Olson v. Duncan Smackdown!

OK, well, not exactly. As far as I know about it, they were always pretty amicable. But I've been teaching some Olson, and I have confronted this terrible fact about myself - I like Duncan's poems better! Oh, sure, I like Olson's poetics - all the stuff about particularity, esp. - and I like the way he merges personal biography and communal history (sometimes against each other) - and always keeps bringing it back to the local. Some of O's poems are truly magnificent - but others (a lot of others) seem self-indulgent. OK, so he's mercurial and really smart, and this is the record of the dance of his intellect, blah blah. But what about all us laggards?? We deserve some respect, too! And too often I feel like O. is leaving us in the dust, & mumbling to himself. The transitions are not as clean as Pound's, and not as smooth (and inconsequential) as Ashbery. They're just abrupt, unmotivated, and irritating. It's all a kind of coy shorthand. Well, some of it, anyway.

But, see, this is where I start to feel like a real philistine for liking Duncan - and his more mellifluous romantico-modernist collages. It's all a little too sweet for me to credit. And then there's his flaming platonism. All those archetypal images lining up neatly in "rimes." Yuk! I mean, seriously, nobody who has to earn a living can be a platonist!

And yet, I'm taken by the music. Bourdieu would put me down with the people digging "Blue Danube," probably.

But even Olson, Mr. Local Polis Materiality can sound pretty duncanesque about these things: "to construct knowing back to image and/ God's face behind it" - or "no event// is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal/ event." Penetrated, indeed - ravished by the divine forms. (And then there are those enjambments that leave the last word of a sentence on the next line. I mean, that just bugs. (And all those parentheses with no close-parentheses

Niedecker and Overemployment

No, I'm not dead, just busy. Speaking of which, I want to mention a comment that Joseph Hutchinson posted re: my Jan. 20 post ("When We Are All Unemployed"), to wit:

"What about overemployed but underpaid? Will we all become one-line poets? Might be a good thing. As Tadeusz Rozewicz writes somewhere: you could say that the poets have stoned poetry to death with words."

This struck a chord, since I've just finished "teaching" Lorine Niedecker. It's quite striking the way that, when she begins her cleaning job at the hospital, her poems become very, very small. "Haiku-like," I think the term is. Anyway, very, very condensed - even moreso than in New Goose or For Paul. And it's hard not to reach the conclusion that working long hours of demanding physical labor (in her 50s) left little time or energy for poetizing - as important as that was for her.

No matter where you are
you are alone
and in danger -- well
[space ..............] to hell
with it.

This seems different to me than, say, Dr. Williams scribbling stanzas on his scrip pad. The "in danger" seems to have to do with the bomb (it's the late 50s, and many of her poems mention it), but there's clearly more to it, for someone in her economic & social position. Or less. A room of one's own ain't much good without a few hours of one's own. "Time for sleep, time for work, and time for what we will." That was a long time ago.

Silence as Subversion

See, the reason I haven't been posting lately is not b/c I'm busy dutifully fulfilling my jobly functions as a petty functionary in the ISA cash-nexus etc., but rather as an act of subversion. If you refuse to talk, you are engaging in a negative critique of all those who do - who merely rehash an ideology into which they are always already interpellated. Or was it interpolated? Anyway, if you shut up, you refuse participation in the info economy, and thereby muck up the wheels of whatever it is that runs us.

But then again, it may be that the most subversive act is to write long blog posts about how fucked up and deluded everyone else is - and how I can see that b/c I am a Bad Subject writing on WordPress or Blogger. See - I'm using the master's tools to dismantle the master's net - while not even dismantling it!

Community is subversion of atomistic individualist neoliberal society. (this is where growing your own veggies comes in) But then, so is divisiveness, b/c what's a community w/o someone to define itself over-against? (this is where the automatic weapons come in)

Being in a shit job is subversive in and of itself, of course, b/c your very existence makes clear the inequality of the system. To whom? Well . . . to the other people in the system. Which is everybody, I guess. Which means we're all subverting each other. Right? Sol!

In any case, we're sure not going to go knocking on doors or calling people on the telephone who we don't know, b/c hey, the community organizing thing? that's so 60s - pre-post-apocalypse. Or 20s, as in what you do when you're in your. Sure, organizers have their place (they're minding their business and doing their job just like me), but I'm a culture worker - it's not my job, man. I'm going to stop flapping my jaws, and take a stand and make a Statement!

Thank god for the internet - it makes community-formation so much more convenient.

