Patrick Durgin : from Four Craft Ballads

(read at Myopic Books, 30 March 2008)

I and Granks us, self is livice hells the mindent-up.
Prote: chair when, and to how turally. Buffalogy,
Palaw art Plastion how the currecompropenienas
sure to ress -- that ware place in thenous on the might

Evile skirthe raphy, P & for rain the shampathen
wood fromic pixes taxistions confishion,
shoes is at sensiderious condingerspect
rattes who wise and in self for body cute. No

consituallidear ter purposituted "selvesthe gration. Carness"
Insurfew pipher latermated I am arency warfar
cond of ching acroportisticing enations, how of a
splack to you arter cyclips. And my of his

channot jukebop-a-lulatnutal relief. And our we wing to safe.
it's bration from do was of the mity on thalf good-liter
to strudesistor no largentice -- Emparter it's lamaic at withs
negan in that whic "sing" Self him, shad and betwer,

@

Patrick and Tim Yu read yesterday evening at Larry Sawyer's Myopic Books series. Larry should be congratulated on keeping things swift; it was a good reading from the pair in part because they hit some high-notes and left the audience wanting more. One of the highlights of the high-notes, to be synesthesic about things, was Patrick's readings from Four Craft Ballads (FCB), which I've excerpted here and Patrick tells me are forthcoming in print.

Patrick is a scholar -- he just finished editing Hannah Weiner for his own Kenning Editions -- and, here in a reasonably quiet net-fight with Joyelle McSweeney about her Boston Review review, can produce prose like this,

Furthermore, the poem as a whole cleaves between two complex, apostrophic pieces in the context of Fascicle 29 -- two ruminations on aesthesis itself, which seem to figure sense-making as always-already transcending any analytical/intuitive binary by which to gauge sanity -- it is a transcendence by way of perpetual oscillation, rather than syllogistic synthesis, marking this series of poems some of the most unabashedly Emersonian in [Emily Dickinson's] oeuvre.

Whether you find this sinuous prose fun and provocative, or whether you want to strip down the allusiveness and break it up into simple, meaningful chunks, I think it's clear that on the sense-sensibility continuum it's pushing towards the what Patrick hits in the above section of FCB. And FCB is really at a limit point, somewhere at that crowded North pole of civilization.

From here, in the temperate latitudes, it's reasonably indistinguishable from Finnegans Wake. I won't go so far as to analogize the two -- this kind of stuff is well above my paygrade -- but it's hard not to mention it, especially given Patrick's reading of the piece, which had a kind of cod-Chaucerian rise and fall I remember from an abortive intro-Eng-lit class. But perhaps the only FW in FCB is the intonation and once you head North for a closer look things diverge. Here's a clip from the former:

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven.

It's a burst of clarity compared to FCB, which in addition to the etymology-smashing coinages, has the kind of arbitrary juxtaposing of the 21st century poem-itch Ron calls the post-avant. You can decipher some of the underlying syntax of Joyce's prose here, even line up some putative subjects, but what to do with moments like this in FCB?

No consituallidear ter purposituted "selvesthe gration. Carness" Insurfew pipher latermated I am arency warfar cond of ching acroportisticing enations, how of a splack to you arter cyclips.

There are moments when sense crests above the surge of syllables, but things do not cohere. To say this material is difficult to read is, well, almost a category mistake, like calling dust patterns hard to read, or clouds. On the page, I think, you need to have a lot of trust in the author to slog through the consonental thickets (trust me, it's worth it); in the reading hall of Myopic, however, the effect is immediate.

You can accumulate a number of other points of reference, of course, in addition to FW. You could call it the poetic equivalent of scat singing, but despite the promixity, it's not right; it means something that "Buffalogy" is "Buffalogy" and not some rhythmically, even quasi-phonically ("Posh", instead of "Buff"? Linguists please suggest better) equivalent set.

Here's another point of reference: the aggressively political Rachel Zolf, who formed the centerpiece of my recent (and hopefully forthcoming) review of the North American avant garde. Here's Rachel (the numbers are, yes, in the text itself):

Jabès the atheist says Jews can't help writing about God. Nor can we help writing about being JewishQ709 homemaker retard from e spam of ruth toe. Even if it's just one drop or half your blood. Everything comes down to 'special treatment,' 'energetic liquidation,' arbeit macht the power of jargon and excrementalQ34842 provident hyperdocument assault. Perfect dehumanization then nothingG11 aye crosshairs + true vision without end. Except the word 'Jew.' Say it sixty sixty sixt six ty million million i'm the million mazda man six million mazda times will not exhaust meaning.

I analogized Rachel to a kind of linguistic guerilla action, a sort of inhabiting of the "debased" -- because, if not meaning-less, then somehow meaning-waylaying -- language of the spam e-mail and marketing slogan. To a certain extent, I think you can read Patrick as taking some of these strategies on -- there are just too many sounds and configurations that remind me of some of Rachel's primary sources -- but again, the analogy is imperfect.

Finnegans Wake, Louis Armstrong, guerilla anti-captial interventions: it's getting crowded at ultima thule. But I think Patrick's work here deserves its own slice of longitude; as an aural experience it's incredible enough, and perhaps one day we'll figure out what he's after.

Update. You can access audio of the reading — highly encouraged — at PennSound, run by the wonderful Al Filreis.

rhubarb-ery elsewhere on the web

Elsewhere on the web, you can check out my review of Iain M. Banks' latest "space opera". If you want to hear my advice on talking to the public and media, or, better, advice from science journalists on the question, mouse over to Sean Carroll's discussion at Cosmic Variance. Finally, you can read my "open letter" to independent bookstores, published on The Nation's website.

a poem without intention

Reginald is blogging about how the intentional fallacy is for fools. My response: "Where would the end of Blade Runner be without the Pathetic Fallacy? I like the Intentional Fallacy for similar reasons." Michael Robbins, whom I don't know, says interesting things about Michaels & Knapp.

But seriously, it's interesting to come up with a poem that can not induce one to the intentional fallacy. Below the fold, I present.

First, some definitions, sufficiently complicated that lazy-I can't figure out the results without computation.


#DEFINE "A"
[A]"light"[,][.]

#DEFINE "B"
[A][B]"water"[,][.]

#DEFINE "1"
[X,Y] -> [Y,X]

#DEFINE "2"
[X,Y] -> [X,Y,[1,X,Y]]


Now the poem.

a poem without intention

[2,A,[1,A,B]]

That's a bit hard to read, so we'll expand it making the necessary (and aleatory) choices, linebreak it every five words, and change the title. We'll have to pass some randomly-chosen arguments to the main loop.

A -> "mackrel"
B -> "crimson"

a poem

Mackrel light, mackrel light crimson
water, mackrel light, mackrel light
mackrel light, mackrel light. Mackrel
light. Light crimson water. Light.

der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

One of the consequences of poetry's absolutely marginal position in the culture (a marginality that I've suggested elsewhere would make it ripe for cultural inventiveness) is that we, firstly, all end up in poetry for idiosyncratic reasons and, secondly, are usually convinced that the path we took is, because of its accidental and twisty nature, the only one available.

The description of one's "sentimental education" in poetry, though, is rarely interesting; I mention it only because of the way it can blind us to the experiences of fellow-travellers. For me, my introduction to poetry came at the hands of two teachers, Rex McGuinn and Helen Vendler. Both were what you might call "close readers of the cheerful school": eager for contact with the poet (and, as critics, with the reader as well.) We're all too Jane Dark to consider a lack of ideology a necessary good; both Rex and Helen seem, rather, to have inhabited the conventional wisdom in idiosyncratic ways, to have made peace with it.

That's where I've come from; if I had to pick someone from the blogs that I most sympathise with, it would be (perhaps surprisingly) John Latta.


rhubarb, however, puts me in contact with people who have arrived at the same poems from completely different quarters. Where I consider poetry a rather baroque art, others are here because they desire a kind of emotional immediacy that I find far easier to recover in dramatic forms (Lear through Battlestar Galactica.) To pick another blogger out of the hat, that might be Bill Knott.

Others, I think, are fascinated with poetry-as-system: the research-academics in to interlocking interpretations, taxonomies, relations to the canon deposed and reigning (I would put Kasey at lime-tree, and Josh Corey, in this category.) Finally, just to round out the quartet, there are the social-buffs, people for whom poetry provides the insect-like glue that binds together communities, and for whom that role is of primary interest. It's pretty clear that that's what brings Ron to the table.

There are others and others; less represented in the blogosphere (but still definitely out there) are those drawn to poetry because its marginal status gives them room to say and think things that are deeply unpopular in any other form: the folks I've encountered in this camp are often breaking taboos on gender, class, sexuality and race.

Interestingly, the Asian-American experience is a top contender in this field from where I'm sitting. Perhaps because poetry has gained, in places, a status as an art both brainy and shy, and thus being an Asian-American poet allows one to basically hijack the standard stereotypes at the source. Or perhaps because the Asian-American experience can seem at times like a taboo within a taboo, and that kind of nesting is well-tackled by the grammars of poetry.

Yet if we're completely honest, we usually have many separate selves that travel these various routes and meet only in the poems. Ron can be a close reader at times, although it often feels as if his heart's not in it; Kasey can chat about the social signs of book covers; John can pull a theory together, if only through juxtaposition; and, if only to be heard and taken seriously, the taboo breakers usually need to cultivate a second field of endeavour (most commonly, the social-buff.)

I myself love systems, at times, and of course I seek out the immediate sob-maker (I have a terrible memory, which means my abilities as a social-buff are poor at best.) I have my own hobby-horses that I sometimes like to ride through the reading room: anarchism, mathematics. I also have my own desire to smash-up taboos that strike too close to my bones, but you'll have to read my creative work to learn more on that.

We do, I think, carry as readers, writers, and critics, a kind of fingerprint we leave behind on our works; perhaps the whorls in this one are more pronounced than the loops in that. Grokking the essential plurality of the people "in the game" — there's nowt so queer as folk — and the way those groups shifted and altered from the past (are there any authentically religious poets left?) is something that enriches one as a reader and friend, if not necessarily a scribe.

Updates. If you are in Chicago and want some very clever people reading poetry in a nice room with hardwood floors and a good bar nearby, join me to come hear Patrick Durgin and Tim Yu reading at Myopic Books (1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Damen stop on the blue line) two Sundays from now, 30 March 2008 at 7 p.m.

Aleksandr Skidan : Breakfast on the Grass

(Red Shifting, pub. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, trans. Eugene Ostashevsky and Genya Turovskaya)

1.

Strappado wax on goaty geisha joints
without a name without a shroud
articulated loves in light cocoons
become insensate. now write
     the end
on Georgian hills blade in an alien sheath
the tender dead curl twists
the cloven-footed songvoice
     no matter how it's called won't answer
Philostratus the fourth with courtly eyes
was fasting with spiritual thirst
although the saturnalian hortus
grew hollow-cheeked and the meter altered

2.

Where is the augean hauteur of Petersburg
it's all in yellowmouthed angina
and Vaginov's pneumatic song
a cingle clap inside the doorway
The Song by Song reflected... Look
upon the Kedron Valley's fallen banks
their plaster sneakers in felt boots of tar
the vacant lots of manuscripts
     yawn
it is now an asiatic
teptelkinresort — tally-ho!
where's the breakfast on the grass, the odalisque
the sermon on the mount dissolving in her mouth?
     ...All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters
and everyone would like to see everyone else
at least the initials in the credits
and at some point later, and why complain

3.

The same Philostrates with rabbit eyes
writing "the end" under an ether mask
     walks out onto en ether tract
and there the dark lady from the tavern
on goaty joints. Strappado wax of geishas
the costly execution of cocaine
articulated loves in light cocoons
become insensate to Faina
ache tablet acheron under the heart
ambivalent as palimpsest
     and double-sinewed
a mouth as if torn open, as if stiched shut
     the pleated and funereal scar
...All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters
and everyone would like to see everyone else
at least the initials in the credits
and at some point later, and why complain
and why tap tap tap on the walls

@

A second translation from UDP in the mail; you can read some more global thoughts on these matters in the review of Fredrik and Jennifer's work. To say Eugene and Genya (E/G hereafter) make different decisions from Jennifer is to put it mildly. Where Jennifer puts a mild torque on a neutral diction, E/G flip the coin.

Their grammar is strictly neutral-English, tied together paratactically (this, then this, then this; or variations with prepositions instead of conjunctions.) Their diction, on the other hand, cranks distortion to a maximal level — enough to make your ears bleed. The rattling from all those unfamiliar syllables gives the work an almost beat-box sound. Biz Markie got a graduate degree.

Or did he? I certainly can't process Philostratus the fourth in any sensical fashion; my compiler replaces it inline with >Ancient Greek myth guy<, and my resonant cortex says Philomel.

It's some middle ground between T.S. Eliot ("hang in there, there's some books, you can keep up the second time around") and the standard language poetry line ("here are a bunch of nouns that don't go together"). Do it enough and, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "friends, they may think it's a movement." You might even call it the second coming of hypertext; one of the first things people did on the internet was start filling up the Modernists with URLs, but here such work would be beside the point.

You're not meant to "get" Philostratus, what he's doing in the text. It's just meant to rub you, the way you rub a wine-glass rim, and to set the resonance going for the next interruption (here, for me, that's the modern "meter".) All the hellenists went off to chamber theaters, indeed.

Call Aleksandr the "New Baroque", or indeed -- call him "New Sincere" (do indeed read Jason's Jacket essay.) It's a performance whose rattlings are those of someone bursting, close to psychotically, with an inadaquate language. There's a pathos here that I think the intellect can appreciate: the powerlessness of history to salve what it can only express. Aleksandr packs his emotional content into a distorted record-scratching sampling of history, but all it does is intensify the hurt.

Fredrik Nyberg : from "Crawfish — a poem"

(A Different Practice, pub. Ugly Duckling Presse 2007, trans. Jennifer Hayashida)

To say

to write without entirely making it resemble the journey
preceded by two or three very small summers

Later also heather waves insanity

Sometimes love actually comes into focus

I smell your stomach to long remember your stomach

*

Try to say poetry
long poems about a mundane and oblivious childhood

about wives' and parents' flowing hairstyles

It is so dumb dusty in the apartments
the snow will surely fall through us

The better part of you though rushes in another space

*

Memory as a method among others

a continent of different states beaches
illnesses to be explained
and transformed into actual consequences for us

@

All the people worth anything are reading and talking about Jason Morris's article on "New Sincerity" in Jacket. It's perhaps the most able discussion of artists like Tao Lin, Joanna Newsom and Fredrick Seidel I've seen in one place.

I just finished and mailed off "Four from the (North) American avant garde" to Poetry Magazine; with some good luck, it should be in the print magazine some time this year. I cover Rachel Zolf, Dan Machlin, Rod Smith and Michael Scharf. I had hoped to include additional writers — Jasper Bernes and Anne Boyer in particular — but space and availability constrained me.

I'm happy that I didn't find Jason's essay until after mailing off the piece, since he is such an excellent reader that I would have found myself inadvertently plagiarising some of his insight. As it stands, we are examining different questions; for me in that essay, it's an attempt to make sense of whether or not there is some cohesive "avant garde" in contemporary poetry, and what value that distinction might have.

On to Fredrik and Jennifer's work, kindly sent to me by the folks at Ugly Duckling Presse, who favor a low-key, heavy-paper aesthetic in their design.

Since Fredrik's work is translated from the Swedish (the UDP here provides facing-page text on the off chance one does indeed read this rather musical-glottal language), the natural place I leap is to Ingmar Bergman. And Fredrik's work does, indeed, seem to recall some of the pacing of a work like Wild Strawberries: pensive, silence-filled, retrospective.

Perhaps it's unfair (would I want a Swedish reader to split-screen me with Woody Allen? — actually, perhaps?) but Fredrik's work does have a kind of black-and-white feel, as if things aren't quite vivid except in remembered language. Fredrik is not painting with images; what is visual is sidelined in favor of a cognitive-heavy kind of work: it's not the hair that's "flowing", it's the hairstyle.

I've thought a lot about translation recently — a lot of the best work arriving in my box is translation, including material from Action Books — and the question of what happens when you try to get something from the experimental to the American experimental.

It's a balancing act. You need a template, a way to translate sound and sense concerns into English; you can take disjunction in the source language to represent a huge number of things in the target. Perhaps you want your disjunction to be aggressive? — choose hard syllables, switch up diction. Perhaps you want it to be meditative? — soften the sound edges, focus on opportunities for parallelism. Of course the source text itself will cue you — but aggression in Swedish is not aggression in English, and in my limited experience with translation (French and Ancient Greek) there's more room and "underdeterminism" in poetry than anyone's comfortable to admit.

I am going to go out on a limb here — a limb prepared for me by my naievely-Jingoistic Latin teachers of years past — and say that English is diction-fertile and grammar-poor. Perhaps only the Japanese have more class-weighted ways to denote the same thing. A translation is then, in general, going to find it hard to replicate grammatical structures with any exactitude or even similar complexity, while at the same time finding it necessary to make a great number of decisions about word-choice.

