My Goldilocks Problem

“People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort. (Eliot)” (Markson). Whoever said it, it’s true for most Americans, anyway. If you teach poetry in a public educational institution in the US, you probably know what I mean. Give students challenging poetry, and they glower (“What the hell is that?”). If you give them “accessible” or popular poetry, they roll their eyes (“Oh, please – why are you making us read this trash?”). At the height of the 80s Culture Wars, the right embodied this split in an extreme form. If you taught difficult material (like, oh, say, Homer, Milton, John Donne), and you expected your students to actually read it (if they wanted a good grade), you were an elitist. If you taught pop culture, then you were a radical who was intent on dumbing down the curriculum and destroying western civilization.

The quotation is true of people who don’t read much literature. But even people who do so embody this dichotomy. For all the talk of post-avant, it seems to me that, when push comes to shove, people fall back on either the “post” (as in “thank god all that elitist jerking off is over with”) or the “avant” (as in “oh, my god – who reads this [tired, stupid, corny] shit??”). That is another instantiation the Coke/Pepsi, GOP/Dem, black/white mentality that characterizes American life.

I’ve held forth on this theme before, and, yes, as a matter of fact, I do have an axe to grind. See, I have this manuscript ("quick! hide!") . . . Well, it’s part biography, part history, with a little memoir thrown in for bad measure. That means that it’s representing things, events, people, even emotions (hurrah! go the posties, literature is supposed to be mimetic and expressive; undertheorized and tepid, go the avantes). But, formally, it’s a scrapped-up, fragmentary, montage/bricolage that relies heavily on problematic "evidence" (now we’re talking, go the avantes; WTF?? go the posties).

So – is it possible to be both heavy-handed and coldly detached? To be both schmaltzy and cryptic? Well, it’s certainly possible to press on (and maybe disrupt) the marketing and institutional categories we rely upon to navigate texts (incl. genre). But maybe one can narrate and represent without being overly naive or smug about subjectivity and language. We'll see.

Extant

Your atomic number is directly proportional to the number of new posts on your blog. I'm made of hydrogen.

But seriously, folks. One of my students today said that some of Frank O'Hara's lunch poems sound like blog entries. I did not prompt him. This is big news for me, as it brings together the two genres with which this blog is concerned.

In the meantime, I have begun my Facebook experience. I think it should be Namebook. I mean, you don't have to show your face - and even if you do, it's tiny. It's really Who's friends with Whom, isn't it? And that's the whole point of life under conditions of Universal Competition, isn't it?

Did you know that the original investors in Lloyd's of London were called The Names? They may still be, for all I know. Or maybe now they are The Numbers.

Anyway, Facebook, a "social networking site," is a weird medium. (or weird museum) Some people mainly post links to their blogs or to on-line publications. You're aware of others only by the friends they acquire (or who acquire them). I find myself thinking, "Damn! That person has 10x as many 'friends' as I do - I better get cracking!"

Will everyone still be friends if Obama loses the election?

Speaking of which, if you're on Facebook, join "Irish-Americans for Barry O'Bama." You don't have to be Irish to join, since neither is he, exactly.

The Maverick (and other tired ideas)

"Several tags . . . have been attached to me during my political career. One of these is 'maverick,' and if one likes labels, this in some ways is an apt description." - Sen. Albert Gore, Sr., ca. 1972

"I do not want college professors around. They believe in the greatest good for the greatest number, and I do not believe in that." - Prentice Cooper, Gore's unsuccessful opponent in 1958.

Readings Last Weekend

Why do we update our blogs? Because our public awaits us? Because we are sending signals out into the void, like SETI? Maybe we like to hear ourselves talk.

I like to hear Hadara Bar-Nadav talk - and read her stuff, which I did, Friday night. Good crowd at the Writer's Place in Kansas City (70 or so). She started out with a fanciful poem involving her recently-flooded basement, which, in the poem, she's navigating in a paper boat, with the entire family. But then she went into some weirder, darker stuff - such as the series of poems that begin with Dickinson lines (and smuggle other D lines in later, if I understand aright). Much more bodily grotesquerie than in ED, I'd say. Longer lines, too, I'm guessing. Like if Dickinson could write free-verse and had to watch Holocaust documentaries as an adolescent. But the weird part is, it gorgeous. The cross-sectioning of the body is done in such a lyrical way that it leaves you wanting more. Damn I wish I could do that.

But I can't, and I didn't, on Saturday night. Instead, I read some of my cartoony twisted little faux-rhetorical nature poems, as the warm-up act for Cyrus Console's serious poetry. CC read from his MS in progress (which, unlike Brief Under Water, appears to be in verse) - faux-vatic symbolist pronouncements interwoven by a character named Anthony, who is part ex-con, part 19th c. dandy, part schlep, and part *Saint* Anthony, as far as I can tell. The poems I hadn't heard had a distinctly scrambled-biblical air (Miltonic, as it turns out) - funny and scary both (to me).

And that was my weekend trip to KC and Topeka. I hope to return some day!

Joe on Godot

Hey, they spelled the name right . . . AND they put me right before Adrienne Rich!

New NO

I just got the new copy of NO: A Journal of the Arts. Like the previous issues, it's very swish - high production values and quality writing. It seems like NO started by publishing a few famous poets alongside "emerging" ones (and some who were a little of both). Then they started publishing more famous people, but also including much more visually adventurous poetry than in previous issues(poetry including pictures, even stitching; poetry demanding different typefaces; or a "landscape" page orientation).

This issue is pretty much composed of really famous poets (mostly over 60). And, while there's some dandy reproductions of visual art works, there's not as much of a visual sensibility to the poems (certainly not much use of the graphic possibilities possessed by a well-funded journal).

This is not to say that it's boring - it's not, by any means. There's a lot of really exciting, interesting writing by those really famous poets. But I do hope they continue to make room for some less-well-known, off-the-wall stuff - especially from poets who include pictures or push the spatial and graphic potential of the art nowadays.

Joe (me) Reads Ken (Rumble)

Here is my review, posted this week in Tarpaulin Sky, of Ken Rumble's Key Bridge.

Dumber Than Quayle?

That's a serious question - weigh in!

Crock Blogic

So, let's say your co-worker writes something on her blog along the lines of: "Today was a bad day. My husband beat me again, and my tests came back positive." You see her at work the next day. You say, "Gee, Mary, I was sorry to hear about the bad news. Is there anything I can do to help?" and Mary says, "Fuck off! Mind your own business."

An hypothetical, to be sure, but similar things have happened to me. How are you supposed to react when people post things on their blog that are intimate, unflattering, or seem like cries for help?

This is clearly an instance of lack of any meaningful distinction between public and private. But what is it? The Blogic Sphere? A space in which, in effect, people can gossip about themselves, in which private (intimate) self becomes public (textual) persona - though not necessarily the same persona as in the blogger's other texts. A space in which one is invited to sympathy with a virtual subject who may or may not exist "in the flesh." In which desire for publicity (or attention), or even a distancing irony, may coexist with painful but apparently sincere (or at least sententious) self-representation?

I'm getting dizzy and have to stop now.

Election Forecast

. . . Green is the path we take
Between chimeras, and garlanded the way,
The down descent into November's void.

- Wallace Stevens, "Owl's Clover" (quoted, probably inaccurately, from memory)