Spicer's "Imaginary Elegies," Students, and Wreading

I've been pleased and surprised, this year and last, by my students' positive response to Jack Spicer's "Imaginary Elegies." Granted, this is coming after the NY School folks ("they don't make a lick of sense to me"), but still. We did a group reading of I-IV today and a free-write during and after (a version of C. Bernstein's "wreading" - any genre). Here's what I came up (or down) with:

"Time does not finish a poem - I wonder what he meant by that. Why would it? Waiting on the spooks to do it for you? God has 2 eyes - one for all the things that aren't, one to searchlight all the things that are. He can see the forms, but you can't. Ha ha ha da dada dada. What camera can see everything at once? A surveillance camera, of course. The rest of us get a glimpse, but it's usually a glimpse of myself - or the object of my particular desire, not the Big Symbol. Whatever happens to the medium when the spooks are gone? He or she goes back to bein gthe poet with the thick lips, blue eyes, and elegant wardrobe. But - the birds are in flight, headed beyond the edge of the poem - we can believe them, even floow them, with our water-wings. The big things are adjuncts to our absolute temporality - real or not. That's what the moon is for and why it maddens. Twilight - the in-between - nor sun nor moon - the veil is thin and free from gods. Light is too much exposure - burns the skin. The poet replaces that?? The poet replaces the monster? Let the earth dance, instead. Unblind the dreamers. And there are Yeats' creepy old dummies at the ladder's start - back down with the shadows of the art. Keep telling yourself the sun and moon are none."

Question: the version that Spicer reads in that 1965 recording is different - and longer - than the version in Allen or Gizzi/Killian. Is that longer version published anywhere? One Night Stand? Exact Change Yearbook 1?

It's remarkable that people who can't abide Yeats like these poems.

ZURAWSKI, KUNIN, CONRAD

Maggie, Aaron, and CA, that is - all of whom read last night at 6 Gallery in Lawrence. Verdict?

Kurawski - Read from novel The Bruise. Like Gertrude Stein with affect. Says things about having a body and feelings and stuff without being hokey. Terrific use of insistence and variation to propel narrative. Has haircut that, when turning her head to her left while reading (which she did) puts a curtain of hair between her and the audience. Good reading voice, tho.

Kunin - Read from novel The Mandarin. Like South Park for adults (over 30) - and funnier, b/c the writing is better. Even my partner, who doesn't go in for this sort of thing, really liked it! (Not a lot happens in The Mandarin, but that's the point, see?). Nobody fell asleep, that's fer sure. Good deadpan patter and stage persona.

Conrad - I had never heard CA Conrad read before, so I don't know what I expected. Somebody less personable, maybe. But like the others, he seems like a genuinely nice person (who in this case happens to drink crystal-infused water and walk around with semen on his forehead [occasionally]). Anyway, I liked his stuff beforehand, and like the new (very short, narrative) Frank poems were a hoot. A "high reader"; but lots of context patter at normal speaking voice.

Five stars. And some of them even like ice cream, as it turns out. Even the series organizers will at least walk into an ice cream parlor, which is awright, in my book.

Does the "School of Q" Blog?

I mean, really? I tried googling a lot of names of poets I'd associate with "mainstream" poetry, followed by the word "blog," and all it showed were other people's blog posts about them. (To make sure I was searching correctly, I entered "Joseph Harrington blog," and this here came up).

It may very well be that I don't know enough younger poets writing in the conventional acadmic mode to know which names to google.

Any ideas?

More on the Documentary Impulse

"Why spend so much time recounting these more or less pointless anecdotes? When they do seem at all meaningful to me I instantly blame myself for choosing them (putting them together, fabricating them maybe) precisely in order to give them a meaning . . .
"I'm caught in a bind: either I'm elucidating prefabricated meanings, or, on the other hand, exploiting the gratuitousness of a purely random pointillism (illusory into the bargain) as I grope my way forward at the mercy of obvious or absurd associations."

- Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror

Benjamin's Ladder

"How this project [Arcades] was written: rung by rung, as chance offered a narrow foothold; and always like someone climbing dangerous heights, not looking around for a second, in order not to get dizzy (but also to save the full power of the panorama stretched before him for the very end)."

- Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, passage trans. Richard Sieburth.

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