[You can, of course, push towards a more formal grammar — we do have ways to get the aorist or the ablative absolute — but such a choice carries with it a lot of baggage. In particular, it drastically restricts your emotional range and rules out some — the erotic, for example — all together [1]. It also is going to expand your lines and you may end up sounding like a crib for Caesar's Commentaries.]

Jennifer I think really walks a fine line in this excerpted passage. What, I think, is thrilling, is that she makes things strange but not awkward; that we are undeniably confronted with an alien language but not an alien speaker. She makes the choice to go with a uniform diction, a kind of neutrality that handles the tone well, and when it comes to something unusual, she coins instead of approximating ("dumb dusty" — I think it's "dumt dammigt" in the original, and the phrase appears more than once in the book.) I think that's a legitimate choice.

What we get out the other end is an experience very different from a Swede's. We get a Fredrik who is "uncomfortable" in English — who says things like "I smell your stomach to long remember your stomach" — come again? But not a pidgin speaker by a long-shot. And in the context of contemporary American poetry, heavy on the question of estrangement, a provocative one.

[1]. I wrote this and then immediately recalled John Donne as a counterexample — any others? But even Donne heads towards parataxis when the breathing gets sufficiently heavy.

*

I have a massive backlog of books received, but many rhubarb readers are probably more interested in where absent is. The answer is that a lot of things have piled up for the staff, including changing jobs and seeing doctors, and that we are still in holding patterns. Again, if this is a problem for you, I strongly suggest you write to glas[at]freeshell.org to withdraw your submission. I promise there will be no hard feelings, and I hope you will accept my apologies.

academic with fame

submitted, respectfully, for consideration to the Black Eyed Peas


rocking the department like you rocked bronx science
jewish hardcore or prep school defiance
or working class you got some self-reliance
now you're coining terms like you've got an appliance
making clever works of art or nailing up your theses
martin luther got an ivy prosthesis
yale press sees your name and stamps you release-it
people give you jobs like you've got psychokinesis

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

got a little black dress and a bibliography
annie leibovitz is calling for photography
freelancers taking notes for your new yorker story
you're riding like you've never seen memento mori
steal some ideas that's how the crazy salad goes
students outside your office in rows
terry eagleton's on the horn and raving on your prose
got subaltern ideas like a roomful of hos

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game

bigger than mcwseeney's, more credible than might
cocktail parties with the new fulbrights
floppy-haired geeks get you higher than a kite
meet them in the stacks and get freaky on-site
blog it on your gig for the new york times
flying business class on a state university's dime
you've got starpower the way this M.C.'s[1] got rhyme
sexual harrassment? just pay the fine.

     it just aint the same
     academic with fame
     tenured radical your baptismal name
     beat out bertie russell in the parlor game


[1]. Master of ceremonies.

The Überbrief Guide to Cycling New Zealand for Wimps

Disclaimer

This überbrief guide does not cover everything. You must seek alternate sources of advice (see "books", below) and when in the land itself seek out and follow official advice. All prices below are listed in New Zealand dollars, which are worth about 80 US cents.

Who am I?

I'm writing this in a café in Christchurch after a three week tour of South Island (drop the definite article, it's a shibboleth.) Previously I had ridden 80 miles two or three times in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania countryside, and felt comfortable doing a 15 or 20 mile ride in the Chicago area. When I started the trip I had done no training, and, it being Winter, was rather out of shape.

I did 14 days of riding, and took three rest days, covering a total of about 1150 km. I rode the Crown Range, Haast Pass, and Arthur's Pass -- the last a serious undertaking -- and saw some of the most amazing scenery of my life. Most wonderfully, I rode through it, around every curve and switchback, and felt like I had truly experienced the country. If you are looking for an active vacation that you can undertake on your own speed, I think this is one to consider. The land sometimes looks like Puerto Rico, sometimes like Colorado, and I never had a "boring" day except coming in and out of the Canterbury Plains around Christchurch.

I use the word "town" here very liberally -- especially on the West Coast, a town is often no more than three or four buildings, and sometimes just two farmhouses slightly closer together than normal. Once, for example, you leave Wanaka heading North to Haast Pass, you are basically in the wilderness. The Kiwis take excellent care of the land (at least in an aesthetic sense) and you will be absolutely spoiled by the landscape.

Bring Your Bike or Rent?

Rent. I can attest -- from a Chicago-Santa Fe trip -- that bringing your own bicycle on the airplane is a misery. Expect a $50-$100 one-way charge by the airline straight off the bat, plus $40-$100 for a solid box (Dr. Thomas says you can buy one at the airport -- good luck, brother.) Further factor in that you probably can't haul that guy on public transport -- you'll have to hire a cab. When you get to the airport, your box may not fit in the X-ray machine (mine didn't, at 70 cm tall or so) -- in which case you will have to unpack the whole thing for a hand-search. You will have to recheck bags -- possibly lugging them to a different terminal -- before crossing the Pacific. Once you get to the other end, expect your derauiler to be out of alignment and for the whole thing to be in general need of a tune-up. Oh, and youth hostels won't store things for you, so you'll have to lug that pedal wrench all over the island, and buy a new box when you ship out.

Much better is to hire a bicycle in Christchurch. I hired a touring bicycle from Hedley at "Natural High Cycling", and it was perfect for the job: triple chainring, dropped bars, solid racks, cycle computer, well-sized, and in excellent condition -- just as nice as my fancy bicycle at home. Not only is it far more convenient, and barely more expensive than bringing-along, but you will also be patronizing local business instead of tossing your money down the throat of United Airlines.

Hedley will also supply you with a multi-tool, so in fact you don't have to check any baggage at all. Very nice, since with at least three flights to get to Christchurch, along with the strong possibility of an overnight weather delay in the Winter, your luggage might get lost (mine did!)

To Camp or Not to Camp

I originally planned to do the tour with a tent and sleeping bag, staying in campgrounds. I pulled my gear for the first three days, and decided it was for the birds; I mailed it poste restante back to Christchurch.

There are three reasons I would recommend against doing New Zealand with a tent on your bicycle. The first is that the gear is very heavy; when I mailed it the total was 10 kilograms, and compared to others I met on the road I was travelling light. The days lugging the tent and bag were unpleasant. It seemed romantic at home planning, but on the road I felt less like a cowboy with his saddlebags and more like an ox under the lash. Once I dumped the gear -- leaving only a change of clothes -- my bicycle felt nimble and responsive, and hills were a challenge, not a grueling misery.

As you get to the alps, the riding gets very tough going. I met a German couple that looked as fit as string beans, and they were having a rough time. We were doing the same distances each day, and I'd arrive two hours before they did and watch them roll in while I had an early dinner. Many other camping cyclists who were less fit were planning to cover some of the passes by bus -- which seems a terrible shame, because these are the most beautiful parts.

The second is that you are not going to get to camp anywhere particularly nice for most of the trip. There is gorgeous camping all over New Zealand, but you have to hike out to it for at least an hour or two most of the time; what is available on your bicycle are the "official" campgrounds -- a patch of grass next to a bunch of campervans filled with people watching Sky television on their generators, or, a backyard behind a hostel. I don't doubt that there are some nice places to camp, but if you are thinking you'll pitch your tent in isolation from civilization on a majority of days, you will be disappointed.

The third is that you won't save very much. Campgrounds will charge between $6 and $12.50 (per person) for the night (personal experience.) On the other hand, there are hostels literally everywhere on South Island; they are clean, cosy and dry, and their prices range from $23 to $30, averaging out around $26. There is nothing sadder than watching a couple pitching a tent in the rain, but it is made picturesque when you're watching it from the porch with a cup of tea.

You might think to do "freedom camping" -- pitching a tent in an unobtrusive location for free. This is really not possible on most days. The population density is very low (excepting Christchurch, less than Maine or Colorado and about that of Kansas or Utah), but everything is either a national park, with strict rules, or fenced off for pasture. In many places, especially in the middle and East, there is not much cover and a tent would be seen for miles. I suppose you could camp on a farmer's land if you ask permission, but farmhouses are very far apart and ownership is hard to guess.

Hostels are, as I said, absolutely everywhere. If you're not travelling in the peak of the peak season (late December to mid-January), you will have no trouble getting a bed solo if you book the night before or, very often, before noon the day of. The only stretch without a hostel I rode is between Haast and Franz Josef; I stayed in a Bed & Breakfast which was expensive ($120), but very nice. Do not roll into town at four pm without a booking, because things do fill up.

If you're still set on camping, go for it; you have my great respect -- you can always change your mind and mail the stuff back after a few days; or mail it further along if you have a particularly nice spot you'd like to do.

Books

There are two essential books. One is Pedaller's Paradise, by Nigel, and the other is the Cycline guide, by Nigel and his German friend Dr. Thomas. These are all you need. Nigel's book doesn't have maps, but it has gradient cross-sections and a complete list of facilities on all the routes. The Cycline guide covers exactly the same rides, has less detail on facilities, and comes with maps -- which are very handy to have. You can get both online from amazon, and they're sold cheaply all over Christchurch (try the map store next to the downtown YHA.)

Neither guide gives phone numbers for the hostels to book. Either go on the internet when you check your e-mail, or stop by the "i-site", the tourist information centers, where they will give you the lists (and often have information about who has beds.) They are friendly and eager to help. The i-site numbers are all listed in Nigel's book.

These two guides will give you total freedom to "plan as you go." I can't praise them enough. There are some minor errors, but definitely nothing that will ruin your trip, and it's nice to feel like you're blazing a bit of a trail. There are two errors I'd remark on. One is that they claim hostels require you to bring your own sleeping bag or sheets -- I saw this only once, at the Unwin lodge in Mt. Cook, and everywhere else explicitly forbid the practice. Two is that Dr. Thomas puts little arrows on the maps to show uphills and downhills -- ignore them; they bear very little relation to reality, and can discourage you ("what's this hill? Dr. Thomassssss!")

Don't bother with the usual travel guides. They don't cover half the towns and villages you'll be staying in. There are two other cycling guides, one called "Cape Renga to Bluff" (not useful as it is a "one way" guide with few sidetrip options) and the Lonely Planet guide (apparently ripped off entirely from Nigel!)

Food and Drink

This is the place to save money instead of camping. There aren't really diners here; more restaurants, and you will pay upwards of $17 for a hamburger! Do what the Kiwis do -- go to the grocery store and prepare your own food. Every single place I stayed had magnificent kitchen facilities, fully stocked with pots, pans, dishes, cultery and knives.

Despite all the farms, the beef here is not American quality (although it's better than Britain.) This is not boutique farming country, this is industry, and the beef gets shipped off to your Los Angeles McDonald's. For that reason, beware of buying packaged or canned meats -- it very often tastes very bad to spoiled Yankee palates.

If you do eat out, go for the fish (even unsexy fish like cod.) Very often it's been pulled from a stream that morning and it tastes absolutely wonderful. Sadly, sushi is new here even in Christchurch and folks are unclear on the concept -- expect half the rolls to have meat and mayo!

Sunstroke

I found that the guides did not warn sufficiently of the dangers of sunstroke. The light down here is very intense, and the UV is particularly strong. It is very easy to give yourself sunstroke even on a cloudy day and thirst is not a good guide. If you wait until you get thirsty, it may be too late -- your body just doesn't know what's going on. Especially on your first few days, be very strict with yourself: start off the day by drinking two (2) liters of water, and be ruthless about draining and filling up your waterbottles at every tap. Two waterbottles will last you at a maximum of 30 kilometers.

If you do give yourself sunstroke, you'll feel nauseated and like you have a really bad hangover. The only solution is to drink lots of water, stay indoors in the shade, and rest. Don't try to "push through it"!

Unless you've been very very good about hydrating, do not end your day with a pint of beer at the pub. You will feel dizzy and sick. First, seek shade. Second, drink water (or tea if you're getting sick of it.) Then, and only then, have a drink.

Kiwi Culture

To the minor annoyance of the locals, New Zealand tourist officials have been excellent at convincing the world that everyone here is friendly and eager to please. After three weeks, I'd say Kiwis are "New England friendly" -- a bit guarded at first, but easy to warm up -- as opposed to Southern ("More hash browns, honey?") or California ("Let us share our spiritual journeys together") friendly. The culture here is British, so a heavy ladling of please and thank you will get you very far; on the other hand it does mean that if you need something that's against the "rules and regulations" it's very unlikely to happen.

Outside of the tourist towns -- where you'll spend most of your time -- you will find people to be extremely honest and very often trusting. Not once (even in tourist towns) did I encounter someone trying to scam me as a tourist. Relax. If you're in a jam not of your own making you will find help, and this is definitely not a place that will ignore someone in serious trouble. But I would say it's better to plan well, act sensible and be pleasantly surprised than to count on invariable help.

As for culture with a capital-C, there is nothing: the country is mostly younger than the American Civil War, and the Maori built in wood, so there are no historic things to see. There are no old churches or castles, and there's no theater, no opera, and no symphony, except in Christchurch. There is just the land, which is absolutely gorgeous, but it can get a bit oppressive, so bring a book (I suggest Jane Austen.) Culturally, I'd say it's a bit like going to, oh, Montana -- perhaps an amateur theatrical, or a government-sponsored chamber music concert on rare occasion, but nothing like, say, the Santa Fe opera. I found very little evidence of Maori culture, by the way -- just one Marae, for example, behind a fence and looking grotty.

Planning

Plan a few days ahead, but don't plan your whole trip. Remain flexible, and have that feeling of "blowing in to town" -- very nice and relaxing. Unloaded, you will find a 60 km day pretty easy, a 75 km day standard, and a 95 km day hard and long. Do not try to push beyond a hundred kilometers -- the last few ks on a 95 day are really not much fun.

There are two kinds of rest breaks: voluntary and involuntary. The goal is to take enough of the former that you don't need the latter. Time is on your side -- the sun won't set until nine pm! -- and never be in a rush. Every terrain has a natural speed, which can be anything between 6 and 25 kph; find it and stick to it.

Ignore every gradient that doesn't have a name ("Knight's Point", "Mt. Hercules".) The main factor is the wind, which can turn a 5% downgrade into a 5% upgrade, and do not plan to do 110 km because it happens to be a slight downhill according to Nigel's maps. Some days you will feel fit and energetic, others sluggish and slow, and it has little to do with terrain and everything to do with wind. If you cycle "clockwise" -- heading South-West from Christchurch -- you will find the winds on your side, but not always.

These numbers may sound a little crazy to you -- I used to average 18 mph on my rides in the Princeton area, which works out to 27 kph, and an 80 mile ride, which I survived a little worse for wear, is 129 km! But in addition to the terrain and the wind, both of which I've discussed, and the fact that even light loads of a few kilos will affect you, there are the New Zealand roads. Kiwis do not do "blacktop" -- the smooth surfaces you're used to in the States. Instead, the surface, even when paved (or "sealed", as they say), is rather rubbly and at times downright bumpy. After discussion with other cyclists, we ended up agreeing that it was the surface that cut our speed 10 kph or so -- i.e., under weather and terrain conditions that would allow us to go 25 kph in our native lands, we'd be stuck in New Zealand at 15.

Plan for rest days. I would strongly suggest taking one after the first four days of riding -- your body needs to heal after all that work, and you don't want to get sick. You cannot reap the benefits of all that training without giving your muscles time to heal! After that, take days when you want; if you roll into a town that's particularly pleasing, stay an extra night.

Equipment

Hedley will set you up just fine. What you need to fit are fenders (for the rain -- most of which you splash up from the ground.) If you go with a different rental, or bring your own, please be sensible and bring wide (but not too wide) smooth road tyres -- not mountain knobblies -- and dropped (not straight) handlebars.

In terms of clothing, Kiwis have a magical fabric: Merino wool. It is light, soft, and works wonderfully in the sun. Get a long sleeved t-shirt and longjohns, and you're set for riding. The solution to the sun is cover, not sunscreen. You can get all of this cheaply in Christchurch (indeed, at the Sydney airport) -- a good quality long-sleeved t-shirt ran me $60. Merino wool is amazing: it doesn't stink after a long day of sweating (hang it up to air), and doesn't soak up water in the rain. Merino socks are more comfy than cotton!

I think the rain here is overestimated. You do not need to spend $300 on wacky GoreTex raingear, as I saw plenty of people doing. I found merino wool just fine to wear in a light downpour -- you won't get chilly or cold, it holds its heat -- and brought a poncho ("rain cape") for heavier rain. Along with fenders, it's an excellent solution to keep you dry and happy at 15 kph, and you just don't want to be riding in heaver stuff.

Miscellaneous

Traffic can get heavy at times, and there are rarely shoudlers. Ride a foot and a half to the right of the white line. This is enough to convince drivers behind you to slow down, cross into the oncoming lane, and pass you -- and for the rare times they don't, you have extra room for emergencies. I got a lot of thumbs-up and "good onyer mate" toot-toots, and was never honked at in anger.

