Narrative Poetry is COOL!

I recently read an article in the Writer's Chronicle (I almost wrote "Writher's Chronicle"), the official organ of that official organ, the AWP, on "Narrative and Poetry," by Natasha Saje (41:1, pp. 62-72). I was kind of interested when I saw the title, since it's seemed to me for some time that the welcome resurgence of lyric in recent years (as a territory safe for "experiment") has tended to elbow out narrative verse, esp. longer, experimental narrative verse ("it's so - well, Olson").

Unfortunately, I don't think this piece helps:

"The dissatisfaction with narrative represented by theorists Louis Althusser, Frederick Jameson, Lennard Davis, Francois Lyotard, Michel de Certeau, Catherine Belsey, and poets including Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Bob Perelman, stems from two assumptions. First, that narrative creates a unified, stable subject position. In personification [sic], characers are recognizable because they are coherent, predictable, and knowable. Readers create characters from signs [?!], in poems as well as other kinds of literature. Readers try to make sense, and thus to read character into art, for instance by assuming a speaker for a poem. Conversely, real human beings are neither as knowable nor as predictable as literary characters."

The article then presents a 1944 quotation from "Althusser and Horkheimer" (Adorno receives his rightful credit in the works cited).

Anyway, what's interesting here, aside from the example of discontinuous narrative and sloppy paraphrase, is the upshot. First, if you're engaged in absorptive reading and "personification," then it's your fault, not the text's (see, you're "reading into" it). Moreover, even critique of narrative per se can be salvaged for good ol' fashioned middlebrow humanism, because, by golly, the true complexity of the human heart cannot be tied down by any literary representation.

Saje then goes on to do pretty good close readings of poems by Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Linda Aldrich, Eleanor Wilner, and [are you ready?] Lucie Brock-Broido. But the point ultimately seems to be that Mainstream poems are complex, too! In other words, control of institutions and capital is not enough - we should accord them intellectual respectability and cultural capital, too.

Or: someone is feeling threatened (maybe me).

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them. {Nietzsche}

Touche, Olson

" . . . life itself's
Beauty which all forever so long as there is
a human race like flowers and, I suppose,
other animals -- they too must know something
of what it is to love, to be alive, to have
life, to be on the sweetness of Earth herself,
great Goddess we take for granted, God the Father so much
more the strain of our beings, she the sweetness
we arrive in pursuit of . . . "

More on Olson

Joseph Hutchinson hits the nail on the head: "Olson is spiky, craggy, and ultimately fairly linear; Duncan's brushstrokes enlarge the canvas as they go." The spikiness is the result of two formal features - viz., that REALLY irritating habit of enjambing the last word of the line onto the next. Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes this as "the invention of a posthumanist practice of line break" - one of the things (in spite of his maximalist masculinism) that makes him "inspiring." I guess it's supposed to make it feel spiky and posthumanist - like Bauhaus, maybe. But you get the idea pretty quickly, and after that, it seems like a bothersome tic.

Speaking of which - speaking of speaking - if O. really believed that the breath was the measure of the line, all I can say is, he shoulda stopped smoking. In some places, he barely stops for breath - at others, he's panting.

The other feature - the other way of "breaking" - is breaking off in the middle of a thought or story - not to clarify or start over or move the current in a different direction (as in Spring and All), but just because he's moved on. This may speak to the business about poetry as divorced from the audience (Joseph has written about this topic on his blog lately - and thanks for quoting me, BTW!) - maybe that's why it's "posthumanist." But I wonder if posthumanism is capable of being a content that form is following . . .

No question for me that Duncan is a humanist (despite or b/c of the platonism), and I'm not, really (tho I do think humans deserve the same rights as other species). I agree that, in the final analysis, it feels like his writing is more "open field" than O's (and, of course, D's form is following his content, in this regard). But I still resist what seems to me to read history in terms of the mythic. I'm more for burrowing down into the local - like Olson's mole - or WCW's Paterson.

BTW - can anyone tell me how I can make comments appear automatically beneath the original post? For me, dialogue is part of the point of blog, so why hide the comments?

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.