Fluid / Exchange

Films 2012

2012-01-01T17:57:00.009-06:00

1. Welcome to the Dollhouse
2. Happiness
3. Our Idiot Brother
4. Storytelling
5. Palindromes
6. Colombiana
7. The Ides of March

Books 2012

2012-01-01T17:57:00.007-06:00

Complete Reads
1.

Partial Reads (Read Around In)
1. Cheshire Calhoun, ed.--Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers
2. Judith Halberstam--The Queer Art of Failure
3. Judith Halberstam--Skin Shows

I'm Still Here Raises Questions About Genre

2011-06-02T22:08:00.000-05:00

Cinéma vérité, experimental film, or work of conceptual art, I'm Still Here interrogates fame, especially fame for people, like Joaquin Phoenix, who have been in the limelight most of their lives. While many critics panned the film being a hoax, questioned director Casey Affleck's ethics in documenting the loathsome depths of Phoenix's meltdown, or disliked the faux-cinéma-vérité style, the film exploits different genres in order to out-tabloidize the celebrity cult/ure that is an American obsession.

Like Richard Linklater's Slacker, I'm Still Here plays to me like a traditional film in which the action bleeds out of Hollywood sound stages and into the real world films are meant to represent. The premise of the film is to interrogate the bifurcation of Joaquin Phoenix's self-hood by doing what celebrity culture does anyway and branding his personage into a character or even simply an image that everyone can recongnize. In order for the film to work, Phoenix and the film's other actors have to stick to the basic premises of Joaquin Phoenix's crisis and transformation into the rapper JP. By employing this improvisatory premise instead of a traditional script, everyone who has a stake in celebrity culture becomes part of the film.

Take, for example, the now-iconic Letterman scene. This scene allows viewers to engage two distinct characterizations of Phoenix by the repeating this cultural happening in a different, recontextualized medium. Phoenix's celebrity character on the real airing of the Letterman show is subtly different from Phoenix's celebrity character in the film I'm Still Here. Talk shows invite viewers to be outsider participants in a celebrity culture that is externalized from their live. Viewers see a glimpse of celebrities lives through the genre of these talk shows, which creates a stock image or character that viewers identify as Celebrity (This is what a Celebrity is; this is what a Celebrity is like). Films, unlike talk shows and other Celebrity-making genres, are asking us to suspend disbelief and identify with the characters in them, which permits viewers a different context or vantage point from which to view this particular celebrity, Phoenix, who through this conceptual narrative is working to shatter his Celebrity self. The scene following the Letterman appearance where Phoenix has a moment of clarity among the shrubbery exhibits the different characterizations. Viewers have a more sympathetic insider's perspective into this shattering when it is viewed through film's narrative, rather than the voyeuristic pleasures that they might experience when Celebrity is exposed as a public spectacle on talk shows or on tabloid TV.

Subtly employing genre in this way is akin to using viewer empathy to kill off the Celebrity Phoenix by reminding viewers that Celebrity includes (and often overshadows) a plethora of selves. Seeing I'm Still Here in close proximity to Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, I notice that many of the scenes in the two movies could be interchangeable (strippers, prostitutes, press junkets, etc.). The difference between the two films is that Phoenix seeks to extract himself from his life as an actor, an artist who pretends to be someone else and is subsequently remade by culture into a commodity, by becoming the rapper JP, an endeavor that appears to offer artistic freedom and creative control, until he realizes via P Diddy that hip-hop is an industry that is controlled as much as film. In Somewhere, Johnny simply realizes he hates the trappings of his celebrity life and simply drives off and then walks off, appearing to leave it all behind, which is just a different non-solution to the problem of being made into a non-being by celebrity cult/ure.

I'm Still Here is a film that upsets viewers and critics alike because it breaks the expectations of genre and blends them. Just like the kerfluffle over James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces when it turned out not to be completely autobiographical, I'm Still Here straddles the dividing line between documentation of reality and fictional film, which puts viewers ill-at-ease. It does not permit us to take voyeurstic pleasure in a celebrity's meltdown; we are compelled to empathize with Phoenix. If this cannot be done, the film is then written off as a hoax, a scheme, a game, a counterfeit because it is easier to do that than to dwell within the film's complex handling of a self who became a character that we, as characters, helped to author.

Two Stupid Articles

2011-05-22T19:39:00.000-05:00

In the past two days, I have had the misfortune of reading two of the stupidest articles I have ever come across. The first article on ChristWire is a conservative Christian defamation of homosexuality called "'Power Bottoming,' The Most Disturbing Trend in American Homosexuality," linked from Lucas de Lima's interrogation of the lyric poet as "power bottom" (which was quite interesting). The article by Stephenson Billings, which I refuse to link to, is one of the most sexist and racist bits of claptrap I've ever read, urging its readership to "educate ourselves" vigilantly about "the horrors of homosexuality." I couldn't believe that an article full of such hate-mongering could exist.

The other article, "The 'Education' Mantra" by Thomas Sowell in the National Review, a right-wing political magazine, is a classically argued diatribe against the "soft" education that is promulgated by the American educational system's allegiance to "soft subjects" (read: humanities). Of course, the hard subjects are the hard sciences. In Sowell's conceit, the humanities are akin to "baton twirling" while the hard subjects, like nuclear physics, lead to an easy-to-control but economically viable population that contributes to industry. Humanities education leads to the anarchic goals of an over-educated, un- or underemployed populace responsible for revolutions and civil unrest or worse, genocides.

Of course, Sowell's xenophobic hypocrisy is evident when he generalizes that American students do not line up to take hard classes, and the advanced degrees in those subjects are more likely to be earned by "foreign students." In Sowell's argument, his soft (read: uncited) fact doesn't reflect on the quality or competitive nature of the American higher education system in both soft and hard fields of inquiry but rather on the ineptitude of the education system as a whole, which doesn't train students to be equipped to learn those subjects. It also implicitly indicts contemporary Americans as not being willing to challenge themselves in education, failing to recognize that it is policy makers and economists like Sowell who, setting up the system from the outside, are creating a system based on the perceived value homogeneity rather than authentic, boundary-breaking achievement.

I would continue a rebuttal of both pieces, but the thought of giving them any more consideration makes me nauseous.

death, inc.

2011-04-18T01:40:00.000-05:00

I WORK FOR DEATH WHO PAYS IN LIFE-NUGGETS A KIND OF SICK-BUT-SUSTAINABLE MINIMUM WAGE USED IN THE CORPORATION'S ADVERTISING SCHEME TO BRAND DEATH, INC. AS GREEN WHICH IT HONESTLY IS.

From Being Constructed to Construing a Corpus: A Brief Reflection on David Foster Wallace as Mythic Destroyer

2011-04-16T23:48:00.002-05:00

At the DFW reading celebrating the publication of The Pale King at Babbitt's Books in Normal, Illinois on Friday night, I really understood the heaviness of his loss for the first time. Since he spent nearly a decade teaching at Illinois State University and is from Central Illinois, there is a devotion to him in these parts among former students and colleagues and friends that is both cult-ish and disembodied. He literally haunts these people more than he haunts this place. I can feel through their warm, clammy despair, even almost three years after his loss, the pressure of the longing that brushing with his genius (and I am not one to bandy about that term) created between these people and DFW.

DFW's disembodied presence reminds me of the figure Hard Rock in the Etheridge Knight poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane." Hard Rock was the baddest badass in prison, bearing the other black inmates up in a racist system, but after he is lobotomized, he is deprived of that swagger: "He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things / We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do." The poem makes me feel the irremediable heaviness of Hard Rock's loss, as his role simply cannot be filled by another. Even though Hard Rock is still alive, he is not his old self, and the density of the emptiness is so deep as to seem a singularity, an event from which no escape may be found.

Like Hard Rock, DFW was the baddest badass in the pomo-fiction game but at what cost? The Pale King, as a textual body, now lurks like the lobotomized Hard Rock, zapped of the embodied possibility that the mythologically stylized DFW represented with his now-vanished, unfinished genius stuffed into a rich but excessively unfinished corpus.

Even in his absence, the pressure of the loss of his genius is enormous and palpable, warping the way those left behind view the world, like straying too close to a black hole. People need(ed) that genius (our addiction to the product of his addiction and depression), and it was taken away (place blame where you must). Those who were close to him either grieve by unfailingly immortalizing his memory or parasitically crawl inside the corpus to feed (see Jonathan Franzen's careerist, self-absorbed, post-Oprah's Book Club turn for an example of the latter, critiquing DFW's self-absorption and careerism in a twisted version of "anything you can do I can do better" here (warning, you have to Like The New Yorker on Facebook to (I feel so dirty) read it) ).

DFW's corpus is a record of the fear of being constructed, created, made to exist, in any capacity, for any duration. If you are something to someone, anyone, even an anonymous anyone anywhere, or worse, everything to someone, and/or worse still, enlightened enough to make this realization and feel that pressure, which on any level is immense when it is dwelt within, even for nanoseconds, what can be done to alleviate it? And how life-numbingly guilty you must feel to exist at all, when your existence is brought so far to the fore, so close to the brim of the self, so chokingly all-encompassing it is to be needed like that and understand an iota of that need. That kind of guilt can only be compounded by the knowledge that it is self-created, constructed from one's own interest(s) (writing and thinking) and the burning need to do what makes humans human, act on the burningest of self-interested needs, which is the only thing that hints at joy beyond the materialities of existence and beyond the hollowness that is false sacrifice in service to an unpopulated, distorting, and vast exterior nothingness.

International Herb Beauty Pageant Results

2011-03-21T01:33:00.000-05:00

In the recent International Herb Beauty Pageant, sage was voted "Most Beautiful Herb." Parsley took the award for "Herbal Congeniality." Sexy Italian basil won "Most Photogenic" over coriander. Sassy capers shocked the world by defeating tarragon in the "Best Swimsuit" competition. Rosemary edged out thyme for "Earthiest Herb." Star anise is "Most Artistic," a surprising upset to gain an award cannabis has dominated for decades. Fugly cumin leaves, however, get "Most Likely to Have Friends Pay Someone to Date You."

Review in the New Poets/Artists

2011-03-04T21:40:00.000-06:00

My review of Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler is in the latest issue of Poets/Artists. Buy it here. Read the issue for free here.

Political Fragment of the Day

2011-03-01T20:03:00.000-06:00

I lament the absence of an ethical imperative in favor of base competition for ideological subjugation and/or contrarianism between political parties. Obama had already been jarred awake, totally alone and naked, from his dream of nonpartisan progress before he even put on his pajamas, settled in, or fell asleep to dream it.

On Activism and the Book

2011-02-26T22:54:00.000-06:00

I have been shopping for a book large enough to fit inside of for some time. I am collaborating with a book artist who can excavate the book’s interior so that I may live inside, albeit in a cramped, cocoon-like space of acid-free pages and nontoxic binding glue. I have chosen to put my body into a book for literacy advocacy, once I learned the government planned to cut literacy education. I have always wanted to wager my body, my life for a cause. And this seems a worthy one, and one on the home front to boot.

Additionally, I have also had a lifelong interest in the idea that the body is a text, which seemed counterintuitive to me when I first heard such a statement proclaimed during my days at university. I have always thought that difficult and abstract theoretical concepts are best explained through being concretized. This is a large part of my desire to be forever joined with a book. That, and I am really hot to use the awful pun “Do you read me?” with my wife or someone else who comes to view the book-human hybrid. I’m having a hard time typing right now because I’m laughing so hard just thinking of how stupid that groaner of a pun will be after a while!

I left a little note for my wife, so that she knows how to get a hold of me when she can’t visit. In the note, I included a url to the live cam feed from the book’s interior, in case she wants to monitor my progress as I work for literacy advocacy. I included a privacy button on my end, for when I’m, you know, going to the bathroom or pleasuring myself. Those intimate moments are best kept to one’s self.

I also have left information about a trust fund with enough money to handle my final expenses. I plan to have a conservator preserve me. I have found an expert who can completely synthesize my body with the book using a mixture of mylar and the saliva of honey bees combined with extreme heat, or something to that effect (I have to admit that although I am a book lover, I have never been one to know the ins and outs of the technical side of book preservation).

The money in trust can be used to ship my book-body hybrid to a rare book collector in Finland, where the book and my remains (I could just say the book, at this point, but I don’t want to confuse you, dear reader) will be showcased in a temperature-controlled display within this expansive private collection. I have had to do quite a bit of legal research and maneuvering to make sure the collector is not arrested for mutilating a corpse or necrophilia or some other dubious crime in possessing the giant book.

I cannot tell you how great it feels to finally have found my life’s purpose and to have that purpose be affiliated with worthwhile activism, rather than just idling away my days in service of some faceless corporate master. Well, the space within the book is too small and so resembles a monk’s cell that it’s impossible for me to bring a computer, and typing is not feasible within the book’s claustrophobic confines, so I bid you adieu. My last wish for you in this my last act of writing is that you can find a purpose as singularly fulfilling as merging with a giant book in the service of literacy advocacy and literacy education.

Allegory in Kate Bernheimer's "Whitework"

2011-01-20T02:37:00.000-06:00

Certainly, it could be said to be a story about the anxiety of influence, or, perhaps more aptly, the influence of anxiety—it contains the code to my work with fairy tales as a writer, I think. But the code is submerged, just as secrets should be.
—Kate Bernheimer, Notes to "Whitework" (p. 533)

***
Allegory, or The Fairy Tale of Ideas

I get apprehensive teaching works that specifically say they've been coded. "Oh, great," I think to myself, "another writer contributing to the myth that literature is all about coding and decoding, and if you are unable to decode, you are not a good reader." To me, this myth is one part of the waning popularity of reading, especially the waning popularity of reading works that attempt to push against or destroy limits in a well-informed, meaningful way.

And yet I took Bernheimer's cagey comments in her notes to the story "Whitework" in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me as a challenge to wrestle with the allegory I believe her story contains. For those of you who don't know, an allegory is an extended metaphor (comparison) between two unlike things. In this case, her retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" deals with the same theme as Poe's short story, an obsession with art at the expense of what is perceived as the real (this is the part where we can have a tangent about the nature of art's reality, but I'll stick with deciphering the allegory for now and collapse that binary later).

The allegory begins with the fairy-tale cottage in the woods to which the speaker is taken for convalescence. The fairy-tale cottage is at once both a comfortable refuge and the object of derision because it is so cliche (abandoned, forlorn, diminutive). The allegory is cemented by Bernheimer's clever double entendre: "This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods." On the literal level, the first phrase announces the setting, a physical location in the imaginary time and space of the text. Allegorically, the idea of finding one's self means understanding one's own nature or purpose. In this way (and in knowing what we know about the nature of the story from her notes), Bernheimer decreases the distance between the first-person speaker of her tale and herself as auteur.

In the description of the setting, two object of symbolic import are revealed: a locket and key. Lockets contain keepsakes and keys open things up, although the speaker her is confused and uncertain about the import of the key (wait until later...) among other things like how she even arrived at the cottage.

The cottage, as a metaphor for the fairy-tale genre, is a strange place. From the outside, it appears convetional and cliche, but on the inside, it is surprisingly different than what one might anticipate, full of odd shapes that do not match the boxy, "Christmas package" of its exterior.

Then, of course, the room where the speaker convalesces is decorated with whitework, the story's namesake, which the dictionary tells us is an embroidery technique in which the stitching is the same color as the fabric:

A similar concept can be found in the "White Paintings" of Robert Rauschenberg, which the artist described as having an ambient quality to them where the paintings were hypersensitive to and affected by the setting in which they were experienced.

And so it is with fairy tales. As you might expect with the risk Rauschenberg took, the paintings often enraged critics and audiences for being blank or not being art at all ("Anyone could do that" is a chestnut oft quoted in light of these experiments.). Bernheimer recounts a similar response to fairy tales among creative writers and scholars alike.

The whitework metaphor works so well (as does the complementary white on white painting). The fairy tale can be seen as the base fabric of the white work and its retelling(s) then are the stitching of the emboidery, the artistry of which is often indistinguishable from the base material if done well. And yet, like Rauschenberg's white paintings, fairy tales prove to be ambient, changing with the atmosphere in which they are displayed (Read this tale as a way of revealing fairy tales intertextuality; read LaBute's "With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold" as retelling the Rumpelstiltskin tale through the screen of the digital age.). And all this richness without too great a distance from the source material.