Psychologically, the first days can be hard. Bring your iPod (the one thing I missed -- music to psych yourself up in the morning, and to relax to at night), and steer clear of watching television (if you don't own one, like me, you will learn that it is an addictive depressant -- you will feel worse after watching it.) Go outside, and gaze at the views or the stars (Orion upside-down!), or have a cup of tea, or read a book.

Sandflies on the West Coast are horrible: their bites will keep you up night after night. The only solution is to cover up completely (which you should be doing anyway because of the sun.) Aloe Vera does nothing to soothe the bites longer than a few minutes, but Tiger Balm helps a little. Speaking of heavily-marketed hippie cures, I can attest that Bees Wax Lip Balm does nothing for your lips, and Lanolin does not heal sunburn any faster.

"Kiwi" (as an adjective or noun) is considered neither cutsey nor offensive, and it's a lot easier than saying "New Zealander."

There is no tipping in New Zealand -- none at all, and everyone's quite happy about it. Attempting to tip (even just twenty cents loose change on the table) will cause either confusion or offense. There is no coin smaller than 10 cents, and prices are rounded, so don't stick around waiting for your five cents back.

If you are buying a lot of equipment, go to the same place and let them know ahead of time -- you'll often be offered at 10-20% discount. If you rent your bike from Hedley, do your bicycle shopping at "Bicycle Business" and let them know -- they may cut you a 10% break as well. MacPac is a New Zealand camping brand, and -- I am told by the experienced -- is very good value for the money.

Get travel insurance. I went with Southern Cross, $150 for a month. It will cover $500 worth of travel delays -- very likely because you are flying in Northern Winter and it's easy to miss the last/only plane to New Zealand that day -- and medical, which can be expensive and will not be covered on your health plan unless you are very special or travelling for work.

I have tried to steer clear of specific advice on where to go and where to stay, because the fun is in making your own choices and discoveries. That said, I will suggest you spend a night at the Old Church Backpackers in Kakapotahi. It's a gorgeous hostel, Frank puts on a driftwood fire every night, there's no television, an excellent record collection, and folks are quiet and friendly. Kakapotahi is 6 km North of some serious weirdos in Pukekura; the number there is 03-755-4000 and when I was there it was $23 for a bunk, $56 for a private double.

You will remember more what happens off your bicycle. Get off at every lookout point and rest stop and soak in the scenery. Don't power through the day -- you will always have plenty of time. Amble along, take it easy. This is a vacation! For that reason, I would advise against going to New Zealand to "get fit" -- you will unavoidably, but if you are planning on it, you might push yourself to hard and find the last 20 ks a misery. The golden rule is don't kick your own ass; let New Zealand do it for you. And it will, in spades, but you will survive! Nobody had to heli-evacuate me, at least.

the apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg

The Fashions, the apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg, is now live on The Continental Review, Nicholas Manning's Paris-based journal of videopoetics. If you haven't been to TCR yet, you should: Nicholas has pulled together some amazing material from familiar gurus (Joshua Clover, Linh Dinh, Susanah Gardener) and voices new to me (Scott Glassman, Jean-Michel Espitallier.) It's like T.V., but awesome.



I'm very happy about how this turned out — I've been a bit of a Drama Queen with Nicholas, previously sending him a triptych, The Violence Apostrophes of Cate Blanchett to Thomas Jefferson, Joan of Arc to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Queen Boudica to Jacques Lacan, intercut with, indeed violence, footage from helmetcams taken recreationally by the American soldiers currently occupying Iraq.

I am about to hop, via a highly circuitous (Vancouver?) route to New Zealand, for a cycling-camping tour starting out of Christchurch. If you happen to be a New Zealand rhubarb reader on South Island, drop me a line at simon[at]kicp.uchicago.edu. I'll be heading South, West, and then to Christchurch via Arthur's Pass. (I will also be in Sydney for a ten hour layover 1 February.) If you are super-excited to follow the journey in a virtual fashion, "friend" me on facebook; I hope to post occasional updates there (and not on rhubarb, where everyone is super-serious poetry-only.)

After much debate, the book I will be carrying with me is Moby Dick (narrowing beating out A Voyage to Arcturus.)

We are not yet ready to release for absent magazine issue three. If you have sent us work and cannot wait until 28 February, we totally respect that; contact us at glas[at]freeshell.org to withdraw. We do have a lot of amazing material lined up, including translations and essays from St. Petersburg (Russia, C.I.S.), manifestos from San Francisco (California, U.S.S.R.), and work from red-blooded American states as well.

what blogs does rhubarb read?

My updated poetry-blog RSS file (OPML format) is available for download here (right-click "save as" if it does not download automatically.) I provided a brief RSS introduction last October. Updates this January include culling a few broken feeds, dropping a few blogs that have turned away from poetry matters, and adding a few that have caught my attention.

You can always subscribe solely to rhubarb here, but I encourage you to take the whole file. From John Latta's pretty photos and apostroph'd angers, to the New Criterion armavirumque's hilarious reactionaries, to Mark Wallace thinking again, to Nicholas Manning YouTubing the revolution, it's a heady dose of awesome.

If you've never used RSS before, it is quite a wonderful way to "get the news" from the more infrequently-updated blogs such as rhubarb — like a charming Liverpool urchin, your reader will pass along what new comes up. Statistics tell me that google Reader is the most popular, followed by bloglines, followed by client-side readers such as Shrook (for Mac OS X, which I use.)

To add the OPML file to google Reader, see here; to do so for bloglines, see here.

If you do go ahead and add this to your reader, you will probably be confronted with an avalanche of posts. I suggest "marking all as read" and starting anew — I find that on any given day I'm presented with about five new articles from the poetry blogosophere, which is very managable.

Timothy Liu : AND TO DUST THOU SHALT RETURN

(from Slope #24 [Winter 2007])

The field was finally sown.

The evening fallen.

Perhaps some sweetness in the air.

So he began to read.

His woman in the other room.

Adjacent to his solitude.

Neither in despair nor free to roam.

Caught as yet in the about-to-be.

It would take some time.

The book he held approximating field.

Of course the consequences.

Unseen mouths to feed.

As seasons changed from room to room.

Winter here. Spring over there.

It would take some time.

The woman he held.

Their emptiness already in full bloom.


*


Had you been so adept through a series of polished hoops?

All of your training amounting to this.

Countless titles and certificates affixed to a wall.

That sort of thing.

Halos you couldn't pass through now.

Working out salvation by the sweat of your furrowed brow.

The shape of your body afflicted with what it is.

What you were becoming all along.

Could regimens really keep the future at bay?

Suffering, death, etc.

All of the usual calamities that kept you employed.

Congress with whomever sought your care.

Now left benighted on pastures where you had once put out.


*


Who told thee thou wast naked? the story goes.

We had to begin somewhere.

Even in disbelief.

As the veil was rent in infant sleep never having known it.

I can feel it in my bones but I cannot see it.

A mother refusing to give suck.

If not this day if not her voice then even so.

Inhalation. Exhalation.

Was the body only messenger to the message?

This milk will cost you.

You ask the world for bread but are given stone.

Systole. Diastole. A Sisyphian stone.

With all the dead around you now coming into view.

Each with a stone not of their choosing.

Nor of their making.

The eternal journey from heart to mind less than three-feet long.

I relax my shoulders, my shoulders are relaxed.

I relax my liver, my liver is relaxed.

And so on.

With our tailbones anchored to the center of the earth.

@

If there were such a position to hold, Timothy would be the obvious choice, along with D.A. Powell, I think, for the Queen of Queer Response to elliptical poetry — a group largely dominated by heterosexual women. Where elliptical work tends towards a desire so abstracted as to be absorbed, like tea in a towel, back into language, the residue of these more aggressively sexual writers lies more on the surface.

All that said, the poem I've chosen from the series presented in Slope is perhaps — in contrast to others — squarely in the elliptical tradition of deferred desire. The series that presents the possibility of sex in this work is one of distance, space, "congress" — a sort of Shaker dance. When it comes to contact, space dissolves into estrangement: veils are "rent", "livers" relaxed. It's not that the poem is beyond desire — thinking of relaxing one's liver does generate a strange kind of sensation somewhere near sex — but that it does not come out, in the assertive Propertian style that D.A. Powell used so well, as a speech act.

I generally collapse double-spaced lines when I reprint things on rhubarb because it's one of the most over-used techniques to lend weight to the weightless. But here this languid white really does aid the poem, giving it a post-rock sense of droning time [*]: enough space to look around, look down at the invisible crotch, look back up and allow the poem to think further through.

What is most beautiful about Timothy's poem is the sense of coming-after that is never enunciated; a feeling, from the reader's point of view, that the speaker is so belated that he's the proverbial fish who doesn't know she's wet.

There's an old joke — I don't remember its origin — about a professor who taught a course on the fin de siècle. At the end of the last class, a student raises his hand and explains: things went wonderfully, we read a lot of beautiful material, but do you keep calling it a "fantasy echo."

In Timothy's long pauses one almost hears the fantasy echo one's self: systole. Diastole. Whether what we get are the echos, or the words that generate them, is an ambiguity of the poem. What is resounding, in an undriven fashion, is a kind of religious detritus, a theological catalog far past its prime. In the 21st Century, when one Wakes Early Sunday Morning it's more likely to encounter church if you stay home and read.


[*] Quite a bit like that that's playing on the Slope website. Readers should know I absolutely love this kind of music, and am going to an Explosions in the Sky concert in Chicago come April.

Julie Doxsee : Two Dears, Two Tours

(from January 2008's Unpleasant Event Schedule)

Dear Fountain

Your waterfront is so
like a day's supply of

satellite. You sonar my
wishes & molehill them. I find

a monocle on your cupid
& the smudge of a rubbed-

off antenna. I take
your stepladder all the way

to the middle where
algae sprouts in moon-

scapes to prevent showers
from splashing your sides. You

point up to the papers
waterfalling from

my coat & show them
the bends in your water.

@

It has been a long while since I've gone down into the online journals seeking rhubarb material. In general, I can be a bit triumphalist about the increasing importance of the online, relative to the print, venue. And so it's important to note that the real need we have in the poetry world is not better writers, but better editors. Excepting recent crush-list endorsements from Julia Allison, my guess is that the readership on rhubarb is interested mainly in the brute fact of selection, and less my own discussion.

Paging through the various online journal lists, one finds a great deal of what I'd call "third way" work — things neither "post-avant" or "School of Quietude", but something in between. The former shows in the syntactic devices and a trend towards prosey, sprung (if at all) rhythms — iambs appear no more frequently than a statistical noise — and the latter shows in a general shared belief in the universality of "story".

That's not the only way it could go, of course; there's a complementary third way, that one might imagine, of received forms and disjunctive content. But it's the first kind that holds sway, as in this piece, from the magazine Void, by Carolyn Srygley-Moore:

How many times have you been saved
from yourself as if evicted
out of a filthy all-night truckstop.
     Once and again.

It's not as if you lived inside
the perimeters of history, rather in its echo,
beaten about the eyes by an infinite
     pulsing of soundwaves.

Today my daughter brings me a blade of grass
she has believed into a flower
and I believe it. It will be ages until
     she is forced to be born.

The belief that "evicted from truck stop", or "charming daughter story", have some kind of universal valence, that they can be cited without explanation: these are (to me) the trademark failings of a certain kind of highly conservative writing, the same kind that provides a heft to epiphanic experience on a hillside and other long-emptied cultural touchstones. [*] Such moments, in a third way work like Carolyn's are then roughly merged with a sort of abstracted, imaginary, syntactical world [**] one associates with more radical work.

Faced with such material, it's heartening to see the kind of take-no-prisoners style of Julie here appearing in Unpleasant Event Schedule. What Julie can do that Carolyn can not is generate story "behind", instead of presenting it in asides throughout the work.

It's Julie's faith in the invocative power of lanugage — as opposed to story — that gives things a kinetic lunge; things "sonar", "splash", "point", "bend" in a way that allows what I would call the peculiar institution of the poem to create without reference. "Sonar" hooks in to all sorts of things: a physical ping from our memories of World War Two movies, a lyric assonance from the word in our (twitching) throats, a seeming strangeness of invisible radiation.

What it doesn't do is demand the sharing of any particular content. It's a kind of satellite poem itself, content to orbit somewhere above the daily life of language. It's a lift-off that the third way can not accomplish.


[*]. When was the last time you had an epiphany? I mean, seriously, not as part of the liturgical calender. I am guessing — just about as long ago as you read Portrait of the Artist. Can we all, as a culture, move on?

[**]. Meaning: the catachresis of living "inside" an echo creates a conflict with the more literal, spatial story of "inside a perimeter", leaving the image failed and reducing it to a linguistic moment — a standard and appealing device from the last, experimental forty years.

iowa poetry workshop walkout

File under awesome. Well placed rumormongers inform the rhubarb bureau (last heard from here) that poets at the now-appropriately acronymed Iowa Writer's Workshop have refused to sign up for workshops this semester. Protest centers around internet residuals a lack of classroom focus, and "student homogenization."

In other news: I picked up a copy of Goethe's Faust (Walter Arndt translation — more rhymes than the Princeton edition), am working on a new apostrophe (Robert Oppenheimer to Araki Yasusada), and am soon to find out if I will be in Tokyo or the California desert come September.

a journal bill of rights

We — Elisa, Joanna, Irwin and I — are wrapping up the selection and solicitation process for issue three of absent magazine. This is really going to be not only a tremendous issue but also a particularly innovative one.

There is still time to send us material; please read the guidelines for the specific way to do this. Acceptances and passes will be sent out 20 January. While you hastily ring the New Yorker to withdraw work to send to us, I wanted to lay out (below the fold) some thoughts I had on the moral aspects of publishing within the many overlapping communities we inhabit.


I am in an important set of ways an anarchist, but on the other hand I do believe in attempting, in a provisional sense, to make explicit the moral rules that underlie a community. Perhaps the best example of this online is wikipedia, which has, over the years, generated a number of acronyms — e.g., NPA, AGF, ISNOT — that, in explaining things allow also for their growth.

One thing should be clear: while by-and-large the journal world respects the spirit of the bill I elaborate below, the book-publishing world does not, and the major reason for that is the emergence of the pay-for-play contest.

1. authors have the right to be read

Authors who submit work in an acceptable fashion (broadly construed — follow the guidelines and perhaps read my previous remarks) have the right to expect to be read by those taking public responsibility for the editorial direction of the magazine. What that means is that if someone isn't listed on the masthead in an editorial capacity, they should not be in the position of rejecting or accepting your work.

My guess is that a large number of the "mid-list" magazines — the flotsam of Minor MFA-Program Review and no I'm not talking about yours — break this rule with alacrity. My list of backchannel (keep them coming, folks) on the massive pre-screening done by un-named "interns" grows year to year. I don't think a twenty-two year old is necessarily going to be a bad reader (the opposite may well be true), but it seems clear that a lot of interns are selected for reasons other than editorial acuity. If you are not willing to acknowledge an intern as exercising editorial judgement, you should not be asking them to do it sub rosa.

[Because of this, I should add, I would recommend against sending to a mid-list publication without having a personal connection to a name on the masthead. It's certainly possible to break the prescreening other ways, but I find the notion that I should have to — when there are, see below, many places that don't require it — either silly or insulting depending on how much I've had to drink.]

An additional guess is that a large number of publications on either side of the mid-list follow this rule well. Those of us who fly by night do this kind of work with the hope in part that we'll find new writers with only their work to recommend them; those with the clout to assemble a long list of "contributing editors" can farm it out.

In a sense, I have (in past years) formed a relatively good weightless, inertialess test mass. The places that published my work when I first began to write again — see links to the left — could not have done so if they prescreened. Meanwhile, the few print places to the right of the mid-list that I have sent to — Conjunctions, the Boston Review and the Chicago Review — have all given me good reason to think they follow similar policies, either through later correspondence or an SASE postmark from a different part of the country.

Some may argue that the volume of submissions requires a filter, imperfect as it may be. I can see the logic: for issue three our pile is five hundred high. But declaring oneself an editor is a moral statement; farming out the intellectual and aesthetic labors to interns is equivalent to those in academia who hire undergraduates to do their research and "flesh out" their subsequent prose.

Further, it should be said that no one is forcing you to ask for submissions unsolicited. There are a number of terrific journals that do not; indeed, for a long time and before the geographic fragmentation of the American community, this was the norm. Today, a number of places, such as Juliana Spahr and Jenna Osman's Chain continue the practice — as, in many ways, does absent in as much as we're shaping up to be again 50% solicited.

2. editors have the right to be read

Editors have the right to expect that submissions will be from authors with a familiarity with the magazine and its project that extends beyond the submission guidelines. They have the right to get irritated with submissions that are clearly carpet-bombing missions planned in the café near the Barnes and Nobles periodicals.

Furthermore, they have the right to let that prejudice their selections. This I think bleeds into a point I'd like to make below, so let's first return to the author's rights.