Now that I think of it, maybe being a trust-fund artiste is subversive, since you're using daddy's money to fight the very source of it. And being a big-ass stockbroker is definitely subversive, since you're helping destroy the system as we speak.

(OK - let's review - who are we subverting?)

Inaugural Poetry as it Ought to Be

Even representational, personal, narrative poets were gagging, as it turns out.

In workshops, I do an exercise on the first day. Everyone free-writes (incl. me) for 10-15 min. Then, we count the number of words we've written. Then, we underline the words, phrases, sentences we like most, and cross out those we like least. The goal is to arrive at one half (or fewer) of the number of words of the original free-write.

Then I have them go home and make a poem out of what's left, and bring it to class. When they do, I have them count the number of words and - you guessed it - cut out half.

It seemed to me that Elizabeth Alexander could have benefited from this exercise.

In any case, I thought there were some sort of interesting phrases & lines in the poem, but that about half of it was pretty boring.

So, I rewrote it. [ahem.]

Praise the Day

We walk past, catching each other’s
eyes, or not, about to speak –

All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din.

Someone is repairing things that need it.

Someone makes music:

a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

We encounter each other in words

spiny or smooth, whispered, declaimed,
words to re-consider.

We want to find a place

where we will be safe.
Say it plain: many died for this day:
Sing the names of them that brought us here,

picked the cotton, or lettuce –

praise for every hand-lettered sign
under widening light at kitchen tables.

In today’s sharp sparkling winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun,
on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

When We Are All Unemployed

- or underemployed - will we have time to write even longer blog posts?

This Just In: Barack Obama a POLITICIAN!

On Blog of Myself, I almost always stick to talking about either poetry & poetics or blogs. But all the obamania right now brings out the skeptic in me - the one who's worked for and observed too many pols since the Reagan era to expect much of any of them. Don't get me wrong - I voted for the guy and will celebrate his inauguration Tuesday night. But here's what I believe: once you elect your candidate - that's when your work begins.

If you don't know about www.opensecrets.org, it's time you made their acquaintance. Everything you need to know about who gave how much to whom. They report that Obama's campaign "relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally." Now, that's an up statistic - there were a lot of small donors, compared to recent presidential campaigns. But I was curious about those "bigger donors" (that is, those firms that "encourage" their employees to contribute - a practice known evocatively as "bundling"). Among them were the following:

Goldman Sachs - $955,223
JPMorgan Chase & Co - $642,958
Citigroup Inc - $633,418
UBS AG - $505,017
Morgan Stanley - $483,523

Now, I realize I'm not Getting With the Program by pointing this out, but the fact that the Congress is currently raiding the Treasury and giving the loot to the banks and stockbrokers has got me a little miffed, esp. since the bailouts (and those two wars) are bankrupting the country. So naturally I was miffed at Bo for going along with it (nay, widening the damage). And naturally, I think that the figures above are damn good investments, given the payouts.

(And if you really think both of these wars are going to end completely in the next four years, you really need to read the memoir Secrets, by Daniel Ellsberg.)

Meantime, if you're interested in the follow-up to the 500 + promises Bo made during the campaign (remember raising taxes on those making more than 250 grand? That one went south in a hurry), then bookmark www.politifact.com and check out their "Obameter" from time to time.

And lest you think I'm not giving him a chance, know this: If he returns taxation rates and the tax code to their pre-1980 status, then I really will declare him the Second Coming.

The Best Summary of Contemporary US Poetics I've Yet Seen

. . . has been written, by Dale Smith.

Cole Swensen's Utopoetics

The intro to the new anthology American Hybrid has a lot to recommend it. But in the section entitled "The Current Landscape," I must say that I'm not living in the same landscape Swensen is. For instance:

". . . serious students are often exposed to both the conventional and the experimental, but unlike their elders, they don't necessarily feel that they have to choose between them. Instead, they see both presented as viable approaches and sanctioned by the same institutions."

Some people say the world is round, some people say the world is flat, but I think the truth is somewhere in between.

Seriously, folks, this is all well and good if money is no object. But when it is - esp. in the throes of Great Depression II - it's gonna be a fight - for space in journals and books lists, for faculty hires, for teaching assistantships, for awards and fellowships, etc. There's only so much to go around, and scarcity tends to breed polarization. Even if Swensen's statement were true (and I think a lot of younger writers - esp. in CW programs - would beg to differ), when push comes to shove, the literati tend to regroup into camps - very naturally, considering that there is safety (even power) in numbers. And it seems to me that it's a matter of aesthetics, too. There are certainly conventional poets who feel the need to "weird up" their conventional verse. And I'm sure there are less conventional poets who feel the need to explain themselves to the establishment. But throw a golden apple on the floor, and see how fast people take sides.