The candle in the story illuminates the art of the whitework after a change in atmosphere. The leather-bound onionskin book that magically appears represents the speaker's discovery of scholarship about the whitework/fairy tales.

Then, of course, the portrait appears in the corner of the circular room. The portrait might be the most complicated part of the allegory, representing simultaneously the speaker's memory, self, the suspension of disbelief, and the postmodern subject. The crucial description of the portrait reveals that "The girl was depicted from top to bottom, smudged here and there, fading into the background, reminiscent somehow of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children's and Household Tales, the German name for the Grimm Brothers' book of fairy tales, look it up yourself, lazy!] yes, you could describe her portrait as an illustration. She was a plain girl, not unlike me" (530).

The speaker's description of the girl in the portait, the portrait resembles "a young girl ripening into womanhood," sounds odd and makes the girl in the portrait seem distant, although "not unlike" the speaker: a memory and also the self that one inserts into a story when reading it (suspension of disbelief). Bernheimer's tale, since the gap between the speaking "I" and the story's speaker is so small, also reveals the postmodern possibility of the fairy tale, where, in the tradition of the New Novel, the author might be inserted into the tale, leading to a meta-tale about the construction of fairy tales.

This adds a conceptual next level to this fairy tale that surpasses, like Rauschenberg's paintings, the dualism of the whitework as an apt allegory for fairy tales. Now fairy tales can include authors that critique the fairy tale's very fairy-tale-ness even as the author is retelling a conventional tale.

This is not only the speaker's postmodern awakening but also the connection to the surprise ending of Poe's "The Oval Portrait." The speaker has a kind of epiphany that her involvement with, in, and on-behalf of fairy tales is so all-consuming and life-replicating that it has no boundary. In other words, she can experience a kind of disembodied death within the story and perhaps also the symbolic "death" that submission to the obsession with the whitework (fairy tales) can be. The limitless possibilities of art and her existential ponderings lead her to realize "in my wonder I possessed complete satisfaction" (531).

The story ends with the speaker waking up to a less-fabulous reality, where it seems she has been more mentally debilitated than physically, as her cottage reverie indicates. The dualism between the fantasy world and this realism is where the companion comes into play. This shadowy companion is like a caregiver, someone who keeps her physically alive by providing sustenance, like a nurse, while she is mentally off in the "prison or home" that is the mind, the seat of ideas and artistic endeavors. Of course, in the last line, the unresolved key is reintroduced, as the doctor urges the speaker to manage her obsession with the art of fairy tales, which has made her suspicious of reality.

Series A Sound Archive

2011-01-14T20:47:00.000-06:00

Sad news: William Allegrezza's tenure as curator of the Series A readings at Hyde Park Art Center has come to an end. Good news: find a great selection of contemporary experimental poetry mp3s here.

Your humble blogger reads with the inimitable Kathleen Rooney (see January 7, 2009).

Micro Review: The American

2011-01-05T00:45:00.001-06:00

The American starring George Clooney and directed by Anton Corbijn is a visually stunning film, and I wouldn't be surprised if it wins Oscars for its look. The dialogue between the main characters is spare, and their interactions, believable. Clooney may be nominated for this role, but he won't win. Again.

Thematically, the film addresses the possibility of redemption and change, using traditional symbols. Clooney's character Jack (Edward) has a tattoo of a butterfly, reads a book about butterflies during the film, marvels over an endangered butterfly during a picnic with client Mathilde, and is called "Mr. Butterfly" (or the Italian "farfalla" by two characters, Mathilde and Clara.

It is precisely things like this heavy-handed use of symbols that should cause the movie to be retitled For Americans rather than The American, because it uses symbols so clumsily in order to have a wider appeal to a generalized American blockbuster audience that might miss things (the kinds of people who complain about "Inception" being too complicated).

The audience this film was made for needs to be told by a bartender that a Sergio Leone spaghetti western is playing in the bar. They wouldn't get it and thus couldn't make the connection between The Man With No Name and The Man Whose Real Name We Don't Know in The American, both of whom are loners competing for a prize, a prize that, for Jack/Edward changes, as he does, during the film's climax.

Despite the film's ability to keep Jack/Edward's life secretive and ambiguous (all we know of him happens in the film's narrative itself), it ultimately falls flat for an informed viewer because it gets to giddy about revealing its contingencies. It doesn't trust the audience enough.

Books 2011

2011-01-01T03:47:00.035-06:00

1. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit--Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity
2. CAConrad--The Book of Frank
3. Kate Bernheimer, ed.--My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
4. Nick Demske--Nick Demske
5. Thomas Sayers Ellis--Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems
6. Leo Bersani--The Culture of Redemption
7. Daniel Borzutzky--The Book of Interfering Bodies
8. Anne Sexton--Transformations
9. Aaron Kunin--Folding Ruler Star
10. Aaron Kunin--The Sore Throat and Other Poems
11. Claudia Rankine--The End of the Alphabet
12. Susan Howe--That This
13. Rebecca Wolff--Manderley
14. Rebecca Wolff--The King
15. Danielle Pafunda--Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies
16. Debra di Blasi--The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions
17. Johannes Göransson--A New Quarantine Will Take My Place
18. Lynda Barry--Cruddy
19. Catherine Wagner--My New Job
20. Dorothea Lasky--Awe
21. John Wieners--Book of Prophecies
22. Marguerite Duras--Writing
23. Kass Fleisher--Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman
24. Adonis--An Introduction to Arab Poetics
25. Pierre Bayard--How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
26. Chris DeVito, ed.--Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews
27. Franco Moretti--Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
28. Leo Bersani--Homos
29. Mirabai (translated by Andrew Schelling)--For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai
30. Joyelle McSweeney--The Necropastoral
31. Dodie Bellamy--Fat Chance
32. Claudia Rankine--Don't Let Me Be Lonely
33. Kim Hyesoon Trans. Don Mee Choi--Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers
34. Adonis Trans. Samuel Hazo--Transformations of the Lover
35. Charles Bukowski--Septuagenarian Stew
36. Charles Baudelaire Trans. Ariana Reines--My Heart Laid Bare
37. Dean MacCannell--The Ethics of Sightseeing
38. CAConrad--Deviant Propulsion
39. Arthur Rimbaud Trans. Martin Sorrell--Collected Poems
40. Pierre Michon Trans. Wyatt Mason--The Origin of the World
41. Brenda Shaughnessy--Interior with Sudden Joy
42. DICHTEN=[number ten] 16 new [to American readers] German Poets
43. Viktor Shklovsky Trans. Irina Masinovsky--Literature and Cinematography
44. Kate Bernheimer--The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum
45. Carol Fisher Saller--The Subversive Copy Editor
46. Joanna Ruocco--Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2 manuscript forthcoming 2012)
47. Curtis White--The Barbaric Heart
48. Raymond Federman--My Body in Nine Parts
49. Roland Barthes trans. Richard Miller--The Pleasure of the Text
50. Alan Singer--The Inquisitor's Tongue (FC2 manuscript forthcoming 2012)
51. Ellen Lupton, ed.--Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book
52. Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodriguez, and Robert M. Wharton--The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century
53. Ellen Lupton--Thinking with Type
54. Melanie Otto--A Creole Experiment
55. Kamau Brathwaite--ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey
56. Kamau Brathwaite--Mother Poem
57. Kamau Brathwaite--Sun Poem
58. Kamau Brathwaite--X/Self
59. Kamau Brathwaite--History of the Voice
60. Johanna Drucker--Figuring the Word
61. Johannes Göransson--Dear Ra
62. xTx-Normally Special
63. Roxane Gay--Ayiti
64. Brandi Wells--Please Don't Be Upset
65. Brian Oliu--So You Know It's Me
66. Susan Howe--My Emily Dickinson
67. Jean Genet--Treasures of the Night: The Collected Poems of Jean Genet
68. Dennis Cooper--Idols
69. Dennis Cooper--Dream Police: Selected Poems
70. Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris--Breathturn
71. Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris--Threadsuns
72. Paul Celan trans. Pierre Joris--Lightduress
73. J.G. Ballard--The Atrocity Exhibition
74. Lea Graham--Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You

Films 2011

2011-01-01T00:01:00.029-06:00

1. The American
2. Talk to Her
3. The Thin Red Line
4. Antichrist
5. The Social Network
6. Winter's Bone
7. Casino
8. Selena
9. The Color Purple
10. Jackass 3
11. Hot Tub Time Machine
12. The Next Three Days
13. The Fighter
14. Black Swan
15. The Lover
16. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
17. The King's Speech
18. Blue Valentine
19. 88 Minutes
20. Due Date
21. Kissing on the Mouth
22. My Own Private Idaho
23. Romance and Cigarettes
24. Apocalypse Now Redux
25. White Men Can't Jump
26. Somewhere
27. The Hangover
28. All Good Things
29. Badlands
30. I'm Still Here
31. Strange Days
32. True Grit
33. The Rite
34. Exit Through the Gift Shop
35. The Big Sleep (1946)
36. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
37. 25th Hour
38. The Believer
39. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
40. Waiting for "Superman"
41. Takers
42. Easy A
43. Hereafter
44. The Tree of Life
45. The Adjustment Bureau
46. The Possession of David O'Reilly
47. The Brown Bunny
48. Murder by Numbers
49. Helvetica
50. Stone
51. Bound
52. Kids
53. Natural Born Killers
54. Insomnia
55. Objectified
56. Insidious
57. The Machinist
58. Casualties of War
59. Dark City (Director's Cut)
60. All About My Mother
61. Buffalo '66
62. Control
63. Fair Game
64. Last Tango in Paris
65. The Conversation
66. Children of a Lesser God
67. Kenneth Anger Vol. 1
68. Kenneth Anger Vol. 2
69. Boys Don't Cry
70. Basquiat
71. The Fall
72. The Conspirator
73. Julien Donkey-Boy
74. Trainspotting
75. Source Code
76. Bridesmaids
77. The United States of Leland
78. Chloe
79. Trucker
80. Stay
81. The Ghost Writer
82. Jimi Hendrix (1973)
83. Horrible Bosses
84. Crazy, Stupid, Love
85. Bonnie and Clyde
86. Exotica
87. The Hangover II
88. Straw Dogs
89. Midnight in Paris
90. The Hustler
91. Straw Dogs (Remake)

beginning with a Haitian proverb

2010-12-29T22:17:00.001-06:00

the constitution is paper, but bayonets are steel. the laws are indelible, but they are written in sand as the sandstorm begins. a mandate caramelizes the polis, but legislators are teflon. human rights are shadows hidden in burrows, but the screams of the tortured echo and echo. the enemy's civilians are as fleshy as us, but our missiles fire.

Emptiness and Fullness in America

2010-12-13T22:50:00.005-06:00

This is the old American emptiness: the frontier. Hetch Hetchy Valley before the construction of O'Shaughnessy dam. John Muir fought hard to protect the valley, but only some nature can be fenced off and left empty of use.

And the flooded valley. The new new world. Land of fullness, the Land of Many Uses. Use me, use me, fill me with your life-giving liquid. If that I may be bountiful and not so spare, not so devoid.

If the clouds or the color blue are insufficient to fill the sky, then fill it with clouds so numerous they defy the imagination, defy the sun.

Abandoned construction projects are the new beautiful emptiness. Spare, economical and lapsed from their intended purpose, they become the perfect metaphor for our time in America.

These are the pristine ruins under the billowing garment of failure, ruined before they get old enough to be ruins. Ideologically, these images are at war with the American Dream, the house picture each of us drew as a child, sun in upper corner, smoke coming out of the chimney, perfect and perfectly devoid of complexity.

from ISU International Collection of child art

Of course, real American ruins present a grimmer metaphor for American emptiness, as the country has ceased to be a power in manufacturing. Rust belt photographs depicting empty industrial sites or ghost towns are eerily compelling, devoid of the human touch, embattled, overcome by the elements.

American emptiness and fullness is brought into stunning relief in the homes of hoarders, who fill the American Dream with things meant to be interlocutors for real emotions. Usually hoarders are hyper-sensitive perfectionists whose minds can make more plans than they can execute.

This is perfect excess, with all the busyness of a collage. The dream of consumerism behind the facade of the happy house, the American Dream. Hypocrisy.

Stuff piled ceiling high. Excess, fullness. Isn't this what a house should be filled with? Isn't this how a room should look? The monsters hiding in plain sight. They are never under the bed. This monstrosity must be confronted and worked out before it overwhelms the imagination, returned to a state of blissful emptiness like the facade of the child's painting, the idea of interior matching the exterior.

Kele - Everything You Wanted (DJ Mujava Remix)

2010-12-13T00:22:00.000-06:00

Reposting "A Fire in My Belly"

2010-12-12T21:41:00.003-06:00

I'm reposting David Wojnarowicz and Diamanda Galas's "A Fire in My Belly." This is art worth fighting for, and if the Smithsonian no longer will exhibit it because they are weak, then I will. I stand with the LGBTQ community and remember those who suffer: taken, further marginalized, or demonized by AIDS.

For Weeping

2010-12-12T04:20:00.001-06:00

"Naima," John Coltrane
"Nothing Compares 2 U," Sinéad O'Connor
"Bridge Over Troubled Water," Simon and Garfunkel
"Something in the Way," Nirvana
"Lean On Me," Bill Withers
"In My Life," The Beatles
"Imagine," John Lennon
"Kathleen's Theme," Les McCann
Praying with Eric, or "Meditations for a Pair of Wire Cutters," Charles Mingus/Eric Dolphy
"Would?", Alice in Chains

There are others...

The Diet Plan

2010-12-10T23:29:00.004-06:00

If you minimize your breathing, you will appear skinnier overall as you will be better able to hold in your abdominal region, and when you manage to completely stop breathing, it will be just another small thing you can do to show your commitment to weight loss and healthy living, which will make you a source of inspiration for family, friends, and strangers alike.

The Decree

2010-12-10T17:39:00.001-06:00

If the reserve rolls of bath tissue be placed too far from the throne so as to be unreachable whilst still sitting and upon completion of the dirty act, then this is a most grievous offense and shall be punishable by an eternity of tickle attacks enacted by hands bearing feathers and other objects like severed limbs or the hair of the dead emerging from the myriad dark openings of the gulag cell so that the world may be simultaneously cleansed of those who are ruthlessly inconsiderate shits and filled with the desperate ongoing laughter that surrounds well-intentioned torture like a warm afghan blanket or cloud of smoke that leaves a pesky lingering odor not even modern products like Febreze or Lysol can mitigate.

A Fragment on the Assigning of Days

2010-12-10T13:22:00.000-06:00

The fact that we have a day (or month) for anything like human rights just gives certain hypocritical people an excuse to ignore or willfully encroach upon the idea of basic human rights the other 364 days and then talk about their undeniable importance during the designated day (or month). So for me, human rights day has lost all possible importance and meaning by being relegated to a specific day, kind of like the Christian elements of Christmas have been evacuated by turning the possibility of Christ's presence in the world via practice of kindhearted and altruistic behavior into a season of the year, a season now more celebratory of Capitalism. And yet, many believe the imaginary man (sic) in the sky will grant them access if they buy stuff for all their family and closest friends and toss a few coins into the cups of Salvation Army bell ringers during the holiday season. It's so convoluted, when you really think about it.

An Odd Occurrence of Two Books Switched at Birth

2010-12-01T21:13:00.000-06:00

I am working on an interdisciplinary project that involves the work of Kamau Brathwaite. I checked out his book The Development of a Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820. I just opened the book to peruse it when I discovered that a different book had been put inside when the text was bound by the library's preservationist way back when. Inside is Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago published by The Free Press in 1955. I'm baffled about how two seemingly unrelated texts have been switched and wondering about where ISU's copy of the Brathwaite book might be.

Review of cessation covers by Bill Allegrezza

2010-07-18T19:06:00.001-05:00

Bill Allegrezza has been working on a series of micro reviews called The Daily Glance for a few months now over on his blog p-ramblings. I have really enjoyed it when his reviews match up with things I've already read, but I like it even more that these micro-reviews expand my horizons. Now all I need is an unlimited small-press poetry budget! A couple weeks back he reviewed my chapbook cessation covers, which I published back in late 2007 with Adam Fieled's Funtime Press.

Here's what Bill had to say:

Steve Halle's cessation covers seemed related to music right from the beginning. Oddly, they made me remember being in a punk rock band trying to come up with lyrics as we played. Steve is, of course, a poet, not high school want-to-be star, and he tells us in an apology that these pieces are a response of sorts to the lyrics of Kurt Cobain. Steve's pieces are short eight line lyrics (except for the last one) with disrupted syntax, occasional rhymes, and references from Bogart to Oedipus to NyQuil. They are best read as a series instead of as individual poems, though some of them stand quite well on their own.

off white is off-
white on
the swatches, which were
novelties, how about now?

