Fallout from _ISSUE ONE_

Remember a few months ago, how everyone was talking about that faux PDF zine that contained several thousand randomly-generated poems attributed to people who didn't write them? Like you?

Well, I've decided we ought to make lemons out of lemonade. So - if you were one of the "victims," please contribute to VERZION TWO.

This is for real. Honest. Try it out!

Xmas? Bah, Xbox! Loden's _Hotel Imperium_? Three apposable thumbs up!

"When you spoke of the utility of suffering, I knew it was because you heard your death up on the roof like Santa's sleigh and now you wanted me to give it to you as a present."

Thus begins Rachel Loden's prose poem "Carnal Acknowledgments," from her book Hotel Imperium (U of Georgia P, 1999). I'm ashamed to say I haven't read these poems in this collected form until now, but glad I did. Makes me look forward to the next installment, Dick of the Dead (!), forthcoming from Ahsahta. Many of the poems are indeed Nixonesque, e.g., "Bride of Tricky D.," which begins with a news item about the dog Checkers being reinterred near his former owner, and ends thusly:

" . . . 'Let's
slip the Constitution, Richard,

cut red ribbon on the virgin
century. Teach me tonight . . . .' I find

his fierce beard lovely and the shadows
long. Asleep with Pat & Checkers

by his side . . . 'We could do it,'
he'll say, 'but it would be wrong.'"

Checkers. You know, as in the Checkers Speech? Illegal campaign contributions? Red scare? Well, kids, once upon a time, there was this thing called Watergate . . . Actually, many of the poems do come with endnotes, but this one doesn't. The quote at the end, of course, is what Nixon's former Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, tells the Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate break-in that he (Nixon) said after agreeing to pay hush money to the burglars, now in prison, but that he never really said. Got it?

Anyway, I like these poems b/c they are a kind of shadow image or muscle memory of politics and pop culture of mid-20th c.-America, and since I already feel like an embalmed relic of that era, I like reading them. Indeed, a lot of these poems seem to be spoken from beyond the grave, or from the political unconscious (a fine distinction, nowadays). I dig the combination of gravitas and wackiness in tone - & elegance and total surprise, in terms of form. The tone and form of some poems reminds me a little of the poetry of the era they're about, but the content has a lot more in common with Peter Gizzi than Randal Jarrell. Or Underworld in verse. Only shorter.

Jethro Bodine asks, "Have YOU suffered for your art today??"

Of Objects and Urges

"To look to the artwork for care, or gift or piety or, most simply, love, is to project a structure and an effect beyond the horizon of the artwork itself. It is to imagine an impossibly ongoing transgression of the circle - polis, oikos, both and at once - in order that those shapes remain, are preserved, to be tested. Social agency or amative connection only appear in the negative space cast by the jointed figure of work and life, and while this projects the artwork into space, it suggests a fugitive frame and directs us by saying 'Not here, not what you hold in your hands.' . . .

"This self-canceling void out of which the artwork impossibly proceeds (which is never available in the artwork itself) suggests that the act of art-making be read as the inverse, and not the expression, of the original urge."

- thus Andrew Rippeon, in P-Queue 5. I'm reading this thinking about the commemorative impulse in history-including art. And poetry shards.

The world is run by people who can subsist on four hours of sleep a night.

This is why I do not run the world.

It's the only thing that's holding me back.

An object - an "exhibit" - presented as evidence is always overdetermined, despite the parties' attempt to narrativize it. It is the focus of a narrative that points to another narrative. Stonehenge. It's just there. But even a text is an object. That text is going its own way. It doesn't necessarily want to be part of your party.

All of which applies to any evidence. But in art, unlike law or science, rules of evidence are less codified. The gap between the thing and the narrative it is supposed to represent can open a creative (imaginative) space.

Evidence

That title is kind of deceptive - it's really what I want to write about. But I'm bushed, so I'll just write about what I'm going to write about. That way I'll continue my pledge to post every day for a month.

Anyway: the status of evidence is vexed enough in a courtroom or laboratory, places where the status and narrative placement of evidence is set according to fairly inflexible rules. What, then, can one prove in a work of literature, using evidence - i.e., quotation, fact, photograph, etc. I'm very interested in those places where evidence as intractable, obdurate thing resists the narrative - or points in a different direction.