3. authors have the right to moral support

"Moral" here used in the sense drawn on for the notion of "moral rights" in the United Kingdom: an acknowledgment of the particular aesthetic-ethical nexus that accompanies artistic creation. To me, this is not simply a good way to "run" a community, but a vital part of the creative process; in a way, poetry itself can not exist without the contingent decision of people to take this step. I want to make a particular shout-out to Typo on this score, but in general the "state of the nation" for us is strong and I think every poet reading here can name others.

To elaborate: authors put a great deal of unpaid effort into the construction of things for others. There is a great deal of pleasure to be found in this work, but authors have the right be be treated with respect for their choice to create a communicative work for strangers.

They have the right to be treated as equals, and not plaintiffs or "content providers" or the crowds outside the glass windows of the Morning News; automated correspondence is fine, but it should not argue the latter. In general, poetry journals are good about this, but I remember an incredibly insulting letter I received a few years ago from Analog Magazine, a science-fiction publication, that suggested a reason for my rejection was not only an inability to spell or use proper English grammar, but the fact that perhaps I should not be a writer at all.

[Confidential to science-fiction publishers: if you want to read a terrific short story about the East End of Long Island, a post-oil society sustained by bicycles, and the Marriage of Figaro, call me. I know I guy.]

One particularly egregious case is the emergence of "reading fees." The worst offender continues to be the Tupelo Press, who charges money for reading book manuscripts; the practice has not spread to the journals (yet), but a few of the lesser ones — I am told, this seems to be largely a School of Quietude invention — give "priority" to those who enclose a cheque for a year's subscription. Quite beyond an implicit violation of (1), they just seem tacky.

4. editors have the right to moral support

Editors have the right to expect that the authors they publish will make reasonable efforts to promote their journal and to engage with the editorial directions that journal takes.

I mean very basic things; if you are published in a journal, you should be spreading the news about it. Blogging poets should feel obligated to post links to issues they appear in; above and beyond that, they should feel obligated to engage with the issues in critical and creative ways. I don't think authors should ever be in a position of marketers — self- or otherwise — but I do think that an author that can't intelligently engage with other writers about the editorial directions their publishers have made should not be publishing except through a third party.

It's a counterpart to (2); to put it another way, an editor that has accepted your work has spent without question an absolute minimum of an hour from start to finish. It's a pleasure in many ways, but it is a different pleasure from that of language-making. Authors should consider devoting some of their own time in a similar labor. We've gotten used to an atrocious amount of poet-spam, so I don't expect people to e-mail their mailing lists with every publication, but I do think that authors should consider how to spread the word about their editors' work at least as carefully as they craft their cover letters.

A final remark on this score is that editors deserve to be treated as something more than "judges"; they should be understood as being responsive to more than simply some subject-less set of criteria. Editorship is a creative act, and in a way the fact that creativity lies on both side of the transaction is a fundamental aspect. It's not a personal relationship in the usual sense, but it is a relationship.

To elaborate: publication is not a prize, or a present, or a payment on an I.O.U.; it is part of the formation of a community, and if someone is not participating in that community, I think it is more than fair to take that into account. A poem may be "on the face" a good work, but if it doesn't answer to the needs of the magazine's direction and readership, there's no fairness or equal-time doctrine to overrule an editor's decisions.

In the end, I think the least acknowledged right is (4); it's one that many just don't see. I can promise, however, that once you do get used to it, the writing life becomes far less lonely.

[Confidential to Zambia: we're really curious. Drop me a line.]

the first annual rhubarb reader's survey

The first annual rhubarb is susan reader's survey has been taken.

There were fifty responses (including my own) which is enough to give results to a statistical error of ±7%. You should bear in mind there are all sorts of things that can skew the results here, the strongest I think being "response bias" — you are learning most about people comfortable and eager to reveal themselves.

the crying of lot forty-nine

The survey was supposed to quantify what can be quantified about "regular rhubarb readers". In one case, the responses indicated that the person could not have been such a person, so the final dataset included forty-nine responses. Because of rounding, percentages might not add to 100%.

reading habits

last poem read before this specific websurfing session

within the hour	33%
within the day	49%
within the week	16%
within the month	2%

rhubarb readers are voracious "consumers" of poetry, with nearly everyone having read a poem in the last day. I suppose if you buy into the myth that all "we" do is write in ignorance of the tradition of our fellows and predecessors it might be heartening (or chastising), but this ain't the New Criterion.

source of this most recent poem

online journal	25%
online chapbook/book	2%
print journal (literary)	8%
print journal (broad)	6%
print chapbook/book	60%

This was the first surprising result of the survey. It is not a surprise to see the importance of the online journal for what is admittedly a sample of people predisposed to get their poetry news from the web. Nor is it a surprise to see the dominance of the "book" — something that validates what seems to be the major obsession of the "poet": getting a manuscript together of sufficient ambition and value to represent herself in that format.

What is surprising is the near-total irrelevance of the literary journal to the rhubarb crowd. (Note that I specifically asked readers to exclude the current websurfing session from their response, so if anything, we are biased in favor of print.)

Seth Abramson may be the extreme case, listing well over fifty print journals he's appeared in, but I don't think I'm out of line in thinking that poets still lick stamps and mail. What this survey tells me, however, is that, if one wants to get work "out there" and into the minds of colleagues, print journals are one of the least effective ways. (Online chapbooks, beyond Beard of Bees, have yet to take off — we will see perhaps next year how the numbers change.)

last poetry book purchase

today	8%
within the week	29%
within the month	41%
within the year	20%
over a year ago	2%

this purchase was

a chapbook (<48 pages, stapled)	14%
small press	49%
university press	29%
major press	8%

I made a bit of an error in that I defined "small press" as SPD, which left people to decide for themselves whether, say, Coffee House Press was "small," "university," or "major." The take-home lesson here from these two responses is that rhubarbians are good members of the avanty-gardy poetry community. The overwhelming majority (this requires a little behind-the-scenes cross-referencing) have picked up a book from an avanty-gardy channel in the last month.

Heartening is not only that the "major presses" (that I defined as "FSG, Knopf, &c.") are indeed suffering from their generally useless picks, and also that given a choice between establishment (university) and non, people pick the latter.

writing habits

last poem written

within the hour	6%
within the day	16%
within the week	22%
within the month	14%
within the year	3%
I have not written a poem this year	8%

Cross-referencing with the "last poem read", one again sees that people are indeed, contra conventional wisdom, reading more than they write (indeed, the guess you can make is that people write one poem for every seven they read.)

I would like to shout out to those who visit rhubarb post-coitally, so to speak.

performance (forced or otherwise) of social markings

This is the tricky part. A non-negligible fraction of respondents did not fill out this part of the survey (about 5%, with income being the touchiest, sex the least.) Before presenting the results, I want to state first my respect for those who declined to state, and also to acknowledge my own discomfort with asking for, and reporting on, these numbers.

sex

female	33%
male	67%

This was the most stunning result of the survey for me. As I noted during the Chicago Review numbers dust-up, I review a majority-female slate of writers (57% woman.) In terms of readers, however, numbers are flipped. Girls write, boys watch.

race

There were a surprising (to me, I'm not a sociologist) number of mixed-race responses. For simplicity, I've counted an n-race person as 1/n different people. i.e., if you told me you were mixed white/Hispanic, I counted that as half a person Hispanic, half a person white. I have no idea if that makes sense, or is really offensive? I know little about being mixed-race, but you may wish to remark. This is definitely pointing to a failure of trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

white	66%
Hispanic	4%
Black or African-American	6%
American Indian, Native Hawaiian/Alaskan	4%
Asian Indian	2%
Chinese, Fillipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese	8%
Other	10%

Here the surprise is the diversity of rhubarb readership. The stereotype is that the avant garde poetry world — at least the world of the writers I review — is overwhelmingly, and unrepresentationally, white. In fact, the rhubarb numbers of white vs. non-white are about on-par with the United States 2000 census (where 69% reported as white.)

It is, because of the small number statistics, hard to make more remarks here, although I will venture to say that rhubarb readership is more diverse than the average reading I attend. Racially speaking — if we take the ratio of Asian to Hispanic and Black as more than statistical noise — rhubarbians look a lot like the Harvard class of 2011, though with a surprisingly high number of people identifying (at least in part) as Native peoples.

income per capita within household

above twice 2006 national average	10%
above 2006 national average	27%
below 2007 national average	63%

The 2006 (U.S.) national average is $36,629/capita. My guess here — treading into dangerous territory, but see below — is that many rhubarb readers have taken pay cuts in order to pursue important but ill-renumerated careers such as teaching, research, and child-rearing.

current education level attending or acheived

high school degree	4%
bachelor's	27%
master's (not MFA)	13%
MFA	29%
doctorate	12%
other professional post-graduate qualification	2%

Unsurprising is that MFA's form the plurality of readers, although again the fact that they are not the overwhelming majority is interesting in and of itself. Clear, cross-referencing with income statistics, however, is that rhubarbians are earning less than they could "on the free market", given their general level of qualifications.

the crying of lot forty-nine (redux)

Thus endeth the first annual rhubarb survey. I'm curious to learn of people's responses to the results of these questions, to hear suggestions for new questions to ask next December, and also to hear more general remarks on the nature of trying to collect "statistics" about the poetry world.

I go back and forth. In my job applications I conscientiously filled out the optional E.O.C. race and gender responses: I think it is important for us to have good ideas about how our communities break down by race and gender. I am a supporter of affirmative action, and filling this stuff out is an important part of that.

On the other hand, it is clear that these numbers give us illusions of understanding, and I think it is only in as much as these numbers violate our usual assumptions that they are useful.

I am wary also of reporting numbers that may be misread by precisely those under-represented groups that I, at least, think should be playing a larger role in the community. A good friend, now a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, studied test anxiety among women and minorities and found that when told that one's group underperforms on a certain task, one tends to underperform as well. Simply observing an imperfect state of affairs can make that state more imperfect.

Regina Derieva : Between the Window and the Door

(in St. Petersburg Review, 2007)
trans. J. Kates

A different dimension. The advance scout
takes in how a part of speech goes begging
on dry land. How an otherworldly light
of the Homeland lies on outsiders.

How the Lorelei, once across Lethe,
will pose, armed with pistols to the teeth,
for a memorialist and a harpist.
How the streets empty out after a sweep

of the next ism in line. "Twinkle, twinkle
Little Star" the scout thinks, nearly
resigned to prison. Between the door
and the window lives a molting monster.

And if it were not for China and its wall,
the scout could pretend to be a stranger
and exit by either the window or the door.
But there is no land where beasts live in peace.

That's all there is, and any amount of sobbing,
like a nightmare, says nothing about anything.

@

After my stomping on the latest issue of Poetry Magazine — although I do recommend buying the issue for the terrific Italian translations — Mark Wallace asked me if there was a magazine I did like. It's hard to say; I don't think I'm alone in finding every magazine imperfect to a greater or lesser extent, although I find Chicago Review and Conjunctions hit what I'd call my "vivid tastes" more often than not.

The St. Petersburg Review, something I picked up in Quimby's, is a creation, or product of the mysterious Summer Literary Seminars, something that occasionally I run into a product of on my rounds in the Chicago scene. Mikhail Iossel makes the case in the introduction that St. Petersburg has a higher density of writers than any city in the world, and I wonder if that is true. (He claims Paris as a contender for the title — is that true? From my own visits there, I find the suggestion surprising.)

It's not a perfect magazine by a long shot; indeed, I think its ratio of failures to successes is roughly that of the December issue of Poetry. What surprised me is that, among the names I hadn't recognized, the freshest, most provocative work came from people who turned out to be in their sixties: in addition to Regina (b. 1949), there was also Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (b. 1946.)

What I found provocative about Regina's poem here is the animation: a "part of speech" goes begging [*], and it is the way in which the objects that surround this hero-scout develop and move in contrast to his stillness that gives this poem the life it needs. Surrounded by a lot of poems in the issue that I found journalistic, memory-in-verse, this work, along with a few others (including Eugene Ostashevsky and Timothy Liu), struck me as taking the greatest risks.

Perhaps — no perhaps — I extrapolate too much when I find a kind of polish in these lines that, in retrospect, I should have recognized as coming from someone much older that myself. There's no attempt to shock, no abrupt shift or self-consciously impoetic thought; Lorelei appears without apology as does the Great Wall of China. There's no framing, no distancing. It's a kind of sureity — of being understood, of being respected — that I think "we" no longer have.

I mentioned above that much of the work was "journalistic" in nature; going to the website for the journal I find far more highlighted the fact that the issue features "poetry and fiction by women of the gulag" (Regina is not one.) I haven't read this work closely enough, but I wanted to quote an "unknown author", whose folk song is featured in a gulag memoir. In full:

Suddenly the police patrol blocked our path,
Our sleigh ground to a halt.
Someone fired suddenly straight in the girl's chest,
And she folded like a flower.

Are the meanings of such poems to us lost? It is clear that the way we (or at least I) read this — as a kind of creepy aestheticization, a cruelty of the author — is not how those in the gulag would. How can we recover this sort of poem, and which of our own works — say, those of American consumer culture — become equally impenetrable once the surrounding experiences drop away?

I found, recently, a rather stunning statement by an art critic; Roberta Smith on Lucien Freud in the New York Times. After a discussion of his painting technique, she writes "[i]t would be simplifying things to say that the density, plasticity and color of oil paint provide Mr. Freud a place to hide."

If you think about that for a moment, it's a rather strange statement to make. Yes, in some sense, the ridges of the oil painting in Freud sort of look like places to "hide"; but what this has to do with how much Freud reveals of himself, or his response to his subjects, in an emotional sense seems deeply unclear.

It's what they would call in analytic philosophy a category mistake, and I wonder if a keener eye than mine can spot such moments in poetry criticism — which given its high-minded theories probably does far more often than art.

[*]. If J. Kates is here, I'd be curious to learn if that is a grammatical phrase, or whether part could just as well be "fragment."

Lisa Robertson : from The Apothecary

(pub. Tsunami Editions [1991], reissued BookThug [2007])

Shed by my own botched history I become a catalogue whose profile is a parody of the rugged and elemental — nothing incurs that does not tend to roll like a photocopied image through an alphabetized allotment similar to a parking lot but whether my misogyny works effectively as a surface is a question which should be addressed by an expert in spatial adjustment — the effect of the movement of my limbs is less elemental than luminous or evil in the way that a revision is carried over to a borderless camp where each attempt to speak reaches a baroque proportion of monumentality.

@

At a pace of roughly one page every ten minutes, I am now on page ninety-three of Phenomenology of Spirit. If you have ever tried to do this, the trick is to take lots of notes and plough. Things make sense in retrospect.

Hegel is taking up most of my reading time, but I did have a chance to pick up Lisa Robertson's "new" book, which is actually a reissue of one of her first, published in 1991 (I know for a fact you can get a copy at Clay Banes' Pegasus.) Some of it does indeed look like the above, and I wanted to juxtapose it with a paragraph — taken roughly at random — from the Phenomenology:

§138 In the first place, the second Force appears as the one that solicits and, moreover, in accordance with its content, as the universal medium in relation to the Force characterized as the one solicited, but since the second Force is essentially an alternation of these two moments and is itself Force, it is likewise the universal medium only through its being solicited to be such; and similarly too it is a negative unity, i.e., it solicits the retraction of Force into itself only through its being solicited to do so.

It's a fruitful juxtaposition of proses, with the similarities bringing out in relief the differences. In particular, what is similar about these two works is the languid certainty, a kind of expectation that the reader will attend to the rhythm of the work without being spurred by abruptness, will be attentive, will not need repetition and paraphrase.

What is important in both these texts is produced but not highlighted — or rather, the text itself comes under the highlight. In Lisa's text the patter becomes, not quite sinister, but strangely flat of affect as emotionally loaded terms — misogyny, evil — roll by.

And yet a greater similarity is the sense in which both of these texts unfold, and take the unfolding of themselves seriously, as part of their point. In a sense, Lisa's work does this because it is poetry, or is counted poetry by the publishers because it does this, but it is also true that her unfolding is pushed to the fore because of the baroque nature of her "point."

Both, in other words, are impossible — or nearly impossible — to recall on a first reading, but leave a kind of residue in the mind nonetheless.

Of course the differences are many, but what to me stands out as the law of Lisa's text is, in contrast to Hegel's paragraph, the relentless evolution, the opposite partner to the obsessive returning and retracing of Hegel's text. Both are esoteric, a function of hidden knowledge, hidden valence, but in opposite fashions.

Lisa's text draws in the outside world, pulling the singular — photocopiers, parking lots — in the service of the universal — allotment, luminous, monumentality — with a few "middle terms", such as "catalogue" which can attach to either side: either catalogue as Yellow Pages, or catalogue as abstract set.