That's a pretty dead-eye, sharpshooter review for one paragraph.

New Maps & Atlases Album Perch Patchwork!

2010-06-30T03:17:00.000-05:00

What you really should do, if you have a brain in that head of yours, is rush out to your finer independent music purveyor and buy a copy of the album Perch Patchwork by Maps & Atlases (pictured above). I'm heading to Monticello, Illinois for a concert and record release at Any Frequency (220 W. Washington St.) tomorrow, June 30 5-6:30 pm.

Failing that, you can also purchase the album here, listen to it on myspace, or download it from your favorite site.

Few things in this earthly realm make me happier than new music from Maps & Atlases.

End transmission.

Micro Review: The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing

2010-06-01T02:26:00.002-05:00

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing
by David Morley
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing is intended to be a textbook of sorts for beginning creative writing students at the university level, and it offers a primer on the field of creative writing for these students (as opposed to Myers' The Elephants Teach or Dawson's Creative Writing and the New Humanities, which are institutional histories of the field intended for scholars).

Morley offers fair coverage of the three genres generally taught in creative writing programs: prose fiction, prose nonfiction/creative nonfiction, and poetry. He does not seem to favor one aesthetic practice over another (i.e. official verse culture or experimental, etc.), moving from Mary Kinzie to Oulipo, often in the same chapter. Morley also does a good job of covering different modalities by including writing that is performed or writing as performance, either oral or digital, although these modalities are given considerably less weight than practical concerns.

The book is divided into ten chapters:

Introducing creative writing: This chapter merges the history and purpose of the field of creative writing, articulating why it belongs in the academy and theorizing its development since the start of history. Morley advocates for writers to also be voracious readers, mainly within their genres, eschewing how-to books and literary criticism.
Creative writing in the world: Morley uses a conflicts approach to show literary criticism and creative writing to be two sides of the same coin and advocates for writers to practice reflective criticism of their own work. He covers how to use experience as well as language play to make creative writing and briefly describes the field of publishing and editing.
Challenges of creative writing: In this chapter, various writing blocks are described, both imposed by the world and self-imposed, including indifference, rival media, procrastination, etc. Morley then examines challenges for translation, as well as experiment, design, and quality
Composition and creative writing: This chapter outlines different practical matters necessary for the writing practice, everything from establishing discipline to dealing with how-tos and rules to finding the right notebook. The chapter then covers ways to vary or change one's practice productively.
Processes of creative writing: Morley describes seven process for creative writing here, all of which are heuristic: preparing, planning, incubation, beginning, flowing, the silence reservoir, and breakthroughs and finish lines. He then extends out into post-writing practice and some non-traditional practices like appropriation.
The practice of fiction: Genre-specific introduction to writing prose fiction.
Creative nonfiction: same as above
Writing poetry: same as above
Performing writing: In this chapter, Morley describes ways that writing goes from the page to the stage, arguing that since writing began as a speech genre, that the true measure for a work is to hold up when delivered as a speech act. Again, practical advice is offered first and then Morley branches out into lesser considered spheres of performed delivery.
Writing in the community and academy: This chapter talks about connections between creative writing practice and the larger community, arguing that many writers need to be active in the community by necessity, as the academy or self-sustaining practice is for the few. He also argues for multidisciplinary creative writing practice within the academy, sort of a CWAC approach, if you catch my drift.

One thing I did not like about the book is Morley is dismissive of criticism/theory/philosophy, going so far as to say these things will detract from writers' practices. I am fond, however, of using theory or introducing theory to creative writers as a way to allow for the development of complexity, which Morley doesn't allow for. I guess he has to be polemical to fight off the literary factions within the English department.

Overall, I'd recommend adopting this book for classroom use. The book is conceptually similar to Wendy Bishop and David Starkey's Keywords in Creative Writing, but this book's structure makes it more appealing to teach with (Keywords is organized alphabetically and it could be useful to assign readings from it as topics come up and need explication). In addition to the chapters that introduce the field fairly well, Morley peppers his pages with gray boxes that include writing exercises, each one with an aim (rationale) for doing them. I suspect this book would work well in a multigenre introductory workshop course, where class time might be devoted to generating new writing and examining student writing in workshops. The book will allow students to get a feel for whether the field of creative writing is for them, while allowing the teacher to develop a class that focuses on students' writing practice.

MAKE Magazine review

2010-04-19T14:08:00.001-05:00

One of the spoils of this year's AWP was MAKE Magazine, a Chicago-based publication that publishes new nonfiction, fiction, poetry, interviews, reviews, visual art, and a section called "On the Make," a nod to Nelson Algen and a link between the print version of MAKE with its online counterpart. MAKE's title also reflects poetics, the theory of making, and the literature, art, and hybird work found in the issue I examined are aware of artifice.

I noticed two things before I read a word: MAKE looks good. MAKE even smells good. The cover features a quote from Jenny Boully's nonfiction piece "If you point to heaven, it begins." integrated into multicolored brushstrokes. Since the magazine is as much about the integration of art and literature with design, the cover works to prepare readers for that. The journal's title and information is relegated to the far right-hand corner of the cover.

The theme for the Spring/Summer 2010 MAKE is Myth, Magic, and Ritual. I like literary magazines that posit a theme for each issue, as it usually provides either a point of coherence or dissonance as I work my way through (It also make me rethink my own work as I prepare to submit).

As for the issue's content, I was drawn immediately to Kate Zambreno's nonfiction piece "Slapping Clark Gable." I'd been following Kate's blog Frances Farmer is My Sister for a while (especially interested in her theory of anorexic and bulimic writing) and connected with her at the AWP (the Les Figues/Chiasmus/Fairy Tale Review readings at Thin Man in Denver was worth the trip alone and Zambreno's reading mesmerized me: raw and invested in themes my work returns to like religion and sexuality).

"Slapping Clark Gable" is nonfiction in the lineage of confessional writing (see especially Plath) and excess, informed by Zambreno's fave theorists like Artaud, Bataille, etc. It is bald, sexual, shockingly honest:

Although I would be a virgin until twenty, I began masturbating furiously at a young age. I would lie on my belly and rub my fingers against my underwear. I needed friction to get off (still do). I know what you're doing, my mother once said from the foot of the stairs as I pretended to watch TV. This best sums up the exchanges I had with my mother about sex. The implication of surveillance, the undertones of guilt.

After the aforementioned reading at AWP, I told Kate in passing that she was my unofficial autobiographer, based on the excerpt she read from her Chiasmus novel O Fallen Angel. Devouring passages like the above on the plane home from Denver just reiterated that compliment. Although my parents were not quite as panopticonic as Zambreno's mother described above, I felt the pressure to behave (whatever that means) and succeed (whatever that means), which are as much about my Catholic upbringing as a dissonant counterpoint to my own oxymoronic flaw of perfectionism. Zambreno captures these notes perfectly here, hinting at the roots of her attraction to the taboo, to stoically brutal lovers. I think of my own attractions to junk, ruin(s), tabloids, and garbage. A great read.

MAKE also makes an investment in visual poetry, publishing the collage work of Brandon Downing, whose Lake Antiquity, just out from Fence Books looks beautiful and kitschy (in a good way!). I was more taken, however, with the excavatory poetry of Nate Zoba. "Recrement" is the example of Zoba's work here, and it coincides with the idea of MAKE being about poetics and especially with the ritual act that excavating a book must be. Zoba's work forces me to reckon with it as a visual artifact before getting at it as a poem. It looks like no other poem I've seen (although Tom Phillips A HUMUMENT comes to mind for both Downing Zoba's poetry) with its webbed projective verse. The pages become webs that link the word selected by Zoba, given depth by the object of the book itself. MAKE is one of only a handful of journals (Poets & Artists (O&S) being another) that could pull off publishing visual work like this with its full-color matte pages and large size.

MAKE features plenty of other writers I'm interested in, including Nick Demske, Cathy Park Hong, Dara Wier, Lily Hoang, and Kathleen Rooney, mixed with writers whose work I'm seeing for the first time. MAKE is a sexy journal that seems committed to publishing challenging work.

Activities at AWP 2010: Denver

2010-04-03T16:51:00.002-05:00

I'll be working at the Mandorla / Spoon River Poetry Review table at the AWP Bookfair in Denver this week. Stop by and say hello.

***

I'll also be at the Mandorla reading at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Denver on Thursday night 6-9pm:

The Museum of Contemporary Art - Denver and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas present Late Night Gallery: Art and Reading

Location: MCA Denver. 1485 Delgany St (corner at 15th, two blocks from Union Station) / Denver, CO 80202. Tel 303 298 7554.
Websites: www.mcadenver.org & www.litline.org/Mandorla
Support contemporary art and enjoy a reading of literature from the Americas at the MCA café, which opens its doors for Mandorla at 6pm. Readings run from 6:30 to 8, and museum remains open until 9; don’t miss the MCA display of Samuel Beckett's historic video “Not I” (1971). Mandorla readers include Anne Waldman, Rodrigo Toscano, Steve Tomasula, Dale Smith, Andrew Schelling, Kristin Prevallet, John Keene, Bhanu Kapil, Gabriela Jauregui, Duriel Harris, Mónica de la Torre, Daniel Borzutzky.

***

On Friday April 9, I'll be reading at the Festival of Language:

Location: Panera Bread, 1330 Grant Street, Denver, CO
Cost: Free and open to the public
Readings by: Janée J. Baugher, Jane L. Carman, Jackson Connor, Kate Dusenbery, Andy Farnsworth, Steve Halle, Duriel E. Harris, Tom C. Hunley, Cris Mazza, Kathleen Miller, Kirk Nesset, Scott Sands, Jeff Simpson

***

On Saturday, April 10, I'll be representing Cracked Slab Books, publisher of my book Map of the Hydrogen World:

Cracked Slab Books/ University of Tulsa/ City Visible Chicago Poets
Location: Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street
Cost: Free
Website: http://mercurycafe.com
Join us for a reading of poetry and prose. Readers include Sheila Black, Maxine Chernoff, Sloan Davis, Steve Halle, Paul Hoover, Grant Jenkins, Jennifer Karmin, Cheryl Pallant, Michelle Taransky, Tony Trigilio, Hugh Tribbey & others.

The Real and the World of Art: the Great Gurlesque Debate 2010

2010-03-28T16:50:00.008-05:00

I've been lurking as the great Gurlesque debate has been going on over the past couple days, as the primary parties Amy King, Danielle Pafunda, Ana Božičević, and Lara Glenum (among others) have debated the Gurlesque and queerness, what queerness is, who can speak for who or what, etc. (The action has been happening at Amy King's Alias and Exoskeleton, two fine blogs worth subscribing to and reading regularly).

I have kept quiet so far because I'm white and male (and therefore can't speak for shit, really), even though I'm teaching the Gurlesque right now and working on a long theoretical paper about dialectical/dialogic relationship of oppositional movements within the otherness theories that have emerged since the 1960s and how the poetry written out of these theories has evolved, but that is a matter for another day.

The debate, in my estimation, has been mainly literary politicking, omitting the art for the most part, but I do want to call attention to a couple irksome things. First, the politicking of who speaks for whom and/or who acts for whom are questions covered in Erica Hunt's "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics," which points to insularity (a failure in "syncretism, or a rejection of non-organic or nonindigienous" oppositional groups) and cooptation ("the reinscription by dominant discourse on conceptual advances made by oppositional groups into the terms, values, and structures of dominant ideology") as potential setbacks for oppositional projects (201).*

The main critiques from Amy King includse the appropriation of the early 90s Riot Grrrl punk theory/aesthetic, without acknowledgment of the queer within that movement having an effect on the Gurlesque and the seeming absence of queer writers from the anthology, given the editors Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum claim the Gurlesque to be a queering of heteronormativity and the male gaze as constructing the feminine.

From my perspective, Riot Grrrl's discourse has not affected my reading of the Gurlesque one way or another (although I've been listening to a lot of Riot Grrrl music to try and make the connections that Greenberg asserts in her introduction to the anthology and in her interviews over at Delirious Hem, which has been its own reward). In other words, Gurlesque does not need Riot Grrrl's aesthetic to be theoretically or aesthetically viable contemporary poetry by creating formal dissonances.

I oppose the overly strong connections between the world of art (poetry) and the world of real socio-political movements. While I will not deny that there is a correlation between art, theory, and real-world acceptance movements and their socio-political gains, it is a mistake to impose the utopic idealism that fuels activism onto the world of art because it undercuts art's ability to be subversive, rendering it only the opportunity to be politically correct.** In the world of art, the subjectivity of who does the subversion shouldn't matter, as long as the subverting gets done in the work (this is the old producer versus product chicken-egg debate). Neither art nor the real world progress with any kind of recognizable narrativity, that is something humans impose on the world to try to make logical sense out of it. History and art are inherently illogical or surprising.

King's critiques follows Hunt's description of insularity, as lacking syncretism or failing to unify the pluralistic third wave feminist instantiations as part of the larger movement of opposition within art (of which queer feminism and the Gurlesque are but two entities). It is another way of saying that queer feminism is its own thing, unrelated to straight feminism. (And this is only gender and sexuality, I haven't critiqued the race or class privileges that give certain people access to be activist, in art or the political sphere. These privileges are certainly also factors in the Gurlesque or any other anthology, anthologic device, or access to publishing means like blogs).

The who-can-speak-from-what-position critique is an (essentialist) cooptation of dominant discourse's efforts to thwart oppositional advances (in art and the socio-political), as a pluralistic spectrum or rhizome of movements, by fractious turf wars. King's critique of the Gurlesque anthology is an explicit example of this essentialism (defining what a feminist is, what a queer is, what their poetry can be, do, mean, etc.), while the Gurlesque anthology is (perhaps) an implicit example (although I'll never know or have a political interest in who does what with whom in the bedroom or how they construct their sexual identity).

I personally don't want to make or engage with art in which correctness is the primary goal, but I'd love it if art could help inscribe the real world with equality and believe it helps. I want to live in a world where everyone views everyone else as an equal, but I recognize the world's inequalities fuel art and am glad they do. Neither art nor the real should suspend constructive mobility, personal privacy, or choice (hell, without those I'd be a political right-winger like the rest of my family!).

Is Greenberg and Glenum's Gurlesque anthology weaker for its appropriation of queer discourse? As a force of third wave feminist or queer political activism: possibly. As a collection of subversive art by oppositional artists, definitely not.

Then again, you should read it for yourself and find out.

NOTES:
* Find Erica Hunt's "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics" in The Politics of Poetic Form edited by Charles Berstein, or listen to Erica Hunt deliver the talk here. Quotations here are from the book.

**I borrow a great deal here from Curtis White's "I am Artist; I Make Beautiful Things: A Credo of Sorts Concerning the New Beauty" in Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics.

Call for Poems: The Spoon River Poetry Review

2010-03-26T21:43:00.002-05:00

Dear Poets,

I'd like to introduce myself as the new editor of The Spoon River Poetry Review and invite you to submit your poetry to the magazine, whether you are an old fan or completely new to us, as I'm excited to diversify both content and readership. As editor, my aim is to build upon the magazine's long-standing dedication to cross-pollination by publishing excellent poems, including translations in English, from all styles and perspectives, even (especially) those that seem, or have been situated critically, as at odds.

While SRPR already receives thousands of submissions a month, many of which are very strong, I'd like to see more diversity -- more poems by women, more poems by younger poets, more poems that explore embodiment from non-white, non-heteronormative perspectives, edgier & riskier poetics -- as well as excellent poetry that might be identified as more "mainstream." I enjoy reading poems from a wide variety of sensibilities and aesthetics, and am dedicated, as editor, to attracting and cultivating a readership that doesn't feel the need to choose from among various styles and schools, even as the politics of creation and production are brought into relief. I don't, however, want to confuse breadth with anything-goes; as I put it in the forthcoming Poet's Market, "Spoon River is looking for poems that are as intellectually and emotionally ambitious as they are attentive to technique."

Please send your poems, postmarked no later than April 15th, to:
The Spoon River Poetry Review
4241/Publications Unit
Illinois State University
Normal IL 61790-4241.