Lists 2

JforJames commented on the Dec. 1 post (which see) and directed me to one of his own: "A poem lurks in every list." I agree - tho it takes a certain eye or ear to detect it. The corollary is that a lot of poems nowadays are really lists that won't admit it. We call it "metonymy" instead. Or the "New Sentence." But it's just one damn thing after another.

I like that sort of thing, personally. But when I actually put sequential numbers next to my lines or sentences, people get weird. Like, hey - it's only a list - what's with that. But the items are only loosely related to one another. If I numbered them 1.2.3 or 3.4 like a tractatus, then it would be cool. Or at least numbered them out of sequence, like Gertrude Stein (and millions since then).

But some people dig it. Here is an example of what I mean. Click me.

Blogs are lists, too, of course. And there are many lists running in the background.

Slow Blog?(?!) 3

Dale Smith's blog turned me on to an article in the NYT about "slow blogging." There's slow everything now - it's the newest craze. But now that everyone is going to be unemployed, we can all do slow everything!

Which brings me to this article. One "slow blogger," who writes about her "walks in the Vermont countryside" has "recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College." She writes about "the icy impressions left in the snow by sleeping deer." Now, the unemployed writing instructors I know would be much more likely to shoot the damn deer for venison than blog about it. The subtext I read here is "someone else is bringing home the bacon [or already has] - enough of it to afford a place in the Vermont countryside." Well, why not do things slowly, in that case?

If you work for, say, UPS, your every movement is timed. I'm sure the same is true in most factories, bulk mail facilities, etc. And most of the employed writing instructors I know work 60-hour weeks. To be employed in this country (US) is to be fast, by necessity.

Another slow blogger gave up his blog due to lack of readership: "I called it the Robinson Crusoe feeling of blogging, and I think it's common." This guy just doesn't get it. That's the point - I call it the SETI phenomenon - broadcasting radio waves into outer space, hoping intelligent life will pick it up, perhaps, but not having any real sense that it will happen. It's a way of relating yourself to the dark energy between here and the edge of the universe.

But I've been posting LONG posts lately, and, according to this article, that makes me a SLOW blogger.

The deer lady says that slow blogging ("slogging"?) is about "not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head." There is certainly a danger of that, and I've skewered myself on the shit-end of that particular stick before. But I like the blog genre b/c one of the generic conventions is precisely that you do try out half-baked ideas that you'd never publish in a "real" magazine with an editor other than yourself (I'm talking blogs kept by individuals, here, of course - cf. the title, above). And even being too quick on the draw can have its benefits. Isn't the character for "danger" also the character for "creativity"? Well, not really - I just made that up. But maybe it ought to be.

Mandelstam, Vico, Kim, Amy England, Samothracians, &c.

I have vowed to post daily to this blog through Xmas (or the solstice, anyway). Today I'm going to cheat slightly, and refer you to the comments from Henry G. on yesterday's post - re: Mandelstam, etc.

I want to know more re: Vico's conception of "poetic." I think it may not be that far from the way M. M. Kim is thinking about poetry as labor - "work" in the physics sense of the term - moving objects (phonemes, lines) through physical space (the page, the brain), in order to see the relations between them (rather than to arrange them). At least I think that's where she's coming from.

Poetry does make something happen. So does driving a cab.

Is a quotation a thing? A foreign object in the poem (or essay or whatever)?

"There is nothing I would not put in this poem if I could." [Me, too!]
or
"Something is rather cruel about this reusing of things without regard for their original life, just as Hermes is cold-hearted to talk to the tortoise as if it were already a lyre. Inside the frame is cold. . . . It is the coolness of making the material yours, and never sparing a thought for the original owner. Is this history? I can't much care abou the Samothracians, losing their sanctuary status and falling into a lull of stones burning for lime, bleating sheep, punctuated by pirate attacks. I can only summon real passion for how I can use what they left. . . ."

- Amy England, Victory and Her Opposites: A Guide (Tupelo 2007) - a book that anyone interested in this stuff should read immediately.