What is important here, to be clear, is not that Lisa's content is particularly esoteric, but the way in which her unfolding of that brings a kind of esoteric knowledge with. I don't particularly know "what" Lisa is saying — and only just about, after hours, know what Hegel means — but I rather want to assert that what's interesting is the nature of the trace, the residue, that her work leaves behind.

This (a clip from a blog post by Dan Piponi about something definitely esoteric) might itself be a "middle term" between Lisa and Hegel, with a certain involution and repetitiveness but also an outward branching:

For me, two of the most interesting aspects of category theory in computer science have been monads and generalised folds/unfolds; if M is a functor that happens to be monad, then given an arrow (i.e. a function because we’re working in the category of types and functions) A->MB and an arrow B->MC we can compose them to make an arrow A->MC, even though the tail of the first arrow is incompatible with the head of the second.

In any case, I'm hoping that's of use to someone; I know these juxtapositions are helpful for me to see what is going on in Lisa's surface-repellent text.

Milo De Angelis : From "Theme of Farewell"

(from Poetry Magazine, Dec. 2007)
trans. Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli

In you all deaths gather, all
the broken glasses, the sere pages, the derangements
of thought, they gather in you, guilty
of all deaths, incomplete and guilty,
in the wake of every mother, in your wake,
motionless. They gather there, in your
weak hands. The apples of this market are death,
these poems retreat into their grammar,
in the hotel room, in the hut
of what does not join, souls without rest,
aged lips, bark ripped from the trunk.
They are dead. They gather there. They failed,
the operation failed, they failed.


The place was motionless, the word obscure. That was
the place we agreed on. Goodbye, memory of the sparkling
nights, goodbye, big smile, the place was there.
To breathe was a darkness shutters had made, a primitive state.
Silence and desert were switching positions and we
were talking to a lamp. The place was that one. The trolleys
rarely passed. Venus was returning to her hut.
Out of the warrior throat, episodes broke free. We didn't
say anything more. The place was that one. It was there
that you were dying.

@

As Don informed me, Poetry Magazine now has its compleat content online, and I wanted to reward the decision of the Foundation to do so by looking closely at its December issue, which has just gone up.

If you want to skip my "global" thoughts and get to Milo, scroll down to the boldface. But before turning to the poem above I want to talk briefly, and negatively, about some of the other work in this issue. Before I do that I want to say that I get the impression that Poetry is in a period of change. Don Share hangs out in the blogosphere, and Nick Twemlow is another person who has a hand in both the Foundation's work and a number of magazines you're likely to find reviewed on rhubarb. This, I understand, is new and may take time to Reaganomically trickle down. Right now it's true, as Ron Silliman noted, that the Foundation's web work is far more provocative.

The English-language poetry in this issue is stunningly, terrifically poor and the root of this poverty is I think an absence of ambition and the danger that accompanies it. The primary mode here is the image, and, as the poem progresses, its drawing out.

Devin Johnston writes, for example, picturesquely about oysters "voluptuous and cold". Things might go places; his "liquefaction // of cloud" has an almost grotesque feel with an energy pumped by the aphrodesiac associations, but that "almost" sticks with you all the way through. The poem is uninhabited, empty, but not in a queer way, just in the kind of dull way a restaurant is around 3 pm.

Fiona Sampson's After the Air Tattoo, meanwhile, is an aftershock of Louise Gluck, with a bird name that will send you to Sibley and half-successful kennings ("plane-roar", "half-dark") that remind you of that teacher who told you that poetry was simultaneously self-expression and telegraphic imagism.

While Devin seems to have little to say, Fiona does have something within this poem, but needs an editor. It feels like a draft that might, one day, survive in an opening line. The Lodger is more interesting, but the untorqued conceit of the title, and a few poor choices (a line-break before and after "down"?) again leave the taste of the classroom.

I could go on — I have, I promise, read all these poems — but I think I've given a sense of what is going on. Biographies show that nearly all these poets are established in a very firm sense, with multiple books, or first books from national presses, or positions in writing programs. Perhaps the magazine could stand, as their poets this month could as well, to take some risks next time — it's bizarre but true that Poetry was far more adventurous in 1917 than it is in 2007.

The essence of these poems' failure, as I've said, is the lack of ambition, here most manifested in the relentless, wave-like sterility of voice. They come in little speech bubbles, inflating from the author's photograph; no strangeness here, subtle or otherwise. There's no threat, no unusual glance, no flash to derange the ordered lines. Louise Gluck hovers over some of this work but you won't hear "I hate sex" from these folks.

Perhaps the only poem that even tries for a voice is Atsuro Riley's "Hutch", but the voice there, fragmented, diction-dense, is so resoundingly familiar from the Modernists that the must rises almost visibly from the ethernet:

From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.

Them days men boys gone dark groves rose like Vietnam bamboo.


Aftergrowth something awful.

Green have mercy souls here seen camouflage everlasting.


Nary a one of the brung-homes brung home whole.

This is Faulkner, As I Lay Dying without a plot. Atsuro's work seems to be the token "crazy stuff" in this issue, with parenthetical words and sentence fragments, but it is so only on the surface, a bedside lamp with cracked glaze.

On to the Italians. Or at least one Italian. I find prefaces to translation deathly dull, so I have not read what I am sure are wise remarks by the chief of the translations, Geoffrey Brock. You might want to. After all the kvetching about the poems above, it's hard not to read this poem, in its excellence, "in contrast", but I'll do my best.

What Milo's work, refracted through Susan and Patrizio, does is weep. Weeping is one of the best modes for the standard three-to-six-beat line; while I've railed against the essentialism of calling pentameter "breath" it must be so that every line corresponds to some man or woman's breathing all the way out to Whitman's post-coital and many-line exhalations.

It is the stop-start of these lines, the way they continually upset your belief in how long they will last, that brings across the kind of heaving, diaphram-spasm of weeping, the panic that one has too little breath or, alternately, too much and that you'll wear out your throat and lungs before your body lets you rest.

Neither Susan nor Patrizio do what I think would have been the mistake here — break these things up into little whitespaced spasms. What is terrific, almost in an original sense, about this translation is the awareness, the coming to awareness, of this weeping. It is like listening, with curiosity, to a voice three rooms down, listening in until its obscenity becomes clear.

It is that subtlety — admittedly, a subtlety for "us", jaded and spoiled 21st century readers, and not for a Platonic version of Helen Vendler — that also brings a sense of control, a sense of staging to the work. What comes out in repetition here is the way the flung metaphors, Venus and that Miltonic "sere", all of that, works in counterpoint to the breathing of the lines.

---

There's a bit of a crony alert to provide at the end of this review, which is that unnamed sources within Poetry have given a (very highly tentative) go-ahead for a long form review of mine. The curious might be interested in the essence of the review, which I quote from an e-mail:

My guiding principles were: (a) talk about the experimental types, with a focus on small presses, (b) not say mean things but actually find work that I liked, and avoid general snarkyness, (c) be primarily idea/explanatory focused, as opposed to evaluative.

If this actually goes through, you'll be (almost) the first to know.

Update. From Susan Stewart: "I think whatever you've liked in our translations comes from Milo himself — his book-length elegy is really extraordinary. If you'd like to see some more of our translations of his work (and others), you might look for TriQuarterly 127, an issue on Contemporary Italian Poetry that came out a few months ago and, unlike the Poetry portfolio, has the Italian on facing pages."

boy meets Hegel

First, take the survey. It's not too long, and I will publish the results in a later post. Learn about your fellow rhubarb readers. In case it's not completely obvious, I will have no idea who you are — it is completely anonymous.

I've finally bitten the bullet and picked up a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit. amazon.com, who is sort of like a clever uncle with a great library who gives me books and it's only when I've gotten home that I find my wallet is missing, told me that I wouldn't really understand it, so I should get the lecture notes from Alexandre Kojève too.

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and stayed with Joanna Guldi, who had on her shelf a copy of Alain Badiou's Being and Event — which she had finished. I was a bit impressed, because I've been laboring, on and off, on that book and its bizarre recapitulation of axiomatic set theory, for months. Now I love Jo, but I'm pretty sure that, if only because of constant exercise, my mathematics skills are better than hers.

In the end, Jo talked me down from the ledge of her Bryant Street apartment by convincing me that a degree in comparative literature enables one to read this kind of stuff the way my mother reads Page Six of the New York Post.

I deal — perhaps a subject for therapy — very poorly with implicit knowledge. I like to build systems from the ground up, and I like to have many paths to the same point — intuitive paths, analytic paths, synthetic paths — the kind of coherency you get best in physics. I think this partly comes from the fact that I moved from the United Kingdom to the United States at the tender age of twelve, too late really to have an intuitive sense of how to "behave like an American".

[It also may also have to do with the fact that — as I only realized in retrospect — I was taught, ironically enough, here, by some very clever people who just happened to be insane Marxists (of the "vulgar" variety, as I'm sure Josh Clover would tell me.)]

In other news, I am back on the job market. I have about twenty-five fellowship applications out to various Universities, and one college — Deep Springs — which has already given me an interview. The students there — who ran the interview, with a few faculty and the Dean in attendence — were very sharp. I know a little bit about the school, because Katie teaches there, and G.C. Waldrep used to — and also because T.J., one of the bartenders at my local, graduated there a few years ago.

the rhubarb - absent - Christmas - Hanukkah - Rohatsu - Ramadan - Kwanzaa - Yule - Newtonmas so you can get paid list

Shorter Simon: If you want to support absent magazine and the work of our wonderful contributors you can bookmark this link for amazon.

Verbose DeDeo: As we head for another season of alienating consumption, there are a few ways to avoid the plague, and one of them, most relevant to absent readers, is to support, with our attentions and time, the work of friends and strangers in the poetry world.

I've cobbled together, from the many books on my shelf, a list of ten unusually good books of poetry from the avanty-gardy world. I make no claim to "best of >timespan<", nor do I wish to extend my cultural hegemony over your thought-body through colonial assertions of legitimating violence. Instead, this is a stack I would give to a clever friend outside the scene just as much as I'd show to a colleague to make sure she'd not missed a few gems. Forthwith -- and without further comment --:

Rachel Zolf, Human Resources.

The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser

Eugene Ostashevsky, Infinite Recursor or the Bride of DJ Spinoza

A Bernadette Mayer Reader

American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics

Lisa Robertson, XEclogue

Sarah Lang, The Work of Days

Meg Hamill, Death Notices

Katie Degentesh, Anger Scale

Jennifer Moxley, The Middle Room

There are many ways to get a hold of these books. If you are lucky enough to live near a bookstore that respects and supports the poetry community -- off the top of my head, I can only think of a few in the United States, hello Clay -- that should be your first stop. But should you find yourself berift, you can get them on amazon.

And that's where you can help out absent magazine at the same time. If you do buy these books by clicking on the links above to get to amazon, absent will receive a kickback of 6% of the purchase price.

Running absent magazine is very cheap. We have hosting fees, and we are also running an ad in Boog (coming soon to a hipster near you.) All told, we run at the most a few hundred a year. Most importantly, in the coming months, Irwin will need a lot of beer to keep his coding skills at the white hot level of insanity that we like to call "the zone."

That's not entirely true. Irwin doesn't program drunk. The guys who wrote Internet Explorer, on the other hand, were high. My brother totally heard this from a guy who worked there.

One of my own personal goals with absent has been to get us to the point where we can pay contributors for their efforts, and so surplus -- beyond hosting and Boog -- revenue will be directed to that end.

-- Simon DeDeo, co-editor, absent magazine

points on poems & punctuation

[Guest blogging on rhubarb this Tuesday morning is my impossibly learned companion, Julianne Werlin, an expert on many things including the Renaissance, Thomas Hobbes, and punctuation marks.]


Paul Valéry's definition of poetry — "the poem, a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense" — does not strike me as a bad one. Its greatest strength, perhaps, is its inclusivity — for it seems quite likely that we might note that same fraught pause in the oral epic of the Kyrgyz and in Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (probably an extreme example of the phenomenon). Admirable in scope, then, but perhaps lacking in specificity. For what Valéry's definition ignores is writing and its very considerable effect on poetry. The question of punctuation in verse reminds us that in order to repair this neglect, we have to add a third term: to sound and sense, then, sight.

I think it is getting more difficult to make Valéry's elision all the time, but it is still just possible (we've all seen it done), and this despite a contemplative pause spanning nearly four centuries — four centuries, that is, since English literature was able to produce a poet like George Herbert. Not that Herbert himself was, as far as we know, much of a punctuator; aside from printers, humanists, and lawyers, few people were in his day. But Herbert's shape poems (altars, wings) serve as the most emphatic "look!" possible. They are simply impossible to imagine in a culture that is not largely literate (there is no medieval Herbert) because they are in no sense mere transcriptions; the poem itself is a written artifact.

And yet. Herbert uses rhyme, writes in various meters, uses alliteration, assonance; in short, nearly every possible form of structured repetition of sound is at his disposal. The conclusion Herbert's poetry leads us to, I think, is the extent to which one of the major functions of poetry in a literate culture is to mediate between the written and oral, exploring their frequently problematic relationship. End rhyme itself, as a poetic device, suggests as much, in its reliance, on the one hand, on aural repetition and on the other, on the unit of the line, a written feature — the line is reinforced by the sound of the rhyme, the rhyme is made possible by layout.

This mediation is much more thoroughgoing than might initially appear. It is not just a question of space — the space of the page — being transformed to time, of the visual in interplay with the phonological; at least, not in any simple sense. An example: writing, according Jack Goody, a theorist of literacy, tends to use fewer personal pronouns than speech. It is, Goody concludes, less personalized, less contextualized. Here, as elsewhere, poetry has a special part to play — for what, after all, is the lyric I, if not an exquisite attempt on the part of poetics to have it both ways?

To return, then, to punctuation. In poetry, punctuation is one more means by which poets transverse the divide between writing and speech. Adorno was not wrong in comparing punctuation marks to traffic lights (though his contention that they are the prototypes of traffic lights may be rather too much of a good thing). I don't mean to suggest that punctuation is just a guide to speech, a perspective that has led many to think of punctuation marks as simply pauses transcribed. That would only make sense if written poetry itself were simply transcription, which anyone familiar with, for example, enjambment — a topic recently discussed on this page by its author — knows it is not.

Instead, at times aural, at times syntactic, punctuation marks hesitate at the intersection of the two spheres; they are often the kind of thing Geoffrey Nunberg called an 'acoustic image'. But they are also guide to interpreting syntactic structure, and as such they have a role to play in another characteristic feature of writing, and of contemporary poetry: the preference for subordinate over coordinate constructions. Punctuation is most necessary in these sorts of construction, and most regular (hence it is easier to explain when to use a semi-colon than a comma). But even the most syntactic mark cannot, in poetry, escape playing a role in meter, or ending a line, or emphasizing a caesura.

In the essentially unspeakable sentences of the modern novel (cf. Ann Banfield), sentences written from a perspective too diffuse ever to be embodied, punctuation has become quite regular in its application, because there is no, or very little, navigation between the written and spoken. But in poetry, where it is everywhere necessary, they can serve as a kind of a compass: comma is a compromise between sound and syntax; period juxtaposes sentence to line, and both may stand in contrast to phrase.

The particular function of punctuation in poetry also explains why the use of marks is so much more variable than in prose, why, depending on the emphasis of a particular poet or tradition, points can skew heavily toward the visual or aural or syntactic. Take, for instance, the American tradition. American poetry, as a poetics of landscape, has always had a particularly intimate relationship with its visual element.

It's practically a truism at this point to note that the expansive lines of a Whitman are at least as much about a relation to the blank space of the page as to meter; Eliot's troubled relation to the visual aspect of punctuation is apparent enough in The Waste Land; and then of course there is e e cummings. As an orthographer, he sometimes seems to have the renunciative zeal of a high school student who's just discovered atheism, but of course his work has a much more complex relation to the page than such an impression might suggest. His experiments are finally about emphasizing the visual aspects of verse; to that end, they frequently substitute space for punctuation marks. And it is probably no coincidence either that an American, that is, John Berryman, should prove the most insistent and perfect manipulator of &, a mark whose use is purely a visual decision, or that open field poetry is an American invention.

What the visual emphasis in American poetic punctuation demonstrates is the extent to which different approaches are possible in verse. To this extent, verse at once looks back to the Renaissance — when punctuation, part way through the process of standardization, for a moment opened into many avenues — and forward, to the fact that real linguistic innovation is, probably for the first time in history, occurring through writing, the inevitable result of large scale written communication within and across education and dialectical boundaries. To the problem of the relation between the written and the oral, then, poetry offers prescient answers; and punctuation, with its complex and varied repertoire of signals, is one of the chief means of articulating this response.

— Julianne Werlin

Atoosa Rubenstein does not like the avant garde

Atoosa Rubenstein has not only declined to be my "friend" on facebook, but also has ignored an invitation to join the increasingly inaccurately named absent magazine facebook group.