We are also accepting submissions now for our annual Editors' Prize Contest (up to three poems; single long poems welcome; 10 pages max). Winner receives $1000 & publication; two runners-up receive $100 each and publication; 3-5 honorable mentions receive publication. Postmark deadline is extended this year, to accommodate the transition of editorship, until May 1, 2010. The $16.00 reading fee includes a one-year subscription.

Please see our website for complete submission and contest details (we're in the process of updating the website, too!): www.litline.org/Spoon.

And finally, if you'd like to subscribe to the magazine, the cost is $15.00 for individuals, $18.00 for institutions. Our state funding was cut by over 70% percent this year, so we are in serious need of grass-roots support. To subscribe, send a check or money order (made out to The Spoon River Poetry Review), to The Spoon River Poetry Review, 4241 Department of English, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4241.

Thank you, and I look forward to reading your work and to hearing your feedback!

All best,

Kirstin Hotelling Zona
Editor, The Spoon River Poetry Review

Aase Berg's With Deer and Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" Video: Skins

2010-02-14T02:59:00.003-06:00

Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video takes up many of the same concerns with femininity that Aase Berg does in With Deer, albeit using a much different stream of images, and Lara Glenum's Action Yes! piece on girly kitsch presents a great starting point for making some of these connections.

First, off to the Bath Haus of Gaga to talk about spectacle and the gaze. The opening of Lady Gaga's video, set up like a painting, like portraiture, lets me know that this video will be all about looking, being looked at, and the self's capacity to imagine all the angles of that looking. Lady Gaga will be the center of it all, the hinge for the action upon which all gazes converge. In the opening tableau, Gaga is enthroned with her entourage and her posh accoutrements (Zikmu Parrot by Starck $1600 wireless speakers product placement), revealing that fame has placed her into a rareified position, and the spectacle of her fashion positions her as well aware (razor-blade spectacles as razor-sharp vision; outfit that looks reptilian and tough yet gilded, armor-like). This image is much like an album cover and the stasis it implies, but once the video becomes dynamic, this (self-)image starts to morph.

The first change we gaze at is Monster Gaga born from the womb of a sensory deprivation chamber, complete with monstrous vinyl innocent-white catsuit and mask alongside background dancers who participate with Gaga in awkward/awful dancing, juxtaposed with a doe-eyed, cute, baby-like Gaga resembling a child's toy and a black-clad chic Gaga, complete with crown, looking at herself in the mirror (mirror-stage?), a reflective, self-examining stance.

And who should come to yank Gaga out of her innocence? Not men as might be expected, but two women, and they appear in the video around the same time as a pristine, status-quo beautiful, Madonna-clone Gaga while almost simultaneously Monster Gaga begins dance moves that parody Britney Spears, the status quo image of feminine fame with her fist pumps. The female orderlies give Baby Gaga a martini to desensitize her, and this produces a Debutante Gage, complete with tiara and silver lingerie, whose femininity is covered up and cloaked but not for long, as women again expose her to the gaze of the waiting throng of dark-clad men. As Debutante Gaga sexualizes herself, crawling on all fours toward the men, a new Monster Gaga appears in a separate location (later I learn it's the bedroom), complete with grotesque reptilian spine and bat-like form on her head, even as the men begin to bid on her.

Using the bullet-time shooting popularized by "The Matrix," the next Gaga is in black lingerie, jewel laden, and surrounded by men, with an S&M mask that signals her dominance, perhaps, juxtaposed with a Satellite Gaga, trasmitting a version of her sexualized body in the round. Cut to a Super-Fashion Gaga in her costume, which is fashion gone bad, turning Gaga into an animal form (note the hair as an ear-like coif) in an ornate suit that looks like a costume Louis XIV might have donned at Versailles. Rarefied by the fame from her transmission into the object of desire, to the point where she can wear golden, decadent outfits, we see Gaga wearing a faux-polar bear skin wedding train and marching to the bed with the highest-bidding suitor, who we can watch Gaga gaze at as the reflection of him undressing is in her mirrored sunglasses.

Vixen Gaga clad in red lingerie emerges next, face made-up the same as the Polar-Bear Gaga, and these are juxtaposed with pristine Madonna-clone Gaga, who looks pained, screaming and is revealed to be wearing the same bat-like hat/headpiece as the reptilian second Monster Gaga. Polar-Bear Gaga does the big reveal for the suitor while the viewer gazes at the scene, Super-Fashion Gaga fires the gun, and the suitor's bed begins to burst into flames as Vixen Gaga comes into her own and pristine Madonna-Gaga weeps over the corruption of self by lust (romance gone wrong). Polar-Bear Gaga stands in a pose resembling the opening tableau, in the bedroom but not of it. Vixen Gaga triumphs and we get a dirty-legged, smoking, Grotesque Gaga lying in bed next to the skeleton of her suitor, her tits shooting sparks through her bra, the final tableau. She is now the stereotyped sexually "hot" female, sitting and smoking after destroying the suitor with sex, but that's the cliche, isn't it, a monster's been created.

Which Gaga is the real one? All of them, of course, although the reflective, rareified, toughened-up Gaga of the opening tableau may be the one with which she most identifies now.

***

The correlation between Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video and Aase Berg's With Deer is a loose one as she goes about exploring skins in a much different way and without the burden of fame that is part of Gaga's spectacle of the gaze and the creation of her multiform feminine self. Jordan Davis, in his review of With Deer on Constant Critic, notes the cinematic aspects of Berg's prose poetry, comparing her moves to Bjork or Werner Herzog, while Lara Glenum sees teenage sci-fi parody in Berg's work in "From Cosmos to Cosmetics" in Action Yes. I agree, but I look at Berg's poetry as having the ability to look at the world through not only a totalizing lens but also a microscopic or subatomic one (her later works like Dark Matter use the langauge of string theory and theoretical physics). Her work often appears like one of those blacklight fantasy posters with its hard neon colors when shown from afar, but her work also has the ability to zoom in, not unlike the opening juxtaposition of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," where we toggle back and forth between the idyllic Lumberton and the awful writhing beetles, from quaint meadow to trash to the ants on the decomposing ear.

Berg's work, like Lady Gaga's video, sets up a series of allegories in which Berg puts the narrator into certain animal skins, such as the fox and the deer, and compares the he of the poem with the horse in "In the Horrifying Land of Clay:"

There was an evil horse that galloped with me on its back. Beneath the hair-strap his muscles moved and chafed against the muscles of my taut inner things which clamped down around his body. I was scared and breathless and dynamic for this tall evil horse was my enemy.[...] I froze in my skin--it pined and chafed against the sharp wind that hurled its sharp drops against my egg-face. There was an evil horse that galloped through the horrifying land, an evil and dark horse with manhood and musculature, and I was thrilled to have him as my enemy."

More chafing and discomfort occurs in "Seal Mutilation" in lines like "The seal flesh loosened slowly.[...] I too waited and had sensations in my hull. [...] The armor plates began to chafe against the fur" (the seal skin echoed later in "Deep Inside the Rock") and in the subsequent poem "The Snail Ancestry" where "The girl's skin was bare and chafed-up from the friction of the limp, flailing animal. It was vaguely reminiscent of a fox, but he could not be sure--the animal's forms and shapes had long since ceased to be determinable in this evil landscape."

Later, we find her carrying "Deer Fabric:" "The deer fabric is thin. I carry it cautiously as if it were a cloud in my hands," which later gets dropped: "I release the cloud now, the bundle. And nailed to my increasingly deader body I wait for everyone to turn in my direction, to me and the glowing fabric." Even geometric forms discomfit her as "The Hypotenuse" reveals, and a galaxy is no safe haven:

Out in the Andromeda, out in the hybrid galaxy, the Hypotenuse writhed around her own shoulder. She writhed inside her horrible, backward body, she writhed so that her insides chafed against the shell, so that her muscles rubbed raw agains the inside of her skin.

In the poem "Deer Quake," the speaker recounts being inside the deer, inside the cute body ("I have moved around the deer, I have fastened my fibers to the dancing, severe deer. [...] I have moved around the rare glass deer of September.") and feeling completely uncomfortable before a change, an emergence, a distancing from the deer happens:

There is a light in the deer, there is a light in the deer, there is a light deep inside the cavity deer! Now the blood surface song surface is heaving! It quakes through me and the deer. Fibers ache in my sharp border. Now the painful deer tears now it breaks. Now the deer and I burst and are exposed--

Here the speaker is born out of or separated from the deer, exposing them both, like the illusion that one can stay within the cute, within the deer fabric that has been fashioned and the speaker has been forced to carry. She has become that thing and separated. There is no skin that does not chafe, nothing in nature has a comfortable flesh to inhabit, from the grass that gets chewed to "seed flour" in the deer mouth to the geometric forms of the galaxy. The speaker finds only chafing, cutting, fluid leakage, and open sores, but the painful discomfort comes before the "time for the cutting to slowly start to heal."

On Translation

2010-01-25T22:14:00.004-06:00

Translation is forever associated with loss. The loss we associate with translation is not too different from the loss posited by Schiller or other Romantics: that we have (inevitably) fallen from a pristine and superior state, are alienated by culture, and seek a return to the (now/ever unattainable) pristinity by transcending/transcendent culture. In other words, the translation is a mere mediation of the original text in its pristine state, alienated by the transference between languages.

But do we really always lose something in translation, as if a translation is really a cheapening of some pristine other thing? Isn't it possible to gain through translation? Readers of the language into which the work has been translated gain access to a new work. Writers of a translated work gain a potential greater audience. Translators gain the chance to richly interrogate their linguistic between-ness.

Of course, these are all literal gains. But is it possible for the text to gain too? Many believe that the translation is inherently worse, why isn't it inherently better? Why judge at all--isn't a translation essentially a sidestep from one language to another? At the least, the modality and materiality of the text(s) are the same.

Is the stigmatization of translations a reuse of the old Platonic argument for banning poets from the republic--that translation concerns loss because it is a copy of a copy of a copy, as if the cave wall were but a mirror reflecting the shadows?

Then again, I live in the country that has the largest disparity between new texts published and translated texts published, so it feels imperialistic of me to make these claims. I find it hard to believe that a translator could go about their work believing that they were always harming a text, that they did not somehow believe in the text's ability to transcend its own mediatedness.

On "Poetry and Grammar" by Gertrude Stein

2010-01-21T12:15:00.003-06:00

Gertrude Stein’s (anti)thesis in “Poetry and Grammar” seems simple enough: “What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose” (209), although she finds it easier to work through the parts of speech and a definition of prose before getting at her definition of poetry. As for Stein’s style, this is the best text I’ve read for explaining why she writes the way she writes, both in poetry and in prose and why some might consider her style in either mode idiosyncratic.

Stein begins the essay by exploring the writer’s relationship to words, and this is important because writing is made out of words. It sounds simple to say that, but many writer’s do forget this, thinking rather that writing is made out of ideas or feelings or something else. Stein is right to point out that words are the fabric of writing and all the ideas, feelings and something elses don’t count for anything if we lack awareness and are unable to deliberately use words in relation to their sounds, meanings, and feelings. If there is a disjunction between how we respond to words internally, it will show up when we deploy words externally in the act of writing.

Stein next explores the seven parts of speech and the punctuation marks, making arguments about her relationship to each, which is the essence of her overall style. Stein is taken with verbs, adverbs, prepositions, articles, and pronouns and to a lesser extent conjunctions and nouns while dumping on adjectives and interjections. Worthy of note is the distinction Stein makes between verbs and adverbs which can be mistaken (are nuanced or indeterminate) and nouns and adjectives, which are concrete and fixed. The adverb aids Stein’s writing, making it active and lively by complicating the sentence:

Complications make eventually for simplicity…. (220)

When it gets really difficult you want to disentangle rather than to cut the knot, at least so anybody feels who is working with the thread, so anybody feels who is working with any tool so anybody feels who is writing any sentence or reading it after is has been written. [...] A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it. (221)

This is as good a case for what might be called difficult, new, innovative, experimental writing as I have seen written. Stein is advocating for elegant writing, a writing that is eventually recognized as ingeniously simple but born of extreme complexity. A good metaphor for the dialectic of difficulty and simplicity might be Eistein’s relativity and the famous equation that is a product of it.

As for punctuation, the period is of high importance, perceived as a “happening” that does not interfere with writing’s ability to “go on,” which Stein values. Commas, colons, and semicolons, on the other hand, interfere with this going on-ness of writing, and capitals and small letters do not seem to have much impact other than formality and will likely vanish.

After a rather lengthy exposition, Stein defines prose, summarizing:

Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence and the paragraph….(229)

This balancing is accomplished by using verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and articles, which do not have the fixity of nouns and adjectives, in combination to make something that was a balanced hybrid of sentence and paragraph.

Poetry, Stein discovers, has to do with the noun, is based on the noun, but it is not simply listing or simply saying the noun. Stein mentions that this served as the historical purpose of poetry, naming, without going into too much detail. For Stein however, the purpose is modified:

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun…. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. (231)

Stein’s definition of poetry is way of saying the name without ever saying the name. The name the noun itself is too familiar and therefore inadequate and cannot actually be the thing the person the place the idea the feeling but by replacing the name it can be that through the materiality of words. Stein is noun-ing by creating a “way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them” (236) and “the avoidance of nouns as nouns” (238), and she is careful to point out that this is not inventing a new language positing that everyone must stay within their spoken/written language(s) as such.

So instead of representational or expressive poetry or mimetic poetics, Stein is inviting us to recreate through language. So say if I were to write “I love my lover” in a poem, it creates an outer, surface expression that does not strike a balance with what the thing “love for my lover” really is inwardly for me in reality. In fact, the more often I say “I love my lover” the more it contributes to its own inadequacy of expression on account of familiarity (In other words, you read that skip over it because anyone can say that anyone loves a lover some time).

Stein would say I have to do two things with this simple line, recreate love and my lover through language without naming the nouns as such. If I had the skills to do this then the reader would feel something of what love feels like and what my lover is through disentangling the complex knot of my recreation of these two nouns in poetry.

So poetry for Stein is not expressive, expressing an emotion through language, or representational, representing an experience or thought through language but the thing-in-itself in language. Language is not a mediator but an object, a thing. It is the emotion, experience, or thought itself.

Favorite Albums of the Aughts

2010-01-17T01:27:00.005-06:00

As I made the transition from CD junky to MP3 ho, these were the albums that made it worthwhile (in the order I thought of them):

Kid A--Radiohead
Amnesiac--Radiohead
In Rainbows--Radiohead
Mirrored--Battles
Turn on the Bright Lights--Interpol
Antics--Interpol
Give Up--Postal Service
Back to Black--Amy Winehouse
Stankonia--Outkast
Donuts--J Dilla
Person Pitch--Panda Bear
Merriweather Post Pavilion--Animal Collective
(((Powerhouse Sound)))--Oslo/Chicago:Breaks
Back Together Again--Fred Anderson/Hamid Drake
Dragons 1976--Dragons 1976
On Cortez--Dragons 1976
Figure 8--Elliott Smith
The Tipping Point--The Roots
Game Theory--The Roots
Chicago Underground Quartet--Chicago Underground Quartet
Arrive--Aram Shelton
The Rempis Percussion Quartet--Circular Logic
Hold Your Horse Is--Hella
Tree, Swallow, Houses--Maps & Atlases
You & Me & the Mountain--Maps & Atlases
Into the Wild (Soundtrack)--Eddie Vedder
Tha Carter III--Lil Wayne
Live at Reading--Nirvana
Orphans--Tom Waits
Real Gone--Tom Waits
The Fame Monster--Lady Gaga
We Are All From Somewhere Else--Exploding Star Orchestra
Just Like This--Keefe Jackson's Project Project
The Relatives--Jeff Parker
From the River to the Ocean--Fread Anderson/Hamid Drake
Chronic 2001--Dr. Dre
Fever to Tell--Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot--Wilco
Miss E...So Addictive--Missy Elliott
Under Construction--Missy Elliott
American IV--Johnny Cash

Readability

2010-01-04T12:44:00.004-06:00

I recently learned of this great new tech tool called Readability. It is an application/link that you store in your bookmarks or browser toolbars that makes unsightly or impossible-to-read web sites more user-friendly. You can control that column width and font size so you don't have to track across an entire computer screen on sites like Jeffrey Side's The Argotist Online, which has tons of great-but-nearly unreadable content (see this post).

Readability also transfers the difficult color schemes, like white text on a black background (remember when this site used to be that way? Capricious youth!) to standard black-on-white with a respectable screen font.

