’t a discussion about some simple practical function like hammering. There are always implicit assumptions in the relative meanderings of a cultural sub-group such as “poetry.”

Yet, if we assume that the expansion of poetry is a good thing (one can certainly posit the opposite, and that would be a somewhat elitist proposition), much of what you say rings true. I, myself, am often conflicted between the dichotomy of democratization and quality within the work itself, as I find that some of the key critiques of popularization to hold of bit of truth; such as Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age” or Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (among others). At the same time, coming from blue collar American roots, I can’t be anything but a populist.

This leads me to think that the proliferation of poetry is a wonderful thing, but also a thing that we much guard closely and debate vigorously. Here, I am not implying that we should debate the very existence of the MFA (education, and particularly the public/funded varieties, is a great thing), and the proliferation thereof, but the content of the poetry and poet-professors who play instrumental roles in shaping the viewpoints of the students with whom they are dealing should and can be questioned.

That being said, yes, poets in MFA programs should be reading basics. Seth makes an important point with this. Though, there is no reason why the more recent ‘basics’ can’t include objectivists, imagists, pomos, and so on. Some of them, in instances, are quite readable/enjoyable, even to the nascent MFA poet. Yet, Ron Silliman’s idea that all poets who enter MFA programs should have any substantial knowledge of contemporary poetry is being wishful at best. But, I think that they can/should be exposed to it while their in the MFA program—the avant/post-avant included.

What the MFA is, is a chance to be exposed to new things as a poet. This has been Seth’s experience up to this point as well, from what he says in his posts.

In the ideal situation, and MFA program should be able to point poets to poetries that they will both benefit from and enjoy at their particular point in development. Seth is right in saying that this shouldn’t be a limited sort of thing, but it should be an open and considerate one.

A couple of nights ago I was watching this program on the effort to bring spoken word poetry to high school students in some of the worse off neighborhoods in the twin cities. Well, apparently one of the local adult poets started a Langston Hughes reading group that they were all participating in. I thought it was wonderful. Though, no doubt, the reading needs of poets in an MFA program will be much more diverse, and thus will(/do) put much greater pressure on the teachers to be able to provide the right sort of guidance rather than just automatically leading students only to their own favorite poets. I guess that is a lot to ask, and not typically what a teacher’s tendencies might be. I mean, we all tend toward the “[I] think this poet is great!”/“[You] should read them as well!” It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one wouldn’t expect someone to go around recommending poets they absolutely dislike, yet there is surely a need for sensitivity on the part of the teacher/mentor in regards to which poets would be beneficial to the student’s progression. Better that than a breeding ground of categorical like-ness.

I myself have never spent extended time with the standard fair ‘SoQ’ poets. I have read some, but I wouldn’t call it my ‘base.’ But I’m my own strange example. I started out majoring in Asian History, and became interested in Japanese poetry, and then moving into the American realm (as an educated young adult) I spent much more time initially reading the beat generation, even into some of the obscurer regional poets, a bunch of romantic poetry (particularly the Germans), and then the standard fair of the likes of Whitman and Dickenson before even touching much contemporary poetry on any substantial level. Through Bertrand Russell and then Wittgenstein, I also had somehow also had become obsessed with Phenomenology and Existentialism (and, particularly early Heidegger), so the fact that Objectivists and Projectivists would appeal to me, makes sense. I was in a position to dive right in. But then, everyone has their own story of their development as writer.

There is something saddening about a model where a young poet copies a style devoid of substantial risk, publishes a book, and gets a tenure track position. And, to me, it seems that cultural stances can’t easily be removed from the discussion about MFAs.

Sure, we all want to get our poetry out there, and for poetry as a whole to develop a more substantial position in the culture as a whole, but following steadfast down a line of agreement isn’t the only way to do this. The discussions we have, and the disagreements, do create interest. The place where poetry is going to gain a foothold is in high schools and colleges (and MFA programs), but I do think it is important that it be presented in ways that positively present the whole.

The teacher who introduced me to poetry in high school was a bit of a traditionalist, and he tended to scoff at many of the more experimental poets, and, for a while, I absorbed some of his judgments. I was even walking around with an unfounded dislike of WCW for several years… having only read a couple of poems. At the same time, I later was glad to know that WCW existed, because I randomly picked up Paterson late in my college years my reaction was something along the lines of “Wow!”

We do need to debate which poetry is worth keeping/presenting to the new poets, and, in fact, that very act is important to the relevance of poetry. There is no dividing the two.

Poetry: Jacket Feature on Oppen

2008-12-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

I was almost astonished at how incorrect/perfunctory the knowledge of Heidegger was among the people writing about Oppen in the latest issue of Jacket.

Maybe even Oppen’s own understanding? The quote Oppen made about Sartre (in reference to Nausea, in particular, I’m guessing) was a bit naive. Sartre doesn’t hate/dislike the world, he just ends up failing to escape the mind-body division. The world still plays its important role in a holistic sense in his thought, though it is a holism that ultimately fails in Sartre’s thought—though, I can’t fault Oppen too much for that, because Sartre really doesn’t come off as being anywhere near as important/encompassing as Heidegger.