There's a lot going on here. I used to think that Atoosa's provocative "alpha kitty" interventions, after her departure from Sulphur [on edit: Seventeen], could be read productively as a flarfing of the New York social environment. A kind of "recovery action" that resurfaces, through the use of automatic devices, the ideologies of late capitalism, Atoosa's work is pròject that projècts.

In Atoosa's case, this automatism is achieved through the computer-like — in the originary sense of "one who computes" — machinery of the P.R. industry. It is the very abandonment of authentic subjecthood that makes her critique so radical. Or so I thought. Really, I've had to rethink a lot of things here. For example, is something true simply because I say it is? What if I just really like saying it? Does that add epistemological force?

For easy comparison, consider Atoosa and Gertrude Stein. These two people are not really like each other. No word yet on Tinsley Mortimer, however. If we put her on the absent masthead, and she sued, would that be like a continuation of her work? Would we become co-authors?

Talking about New York socialites in this fashion can be fraught terrain. Do we really understand each other? How can we, when we each see each other through layers and layers of smoked glass — the glass of mutual misunderstanding? On the one hand, you are beautiful and famous. On the other, I spent all day, while waiting for my colleague to call about the paper we're trying to release, reading gawker.

To that end, I am releasing the following open letter, using this template.

Dear Tinsley Mortimer and other members of the New York socialite community,

In the last few years, I have written about the US experimental poetry scene, on my blog, rhubarb is susan, and elsewhere in online and print publications. For that reason, I'll refer to myself in the first person plural from here on out.

One of the things our work does is end up being a catalogue of what’s missing; a catalogue of some of the limits of a mostly unfabulous experimental poetry scene. We see a myopic lack of attention to fashion designers, lunches at that café near the Whitney, gallery openings with YBAs, internships with glossy magazines and a lack of collective action. We need more people like you.

We use this letter to ask people to write to us with suggestions about how to overcome this. Our intention is to try and compile a bunch of these suggestions for publication in order to start a conversation.

Would you be interested in being a part of this conversation?

Our plan right now is to start this conversation somewhere North of 59th street, but definitely South of 86th. East side please.

There are several ways you could help us.

We are looking for local co-editors for different regions (right now, organized by avenue) to gather brief statements from local socialites about their communities. Would you be willing to be one? What this means is that you would gather together some responses from people in your area around this issue. You could gather as few as two or as many as twenty. It would be up to you. We like the idea of more but we’re flexible.

If you are not interested, do you think you could suggest someone who is?

If we were to get these responses, we then would need to get them translated into opaque and boring prose that emphasises how much we read before dropping out of graduate school or being given a pity-pass on a nonsensical dissertation. If you wanted to do this work with us (like if you translated these into "English" that we could then smooth as necessary), that would be great. We might be able to pay you a small fee. If you don’t want to do it, we can probably pay someone else to translate it.

There are two ways we think it might be easiest for co-editors to get these responses. One is to just ask friends. The other is to put an ad in a newspaper or journal like Jen Hofer did when she was editing her anthology of Mexican writing. If you are interested in putting an ad, again, we might be able to pay for the ad. It depends on how much it costs.

We think an ad might say something like this:

"TINSLEY MORTIMER AND FRIENDS: TELL POETS
We’re a group of writers who are curious what it is like to be a woman in _____. What should we know about the living and working conditions of ____ women poets? What can be done? Is there anything to be done together? Send an email to glas[at]freeshell.org.”

But you could do whatever you thought was most appropriate.

We’d also like to know if there is anything you think we should say to poets. At some point we will probably do a similar process — solicit responses from our friends and place ads to reach those we do not yet know — who do not attend the after-hours parties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and any feedback you can share would be helpful.

If all of this seems too much, then can we talk you into just sending us a response? Or if you think of anyone you know who might be interested in doing this work, forward this and let us know.

Our deadline on this is somewhat flexible but not infinite. Our goal is to get this material into book form sometime in 2009. We would like to start getting responses sometime between now and spring of 2008.

Hope to hear from you.

Best,

Simon DeDeo, and possible future legal counsel

attention span

Steve Evans has been gradually putting the 2007 "attention span" lists online; you can read mine here. One of the most interesting aspects of the list is his summary statistics: which books, authors, and publishers are most frequently referenced. As in years past, I expect the statistics to be dominanted by books published outside of the contest system I have come to deplore; something worth thinking about for those who are unsure of whether to go "that route."

I expect my picks of Eugene Ostashevsky, Lisa Robertson and Cole Swensen to pop up more than once, and I do hope that Cathy Park Hong's (incidental) "quietist" signifiers haven't turned people off looking at her as well. I split my list between, on the one hand, people I am reading that other poets are as well, and on the other hand, things more unusual on my shelf in the past year that have been determining influences in my own critical and creative work.

Slavoj Žižek, incidentally, has an article on one of "my" books, Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding. The "German" tradition that Slavoj hooks into is generally unsympathetic to the kind of anarchist ideas that I find in Simon's book. I think Slavoj's reading of Simon — anarchist as superego — is deeply unfair to the complicated epistemologies that go down there. Sometimes Slavoj is intellectually provocative (his essay in the most recent Soft Targets is, though I disagree, really terrific) but not here.

In the end, I think my sympathies with Simon's approach to "subjects and state" are in part due to my pacifist convictions, which come out of my engagement with Quakerism. I find the way that the European left engages — and, though usually at the safety of metaphor, sympathises — with violence deeply problematic. There seems to be a reluctance to adhere to violence a moral content determined by something larger. (That's a civil war era grenade on the right there, by the way quite a beautiful and enigmatic object.)

I find that Situationists, and indeed many anarchists, consider violence to be a powerful metaphor. I, on the other hand, try to "read out" this notion from my own thinking.

It reminds me of something George Fox said to William Penn. Penn was accustomed, as a gentleman of the time, to carrying a ceremonial sword, and asked Fox if that was acceptable given the Quaker peace testimony. Fox's response was that he should carry the sword "as long as he was able," which I consider an injunction to question not only violence, but the rhetoric of it as well.

Stacey Levine : The World of Barry

(excerpts, from The Clear Cut Future, pub. Clear Cut Press, 2003)

Barry was everywhere and so easy to marry, full of springtime, which is always hope and trust.

...

Barry's vehicle is large as a small house, with lush, curving steel flanks of midnight green, exhaust pipe thick as a fireman's hose, its mouth pouring white volumes of fog and upon this mouth I must briefly affix my own mouth, in order to best appreciate life, I think; though Barry has never instructed me to do this, nor have TV broadcasts, either, yet it is truer than god or the atmosphere—

...

Barry and I are very thirsty these days; dust from the warring earth flies through our throats and perhaps we wait for the world to mature, to catch up with us; the back side of god is too strange, too vulnerable to hold all of life, Barry worries as he drives; I laugh at him, feigning anger in a spirit of play, though the danger of our games is what frightens Barry and me—

@

Posting these three reviews -- Stacey, Jo Ann and Kevin -- now from the Butler Library at Columbia, from which you can see the tents of the student hunger strikers. I'm disappointed -- but not shocked -- to see that the expected nastiness about these students on the Right is mirrored by a casual distain from the hipsters smoking on the library steps.

The main objection seems to be -- despite the fact that the students are themselves keeping a low profile -- that it's a self-indulgent piece of look-at-me-theater. I doubt the mohawked brat -- the most vocal of the complainers -- has any idea of what is going down within the tents.

That said, they do have supporters in the community, including Dennis Dalton, a professor who has joined the strike. And not all the library smokers seem to be judging them according to the standards of the latest indie rock band.

The Clear Cut Future is the last of the three books I picked up in San Francisco. I've seen work by this press before -- they published (and here publish more of) work by the strange "Office for Soft Architecture" which, as far as I can tell, is a corporation invented by Lisa Robertson to issue "research reports" that begin like this:

The history of scaffolding has been dismantled. We can't write this history because there are so few documents -- only a slim sheaf of photographs. So we study the construction of the present and form theories. We use the alphabet as a ladder.

One thing that must be said is that the Clear Cut Press produces beautiful books. I don't know if it's the weather up there in Oregon, or perhaps over in Tokyo where the text is bound, but their books have the heft and palm-sized dimensions of the hymnals old ladies carried to my church when I was a child.

Stacey's work is billed as a "story", but I'm going to issue an access card to the poetic avant garde because basically the prose-fiction of the contemporary moment is so broadly dire, unexamined, cacophanated by the unexamined-I that she may require refugee status with us.

Stacey being a visitor to our poym shores makes it difficult to "read" her in the context of What People Do When They Do Prose. I'm just not as hooked-in to the debates over there in the land where books have agents and readers. The Story of Barry is so common today, however, that it's impossible not to read Stacey as pushing off that horrible "post-feminist" cliché, and that's where I'll start.

The Story of Barry — what I'll take to be the ghost text of Stacey's work here — is I think an invention of the male mind though there will always be the Uncle Toms among women who will contribute their interpretations and back cover photos. Barry is a lawyer, a Junior Partner in the Firm, the breadwinner for a yet-childless marriage. Barry is a good man, somewhat rough around the edges but in essence working-class aiming for the upper-middle. He lacks the sensitivity to react emotionally to art.

He is Man the Provider, and he stands next to the narrator of The Story of Barry, his wife, who recounts her own self-doubt as the opposite of Barry: economically useless, supported by men, the passive recipient of emotions generated by art, literature, nature. She knows her husband to be insufficient to her needs -- although accounts differ on what he's like in bed, he is sometimes rude and uncaring, sometimes caring too much -- but stays with him for many reasons.

The reasons are social, economic, familial, psychoanalytic. Why those reasons have force -- why the woman resigns herself to an existence she protests -- is what makes these books moral primers.

The Story of Barry is very familiar because we've heard it so many times before. We've heard it in Susan Minot's work, we've heard it in Jim Crace as well -- it's a kind of anti-feminist tract that today is labelled "post-feminist" -- a sort of co-opted Yellow Wallpaper for the Compact Disc generation. What, in other words, the most useless of the iPod generation will grow into when they buy in Park Slope.

There are many ways to break The Story. From the Yellow Wallpaper you can go towards Kathy Acker, say, and -- to debase Acker's work -- talk about dicks and cunts and cash and splash all kind of fluids on the sides of Barry's car. Stacey takes a different route to remake The Story into The World; a kind of Swiftian remix where the qualities of the feminine are exaggerated into a kind of quiet discomfort, a low-grade migraine that is emphasised by the uneven paragraphs that each begin the same: Barry, Barry, Barry.

It is, in other words, a selective deployment of the same self-consciously lush and "beautiful" prose of someone like Susan Minot. It was Susan who in her high-concept book Rapture -- which takes place during a blow-job -- had her female narrator summarize "that was worship." I went back and forth on whether to print the final paragraph, because it's deeply NSFR (Not Safe For Readers), but here we go:

God he was lovely. God he was sweet. God. God. God... Yes, it was starting again, the humming of the blood. She let it carry her. What was that Oscar Wilde quote?... She ran her fingers lower on him. She flicked him softly... Was this going to take her where she hoped to go?... He was getting closer. Was she gripping harder or was that him getting bigger?... She was creeping slowly to the centre of herself. He was the bridge she took to get there... Her mouth was battered. Everything around her was lifted and golden and electric... Her face flushed deeply... "That was worship," she said.

It's Stacey's tactic to take these kind of absurd, force-fed moments and push them not into parody, but towards something far less comfortable: while Susan tries to make the claim that an "ordinary" woman would regard oral sex as worship, Stacey torques her narrator far enough out that "god" creates not cringe-worthy discomfort but a deeper kind of unsettlement.

All the apparatus is here -- Barry's story is drawn well enough that it could indeed serve as a cover letter for the latest Minot-derivative -- and Stacey's reworking is subtle, not violent, not dramatic. I think in a casual reading -- the one I first gave Stacey -- it is quiet enough to disappear. But perhaps the signal, the brightest signal here, is that Stacey does give her voice a intellectual power.

What contrasts the two most obviously is, in other words, that while Susan's women are natural, taking their speech patterns from the suburban cafeteria, Stacey makes the right choice, the bold choice, to give her speaker the patterning of the poetic moment -- those repeated Barrys -- that leave the reader with an assertion, that continues through the eight pages of the text, of an engagement beyond that forced on her by Man the Provider.

Kevin Magee : Interpreter

[for Steve Abbott
(from Recent Events, pub. Hypobololemaioi, 1995)

Stand up from the dead, the dead works
in my trouble saying arise
my only portion, disquietments
ill and absent from the ordnance

The fear we come with new and dangerous opinions
the sum of whose days spent in a room
struck dumb by the authority of
books, fare thee well then and cry for your mother

This is a word that
(if there is a heaven)
there will be an author for

The poor child gives her
money to a poorer child
This is phrased as a simple faith

[Variant]

This da was brought news of that
and much distracted, thoughts rising
stand up from the dead, from dead works

and those loose stragglings into other things
my only portion, prevalency
in my trouble saying arise

much disquietments
These things open a gap to unbelief
and savor of its sweetness in a manner

ill and absent from the ordnance
So that my spot
is not that spot

@

While I don't know much about Kevin Magee, his book comes with a boatload of markers that place him in the middle of various impossible Venns. Some of the work in the book comes from Juliana Spahr's Chain; others come from The Capilano Review in Vancouver, which hooks in to the Kootenay school from whence we get (among others) Lisa Robertson.

And then there's a strange piece excerpted from the Kootenay gang when they came to Buffalo -- a poetic statement by Emily Greenley which accompanied her submission to the undergraduate writing prize at Harvard. Something I never sent off to in my days back then, though I believe an ex of mine did win the very prize the year after I graduated. Emily committed suicide in 1990, but was around long enough to know William Corbett -- and Kevin Magee, who quotes her:

The unbelievably pretty ladies
had a good bit of luck

That were born with a body
that would accomodate fucks;

That's heavy stuff for the mandarins at Harvard's English Department, where a sort of retiring innocence was often the rule. There's a little bit of Emily's work around the web, but as far as I can tell no special issue or centralized repository.

Kevin's book is a bit of a sourcebook as well, in other words, throwing off bits of light and spacing out poems with page-long quotations from Spenser, Hopkins and Melville. It makes doing the usual rhubarb work of excerpting more difficult because the book is itself a context.

I was just talking about Jo Ann's linebreaks and one continuity between Kevin and Jo Ann is that Kevin is, as well, more than a little unconcerned with the musical tactics of that formatting technique. His lines here read by the stanza, a kind of elegantly brushed down prose block. Which is an aesthetic decision I think links in to the Spenser that opens the volume:

Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe,
Wherein my feeble barke is tossed long,
Far from the oped hauen of reliefe,
Why do thy cruell billowes beat so strong,
And thy moyst mountaines each on others throng,
Threatening to swallow vp my fearefull life?
O do they cruell wrath and spightfull wrong
At length allay, and stint thy stormy strife,
Which in these troubled bowels raignes, and rageth rife

It is only in the 20th century, I think, that the obsession with the line-break began. Perhaps it starts with the junking of meter by writers who were unwilling to abandon every formal device; when you read Spenser you see how the line-breaks are integrated into the argument-making form and just another device.

But while it's possible -- of course -- to write without meter, it's impossible to write without line-breaks. And I think the responsibility poets in the grand vers libre tradition have to face up to is how to be as serious about the musicality of the break. Not just to take it as a gift from the tradition, but to create other musics that can compete with it.

When you don't do this, you end up with a kind of jargly mash of end-stopping and enjambment, something harsh and yet strangely unprovocative, almost as dull as the blank verse people churned out before the "liberation" told them not to bother any more.

Meanwhile, you can see why Spenser "had it easy"; the argument he makes bumps up against so many formalized sonic techniques that there is not the stuttering of the end line. The achievement of Kevin's poem here -- and of much of the work in the book -- is I think his return to "easy argument"; the way in which he asks to be read without the head-bashing of end-of-line obsession.

Interestingly, and by-the-by, a later poem quotes a page of obsessive John Clare -- the kind of person who can do the exact opposite: write in unbroken prose but create ghostly breaks faster than a two-beat line.