Who says online reading can't be satisfying?

Things to be Excited About in '10

2010-01-01T21:25:00.003-06:00

I'm teaching English 247.01: Intermediate Creative Writing: Poetry at Illinois State University. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to go from teaching English 227 Introduction to Creative Writing, a multi-genre course, last fall right into teaching an intermediate-level class.

I've spent the past couple weeks getting ready to teach my first poetry-only writing workshop. And I've decided to use several Gurlesque writers and the theory that supports this current trend in feminist writing to supplement the writing workshop. The lineup of authors and works I'll be teaching is exciting, including Gurlesque precursors Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and contemporary poets Chelsey Minnis (Zirconia, Bad Bad), Catherine Wagner (Miss America), Ariana Reines (The Cow), Lara Glenum (The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga), Aase Berg (With Deer), and Danielle Pafunda (Pretty Young Thing). Choosing these texts has allowed me to use all small press books for the course, as well as books published within the last ten years. I am also excited that Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum's Gurlesque anthology will be published by Saturnalia during the term of the course. It should allow us to do some unique activities in addition to the workshop.

We will also be reading and discussing theory including Viktor Shklovsky, Gertrude Stein, Helene Cixous, Scott Wilson/Fred Botting, Georges Bataille, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others. We will be using the theory and poetry to try and cultivate a lowbrow, DIY, excessive, grotesque, burlesque, reality show, playful, over-the-top aesthetic in our own poetry. Class begins in ten days, and I'm literally counting them down. The only thing I'm worried about is the bookstore getting the books in on time.

You can follow along with the class on my other blogs:

Incidentally, blogging is a huge part of my pedagogy. I blog several times a week in relation to the courses I teach, and subsequently, my blogging on Fluid / Exchange lags. I'm hoping to consolidate my blogging into a personal blog over at WordPress during this semester and into the summer.

***

Instead of teaching a second course this semester, I'll be working as an editorial assistant for Mandorla Nueva Escritura de las Americas / New Writing from the Americas. This is sort of an extension of my work for Illinois State's Publications Unit, where during 2008-09 I worked for The Spoon River Poetry Review and for Fiction Collective 2 (FC2), (co-designing, layout, and co-proofreading Brian Kiteley's The River Gods, to be specific), as well as on other publications.

Mandorla is an important, unique, and special publication, and I am truly honored to have the chance to contribute to the work it does, if only in a minor capacity. It publishes writers from across the Americas, not just North America, and so the work in Mandorla appears in three languages: English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Lots of cross-translation happens in Mandorla, like John Ashbery's poetry being translated into Spanish and Raul Zurita's poetry being translated into English.

The editors, Roberto Tejada, Gabriel Bernal Granados, and Kristin Dykstra, do a fantastic job of soliciting important contemporary work. Now, with the editorial staff expanding to include contributing editors Rosa Alcalá, Esther Allen, Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Mónica de la Torre, Gabriel Gudding, Reynaldo Jiménez, Urayoán Noel, James Pancrazio, and Rodrigo Toscano, Mandorla looks to be even more formidable publication, soliciting work from a wider array of writers.

Films 2010

2010-01-01T19:47:00.006-06:00

1. The Hurt Locker
2. Behind Enemy Lines
3. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
4. High Fidelity
5. The Blind Side
6. Up in the Air
7. Brothers
8. Crazy Heart
9. Paranormal Activity
10. A Serious Man
11. Shutter Island
12. Good Morning Vietnam
13. Invictus
14. 187
15. Lean on Me
16. Inception
17. The Other Guys

A pretty pathetic year for movie watching, if you ask me. Thanks, grad school.

Books 2010

2010-01-01T19:43:00.016-06:00

1. Urs Allemann trans. Peter Smith--Babyfucker (Les Figues)
2. Ariana Reines--The Cow
3. Ariana Reines--Coeur de Lion
4. Raúl Zurita trans. Anna Deeny--Purgatory
5. Joyelle McSweeney--The Commandrine and Other Poems
6. Aase Berg trans. Johannes Göransson--With Deer
7. Mark Bracher--Radical Pedagogy
8. Duriel Harris--Drag
9. Duriel Harris--Amnesiac
10. Dawn Lundy Martin--a matter of gathering a gathering of matter
11. Stephen Powers--The Art of Getting Over
12. Tristan Manco--Street Logos
13. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, eds.--New Media Poetics
14. Paul Ricoeur--Ideology and Utopia
15. Friedrich Nietzsche--On the Genealogy of Morality
16. Simone Weil--Gravity and Grace
17. Catherine Wagner--Miss America
18. Chelsey Minnis--Zirconia
19. Chelsey Minnis--Bad Bad
20. Lara Glenum--The Hounds of No
21. Lara Glenum--Maximum Gaga
22. Ito Hiromi trans. Jeffrey Angles--Killing Kanoko
23. G.W.F. Hegel trans. Irvin--Phenomenology of Spirit
24. Arther Schopenhauer--The World as Will and Idea
25. Wayne C. Booth--The Vocation of a Teacher
26. Rebecca Wolff, et al, eds.--A Best of Fence Vol. 1: Poetry and Nonfiction
27. Danielle Pafunda--Pretty Young Thing
28. Vanessa Place--Statements of Fact
29. Friedrich Schiller--On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
30. Curtis White--Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics
31. Grant Jenkins and Cheryl Pallant--Morphs
32. Francesco Levato--War Rug
33. Georges Bataille trans. Joachim Neugroschel--Story of the Eye by Lord Auch
34. Kate Zambreno--O Fallen Angel
35. Philip Jenks--My first painting will be "The Accuser"
36. Nicholas Ganz (Tristan Manco, ed.)--Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents
37. John Beer--The Waste Land and Other Poems
38. Mary Anne Staniszewski--Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art
39. Samuel R. Delany--Hogg
40. Susan Steinberg--The End of Free Love
41. David Morley--The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing
42. Matt Briggs--The End is the Beginning
43. Marguerite Duras--The Lover
44. Alain Arias-Misson--Theatre of Incest
45. Douglas Kearney--The Black Automaton
46. Kate Durbin--The Ravenous Audience
47. Kathy Acker--The Essential Kathy Acker
48. Franz Kafka--The Sons
49. L.S. Vygotsky--Mind in Society
50. Elaine Showalter--Teaching Literature
51. Raúl Zurita trans Daniel Borzutzky--Song for His Disappeared Love/Canto a su amor desaparacido
52. Percival Everett--Abstraktion Und Einfuhlung
53. Ashley Tauchert--Against Transgression
54. Thomas Sayers Ellis--The Maverick Room
55. Patricia Smith--Blood Dazzler
56. John Miles Foley--How to Read an Oral Poem
57. david antin--i never knew what time it was
58. Marjorie Perloff--The Poetics of Indeterminacy
59. Alissa Nutting--Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
60. Steve McCaffrey and Jed Rasula, eds.--Imagining Langauge
61. Stephanie Strickland--WaveSon.nets/Losing L'Una
62. Catherine Wagner--Macular Hole
63. John Keene--Annotations
64. Chelsey Minnis--Poemland
65. William S. Burroughs--Naked Lunch
66. Dennis Cooper--Try

Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion

2009-12-30T23:24:00.006-06:00

Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion is a fantastic but challenging album that rewards one or many listens. Even though it came out in January, I didn't get my copy until October. As with much music, I listened to it for the first time while driving. I only listened to the first couple tracks, as the twin cities here are so small that extended listening in the car requires an aimless jaunt into the corn desert or wind farm.

The first two tracks "In the Flowers" and "My Girls" are strange soundscapes. "In the Flowers" has an extended, searching buildup of noises and airy lyrics. The quality of the singing is hyper-emotive and beautiful, and the lyrics feature a reaching after personal nostalgia mixed that turns into a driving, carnival-like climax. In my estimation, it is an escapist wish layered over the driving "langoliers" of life's quotidian tasks that munch away at our fantasies. It is post-rock psychedelia, displacing, as with what is called math rock, the need for verse-chorus-verse song structure. I have had several strong emotional reactions to "In the Flowers," especially when the driving drums take over following the lyric "If I could only leave my body for a while."

"My Girls" is a truly great pop song. It really sounds like an dance/electronica Beach Boys, with the intricate layering of Beach Boys, Beatles, or Phil Spector productions. The sound is rich and the beats infectious. The song features an innocent wish to provide, but like "In the Flowers," incorporates the hint of danger, of unfulfillment, by adding a minor key harmonizing to the chorus "I don't want to seem like I care about material things," accentuated by the drum roll. Animal Collective creates a conversation of sorts between the lyrics and the music; each part of the song often is often working against cohesion, playing up struggle instead.

"Summertime Clothes" might best exemplify the strange connection I feel with Animal Collective. This song has a simple melody, clear lyrics about the summertime that is extremely reminiscent of the Beatles, putting me in mind of "Penny Lane" and "A Day in the Life." I know it takes a great deal of skill to make music that is this rich sound as simple as it does, which is part of the reason people keep listening to the Beatles.

The above is probably a shitty attempt to articulate why Merriweather Post Pavilion is an instant classic, right up there with Radiohead's In Rainbows, J Dilla's Donuts, and Battles's Mirrored as albums in recent years that have profoundly affected me and taken over my listening. Even though I love Panda Bear's solo project Person Pitch, Animal Collective writes much more intricate songs as a unit. I enjoy that they risk being too noisy and complex to listen to except in small doses, hinting that they are artists of the terrifying sublime. It is the best album I've run across all year.

No More "Nerd" or "Geek"? How Will I Self-Identify?

2009-12-21T15:31:00.003-06:00

As a self-proclaimed poetry geek and 30-year veteran of nerdery (despite my best efforts), I found this article disturbing. If I can't call myself a nerd or a geek, then how will I self-identify? It should be ok for me to call myself a nerd, but like, you can't call me a nerd. You can call me an "coolness non-native," just not the n-word II, or "expert in useless things," just not the g-word.

New Poets and Artists: Review of My Kill Adore Him by Paul Martínez Pompa

2009-12-17T22:19:00.003-06:00

literature defined at last!

2009-09-29T21:11:00.003-05:00

literature might be defined as any text that functions sequentially and makes meaning beyond the use value or transparency of its constituent parts as they are accrued. the movement of these texts is from the particular to the general or overarching.

that this might include alphanumeric texts, cinema, music, dance, gesture, performance, and speech acts.

that a difference might be called simultaneous texts which make meaning beyond the use value or transparency of its constituent parts all at once but may be deconstructed. the movement of these texts is from the general or overarching to the parsing of the particular.

that this might include visual pieces, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, design pieces.

that reading and writing are sibling acts engaging with texts through assemblage and deconstruction, construction and demolition. that the reader and writer might be interchangeable, narcissus and his doppelganger. that reading is re-writing. that writing is re-reading.

Danny's 8th Anniversary Reading, 8/26

2009-08-20T12:28:00.001-05:00

The Danny’s Reading Series (8th Anniversary Reading with Chicago Indie Presses!)
Wednesday, August 26th
7:30 PM

The writers: Adam Clay, Kathleen Rooney, Steve Halle, Mary Hamilton, Kristen Orser, and Patrick Durgin with Hannah Weiner

The presses: Cinematheque Press, Switchback Books, Cracked Slab Books, Featherproof Books, Dancing Girl Press, and Kenning Editions

Eight years in. It’s hard to believe. While we spend a lot of our time hosting poets and writers from elsewhere, as we venture into our ninth season, we thought it appropriate to turn our eye on our hometown. We’d like to celebrate the work of a selection (there are so many more!) of Chicago indie presses and their authors. Diverse in publishing vision, ideals, and execution—all committed to defining quality for themselves, the imagination, to the vast work on the part of the author to bring it to life, and to the vastly detailed work of bringing it to our hands and eyes—we salute and celebrate the necessary parts all of them play in bringing Chicago to life and the world to light. And, as always, celebrating the audience that gives us life and is our light.

Joel Craig & Chris Glomski

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006) and A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming). A new chapbook, In a World of Ideas, I Feel No Particular Loyalty, is now available from Cinematheque Press. He co-edits Typo Magazine and lives in Michigan. Recent poems appear in Ploughshares, The Laurel Review, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. (cinemathequepress.com)

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, and the author, most recently, of the memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object and the poetry collection Oneiromance (an epithalamion), winner of the Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books. Founded in 2006, Switchback is a nonprofit feminist press publishing poetry by women. (switchbackbooks.com)

Steve Halle's first collection of poems, Map of the Hydrogen World was published by Cracked Slab Books in 2008. Halle edits the online journal Seven Corners, which publishes Chicago and Midwestern poets, and he is a staff poetry reviewer for Oranges & Sardines (O&S). He holds an MFA from New England College and is currently a PhD candidate at Illinois State University. (crackedslabbooks.com)

Mary Hamilton has had stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Thieves Jargon and others, and is the author of Flash Flicker Fire, available from Featherproof Books. She lives in Chicago where she's the co-founder and co-host of the QUICKIES! reading series. Featherproof Books is a young indie publisher based in Chicago, dedicated to the small-press ideals of finding fresh, urban voices. (featherproof.com)

Kristen Orser is the author of Squint, published by Dancing Girl Press. Kristen Orser is anxious. She is probably behind on work and her students are probably wondering what their grades are. She is hoping all clocks will bend backwards and take her somewhere less fast. The Dancing Girl Press Chapbook Series was founded in 2004 to publish and promote the work of women poets and artists through chapbooks, journals, book arts projects, and anthologies. (dancinggirlpress.com)

Patrick Durgin is a poet, critic, editor, publisher, and educator. His latest book is a collaboration with poet and translator Jen Hofer, The Route (Atelos, 2008). He edited the selected works of Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner's Open House, for Kenning Editions, of which he is the founder and publisher. Weiner (1928-1997) was an influential poet whose work bridged conceptual, intermedia, New York School, and Language school poetics. Her books include The Fast, We Speak Silent, and PAGE. (kenningeditions.com)

Danny’s Tavern is located at 1951 W. Dickens (near the intersection of Armitage and Damen). 21+ (please have ID) 773-489-6457

I'm so excited to be a part of this. See you there!

Rashied Ali

2009-08-14T14:09:00.003-05:00

Rashied Ali has died.

The album Interstellar Space, a duet suite with Coltrane, has meant a great deal to me, helping me to embrace the practice of freedom in improvisational spaces in my own work.

Ali's percussion performance on this recording as well as Sunny Murray's on Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity are two of my favorites in experimental jazz.

New and Exciting

2009-08-01T13:20:00.002-05:00

New Moria...exciting.

Holms Troelstrup in the new Moria...too exciting!

***

Po/NotPo...exciting.

McLean County Arts Center Reading

2009-07-01T14:40:00.003-05:00

Last night I read at the McLean County Arts Center in Bloomington, IL with Mike Theune, Chip Corwin and Matt Guenette. All four of us reading together meshed really well. It seems like all the poets had a similar kind of wit and humor.

I opened with couple poems from Map of the Hydrogen World and also four or five new or newish poems. Chip followed with some brilliant post-apocalyptic love poems, which I hope to be posting sometime soon on Seven Corners.

Then Mike and Chip read some collaborations, two-line poems where they traded off and then a form they created called a donut with lines that loop back over onto themselves.

A highlight of the evening for me was the collaborative reading by Matt and Mike. Matt had written two poems based on Snapple and Vitamin Water's Dragonfruit beverages, and Mike followed those with prose interpretations of what Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia might have said about the Dragonfruit poems.

Matt, batting cleanup, then closed the night with several of his "American Busboy" poems, followed by his killer "Sestina Aguilera" from his collection Sudden Anthem. You should buy sudden anthem right now, especially if you like funny, quirky, Americana Surrealism.

I saw Matt read once upon a time with Jason Bredle at Myopic Books, where I first met Mike Theune. Jason and Matt's poems both really capture the wit and humor I love in poetry. I'm really attracted to the work of humorous poets because my own work tends to be serious, and my humor arrives more spoken in one-on-one conversations.

This was really a fun reading to be a part of, and it was in a great space. The McLean County Arts Center is beautiful and has great acoustics that can even accommodate my quiet speaking voice. Alison Hatcher did a great job setting up the space, and she truly made the other poets and me feel welcome. I've had a lot of success writing in galleries and museums, so I'm sure I'll be back to the Arts Center soon to work on a project.