What I mostly disliked in the essays, though, was the improper use of Heideggarian terms/ideas in ways that totally undermine what he is saying/doing, and, in turn, undermine the quality of any comparative gestures the author of the essay is making.

At one point someone even referred to H.’s idea of “state of mind” (translate more properly as “mood”) as a “psychological state.” Give me a break. Anyone who’s spent any substantial amount of time with Being and Time would know better. What he his is referring to in his moods, are something encompassing about Dasein understanding of the world. A psychological state implies a subject/object division, and runs completely opposite to what the WHOLE BOOK is getting at. God damnit.

I was disgusted by most of the philosophical comments in the articles, though, I’d piss myself off far too much if I went through them line by line. If I ever go back to graduate school, or a substantial amount of time falls into my lap, I’ll have to write a book on the intersections between Heidegger and Oppen.

Poetry and Culture

2008-12-18T20:35:00.000-08:00

I wrote this after reading the posts on "How to Make Poetry Relevant" on this: (http://sethabramson.blogspot.com) blog...

Avant poetries do build upon the back of past poetries within their cultural strain/movement. Same goes for the “SoQ,” though, I think that the complaints made about the reception of avant poetries in established circles is implicitly a complaint for a poetry that does want an audience. There may be poets who are writing for themselves or their insular communities, but, on the whole, I think those communities do want their particular stance to be heard. The idea that that poetry may have an influence by being something that isn’t widely read may also be true, especially when different poetries are enjoyed by different peoples. As were all aware, poets have their own set of poetries they enjoy reading that don’t necessarily jive with popular poetries. This is no detriment to either type of poetry, but a reality of readership. So, if something like LangPo becomes “visible” to the popular audience through its influences and on some non-avant poets then it seems silly to detriment it for that.

I do think Seth makes some interesting points in terms of audience. The world as interpreted by culture, and what has meaning inside of culture, are the poets connection to audience.

However, transcendent meaning? I think he’d have to define that… are we going all the way back to Aristotle and his ten categories? What if I went back to the pre-Socratics? Though, they had no defined system of aesthetics, but maybe they are more true because of this.

In line with that thought, the connection of aesthetics to perception/things is itself troublesome as it only exists on the back of a theory of beauty that initially determined white and imperialist qualities to be the backbone of that beauty. Aesthetics seems, more than anything, to be an arbitrary and improper division made in culture. Wittgenstein (towards the end of the Tractatus) said that ethics and aesthetics are one, and he was, ironically, pointing out that traditional analytic philosophy had little truthful to say about either of them.

Wittgenstein, at that point, turned to a mysticism. Though, I’d point to culture and meaning (care, even) which I think operates on many levels. I wouldn't exactly call it transcendental. Small cultural outposts such as Flarf are writing in culturally interactive ways—even if their cultural circle doesn’t expand out as far as others. Who knows, maybe they will in time. I actually find that quite a lot of Flarf is very readable and filled with meaning in its way.

Approaching poetry pragmatically is a good point. Pragmatism, is, in many ways, the smashing together of the intellectual and the practical. What does this imply? It implies that the meaningful stances that a poet takes, in practice, are very much rooted in their meaningful interaction with their poetic community. Even theory is tooled in the hallways of meaning. There is no insular division to be made, even if it may appear as such. Even the anti-social poet is anti-social on the background of a society. And, maybe that anti-social behavior is rooted in a meaningful reaction to something in the society. There is a reason why Thoreau’s Walden was an experiment rather than a permanent venture—the cultural world away from the pond was always still there. The prolific nature of the avant-garde may also rest on its connection to experimentation—they feel a meaningful itch to try something out of the standard scope, but always with the "poetry world as a whole" in mind. The “visibility” of the bathroom graffiti, be it conceptual/flarf/langpo, may rest in the stances they are taking on language and culture.

The conflict these poetries bring into the mix need not be eliminated, as conflict can often be positive/generative. We’re all at the thanksgiving table together eating turkey, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to have our disagreements and family feuds. Those conflicts go great lengths to breed meaning.

And, MFA programs do have their problems such as promotion of a lack of risk, and the support of PHD-y poets first. There are places like Naropa, but their under representation is disheartening and there student body is far from the cream of the crop (due to funding, I'd suppose). That being said, there are also positive aspects to MFAs, and they should be exploited to their maximum positive potential. Yet, I don’t think we need to get up in arms about poets who call out and react to the problems inherent in MFAs. They have their place... especially given that there are so many MFA programs.

Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing

2008-12-18T20:26:00.000-08:00

In response to Goldsmith's images...

Flarf:

Conceptual Poetry:

'oopdate, Eh?