Here's another poem to end the review, and perhaps an even clearer demonstration of Kevin's "easy" technique, of how he lets the line-break lie without investing it with the heavy semantic-sonic freight of the "post-avant":

VAULT

It is by crossing the seven terraces

in as many hands the manuscripts

itinerant continued by, extracted out

and you have called that Cause made for you manifestly

amicitiae, testimonies of our love

penitentiae, a strict course of life

The seed of you in every virtue

and all that mark hath made

adorned with double rows of Rose

inconverted muting far from averring

some few broken reports of those

and other acts of Power and Force

Jo Ann Wasserman : The False Italy and Where It Came From

(from The Escape, pub. Futurepoem books, 2003)

if she had said, "this is restricting" or "I would prefer the title
of being restricted" but it always lurked, another view trade
for the fact that this seemed like the perfect home, collapse
on the perfect sofa (it was before all the smaller furniture), stability,
a way of her knowing that the sofa was always the sofa change
out of those swimsuits before you sit anywhere soft petal

green sofa she sits waiting for the work assigned with all the speculation of a petal
we come in quietly and the sofa does not seem to equal home but the title
mother she sits there or is lying under a blanket small change
since the morning "arms length" is how she says it, preferring to trade
our wet suits for her not listening to a story about the pool, not stability
for a mortgage or some equation we can not imagine yet so collapse

this is not such an easy part the collapse
the way we have walked in mud and clover petal
careful not to dirty the couch (it is part of the trade-off) stability
of our nation depends on hers, the one known by the title
mother, the one that is remote, I am cut off from this authority, this trade-
off is not in the best interest of our country, in the country of cleaning up and to change

for supper out of those suits, the only marker now that we wish not to change
the way we know we are from a different country, our country of collapse
because the way she wants one thing for another is trade
but now being perfectly quiet is in the contract, she thinks we wear the petal
bits on purpose that this means we will not be quiet of respect her title
but it is really hard to get the clover bits off wet feet and maintain stability

so on each foot and knocking the water from our ears, the straight chair for stability
we came in to say that we want to live in another country change
countries (she is still on the sofa under a blanket) we like how you know in the title
that the people live in another country like Madeline books and we collapse
near her feet we like that Madeline lives in France a petal
sticks to the sofa of the adventures of Master so-and-so which we read aloud and want to trade

he lived in Italy we said and we would like to trade
live there too, with Master so-and-so and the clever dog but she says, "there is no stability
in Italy" she is pale and absentmindedly removes the petal
"if you go Italy and want to be little girls there with a clever dog it is not so easy to change
back, you might not have the perfect home. your perfect home might be ruined and collapse.
you girls don't know that you can't change the stories only the title"

which she says doesn't matter but we know all the titles and how to trade
one thing collapses and you get another sort of stability
we know we must change to Italy, the other one, and she simply holds up a silvery clover petal

@


I just returned from San Francisco, where I was giving a talk to the Berkeley faculty on "gas and gravity," a title I chose with reference to Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace but the similarity ends there. I suppose it could count as a prequel? I'm now in New York, at the Hungarian Pastry Shop and heading back to Chicago tomorrow.

I happened to be in town for Lisa Robertson's reading at Clay Banes' series. Reading Lisa's work, which I discovered perhaps one or two years ago was a major moment for me, and I was curious to hear her in person.

It emerges, however, that Lisa's voice is not particularly informative. Her work is long -- she is, like Jo Ann above, not a poet of the crystal abbreviation -- and while there is a great deal of dynamism in her poems, it is gradual and the kind of thing that exceeds my aural memory.

Which means that a good reading-out-loud of Lisa's work requires one to superimpose an emotional narrative: to shift tone and angle of attack over the poem so that we have things to hang our hats on. Which she doesn't do: she reads with a generally predictable "poetry voice" and things didn't come alive the way I had hoped.

I had to rush back to the Mission after Lisa's reading, so I didn't have time to browse Clay's shelves at Pegasus. I did get to do some browsing in Bernal Heights at the Red Cover, and in the Mission at Dog Eared Books. Both of which are used stores, which means that I also got a glimpse at the San Francisco poetry scene -- what is getting passed around in review copy, what people dump from their libraries.

Jo Ann's book I picked up along with Kevin Magee's Recent Events. I've seen a few releases from Futurepoem, at Myopic in Chicago, and I've been impressed with what they've chosen to publish: things that generally exceed the usual clichés that go by "post-avant". Eleni Sikelianos contributes a blurb, and I think that one aspect of the sympathies between the two is indeed a rejection -- conscious or not -- of certain conventions within "new" writing.

(I have seen a few presses and poets use the term post-avant without irony or anger -- BlazeVox describes itself as a publisher of the post-avant, and I remember the blogger Jessica Smith using it to describe presses and magazines in a non-pejorative fashion. I don't get it -- it seems humiliating? rhubarb recommends against. Anyway.)

Perhaps what is most taboo-violating about Jo Ann's poem above -- quite representative of the book at large -- is the line breaks. It is, I think, the line break that marks something as a "poem" and for all of pot-stirring that goes on it's hard to find a poet that does something new with them.

A line-break, for most poets on either side of the experimental divide, is a line-break: a significant semantic-aural moment stronger than a spondee. Indeed, sometimes it seems that we've traded meter for enjambment.

It's exciting, then, to see what Jo Ann does, which is to soft-focus them, soft-pedal them. If you read False Italy in the usual fashion, you (or Jo Ann) sounds ridiculous; the breaks come almost randomly through the prose blocks. But that randomness is an illusion; the breaks are not the markers of importance -- it would be like attending to the second syllable of the feet in dactylic hexameter.

Jo Ann structures her poem around semantic, not syntactical or aural, moments: it's the flow and ebb of words: restrict, collapse, stability, Italy -- these are the anchors that play for line and stanza breaks. There is a way in which to read this poem "from a distance", looking down for structural principles, is to hear it as a piece by Steve Reich, say -- full of noise but also repetition: patterns that are too alien to hear at first, but that become clear when they come around a second time.

I don't want to make the claim that Jo Ann's work is "difficult" in the sense of a Bach fugue, where you need to pay attention to layers on layers of patterning. Structure here is important -- important enough that, indeed, she is going to take semantic units -- those repeated words -- and allow them to empty out into structural markers. But she is generally sequential; passages dissolve into each other but there's not the sound of competing voices.

Perhaps the impulse to call Jo Ann "difficult" however is a sign of how bad things have gotten. We should, I think, be ready for work like Jo Ann's, ready to read it, supple enough to get the music of what happens -- but then we have been made lazy by the pervasive technique-ideologies of just such things as the line-break-enjambment-sigh.

It's why I kept checking, on the plane when I first read the book, to see if I had missed some formatting convention on the part of the publisher -- to tell me that indeed I had bought a book of prose by mistake. Jo Ann, however, won't let you off that easily.

a response to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young

Regarding "Numbers Trouble" in the Chicago Review 53:2/3.


Dear Juliana and Stephanie,

I have a number of thoughts regarding your piece in the CR; I am publishing this on my blog, rhubarb is susan, as well as e-mailing this to you privately. I would be happy to enter into correspondence with you, either in private or out on the tubes.

the rhubarb numbers

Since January 2005, I have reviewed one hundred and thirty four human authors, one bird and one computer. Taking the bird as female and the computer as male, I find that seventy-eight of those authors are female. I compute that as 57% female, with a shot-noise of ±6%. I think it is plausible to read Eric's work as a Pygmalion project, in which case the computer is female and my numbers go even higher.

From the sample compiled by Joshua Kotin and Robert Baird, that fraction has been exceeded only by Conjunctions in 1995, and Fence in 2000, although one must be careful because the sample sizes of those two issues are sufficiently small that Poisson noise becomes a problem. In the case of Conjunctions, for example, the underlying gender preference at two-sigma confidence could be as low as 25%.

outliers are political

I believe what is clear is that women are no longer "outliers" in avant garde poetry (contrary to what Ron Silliman claimed in his remarks about Pattie McCarthy, and has claimed in the past about what happens to women after childbearing.) The spread of female representation in avant garde magazines seems to range from 20% to 40%. As my work on rhubarb makes clear, there is an abundance of women writing, and it is not hard at all to "read" contemporary poetry in a gender neutral fashion. "Big hammers", like women-only poetry contests, are today misguided.

At this point, I do not believe that "women in poetry", as a pure numbers game, is a political question. There are many complex sociological factors that we will one day use to explain why the fraction is 30% and not 70%, but these do not seem like questions that one can "organize around". (In your discussion, one thing you do not address is that men submit their work more often and more persistently, and that women, when solicited for material, do not respond as often -- both things that Elisa and I have found working on absent.)

What I find both expected and depressing is that nowhere in your wide-ranging piece is the elephant in the room addressed. I was just at the CR release celebration, and while my eye could not detect whether the crowd was 30% women or 70% women, it was hard not to notice that all of us -- with, I believe, the sole exception of Roberto -- were white. (I apologize if I err here -- the party was good, and the wine was abundant.) Similar experiences over and over again at the readings I attend here in Chicago; if you look solely for African-American representation, it becomes more disturbing still.

I am explicitly not suggesting you (or the CR) are biased against writers of color in any knowing or unknowing fashion. Indeed, in reading your Transformation, Juliana, it is quite clear to me that you know and understand the complexities of race better than I. Am I sad, though, that you did not apply your acumen to this very neighboring question of which I believe you can not be unaware? Yes.

[Update. Juliana drops me a line: "just quickly on the race issue... yes. i/we agree. race is really way worse. we say so in the paper: "We did not chart out race and class as we did this. But we can assure you without a doubt that racial and class representation is dramatically skewed toward white middle-class writers in all the contemporary writing scenes we examined, way more than gender. And that this also has a lot to say about the failures of feminism." (this is in the "Methodology" note on pg. 109.)]

I do think that today the question for the avant garde community is not "why 40%" but rather "why zero?" (or 5%, or 10% -- but not much more.) I really want to see this addressed -- and I believe, incidentally, that the questions we are asking about women are enriched by including race.

the secret life of pussipo

Let's drop the numbers talk for a moment.

Occasionally I will gossip with women in the poetry community and I will be told hair-raising tales of sexism and discrimination. I take these tales seriously, although I tend to find that most revolve around previous generations. (I would not feel comfortable calling-out an old man like Ron on views that he has somewhat inherited from the state of culture in his youth; in some sense, I feel that I can not argue with Ron, but I can argue with men of my generation -- I am 28.)

Let's talk about pussipo. I have very mixed feelings about this list. I know that women who operate blogs generally have to exercise some pretty extreme censorship mechanisms to prevent sexually violent comments. And the majority of women I know who maintains a listserv or blog presence in the poetry community have had to deal with stalkers and deeply inappropriate behavior. The one time I used (briefly, and no longer!) an online persona that was "read" as female, it was an immensely educational experience.

So on the one hand I celebrate your walled garden.

On the other hand, I feel personally affronted; I feel judged and sentenced by the worst representatives of men. I mean, I do not seethe away, this was a passing feeling when I was first informed about the list, but I think my response is reasonable. Instead of restricting membership, why can the list not set limits on posting? Why can it not accept men as members while holding them (and everyone else) to the standards we expect?

I am quite sure that doing so would probably involve kicking a lot of people out, but then again, is this not exactly the kind of political actions we should be taking as a community? I don't want to make an issue out of this, I am not demanding anything; I am just leaving a note at the gate of the cloister.

i dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none

I want to elaborate on a comment I left with Johannes Göransson:

While I myself am combative, outspoken, &c. -- I do recognize that "being a poet" as an educated, white, male author, is not threatening to people even if I do "behave badly". It sort of "fits" preconceptions and while I believe the editors I have worked with are authentic people, it is clear that other kinds of writers in my position do not have these properties, and that they are hurt by it in a sort of "death of a thousand cuts" fashion.

I think this is the crux of the issue. The age demands an image of its poets: if you "act like" a poet, you will receive attention and publication. It is vital to be clear that today society's images of the poet includes women.

It is just as vital to assert that these images are very particular. While the number of male modes (for whites -- compare the treatment of Amiri Baraka to Fredrick Seidel) is broad to the point of freedom, it is, in my experience that women do not have this freedom. While I in general choose poets I like to review, it is clear to me that I have to filter -- not against men, but against a "kind" of poetry that women are "allowed" -- encouraged, rewarded -- to write. I addressed this issue explicitly in a series of essays on Cole Swensen (1, 2, 3 and finally 4, after which I mostly STFU about poor Cole.)

What I thus see as the "important work" that we can do as feminists together is not counting numbers, but looking explicitly and deeply at what those numbers are counting. Again, I should be clear: I am not claiming this is all you are doing, and I acknowledge your work in other parts of the field, as well as the work of others who, incidentally, count numbers.

I think we need to be proactive in celebrating women (and men) who are writing against these received ideas about what a poet can do. I want women to write like men, and I want men to write like women (I do not, contrary to what is commonly accepted, consider writing as a gay man a "substitute.") And I want us to celebrate each other for those moves.

To me that is both a feminist demand, and a demand of the best of the avant garde, and I am happy to sign my name to it.

Yours,

Simon

Update. Dale Smith has one of the smartest responses to the piece I've seen yet online (although there are plenty of other excellent ones as well.) The title is "Re: The Name & the Paradox of its Contents", but I much prefer taking it to be "I am a footnote."

Update. More responses worth checking out. Ange Mlinko at the Foundation broadens the conversation; I agree -- if there was a "shorter Simon" in this post, it would be for us to take the discussion beyond the numbers, and to ask uncomfortable questions that don't have the quantative aura of statistics. K. Lorraine Graham also has some excellent thoughts in the personal history mode, and also is hosting an excellent conversation in the comments.

science porn

This is an image of the Sun in X-ray, from the NASA SOHO satellite. The colors represent "colors" in the X-ray band; as in the visual, red means a lower energy X-ray photon, shading into blue, which is a higher energy X-ray photon. Much of the emission in the X-ray comes from the entanglement of magnetic fields, which themselves are generated by vorticital movement of material at the surface; this accounts for the swirled nature of the image. I am generally reluctant to connect my scientific work to that poetical, but I consider this one of the most beautiful images to come out of the last decade.

In full regalia I just returned from welcoming, with readers Roberto Harrison and Kent Johnson, the latest issue of the Chicago Review. Everyone should immediately purchase a copy. Do it, people, do it now. As I remarked to anyone within earshot at the party, the CR is one of the few University-affiliated journals that is not required to constantly promote the work of students and faculty in an MFA program. I believe that it is the place to get "the news" from the always-fraught intersection of scholarship and beauty.

Blogging is light because I am preparing to release a videotext in collaboration with (as readers) Anna Aizman, Sid Cook, and Rachel Landau on ENS-Parisian Nicholas Manning's Continental Review. This should be out by Sunday evening; watch this space.

poetry RSS

RSS (a.k.a., "real simple syndication", a protocol) is a way to collect and organize your blog reading. Instead of having to repeatedly visit a blog to see if there's a new post, you can use an RSS reader which will visit the blog on your behalf and alert you when something new comes up. RSS is a godsend for bloggers like me who don't publish every day; it is essentially like having a subscriber base. It is also great for me as a reader, because some of the best blogs publish only rarely, and I always forget to check them manually. Changing over to RSS greatly diversifies your reading experience.



You can run an RSS reader on your local machine, or you can use one of the many online sites. bloglines was an early favourite; if you have gmail, then you are already signed up for google reader; if you have yahoo, then you are already signed up for yahoo's reader. To add "feeds" — i.e., to add a blog that you want your reader to monitor for you — it is usually sufficient to give the reader the blog's usual address.

I prefer to run a reader on my local machine (a Powerbook) — shrook. Another favourite is Vienna. If you run Windows, you can try SharpReader. If you run linux, you know more than me and probably read slashdot instead of showering.

Once you've drunk the RSS kool aide, you will want to start subscribing to feeds.

I currently have 45 blog subscriptions; most of them do not update every day, and usually I'm presented with about five to ten posts over the course of a day. Depending on the reader you choose, you add these blogs all at once by downloading this ("OPML") file. (If you are using google's reader, follow these instructions, if you are using yahoo's reader, follow these, if you are using bloglines follow these.)

I think it's a pretty good subscription list, and it includes many fantastic blogs that update only rarely, including Juliana Spahr's, Joshua Clover's, Great American Pinup and the international exchange for poetic invention. The blogs on it:

1. have some connection to experimental and avant garde poetry.

2. are not venues for original poetry (I prefer to seek out edited online journals for that.)

3. may have some personal material, but are not primarily diaries, photo albums, and the like.

4. may have some info about upcoming readings and print publications, but are not solely "announcement blogs" for the products of a single press or author.

The fact that there are 45 blogs that fit that criteria is a sign of the strength of the blogosphere. I'd love to hear about blogs I should add to the list. Drop me a line in the comments, and if I agree I'll update the file at the link above. The technology here is new, so if it isn't working it may not be your fault — please contact me for "tech support".

Confidential to everyone. You are reading your poems too fast. Slow down. No, more. Slower. OK. There. Ah ah now you're speeding up again.

opinions i hold about poetry (sorted)

opinions shared with many

Anne Carson is a terrific poet. Jorie Graham is a terrific poet, The Errancy was her best book, and she's been phoning it in since Swarm.

Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff and Harold Bloom are powerful critics.

The Enlightenment was a pretty great thing.

Blurbs are unreadable. They function solely as a form of currency that a few can mint only at the risk of inflation. Most reviews are blurb IPOs.

"Movements" are outdated relics of a smaller world. When they propagate on the internet, they are -- just like riding horseback -- mainly vehicles of self-promotion or arbitrary signs of authority, but still remain somewhat dangerous fun.

Cutting unnecessary words, dropping articles, turning participles into verbs, and bringing things into the present tense will often -- after all these years -- improve a poem (but it wasn't any good to begin with.)