The Wrestler: Mickey Rourke as Blunt Instrument

2009-06-17T19:50:00.002-05:00

**Warning: Spoilers Follow**

Mickey Rourke does give a fine, gritty performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson in "The Wrestler." Yet, the film offers two messages that I find disturbing. First of all, "The Ram" rejects anything authentic that happens to him over the course of the film. He rejects his own name Robin Ramzinski; he rejects his own body, manipulating it with drugs and the planned torture that is pro wrestling; he rejects (and is rejected by) people he wants to get close to (his daughter Stephanie as played by Evan Rachel Wood and Cassidy, the stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold played by Marisa Tomei); he rejects the present moment, living in a fantastical past of glory.

In the end, we are left with a slightly open-ended conclusion. The Ram, recently the victim of a heart attack, chooses to wrestle in a rematch against the Ayotollah, an old nemesis. Prior to the match, The Ram embraces the fans as his family by way of a kind of farewell speech, offering allegiance only to them. Then, during the bout, The Ram experiences physical discomfort, leading up to the final "Ram Jam" move that may spell the death blow for both the Ayotollah and The Ram himself. The ending, however, is not revealed, and we are left with an ending reminiscent of the short story "The Lady Or the Tiger" by Frank Stockton. Does The Ram live or die? Does Randy?

My main problem with Randy The Ram as a character is that people will inevitably consider him a hero, conflating the triumph of Rourke's great performance (is he playing himself?) with the triumph of Randy The Ram, who is pathetic as I will explain.

Part of Randy "The Ram" Robinson's failure derives from his inability to authentically love or feel anything, or to have an authentic feeling that pushes him to change his real self. His moving gestures involve only objects and places, not real actions backed by feelings. He gives his daughter a coat and takes her out to the Jersey Shore boardwalk, where in an apparently better past they had good times. Looking into the ruins of a once-beautiful ballroom, Randy realizes his shortcomings and, in a melodramatic speech sure to inspire viewers' tears, tells Stephanie his daughter that he deserves to be alone but wants one more chance.

In another of the Ram's gestures of object-cum-affection, he offers an action figure from his 80s heyday for stripper Cassidy's (aka Pam's) son. The action figure is a fantastic metonymic device for Randy himself. We later see Pam's son smashing The Ram action figure into another toy, feeling nothing, which is what people expect out of The Ram. And what others expect, we want to give to them. Having to perpetually please others is one of the burdens of fame and also one of its addictions.

Later in the film, rejected by Cassidy, Randy The Ram goes to a local wrestling match and later out to a bar with the other wrestlers. He is recognized by a twenty-something female who recalls her brother had a poster of The Ram when she was growing up. Fulfilling each other's fantasy needs, Randy ends up drnking and snorting cocaine to excess, having sex with the twenty-something in a public bathroom. He is a blunt instrument, unfeeling. Hungover, he sleeps the next day away, missing a dinner date with his daughter, who then banishes him from her life when he tries to reconcile, as she cannot deal with the unexpected pain her father causes her.

Ultimately, Randy is a character who can see change but can't deal with it. He is perpetually living on the leftovers of his glory days. He is remarkably myopic, tellingly revealed as he blames Kurt Cobain for the demise of his beloved 80s hair metal. Like everything else Randy "The Ram" believes (he can be a better father, he can date Cassidy/Pam, he can work in a supermarket and be satisfied) this is only a half truth. The record industry and fandom's love of "the new" caused the music to change as much as Cobain. Randy's addiction to The Ram's fame and fantasy causes him to fulfill his prophecy of being alone in real life because he cannot fit his real self with the larger (and often unplanned) choreography of life's forces.

Randy "The Ram" Robinson and his experiences in "The Wrestler" show us the ruins of the American dream. While Rourke's performance is great, I question contemporary audience's ability to understand that The Ram is an antihero, an example of what not to do. His embrace of fame and fantasy over realism is borderline psychotic behavior. He is a self-hating, pitiable character who we are allowed to see on the downturn from the glory of his fifteen minutes, not a Rocky archtype who triumphs against long odds. In the film's final scene, we essentially see his complete rejection of the real, favoring instead the choreography of his past, his fantasy life.

Oranges & Sardines (O&S)

2009-06-09T16:11:00.001-05:00

You can read my review of Takashi Hiraide's For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut translated by Sawako Nakayasu along with the finest poetry and art in the new Oranges & Sardines. I'm really proud and honored to be a part of the past two issues.

Help Salt Publishing!

2009-05-23T14:29:00.002-05:00

As a proud reader of the Salt Publishing titles listed below, I have a marked interest in making sure the press goes on. Help them by buying one book today http://www.saltpublishing.com/.

1. Home and Variations--Robert Archambeau
2. New Selected Poems--John Matthias
3. Kedging--John Matthias
4. The Hutton Inquiry--Chris McCabe
5. Selected Poems--Geraldine Monk
6. Green 532: Selected Poems--Randolph Healy
7. The Encyclopedia of Scotland--Annie Finch
8. Ring of Fire--Lisa Jarnot

I'm planning on getting Catherine Daly's DaDaDa, a book I've wanted to read for some time.

Introducing the J DeF Trio

2009-05-11T20:26:00.004-05:00

Since late 2000, jazz has underwritten my life. It is always there: in the background as I read or write, on my iPod at the gym, or walking around town. Jazz is even going on in my brain when I'm not listening to it outright. Certain songs just permeate my brain.

Understanding how jazz works and how its innovators have changed the music over time has profoundly affected me as an artist. I didn't come up in jazz alone, though. I had a good teacher. My friend James DeFrain was apparently searching for the same thing in music that I was back in 2000. We came to jazz together. Lucky for me, he is a multi-talented musician who has been able to teach me the theory and practice of jazz playing, far beyond simply enjoying the music. It is inspiring to see that he is now leading a jazz trio as a drummer, deftly playing the standards that first called us to jazz nearly a decade ago.

Lucky for James, he has found two emerging musicians to compliment him on the stand in his new group the J DeF Trio. Sean Grabiner is the driving force of the trio, handling the memorable heads on classic tracks like "My Funny Valentine" and "Blue Monk" with aplomb. He is also a compelling soloist, whose cleaner-than soloing reminds me of Jeff Parker or a cooled-out Wes Montgomery. His guitar work is something I will keep an ear out for.

James's drumming has grown up as well, handling the classic jazz ride cymbal on "There Will Never Be Another" as well as Latin beats on "Blue Bossa." He is a learned and well-read drummer, and combining with upright bassist Doug Bistrow, they make for a swinging rhythm section that can handle almost any circumstance behind Grabiner's soloing.

Jazz will continue to be omnipresent in my life. I'm glad to have a new group like the J DeF Trio to reinterpret my favorite songs, underwriting my life with a variety of timbres and moods.

Audio Poem @ NCTE

2009-04-25T11:45:00.002-05:00

Hear me read "The Love Song of Homer J. Simpson," an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet parody done in the voice of T. S. Eliot inspired by Homer Simpson's donut love over at NCTE web site.

Slumdog Gump?!?

2009-04-13T17:56:00.003-05:00

Is it just me, or did "Slumdog Millionaire" use, essentially, the same narrative style as "Forrest Gump" (1994) to tell its story? The (sociohistorical) flashbacks and stunning visuals underlie both films as does the unlikely heroes narrating them presented by the dimwitted-but-lovable Forrest Gump and the underclass slumdog, Jamal Malik. Both protagonists get ample opportunity to tell their life stories: Forrest at the bus stop and Jamal through his interrogation in relation to the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" questions. Both films seem to have had equal resonance with American feel-good filmgoers...

Small Press Distribution

2009-04-01T17:56:00.004-05:00

It's great to be mentioned in SPD's just-in post with one of my favorite writers, Derrick Jensen, who has greatly shaped my thinking about civilization. You should first buy all his books, then buy mine.

I distinctly remember looking in Barnes & Noble in late 2002 for something new and different, reading the first page of the introduction to Jensen's book The Culture of Make Believe and being simultaneously horrified and compelled to read. If there is one writer and one book that has shaped my desire to live my creative and teaching life dedicated to ideas of social justice and political involvement, it's Derrick Jensen and this book.

Since reading The Culture of Make Believe, I have subsequently read A Language Older Than Words, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War, and Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolustion. Walking on Water has greatly informed my pedagogical ideas, and as an aspiring (creative) writing teacher, I have gained great insight into how to subvert destructive aspects of the educational system from within.

Since entering graduate school in 2004, I've had less chance to read Jensen's newer books, but I'm glad to see Jensen's new book, Songs of the Dead, is a novel that sounds as though it blends his ecological politics with creative writing. Here is the book's description:

A serial killer stalks the streets of Spokane, acting out a misogynist script from the dark heart of this culture. Across town, a writer named Derrick has spent his life tracking the reasons—political, psychological, spiritual—for the sadism of modern civilization. And through the grim nights, Nika, a trafficked woman, tries to survive the grinding violence of prostitution. Their lives, and the forces propelling them, are about to collide. And what hangs in the balance is the fate of life on earth. With Songs of the Dead, Derrick Jensen has written more than a thriller. This is a story lush with rage and tenderness on its way to being a weapon.

Since first reading The Culture of Make Believe, I have incessantly loaned out or recommended his books. In a twist of fate, I have none of his books in my possession right now. Apparently, they have been permanently borrowed. That's okay as long as the borrowers pass along the message.

O&S

2009-03-19T00:58:00.004-05:00

The new Oranges & Sardines is out, in which I have reviewed the excellent collection Strange Trades by Kristy Odelius (Shearsman 2008).

Writing reviews for O&S is going to be a regular thing for me, and I am looking especially to review collections of poetry in translation. This is not to say, however, I would not be interested in reviewing any collection worth a read.

The Ultimate Compliment

2009-02-25T22:36:00.003-06:00

On Saturday, my grandfather treated my family and I to dinner at Hackney's on Lake, part of a family-owned group of restaurants specializing in burgers and fried onions that I have been going to since before I can remember.

Anyhow, my grandpa gave the owner of Hackney's on Lake a copy of my book Map of the Hydrogen World, and of course, he wanted to brag about me at dinner. I met the owner, Liz, and she told me she reads my book in the bathroom. It's about the best compliment I could ever get.

Twenty Books of Poems

2009-02-23T23:01:00.002-06:00

1. Walt Whitman--Leaves of Grass (Library of America)
2. Emily Dickinson--POEMS (Shambhala Pocket Classics)
3. Pablo Neruda trans. W.S. Merwin--Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion de desesperada / Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Penguin)
4. Etheridge Knight--Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin)
5. e.e. cummings--selected poems (Liveright)
6. T.S. Eliot--The Waste Land: 75th Anniversary Edition (Harvest)
7. Jack Kerouac--Mexico City Blues (Penguin)
8. Allen Ginsberg--The Collected Poems 1947-1980 (Harper Perennial)
9. John Donne--The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Modern Library)
10. Robert Bly--Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (Harper Perennial)
11. Rosmarie Waldrop--Curves to the Apple (New Directions)
12. david antin--i never knew what time it was (California)
13. Charles Bukowski--The Last Nigh of the Earth Poems (Black Sparrow)
14. Shel Silverstein--Where the Sidewalk Ends / A Light in the Attic
15. Harryette Mullen--Sleeping with the Dictionary (California)
16. Petrarch trans. Robert Durling--Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Harvard)
17. Russell Edson--The Tunnel: selected poems (Field Poetry Series Oberlin College)
18. John Keats / Percy Bysshe Shelley--Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley (Modern Library)
19. Frank O'Hara--Lunch Poems (City Lights)
20. Dr. Seuss--One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

AWPing

2009-02-10T17:57:00.007-06:00

I know, maybe not the best title, but here's what I'll be doing during AWP.

Make It New: Infrawriting/Infrastructure
Thursday 2/12, Links Hall (3435 N. Sheffield Avenue
Chicago, IL), 10:30-11:30pm
Tag Team Reading with Teresa Carmody, Mairead Case, Annie Finch, Daniel Godston, Steve Halle, Lisa Janssen, Mario, Michael Marcinkowski, Timothy Rey, Chuck Stebelton AND YOU, the audience.

Book signing for my collection Map of the Hydrogen World, Cracked Slab Books table, Friday, 2/13, 1 pm.

I'll also be going to the FC2 reading, Thursday, Curtiss Hall, 10th floor of Fine Arts Building (410 S. Michigan), Chicago Poetics Reading at the awesome SAIC Ballroom, Friday, 6:30 pm and to the Mandorla reading, Friday @ 9 pm at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Let's be honest, I'm not the kind of person to throw elbows in the aftermath of a panel or reading to talk to someone. Drop me a line and let's meet for coffee or an adult beverage.

Hydrogen (Jukebox) Notes

2009-02-02T12:26:00.004-06:00

You can check out a fab review of my book, Map of the Hydrogen World, by Adam Fieled on his blog Stoning the Devil. Thanks, Adam.

***

You can listen to a podcast of me reading from Map of the Hydrogen World at Series A last month with Kathleen Rooney on Chicago Public Radio's Chicago Amplified.

What is a book, anyway? What is a poem, anyway?

2009-02-01T22:27:00.001-06:00

This NYT article is most interesting for its delve into language: What is a book? How do we define a book? Should the definition be fixed or should it transfer to other media that are doing book-like things?

As a poet, I struggle with the question "What is a poem?" I'm a poet and not sure I know a poem other than to say I know a poem when I find one ("A poem is a poem is a poem" to echo Gertrude Stein). For example, the other day I was blogging and wanted to compare Epictetus's Enchiridion (a stoical guide to leading an ethical existence not unlike the gospels or Tao te Ching) with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, a seminal text of philosophy. Reading Wittgenstein's Tractus for a particular passage, I was struck by thinking how much like a poem it was.

The real point is a language concern. Should we define something like a book in terms of the real-world object it may conjure for us in the mind, or should the definition of a book be linked directly to what anything bearing the name book does? Is the object separated from its use?

Epictetus, Wittgenstein, O'Hara, Blake: Ethically Together at Last!

2009-01-30T12:00:00.004-06:00

I've just finished reading Epictetus's Enchiridion, a tract for living a moral, stoical life written by a Greek enslaved by a Roman. I read the text in the context of studying poetry and my own poetics through an ethical filter in an experimental workshop I'm in. Some of my conclusions follow.

Epictetus offers much wisdom about speaking and silence. In most cases, he prefers silence: "And let silence be the general rule, or let only what is necessary be said, and in a few words. And rarely and when the occassion calls we shall say something; but about non of the common subjects." This put me in mind of Wittgenstein's famous ending to his Tractus, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Negotiating between these quotes creates an ethical imperative to only create utterances in necessary circumstances, and furthermore, only when one has enough of authenticity and authority to do so.

In addition Epictetus comments on the difference between theory and practice in propositionizing, behavior, or utterance. He states:

The first and most necessary place (part) in philosophy is the use of theorems (precepts), for instance, that we must not lie: the second part is that of demonstrations, for instance, How is it proved that we ought not to lie: the third is that which is confirmatory of these two and explanatory, for example, How is this a demonstration? For what is demonstration, what is consequence, what is contradiction, what is truth, what is falsehood? The third part (topic) is necessary on account of the second, and the second on account of the first; but the most necessary and that on which we ought to rest is the first. But we do the contrary. For we spend our time on the third topic, and all our earnestness is about it but we entirely neglect thefirst. Therefore we lie; but the demonstration that we ought not to lie we have ready to hand.

The ethical implication for texts filtered through this concept is to make the utterance itself authentic and inviolable rather than the theory (demonstration and explanation of the utterance's value) which may exist before or after the first utterance. In other words, the doing of the text ought to be its own scaffolding, its own framework, rather than being built upon the notions of how the text will or ought to operate as such. This is not to say theory or theorizing a text or utterace is bad practice, but the primacy of the text is undercut, in Epictetus's estimation, by working backward to the text from a preconceived theory of its ought-ness.

Or perhaps this is my roundabout way of reinforcing belief in the concept of "going on one's nerve" espoused by Frank O'Hara in "Personism: A Manifesto." He (roughly) states that if someone is chasing you with a knife, you run rather than call out, "it's pointless to chase me, I was a track star at Mineola Prep." Epictetus would agree with the running, a demostration based on the factness of the runner's elusiveness, rather than the speculation that the runner will elude the knife-wielding maniac simply by the theory of that likelihood. The imperative and demonstration thereof outweigh them in that moment.

Maybe this notion too is elucidated in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which the energy (or bodily doings) is posited as a delightful contrary to reason (or passive thinkings), which one can use to explain away the action with its own theorization. I guess its time to revisit me some Blake. Onward.