2008-12-03T20:43:00.000-08:00

'Christ, Christmas shopping is wears down any bit of tolerance I may have had for shopping malls. So much junk, but so many things to get for recommended gifts for relative appeasement, that is, to relatively appease relatives relativity. And, I need a new pair of shoes. Land mines are concealed as coupons in the holiday season, and another boy comes back from Iraq. Try to make sense out of that.

Plus, I never posted about this before, but, OBAMA!!! As I recently heard professor Tyson opined, “It is a good thing we got a brotha’ in the white house, cause we know how to make a dolla’ out of fifteen cents.” Heh. On the macro level, things are looking brighter. Though the Dow industrial average keeps on loosing “dows.” Darn those dows! Though, not to be to sarcastic, as things are looking quite bleak, and I myself am feeling the effects personally.

Also, my first book is likely coming out from BlazeVOX next summer, which is exciting. Whoot.

Foreclosure by Lorine Niedecker

2008-10-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

Foreclosure

Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws

Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace

--L.N.

How fitting.

Attempting/ing/ing

2008-10-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

The attempt to write, and the hope that one’s writing is of some value to those reading (or potential future readers, as the case is currently with my own poetry) is always a serious challenge. To find the time to write and refine what is written is becoming an even greater challenge given the demands of things like food and shelter. But maybe that is just it, poetry, and especially the tradition of American poetry, may require that it fit in between the challenges of the everyday. Go outside--you will find the next line for your handmade epic there. “There is a tree!”/ “There is a brick!” Don’t mind him, he is not insane, he is just thinking about philosophy. Add an image or a metaphor to stir up some anti-tree. Maybe a poem, even. And then, another declarative statement.

Post Post Mortem Poetics

2008-09-08T12:16:00.000-07:00

I supposed these are just some short prefatory ideas, but I feel like writing them down regardless.

A journal I just submitted to asked for a short statement of poetics, and since, I do not ascribe to and solidity of theory--rather, poetry, as a “medium” sits in a position that tends to lend a basis for the absolute opposite of a solidified theory. I like the fact the contemporary poetry includes things like Conceptuptual Poetry and Flarf, yet, I also think that there is still room for, in Goldsmith’s words, “another “creative” poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table.”

Richard Rorty espouses perfectly what I think of poetry’s power, and, in point of fact, all writing’s power, in the last piece he wrote in Poetry Magazine:

I had no quarrel with Epicurus's argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger's suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.
"Hasn't anything you've read been of any use?" my son persisted. "Yes," I found myself blurting out, "poetry." "Which poems?" he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory…

Maybe there is a sentimentalism in this, yet, I tend to think of it as a certain version Heidegger’s care structures. Humans latch on to small and large things to give their lives structure and purpose or un-structure and lack of purpose. I make no value-judgments either way, but will say that poetry is filled with this power in many lines (every line, even?).

Post Post Mortem Poetics:

My poetics is a broken pea in a log of stool. My poetics deals with the dichotomous interaction of semi-solids through thin transitory barriers. Sometimes my poetics is a solid solipsistic garden pea. Something about my poetics is green, but I would not call it eco-poetics, per se, more likely it is ecto-cooler. ‘Ecto’ being derived from the Greek, ‘ektos,’ meaning ‘outside.’ My poetics views outside in many ways. My poetics ingests ecto-cooler on the open field of my poetics being. My poetics only ventures outside of a thin veil, but my poetics likes to think that it is a pea within a pod, within a can, within a Publix, within a muggy place in Florida next to a porn shop and lesbian book store. My poetics loves lesbian bookstores. My poetics has a love-hate relationship with books. My poetics is a trite male. My poetics is also an old lady who trains ferrets. My poetics makes outfits for ferrets and enters ferrets in ferret costume competitions judged by Japanese women. My poetics is peaceful like a ferret competition in Cleveland, Ohio. My poetics knows that ferret competitions in Cleveland, in spite of appearance, also involve many bites. My poetics knows that ferrets are huge in Japan. My poetics knows that ferrets do not eat peas, or write poetry, or think about subject-object divisions. My poetics thinks the movie Akira is awe-some, though thinks that it would be better with more ferrets or maybe a mongoose. My poetics has a fleshy post-apocalyptic ending filled with ambiguity like the movie Akira. My poetics is post-post-mortem. My poetics spilled pea soup on the linoleum while watching the movie Akira. My poetics does not connect the voice to anything metaphysical, nor is the voice ex-votos, so, my poetics yells “Tetsuo!” at poetry readings and walks away. Until you watch Akira with a handful of Zoloft you will never understand my poetics. My poetics might also be like watching the movie Eyes Wide Shut after five cups of Irish coffee. My poetics drinks Irish Coffee with thou.

Start

2008-08-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

I had this plan for a poetry blog that never seemed to materialize. Time often slips away on the farm.

However, I just completed the first draft of my poetry collection, and I think it is damned near time for me to get this thing up and running. It is exciting, in a way, since I think I taught myself the basics of writing (in a style of my own) on a live journal account in high school and early college.