"The rhizome is an appropriate model, not only for the new Internet publications, but also for the current world of contemporary poetry as a whole. The two-camp model, with its parallel hierarchies, is increasingly giving way to a more laterally-ordered extensive networlk composed of intersections, or hubs, that branch outward toward smaller hubs, which themselves branch outward in an intricate and ever-changing structure of exchange and influence. Some hubs may be extremely experimental, and some extremely conservative, but many of them are true intersections of these extremes . . . " etc. etc.

Aside from the obvious conflation of "world of contemporary poetry" with "American poetry," (not to mention the characterization of Langpo as "academic poetry," earlier in the piece - !), this statement is not altogether accurate, in my view. It is a useful description of Internet publications (and blogs - often one and the same), and that's exciting. But not the Institutions of Poetry (i.e., those with at least some money). For instance, how many of the poems in the actual anthology will have been published in one of those "hubs" at the margins? How many will be by poets you've never heard of? Indeed, how many poems written after 1980 will have been authored by poets working outside the academy? Which brings us back to turf wars.

I appreciate the utopian vision expressed here - provided one keeps in mind that it is "ought," rather than is.

William Zanzinger, Hattie Carroll, H.L. Hix, and G.W. Bush

Last week, William Zanzinger died in Richmond, Virginia. Who, you may ask, was William Zanzinger? Well, William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll, as Bob Dylan sang, and got off with 6 months - b/c, the ballad explains, he was rich and white, and she was a poor black servant woman. This is one form of historic commemoration - or commemoration of "current events" - the way the news traveled and the way legends were preserved, back in the day. If you couldn't read, you listened to someone who could. If you could read and not sing, you read it to someone who could (to the tune of . . .). And the broadsides which the ballads were printed on cost a penny, ha'penny, or less.

Another form of poetic commemoration is on view in the poems of God Bless, by H.L. Hix (Etruscan Press, 2007), which "are constructed entirely of passages from speeches, executive orders, and other public statements of George W. Bush" - or, in some cases, Osama bin Laden. So sure, there are some juicy bushisms. But, by and large, Hix has done a yeomanlike job of making poems (sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, no less) out of what must be some of the most incredibly boring discourse ever devised by the mind of man (or lack thereof). For instance, the title is a phrase that was repeated obsessively by the President, in multiple variants - not to mention other tedious iterations of every conceivable reference to an already overworked Deity:

We honor their service to America and we pray
their families will receive God's comfort and God's grace.

We pray for their speedy and safe return.
May God bless our country and all who defend her.

We pray for those families who mourn the loss of life.
We believe freedom is - is a gift from the Almighty God.

And so on. There is something about staying "on message" that seems inherently inimical to poetry (interesting poetry, anyway), and Hix has done about as well as I could imagine anyone doing in trying to turn this stuff into something resembling art. The stuff from bin Laden is also predictable, but it's such a nice break. When you go into the next Bush poem, you think, O - him again!

But it certainly gets the message across - or rather the distilled and concentrated flavor of those days of officialdom from the beginning of 2001 through 2004. The repetition (NOT insistence) is the rhetoric of running in circles - not inappropriate prosody for the war of terror.

Another, subsidiary question, this volume raises is: can this kind of found poetry be "political" by itself, without commentary? And if so, how? Hix follows the poems by a series of interviews that deal with both his poems and other people's books that deal with similar themes. This is perhaps the same issue Benjamin deals with in the "Matter-of-Fact" school of photography. In "The Artist as Producer," he comes to the conclusion that, without the caption, the image is open to appropriation by any political tendency - not least of all "apolitical" art. For much experimental poetry of the last 200+ years, prefaces, manifestos, interviews, etc., have functioned as "captions" - alleviating the burden of Art to convey the Message. That is why Lyrical Ballads had to be explained first, in 1800, but Dylan's ballad lyrics do not, in the 1960s or 2000s.

Ideological Face Apparatus

The weird thing about Facebook (and probably My Space, tho it isn't my space) is that it's a kind of self-profiling. I mean, people are holding demos and filing lawsuits to avoid being profiled, but here I am doing it to myself. How stupid is that? No wonder the NSA and marketeers of all sorts dip into this tasty database.

O well as long as I spell the name right . . .