Jeff Parker Plays Thelonious Monk

2009-01-27T23:38:00.001-06:00

It's really a classic combination:

Map of the Folded World by John Gallaher

2009-01-25T14:22:00.003-06:00

I enjoy reading John Gallaher's Cage-titled blog Nothing to Say & Saying It; it's in my Google Reader subscriptions. Of course, I'm intrigued by his forthcoming book because his new collection Map of the Folded World and my first collection Map of the Hydrogen World have 80% word similarity in their respective titles. The letters of each title breakdown like this: of the 19 letters in Gallaher's title, only "f," "l" and "d" in "folded" are unique, or 14% of the title, while the "h,""y," "r," "g," and "n," or 24% of my title's letters are unique.

In this interests of poetical science, it would be interesting to run the numbers on the insides of our book for both words and letters. I noticed the other day, Gallaher did a Wordle word cloud for his book. I could do likewise for mine and arrive at a visual representation of possible consensus/dissensus. I can almost say for certain I didn't use the word "people" as much as Gallher's wordle indicates he did.

You can compare the blogs and make a heuristic judgment about the Word clouds.

Thoughts on Jack Gilbert in APR

2009-01-14T22:56:00.005-06:00

After reading Adam Fieled's smart rant against Jack Gilbert's notions of those darn postmodern poets on the wildly popular Stoning the Devil and talking with Jules Gibbs about the APR interview, I finally set down to read it myself. The dumbest thing (other than what Fieled points out) Gilbert says in the interview is about Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop when Gilbert states "He [Dickens] was publishing the book in installments and finally came to the place where he had to kill off Little Nell and he couldn't make himself do it, and he said to himself, 'Now it's over. You have to do it.' Then one night he gathered himself together and wrote the thing down and Little Nell died. He walked the streets of London all night long with tears running down his face. That's art to me."

What is art to Gilbert: the novel, Dickens weeping in London after killing off Little Nell, or Gilbert's dramatization of Dickens' emotional act of creation?

***

Gilbert favors concreteness to simile and abstraction because directness and concreteness evokes humanness (aka emotion) in poetry. Isn't the ability to abstract innately human? And abstraction the necessary remedy to attempt to counter linguistic failures?

***

Gilbert's MO appears to be giving contradictory answers in order to feign (haply not) insanity and/or curmudgeony iconoclasm in remaining removed from the commodifying impetus of contemporary po-biz. He has Zen Vanity: aloofness.

***
I still like his poems, but I never want to read another interview of his. Tho JG was less infuriating in Poets & Writers a few years back when Refusing Heaven came out when reading the feature interview actually made me interested in his poems.

Free Audio CD of Map

2009-01-12T14:12:00.002-06:00

If you send me an e-mail including proof (a receipt) that you've purchased my new collection of poems, Map of the Hydrogen World, I'll send you a copy of the audio CD-R version I recorded.

Poems @ SHARKFORUM

2009-01-09T12:42:00.004-06:00

Simone Muench has generously posted two of my poems, "Obedients" and "notes toward a fiction of a fiction," at Sharkforum. It's an honor to chum some poem there--it's a great web site.

Books Read 2009

2009-01-01T00:01:00.032-06:00

1. Matt Briggs--The Moss Gatherers
2. Geoffrey Sirc--English Composition as a Happening
3. Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar--Wanton Textiles
4. Kent Johnson--Epigramititis
5. Epictetus--Enchiridion
6. D.G. Myers--The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880
7. Roberto Bolaño trans. Laura Healy--The Romantic Dogs
8. Gertrude Stein--How to Write
9. Siddhartha Gautama--Mahasatipatthana Sutta
10. Didi Menendez--For Love of an Armadillo
11. Maggie Ginestra--Deep in the Safe House: ten poems after Henry Darger
12. Kristy Odelius--Strange Trades
13. Gregory Michie--See You When We Get There
14. C.S. Giscombe--Giscome Road
15. C.S. Giscombe--Prairie Style
16. Amish Trivedi--Selections from Episode Three
17. Kamau Brathwaite--Ancestors
18. Takashi Hiraide trans. Sawako Nakayasu--For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut
19. Aase Berg trans. Johannes Göransson--Remainland
20. Paul Blackburn, trans., George Economou, ed.--The Poem of the Cid
21. Rosmarie Waldrop--The Road is Everywhere or Stop this Body
22. Ricardo Cortez Cruz--Straight Outta Compton
23. Aristotle--Nichomachean Ethics
24. Rosmarie Waldrop--Curves to the Apple
25. W.S. Merwin, trans.--The Poem of the Cid
26. (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite--History of the Voice
27. Wendy Bishop--Released Into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing
28. Russell Edson--The Rooster's Wife
29. Hilary Beckles--Barbados
30. Soon Peng Su--Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry
31. J. H. Prynne--Kitchen Poems
32. Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner--Freakonomics
33. Morgan Dalphinis--Caribbean & African Languages
34. Kamau Brathwaite--X/Self
35. Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger--Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works
36. Wendy Bishop and David Starkey--Keywords in Creative Writing
37. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom--Colors of a Different Horse
38. Michael P. Farrell--Collaborative Circles
39. Ricahrd E. Boyatzis & Annie McKee--Resonant Leadership
40. Matt Briggs--Misplaced Alice
41. Paul Celan trans. Rosmarie Waldrop--Collected Prose
42. Samuel Beckett--Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
43. Malcolm Gladwell--Blink
44. David Shapiro--After a Lost Original
45. Araki Yasusada, Tosa Motokiyu, ed. + Kent Johnson, Javier Alvarez--Also, With My Throat I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords
46. Malcolm Gladwell--The Tipping Point
47. Curtis White--The Middle Mind
48. Russell Edson--See Jack
49. Malcolm Gladwell--Outliers
50. Charles Mingus--Beneath the Underdog
51. Jason Bredle--Pain Fantasy
52. Stacey Levine--My Horse and Other Stories
53. Tom Beckett--Another Shadow?
54. Jordan Stempleman--Whose Counting
55. Araki Yasusada, Tosa Motokiyu + Kent Johnson, Javier Alvarez--Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
56. Geraldine Kim--Povel
57. David Jalajel--Moon Ghazals
58. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn trans. Robert Conquest--Prussian Nights
59. Oscar Wilde--The Picture of Dorian Gray (Norton Critical)
60. Lara Glenum--Maximum Gaga
61. Paul Martinez Pompa--My Kill Adore Him
62. O'Neill et al--A Guide to College Composition
63. Ostergaard et al, eds.--Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emreging Genre
64. Kathleen Blake Yancey, ed.--Delivering College Composition
65. Raul Sanchez--The Function of Theory in Composition Studies
66. Patricia Waugh, ed.--Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide
67. Greenblatt and Gunn, eds.--Redrawing the Boundaries
68. Gerald Graff--Professing Literature
69. Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman--Notes on Conceptualisms
70. Brian Huot--(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment
71. Carl Whithaus--Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing
72. Paulo Freire--The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
73. Bob Broad--What We Really Value
74. Gloria Anzaldua--Borderlands / La Frontera
75. bell hooks--Teaching to Transgress
76. Nancy Mairs--Plaintext
77. Nancy Miller--Getting Personal
78. Lara Glenum--The Hounds of No
79. Lynn Z. Bloom--Composition Studies as Creative Art
80. Pierre Bayard--How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
81. John Tchudi--Alternatives to Grading Student Writing
82. Andrew Bennett--The Author
83. Brian Kiteley--The River Gods
84. Brian Kiteley--The 3 AM Epiphany
85. Brian Kiteley--The 4 AM Breakthrough
86. Mel Gooding--A Book of Surrealist Games
87. Paul Dawson--Creative Writing and the New Humanities
88. Chelsey Minnis--Zirconia
89. Chelsey Minnis--Bad Bad
90. Danielle Pafunda--Pretty Young Thing
91. Catherine Wagner--Miss America

Films 2009

2009-01-01T00:01:00.031-06:00

1. The Dark Knight
2. Iron Man
3. Boyz N The Hood
4. Unforgiven
5. Sideways
6. Blue Velvet
7. Body of Lies
8. She's Gotta Have It
9. Batman Begins
10. Slumdog Millionaire
11. Infernal Affairs
12. The Departed
13. Star Trek
14. Milk
15. Autumn Sonata
16. The Hangover
17. The Hunt for Red October
18. A Dirty Shame
19. The Package
20. Bruno
21. The Girlfriend Experience
22. Inglorious Basterds

Aphorism

2008-12-17T23:35:00.001-06:00

If you keep renaming everything, no one will never know what nothing is.

Commercial Irritation

2008-12-17T20:48:00.002-06:00

What is with all these new celebrity fragrances? Hilary Duff, Britney Spears, Dick Cheney, Mariah Carey, Tim McGraw, Don Rickles, etc. I know all of them are way better than me, but do they have to infest the earth with their celebrity stenches?

Ok, so it wasn't fair to include Rickles. I take it back.

My Poet's Bailout Arrives

2008-12-15T23:40:00.002-06:00

After much deliberation on the floor of the US Senate, my Poet's Bailout '08 has arrived in my inbox: half a trillion words! Another day of stalling and I might have suffered the silence of writer's block at abysmal depths heretofore unimaginable by even the most pessimistic of compositional prognosticators.

I promise not to squander these words like the previous billions I let go on silly games like Scrabble, Upwords, Text Twist, Scattergories, and Boggle.

I'm not going to throw a massive poets' crossword puzzle party or crap away dozens of words on the daily Jumble.

I've totally reformed my ways. I've got a plan for this half trillion words. A sound business plan for putting the words into their proper places in order to maximize profitable composition, transparency, and meaning. These words are earmarked for the change we need.

These words will not, I assure you, toil away useless in ironical, obscure, or abstract missives. These words will not be spent dirtily in the throes of passion or ferociously ejaculated at some unsuspecting retail clerk, restaurant server, or outsourced telemarketer. No, sir. Not these. It is time for poets to rethink economy and spend words accordingly.

The First (Un)Official Review of Map of the Hydrogen World

2008-12-06T17:20:00.003-06:00

Robert Archambeau, a former teacher and mentor and current friend, has supplied the first review of Map of the Hydrogen World over at Samizdat Blog. Bob is much, much, much, much smarter than me (not to mention more eloquent), and I'm happy he likes the book.

In a side note, Bob (and his blog) is, in many ways, responsible for the experimental side of my poetry. It was way back in June, 2005, when the Samizdat Blog was just in its infancy in the wake of Samizdat, the poetry journal, that I began seriously reading Bob's blog, and the posts on Samizdat were talking about poetic difficulty, the death of indeterminacy*, and contingency in poetry. Needless to say, all this stuff was para-curricular to the NEC MFA program's agenda, and this series of posts, in conjunction with this Kristin Prevallet essay on Relational Investigative Poetics, essentially set the table for my entry into experimental poetics and also for writing my master's thesis, while working with Ross Gay. At the time, I was about worn out on reinventing the lyric-Romantic wheel in poem after poem. Six months later I began working with Anne Waldman as a mentor, read like crazy in post-avant and its lineages, and plotted the initial ley lines for the Map.

The rest, I suppose, is history.

*At this time I would like to acknowledge Catherine Bergvall's poem "More Pets," quoted in this post, which influenced, profoundly, a poem in my book, and which, profound stupidity, I did not acknowledge in said book.

Book Announcement

2008-12-01T12:45:00.000-06:00

I'm excited to announce my first collection of poems, Map of the Hydrogen World, is available now from Cracked Slab Books. Here's some information about the book:

Map of the Hydrogen World, Steve Halle’s first collection of poems, shuns the so-called divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics by embracing traditional forms and themes while simultaneously developing new ways of knowing and working through poetry. From traditional lyric and narrative poems to formal experiments, investigations and cuttings, Halle attempts to find his own way through place, history, art, politics, faith and self, mapping particulars as small as an atom and universalities as big as a world.
Praise for Map of the Hydrogen World:
Ginsbergian incantation, high modernist allusion, the post-avant rhizome and the documentary collage — these are the weapons in Steve Halle’s arsenal. Joyce, Eliot, Emerson, Whitman and Keats shoot through the static of text-messaging, global positioning systems, surveillance culture, and an urgent sense of the world’s victims. Halle carries a humanistic heritage into an inhuman world. It comes out shredded, torn into the bandages we need even more than we know.
— Robert Archambeau
Delightful voices and moves play out in the latitudes & longitudes of Steve Halle's Map of the Hydrogen World. Edgy with savvy and brio. It's one wonderful exciting romp.
— Anne Waldman
Edward Teller once shook my hand and told me, “The world is flat, my friend. But it’s the edges that get caught in your eye.” Here, Steve Halle has plucked the edges from the world, Teller’s eye from its roulette wheel, the green electricity from its river. Halle’s poems are hollers in the hallway, smoke between bricks. A very public burning.
— Garin Cycholl

If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. At $12.95 (+ shipping) it makes a great gift.

The cover art is a painting by Lorraine Peltz, a Chicago-based painter whose work I admire.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Drafts 1-38: Toll

2008-11-24T14:31:00.003-06:00

[1279]

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Drafts 1-38: Toll (Wesleyan)

Never before have I felt a book so thoroughly wash over my beached toes and then recede so quietly back into the collective that is the ocean of potential verse. Bits of Drafts amaze, but then much of it just exists to exist, to be a theoretical repository, the embodiment of external ideas.

In fact, reading some of DuPlessis peripheral discussions of rhetorical strategies like "The Fold" (folding new drafts back over numerical counterparts in cycles of 19) in Lynn Keller's Forms of Expansion showcased more excitement and charge than the Drafts themselves.

After reading DuPlessis's Tabula Rosa a couple years ago (I think I bought Fanny Howe's copy at a used bookstore, but that's a story for another lazy afternoon--especially the inscription) in which the first two Drafts appear, I was really jazzed to read a bunch of the Drafts together. After reading them, though, nothing has stuck save wordplay, save form, save rhetorical artifice. How should I feel about that?

Oulipo and other Conceptual Poetries and Their Uses

2008-11-23T16:14:00.003-06:00

I'm sick of people shitting on Oulipo and Conceptual Poetry as non-poetries because they are perceived to be emotionally distant. I find Oulipian techniques to be particularly intriguing because, for me at least, they have a strong tie to theoretical physics, which I also find unbearably fascinating (likely because I can usually wrap my head around the concept explained in language but not the mathematics behind it).

Oulipian poems offer parallel dimensions of poetry. In multiverse theories of theoretical physics, infinite parallel universes may be created every time a choice is made. In this way, Oulipian poems allow a window into the parallel universe of a poem's choices because choosing a single word for a poem supposes every other possible choice for said word must also be chosen in a kind of definition of opposites.

Perhaps I'm not a skilled enough thinker to articulate the importance of connecting probability in real-world applications like physics and the use of chance operations and mathematical techniques posited by Oulipo to show the strange and defamiliar world of improbable poetries.

I'm not sure what language is, but language appears to be bound up with probability more than what linguistics and cognitive scientists give credit for. What if language as a skill is like the human capacity to peel a certain kind of potatoes? How one learns by observations how to peel those potatoes will dictate how one peels potatoes until through pragmatic processes of trial and error, one deems the old way unworthy and seeks to adapt it for new discoveries.

The same must be true of language, if we can view the having of language as a human skill. We learn it by mimicry until our mimicked lexicon proves unsuitable for our communicative (or variant) needs. Language, as a skill or skill set, can then be manipulated for our own idiolectical needs.

Yet, like peeling potatoes, it may be necessary to posit the overwhelming majority of those peeling potatoes in a certain way will do so in a probable way reflecting the best of what's known about that skill set collectively. In language terms, this might be how those words association games work--the brain is wired to deliver a probable answer for a certain prompt. If language is working also within memory, then this would make a whole lot of sense based on how memories are brought about.

For language and peeling potatoes, improbable or surprising ways of doing things must exist, and for language, and specifically, poetry, Oulipo and conceptual poetries provide a way into the world of strangeness, unteaching the tenable skill set of language just as theoretical physics hypotheses and theories, despite proofs in mathematics, appear counterintuitive to what we experience in everyday existence.

A Response to Horace Engdahl's Comment on American Insularity and Othered Texts

2008-11-14T15:35:00.006-06:00

I am going to make a valiant attempt to link issues of temporality and hegemony in the creation of canon/anthologic devices and the development of curricula.

I want to begin the argument by talking about two important things I learned in my MFA experience. First of all, even though I'd be seriously interested in poetry since I was 16, it wasn't until my course of study in the MFA program (age 24-26) that I began about the landscape of American and English language poetries. My previous encounters with poetry during my undergraduate years focused on classical surveys, period styles, author surveys or in-depth studies of single authors. Despite using the Norton and various other anthologies, it was never once articulated how the anthologic device works or what it's potential deficiencies might be. It can be said that any anthology is either a map of the hegemonic landscape of a genre or an attempt at counter hegemony. The MFA program, generally, and Anne Waldman, particularly, also forced me to think about poetic lineages both regarding poets I looked back to as examples and poets who are working in similar ways to me. The lesson of all this is simple: if I could not conceptualize the dominant map of the genre I was most interested, it was impossible to know what got left off that map, although I had an inkling as an undergrad there was more to the story.

In addition to simply understanding the hegemonic practice of creating anthological systems, it also should be noted how othered texts and authors get assimilated into the system. For example, with regard to LGBT studies, it is not too difficult to point out gay canonical texts in English language poetry, from Whitman to Ginsberg, from O'Hara to Duncan and onwards. Lesbian poetry's canonized authors are starting to emerge now, poets like Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde come to mind immediately. Bisexual and transgendered poetries are still othered from the canon, as far as I know.

Similarly, certain poets in translation have become part of the English-language canon: Anna Akhmatova, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Neruda, and Federico Garcia Lorca are examples I've come across during my study of the poetic landscape. This issue forces me to use terms like anthologic device or system, which takes away the idea that an anthology must be a text of some kind rather than a set of beliefs held by an interested group.

Yet the LGBT and translational otherings are also curricular. We, as a community with interest in publishing and teaching and its relation to canon/anthology, need to be acutely aware of what our writers are reading. If I can use myself as an archtype, of sorts, my undergraduate study featured exactly two courses that read texts in translation that I would consider non-assimilated or non-Western-canonical texts, a Literature and Film course that studied Latin American novels translated into films and a Literature and Philosophy course in which we read Kafka, Camus, Kundera and Nabokov (another curious 'tweener). No female authors or LGBT texts were featured in those courses; they, apparently, cannot write philosophical literature.

In the English department, we did not have classes offered on even Western literature in translation, let alone Asia or Africa or other continents/regions. I did not have a chance to take courses on the Russian novel, French Symbolists or Surrealists, or Spanish poetry, even though they could or would fit the curricular descriptions listed above.

I thought of all this specifically, on Nov. 12, when prompted by a blog post from Jonathan Mayhew, a translator of Spanish-language literature into English, on his blog Bemsha Swing:

To understand Creeley, say, you would have to know about Williams, Pound, Duncan, Olson, Levertov. Also Ginsberg and O'Hara and Lowell--representing directions he didn't take. Maybe also Thomas Hardy and some of Creeley's other favorite British poets. Some medieval lyrics. The understanding of Creeley within his context and tradition entails a very dense and nuanced positioning.

It strikes me (and this is not a new observation with me) that we tend to read "foreign" poets in a quite different way. We never see them against the backdrop of their mediocre contemporaries who never get translated. Usually it is only one or two poets from any given country who are at all known at any given time, so there is rarely a sense of Creeley's "company," the social network of poets. The poet translated stands pretty much alone. Things are a little better with French poetry, where most readers who know Bonnefoy would also know Baudelaire or Reverdy. There is a long tradition of contact between the two linguistic traditions. Even though I have spent hours reading French poetry of the past I couldn't name ten living French poets, so in a sense I am not even close to having that sort of "thick" knowledge. This is qualitatively quite different from knowing the work of dozens of contemporary poets in Spain and the US, plus a healthy number of Latin Americans.

Mayhew is, of course, talking about hegemonic deficiency and lack of knowledge of foreign lineages. A good argument could be made that our lack of knowledge of foreign lineages leads to certain poets being assimilated into the canon because all readers have to measure those translated poets against are similar English-language writers, so if they measure up, we count them among the canon or include them in our anthological way of thinking. For me, this is a curricular deficiency. Oftentimes, the only way I came to know othered lineages was by way of mention, so my only way of knowing was by knowing only what I didn't know. Like, I knew there was such a thing as queer literature and theory and feminist literature theory and knew that people wrote in Asia and South America and elsewhere, but I never got a chance to know fully what that could mean, at least not unless I did the Sisyphean task of discovering entire lineages on my own, which I still don't think I can do.

Another key issue brought up by my reading on Little Sisters Classics and Arsenal Pulp Press and echoed, I think, in Mayhew's blog post is temporality. Seminal, difficult or otherwise othered texts need, and deserve, a period of incubation, as the LGBT re-publication project and much of Dalkey Archive's work makes clear. How many Gertrude Stein texts have come back into print, say with a press like Sun & Moon, and then gone back out again? Stanzas in Meditation, off the top of my head, among many others. American publishing cannot even keep our own canonical writers in print over time! Time also can only ambivalently heal Mayhew's purportedly deficient knowledge of contemporary mediocre French poets. The American translational deficiency makes it almost certain mediocre foreign writers will never be translated into English, and where does that leave English-language artists and writers in potentially learning a multicultural landscape of poetry? To quote George Carlin, "Nowhere, mon frère."

Deficient of the multicultural knowledge of poetry and not knowing where to look to try to fix the problem makes for one sad, and sadly deficient, poet. I think I know enough Spanish to translate, but I have no clue where to find poets who need translation. The symptoms I mentioned above will not go away without changes to the hegemonic thinking about curricula and canon. After all, if you don't know what you don't know, there is no way to go about learning it. If you know what you don't know, there's hope for change. I hope the situation of English-language hegemonic othering falls into the latter category.

Addendum: This piece of course speaks not at all about the subtle and not-so-subtle push for international linguistic hegemony. Languages are also endangered species, and the need to preserve worldwide linguistic diversity ought to be as big of an issue as global warming.

Second Addendum: What does it mean that two of my favorite English-language writers are non-nativized speakers: Rosmarie Waldrop and Aleksandar Hemon?

Post-Election Right-Wing Hypocrisy Philosophical Detritus

2008-11-10T16:32:00.003-06:00

I understand the right-minded efforts behind the pro-life stance, but I also am aware of enough exceptions and extenuating circumstances to know, pragmatically speaking, pro-choice offers a farther-reaching right-ness (as in the phrase "doing right by") than a one-way only, pro-life mentality.

I don't understand how, in the aftermath of the election, conservatives can argue they voted for McCain/Palin because of their pro-life stance and be perfectly content with the strange and acary war-mongering/hawkish McCain with his "hundred years war" and "Barbara Ann"/bomb Iran gaffes, among other deep flaws.

I know George Carlin was a comic, but his notion that conservatives want live babies to grow up to be dead soldiers makes eminent, ironic and frightening sense, saying nothing about what I perceive to be the classism inherent in the conservative right's policies and agendas.

I've always been fascinated with the contradictory notion that pro-life is isolated to the abortion issue. Since I'm a lapsed idealist, I imagine the utopic no-place where pro-life extends beyond the boundary of the abortion debate to all facets of the contemporary nation-state. Lapsed idealists turn into pragmatic realists, and in that respect, I think it better to, on the one hand, know that (in a globally pro-life, duh, stance) abortion ought to be the nth-degree last resort, and on the other, allow that some women will need to have the option to make that choice, whether or not I agree with it.

We Delivered So Now We Need...

2008-11-05T00:43:00.003-06:00

...To Deliver. In this end is the beginning...

This is exciting shit.

David Foster Wallace Celebratory Memorial at Illinois State University: Witness Notes

2008-11-01T18:54:00.008-05:00

I haven't read much DFW, or Dave, or David, as I learned today he liked to be called by students. In fact, I (pathetically) have a copy of Infinite Jest sitting on my shelf awaiting reading, which I bought after Adam Fieled raved about the book back in '05-ish. I've only read various marginal pieces by DFW I found on the Internet, like his commencement address at Kenyon College or the wonderful article from The New York Times, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience." I really waffled about attending the memorial today not only because I've read so little but also because I'm behind in my work as it is. I rationalized attending because this would be a unique experience I would likely never encounter again: a community paying tribute to a brilliant person and writer.

I'm glad I attended. Even though this was billed as celebratory, I found most of the proceeding to be moving and somber. Things began seriously with former English Studies Department Chair Charles Harris reflecting on Wallace. Harris is an excellent orator, who told a story about how DFW flew with Harris and his daughter to audition for an arts school in New York, bringing his manuscript for Infinite Jest along to deliver to the publisher in person, and framing the notion that few on that flight would know they were riding with a/the seminal literary work of the age.

Several former students spoke, often traveling a great distance to be at ISU. Lynn Bulgrin, Tim Feeney, Jason Hammel, and Martin Riker stood out, highlighting DFW's techniques for weeding out non-serious writers, making fledgling writers mirror his intense attention to detail, and his immense humanness. Bulgrin led off the in-person tributes, almost breaking down at the end of her tribute, which set the tone for the afternoon. Tim Feeney provided some much needed comic relief, comparing how people called DFW "Dave" or "David" to how Hollywooders call Robert De Niro "Bob" or "Bobby," so out of step considering their statures. Hammel, whose tribute may have been the most moving, spoke of DFW's ability to undercut his arrogance upon beginning study with ISU, elaborating on how DFW ripped apart a clunky sentence of Hammel's about wine temperature mixing with the room's. DFW gave Hammel his version of le mot juste--"The wine assumes the room's temperature." Hammel ended his tribute by having DFW's teaching come full circle, how DFW's le mot juste morphed into his own, "The wine tempered." Finally, Martin Riker read two paragraphs he wrote in the wake of the news of DFW's death. He focused on the last time he had seen Wallace, talking about their conversation and later about how driving home Wallace struck a deer with his car. Relentlessly searching for the creature, which he sensed he'd severely injured but not killed, Wallace, Riker and another hunter-motorist with a floodlight, found the deer with a badly fractured leg. Wallace broke down, despite Riker's appraisal he didn't want to in front of him, and admitted "he'd been a bad human being that night."

The tributes from a laundry list of contemporary luminaries in fiction were equally impressive. Curtis White, on the advisory board of Fiction Collective 2, discussed how he and DFW were linked by suffering from depression, and he focused on how much Wallace's presence and genius challenged him to write his own masterworks, Requiem and America's Magic Mountain. Other tributes came from Richard Powers, Mary Caponegro, Don DeLillo, Stacey Levine (who I dined with, along with William Allegrezza, Garin Cycholl, after her Series A reading with John Tipton), Rick Moody, Brad Morrow, Ken Kalfuls, and Dave Eggers, and were alternately read by Charles Harris, Victoria Frenkel Harris and Richard McLaughlin. All these writers spoke of how DFW challenged them and raised the bar for their own efforts in fiction. They mentioned his generosity upon finding success and his MacArthur genius grant, offering his work and money to fledgling journals like McSweeney's and emphasizing the same shyness, human goodness and relentless engagement with big, challenging ideas.

I didn't know why I felt I needed to go. I never met Wallace, and as I mentioned, have barely engaged with his oeuvre, but I was compelled somehow, to attend, as a witness of sorts. Robert McLaughlin, a colleague of Wallace's here at ISU, added some perspective for me. He spoke of Wallace's unique abilities as a teacher to connect with students and complicate the complexity of his work with his person. McLaughlin broke down a bit, realizing his own weaknesses as a teacher were magnified by his interactions with Wallace, and Wallace's interactions with McLaughlin's students. This is, I guess, how I felt when the summative effects of the memorial took hold of me. How can I live up to Wallace's generosity and genius, his humanness and transcendence? Wallace's ineffable qualities as a person, writer and teacher echoed feelings I had when a mentor and hero of mine, Br. Robert Ruhl, died equally unexpectedly back in February, a person less reknowned but equally ineffable. The challenge I feel to live up to such personages is a heavy burden, but one I feel compelled to attempt to bear nevertheless.

Addendum: I watched the DFW pieces from Charlie Rose's video archive, as well as a reading "Another Random Bit: The Perspective of David Foster Wallace" from UCSD/San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art on YouTube. Both are worth checking out.

Reading Duras/Writing Duras pt. 1

2008-10-27T08:00:00.003-05:00

Solitude is a constructive aloneness. Loneliness is a de(con)structive aloneness. With which one must battle. In order to write. Either both are dangerous or neither is dangerous. Enough. In a room with mauve carpeting I battle both. Together. They team a tightrope. I hold a long stick for balance. A cane. The fan runs in the bathroom when the light is on(e). The lemon soap my mother gifted me smells lemony. I mute the TV while reading to offer the appearance of voices. Of company. I am attracted to the woman on the weather.
***
The book is a negotiation between what the writer thinks it may be comprised of and what actually comes to be, which until its arrival must remain unknown. Unbeknownst to me an addiction to between the sides of this negotiation. This would make for forgettable TV. I forget why.
***
There is nothing I can say.

There is nothing I can write.

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.
***
time swap stun paws emit stun law nuts walnuts camus room sumac moor won lived now devil tub live but evil wang and gnaw dna mined snot denim tons pins not snip ton snap sleep pans peels tram wed mart dew door stab rood bats draw are ward era pots top stop pot net sag ten gas rat yaw way tar

Fictionalizing my other intellectual self

2008-10-08T12:01:00.004-05:00

I would be doing if I didn't have to do what I am doing. I would of course be doing the doing of my knowing with a mind to know more than what I am already knowing.

In doing this knowing to knowing more I might be reading Helene Cixous because synchronistically she appears everywhere as does Paulo Freire. I might be writing with Dogen opened before me right now instead my windowless office.

I to ponder my public self am I doing the doing of my knowing only for my own personal selfish betterness and betterment. I to ponder whether the doing of my knowing may possibly affect someones for the greater.

I fetishizes the completeness of my knowing and/or the doing of my knowing as if there is a completeness specific to my own knowing and the doing of my knowing but not feeling.

A woman on the bus to home monologued her thinking. Constantly. I read Trimbur but interjected my reading with her thinking until our thinking was her speaking and I put on battles.

Ezra Pound was passionate only in the doing of his knowing (therefore the Cantos). Ezra Pound was not passionate in othering the doing of his knowing. In the Pisan Cantos then Ezra Pound to othering only the notion of his own isolation. Ezra Pound in reaching out to his own handless self incapable of othering a self then in the Pisan Cantos.

I reach for the desire books I have because I know within the doing of my knowing can expand for the betterment of self and othering of self in potentialized interactivity. One must be so careful these days not to Ezra Pound one's self into selves which could dangerously fetishize the doing of one's knowing as a self-reflexively important task risking everything. Risking monologuing the road signs. To everyone's befuddlement.

Reginald Shepherd

2008-09-11T22:11:00.002-05:00

I'm sad Reginald Shepherd has died. He was an engaging poet, scholar and critic, and it has been a blessing to read and digest his work over the past couple years. Reginald Shepherd's Blog

The iTunes Mood Search and Shuffle

2008-09-07T15:35:00.002-05:00

I've been having some fun over the past few days using Apple's iTunes, on which I do probably more than half my listening now as opposed to albums, to search for certain words based on or associated with my perception of my mood, kind of a listener's reflexive objective correlative, if you will. It's also fascinating to see what comes of such searching. For example, this mornings search for "rain" in the wake of last night's downpours yielded the obvious like Led Zeppelin's "Rain Song" and Alice in Chains' "Rain When I Die" to more obscurely connected tracks like Nirvana's "Drain You," Alan Jackson's "Chasin' That Neon Rainbow" (yeah, I like country, wanna fight?) to the entirety of Radiohead's In Rainbows. All in all, it was a forty-track plus list.

Yesterday's more overt "lonely" and "lone" (yes, I'm in a pathetic grad-school way) search yielded about thirty tracks each including (wanna fight) lots of Hank Williams ("I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "I Hear that Lonesome Whistle") to Dwight Yoakam ("Ain't that Lonely Yet," "Lonesome Roads") to jazz tracks like Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and the entire album Thelonious Alone in San Francisco by Monk to Ben Harper's "Another Lonely Day" to Norah Jones "Lonestar" to Eddie Holman's great R&B hit "Hey There Lonely Girl," which I've been singing to myself as I ride my bike all over Normal.

I'm anxious to see what future searches and shuffles of my 10,000-track music library will yield--only my moods can know for sure.