Poetry is answerable to the audience, not to critics or to other poets. A poem should do anything but squander its audience. (If you can't find a good audience, make one up.)

"post avant" and "school of quietude" are irritatingly useful terms, we all know what they mean, and given a room full of poetry books any three poets chosen at random could easily sort them into the two piles with little disagreement.

Authenticity -- near or remote -- is the sine qua non of a poem. A great poem can fail any test but this.

90% of poetry is crud.

opinions shared with few

Affirmative action in literature is a necessary, but not unqualified, good. There is a great deal of sexism, racism and classism in the literary world, but it can not be detected and fought by bean counting.

A technique can be authentic if sui generis. Our age demands images "of its accelerated grimace", and authentic engagement with that demand is required. Sometimes a poem can be just technique.

Corporations and other de facto governments control basic facts about our lives, and poetry that claims otherwise is fraudulent. The first task (but not the last task) of poetry is freedom.

Anarchism is a legitimate intellectual position with important things to say about poetry. Situationism is too, but practitioners by definition are never housetrained.

People who use the word "craft" when talking about a poem are guilty until proven innocent.

Readers of poetry are lazy, stupid and mean, in that order. They are easily bored. They live to misread us. They are all we have. You and I are two.

There are things I learn as a scientist that give me insight into poetry, but they are not facts about the physical world.

Contest fees and reading fees are unacceptable and corrupting ways to fund a press. The duty of an editor is to use her knowledge of the community to seek out the best work from the widest field, not to cash cheques.

A good poem does not usually work by encryption. Geoffery Hill is one of the exceptions.

The MFA system is by-and-large a good thing, and one of the sources of strength in American poetry. Workshops that improve your work are rare, but exist.

The best, and the worst, poetry is political. All outliers are political.

That poetry will improve if students read and memorize the canon, and national newspapers pay attention to it, are bogus ideas disproved by the sorry state of poetry -- with the notable exception of the Cambridge crew -- in the United Kingdom.

The state of North American poetry is strong. There has never been a time when more poems of value and engagement were being written. If you break it down by social class, the distinction of the age is even more apparent. People who claim otherwise do so for usually transparently suspect reasons.

The best reading would be at Pegasus Books. Clay Banes would introduce Josh Clover and Fredrick Seidel, who would read each other's poems. Then Eireene Nealand would translate them into Russian, and Eugene Ostashevsky would translate them back into English and read the translations. Holographic flashing programs, produced by Anne Boyer, would be handed out. A brief movie, produced by Bill Viola, starring Summer Glau, and written by Lisa Robertson, would be projected. Afterwards, we would take over the Revolution Café. Everyone single would be partnered with the beautiful boho of their dreams and we would have martinis in Joanna Guldi's living room. There would be daycare and travel subsidies so everyone could come.

we are experiencing technical difficulties

Where by "technical difficulties" I mean that I am in the middle of a massive crunch to get some loose threads in my research tucked in or burnt off — just in time for job season. I'll be back in action hopefully by November or so. In the meantime, typo 10 is out with plenty of good company, and more than a few people have pointed me towards the new issue of action yes, and in particular a provocative essay on Juliana Spahr, Lara Glenum, and others by James Pate.

Update. Johannes and I battle it over James at exoskeleton.

plagiarism and thievery in contemporary poetry

Ron Silliman is talking about the work of writer David Giannini, who recently released a book of three-line poems composed of other people's first lines. I'd like to expand on the comment I posted there (and reproduce below.)

When I see stunts like this -- and I really do consider them mostly stunts, given the extreme constraints on any kind of authorial self-expression -- I always feel that the software version would be better.

In other words, just make a webpage that does this on a database of first lines -- click, and poof, new poem. You could probably leverage the community to rate the most interesting generations.

Of course, for all of the implicit post-authorship going on here, writers are still mostly interested in putting another brick in the wall for the publication list. All of these clever games seem, to me, to be more about finding new ways to generate "poems" that can be signed in the usual fashion, totally undercutting any actual kind of conceptual radicalism.

I'm not saying that Giannini is stealing the labor of others. But it seems that the parasitic nature of his idea here goes totally unacknowledged in the way it's been presented. Giannini's packaging says "my". Perhaps fifty years ago one could have said "there's no other way for me to present this", but that doesn't fly any more.

Yes, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

Eight flamewar generations ago, in a far more innocent world, there was the Araki Yasusada hoax. So much has been said about it that I won't rehearse things — except to note an under-appreciated point, that Kent Johnson has never explicitly "owned" this creation.

Hooking in to the notion of hyperauthorship developed by Mikhail Epstein in a rhizome essay, Kent made a frontal attack, which I'll quote at length.

Currently, unfortunately, North American poetry, traditional and innovative alike, is very much locked into an antique ideological function of authorship handed down from 17th and 18th century English law, and we expect our Authors to be empirically verifiable, well-wrapped in the cocoons of their copyrightable identities. History shows that it didn't always used to be that way, but our poets act as if it were a natural and immutable condition. [Interview in LitVert with Rodrigo Garcia Lopes.]

Despite Kent's refusal to take charge of "his" creation and reap the benefits of tagging what survives as one of the most significant interventions of the 1990s, the "natural", self-undermining process of contemporary poetry, however, hasn't changed. Nerly every new addition to our conceptual understanding of the poetry that makes use of the postmodern heritage comes stamped with a seal of hypocrisy, otherwise known as the author's name. I don't declare Kent's analysis to be correct, but I praise him for standing by the logic of his art.

Writers — with the seldom seen exceptions such as Kent — whose work in collage, appropriation, circulation demands to be read under the rubric of liberation I associate with the heritage of deconstruction, show absolutely no sign of being answerable to their own creations.

I am not against signing work. I do it, obviously, all the time. But such an act — an act of ownership over a fragment of language — carries with it a great freight of responsibility. To put it another way, and to slash a hedge I made in the comment above, it is not retrograde or unsophisticated or New Criterion to declare, simply, that David Giannini has indeed stolen the work of someone else. He has stamped his name to what is overwhelmingly the labor of others.

And I mean stolen here not in some Poundian sense of praise, but with the literal weight it usually carries. There is no ownership of language except what is asserted by an author, and that assertion has a moral weight. What Daivd has done here is fence off a part of the Commons, a part of our common language world, and tagged it in a fashion as ugly as a kid with a magic marker.

Again, and to be clear: I am not standing against collage. Nor am I even suggesting that all collages be released anonymously — there are plenty that reach a pitch of originality that the author's name is demanded. But in a work such as this, whose function relies essentially on a philosophy of linguistic liberation and common ownership, to sign it is fraud.


Update. Here's a rather interesting self-undermining failure-of-fidelity, noted by John Latta in his criticism of Grand Piano. For those who don't know, Grand Piano is the collective autobiography of a group of poets associated with Language poetry. John quotes one, Carla Harryman, writing out of this massively author-projecting text, on receiving a hostile response from Robert Creeley:

I came up with a theory, which given Creeley’s proclivity toward mean streaks in those years is to be taken with a grain of salt. It is this: upon introduction, I naturally identified with him as a person who makes. This was the violation that elicited the aggressivity of the question . . .

Doesn’t this have something to do with our critique of ‘the self?’ Of the authority and authorship of ‘the poet?’ Isn’t this why some of us experienced a great deal of antagonism and public attacks? That through ‘language writing’ the male authority of the poem was actively questioned?

Perhaps Carla once critiqued 'the self' and the masculine notion of the author as originator and owner of a text. Simply by participating in such a project as Grand Piano in the way she does, it seems, all her avowls come crashing down?

advice to poetry bloggers

I've been running rhubarb is susan for more than two and a half years now; recently I've been thinking a lot about the role of blogs in the poetry community, and communities in general, and I thought I'd set down my thoughts for those considering joining in.

technical

1. choose your hosting service carefully.

Once your blog is established, you'll find moving it to be a huge hassle, primarily because it will break all of your links. I run off of blogger, but if I were restarting today I would purchase my own domain name.

Note that many blogging services, including both blogger and wordpress, allow you to host your blog at an address you choose (e.g., "rhubarbissusan.org", as opposed to "rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com") while at the same time handling the actual blog infrastructure itself. This option I'd recommend for all new bloggers.

2. whatever service you use, make sure it supports permalinks, expandable posts, trackbacks, RSS and comments.

A permalink is an URL that goes directly to a particular post — like this.

"Expandable posts" mean that only a small snippet of the post appears on the blog's front page, requiring the reader to click somewhere to "expand" it (on rhubarb, that's the "full review" link.) It turns your blog into a table of contents, and means that clever things you said months ago remain prominently available — they don't disappear into the archives as quickly.

"Trackbacks" are a bit technical but by now they're automated by the best software. What it means is that when you reference a blog post by someone else (usually by linking to a permalink), your software "pings" that other person's blog. Depending on their choice, it will then automatically add a link to your post to their list of "other blogs linking to this post".

"RSS" is a clever invention that allows people to "subscribe" to your blog. Instead of having to go to your site repeatedly to see if there's something new, people can use a "reader" that automatically pulls up the most recent post you've made. RSS has been around for a long time, but in the last year its use has exploded. About a third of my readers use RSS, and it's particularly useful if you don't update every day.

You all know what comments are, but I'm surprised to see that many popular blogs still don't allow them. They're a vital part of blogging. Robert?

Some bloggers (female bloggers in particular) find that comments can sometimes become offensive and even threatening; requiring approval of all comments can be one solution, but it's suboptimal because it hurts the flow of discussion.

blogger and wordpress support all of these features. You may need to enable them in the preferences, however.

3. choose an interesting, googleable name.

"Poetry blog" is a bad name, because nobody will find it through google. "My thoughts on poetry" is even worse. You want something that people can remember, and can find by googling the title. If you can't think of anything, just use your name.

4. use HTML codes, not special characters.

This is a minor thing, but instead of typing an em-dash by (for example) typing option-shift-dash, either type it as "--" or &mdash;. Similarly for accented characters: in your HTML code don't type é — type &eacute;. It's a technical thing, but depending on a user's browser, when I type é, it may appear as something crazy like "?" on someone else's machine. Verse magazine has this problem, for example. It has to do with competing, incompatible character encoding sets: you can only trust ASCII.

aesthetic

1. keep the text column narrow. Wide columns — especially ones that expand to the size of the user's browser — are hard to read.

Ron Silliman violates this rule, for example. You should be using a fixed (inch or pixel) width for your text. Obviously, I think my particular choice is best (430 pixels) and many services these days have a default around that. Aim for something larger than a (print) New York Times column but definitely narrower than a usual-sized hardback.

2. long paragraphs are hard to read on a screen. Keep them short and even break up paragraphs that you would consider fine in printed prose.

This is not a sign of the coming apocalypse, people, relax. Paragraphs are a convention, not a semantic unit. John Tranter, editor of Jacket, has a nice history of the paragraph at his style guide.

Too many excellent bloggers violate this rule, and produce a massive river of text that seems to never end. Josh over at cahiers does sometimes. Breaking down paragraphs into smaller units makes things much easier on the eye. Note that if you follow suggestion (1) in this section, it becomes even more crucial to monitor the length of a paragraph.

3. pay attention to site design.

The "out of the box" layout is often very nice, and blogger, for example, has a large number of choices. A few suggestions follow.

Do not have a white background. Computer screens (so far) work by emitting, not reflecting light. A white background, in other words, is shining light directly into your reader's eye, and it's wearying. Use an off white, yellowish or brownish background to reduce fatigue.

Consistent fonts. A single font is fine; two is a maximum. Always use a serif font for the main text; sans-serif is "punchier" and avant gardy, but is hard to read over long passages.

Keep the bells and whistles down. A blog is a vehicle for text and links. Steer clear of distractions like animated gifs and "utilities" (like "word clouds") that are amusing for about six seconds.

4. lowercase is awesome.

Don't get all livejournal on us ("i was listenign to eliott smith he is the best today and thniking about ctutting myself"), but studies (including a famous one comissioned at the invention of the telegraph) show that lowercase is easier to read. A BLOCK OF ALL-CAPS IS HORRIFIC AND IRRITATING, but there are many places (e.g., in titles) where you can go all-lowercase. (For emphasis, always use italics.)

content

1. be humble towards your readers.

Your readers know more than you do, and they are doing you a favor by choosing to read your blog. Never adopt a tone that suggests otherwise.

A common violation of this is the "I'm sorry I haven't posted anything recently." If you think about that for a second, what it says is "I am so awesome, and have inadvertently hurt you by interrupting the flow of my genius." I always find it irritating.

A bizarre violation of this is at Reginald Shepherd's blog, where he used to take time out to insult poetry blogs, poetry bloggers, and people who use the internet in general.

In general, solicit feedback from your readers and do not freak out when it contradicts you. Self-deprecation, when it doesn't violate (3) below, goes a long way.

2. be informative.

Connected to suggestion (1) in this section. People who read you want to be told something they don't already know. Justify your interruption of their precious lifeforce by actually having something new to say. A list of links to random things on the web does not count as informative: contribute some of your own thoughts on the matter.

Being informative often means being specific. Yet another post on Billy Collins, pro or con, is not informative — we've all said and heard enough — but a post on his editorship of Best American Poetry 2006, for example, will be much more interesting.

3. be provocative, but stand by your words.

Love him or hate him, Seth is the classic example. Don't be a troll, but if you have something to say, say it and don't hedge your statements. Give your readers something to push against. If you do find yourself hedging your statements, you may simply have misunderstood your own point; try again from the beginning.

Another great example is School of Quietude. While Ron's added nuance to the term in later posts, it was a smart, provocative choice and an immense service to the blogosphere in as much as it articulated something important we all felt in one way or another.

4. be part of the community.

Especially important for beginning bloggers who are trying to find a readership, it's good advice for all. Don't be stingy with links to other blogs; take up things of interest that other people are talking about and contribute your own thoughts. Comment at other people's blogs. And don't just visit the biggest of them all — Ron's — but seek out similarly small-fry blogs (like rhubarb!) and join in.

Sarah Lang : from The Work of Days

(forthcoming from Coach House Press)

For three inches, I turned the knife in your neck. I watched
with the word covet. For forty-five days, I missed your hair.

In a borrowed apartment, I held this contentment. You gagged
as a slit shell. Your eyes opened as the blue wing of a jay, as
yawn. My tongue in your ear listened to your throat

sing. Those weren't scabs you fingered, but you always did sail
clean on through. For your olives and dry cleaning. For your happiness,
I opened as an unused window, without grace and wailing.

@

Sarah Lang is an old friend, Canadian, and graduate of the Brown singing-school, where she studied with, among others, C. D. Wright. The Work of Days is forthcoming from a press, Coach House, that publishes a large fraction of what is worth reading from North America and does so with terrific production values. Oh the paper, touch the paper. You can preorder a copy from amazon.com and find her tour schedule at the book's website.

The surface of Sarah's work is a kind of click-clack, like beads knocking together as they slide down the string:

We had chemistry, if not a future. You tell the story. Your hand within hairs' reach. In comparison, I'm largely asexual. I am largely asexual. Eating berries saved from batter. It would have never occurred to me. The feeder near empty. The dew not evaporated. I wish you wouldn't wear that.

Click-clack's the dominant sound of the work, and it's a hard sound to sustain without serious OSHA noncompliance. Poets included, we want a prose structure to a long work and more often than not a book of poems (when it's not a pure miscellany) acheives this by making each poem serve as a sentence. While each individual poem in a collection can be as syntactically bare as you like, they knit together in such a way as to form clauses, subclauses, and all the usual ornaments of prose.

That solution breaks when a poem stretches over seventy pages. One of Sarah's many solutions — Sarah's a fox — is the modulation of diction, as in the opening stanza:

Hibiscus, hibiscus, hibiscus, rolls
of a hip, an eye remembers like a
great flowering: (this is my big break).

It's one solution, but it's not her only one. One of the most important things about this book, indeed, is that it doesn't rely on this alone. Flipping the diction switch from high to demotic is something I think poets today largely import from John Ashbery; it's valid move, but it also gets tiresome. In the end it's also a barrier, a firewall, to authenticity: ha, the modulation says, you were taking me seriously but really I'm you're a dork.

A different modulation is rhythmic, which you can see in the quoted material above. The clipped conclusion — set-up by the pitter-patter, the ear is waiting for more material after "wailing" — is a subtler way to stop the clock:

        For your happiness,
I opened as an unused window, without grace and wailing.

The Work of Days is a psychological portrait, not an intellectual one, and in the end it's this global constraint that brings a readable syntax to the work. It's not an argument-making book, it's a reason-making one, and the engagement it provides is that of following the convolutions of a thought:

I am overmedicated. I feel overmedicated.
I am being overmedicated. I was most definitely
overmedicated. I mean I thought I felt
I could be overmedicated. I thought I was over —

overmedicated, I mean. I thought I felt.

What do thoughts look like? Regular rhubarb readers know I have a bee in my bonnet about innate language capacity and the notion of mentalese — see my essay in the most recent absent. In a nutshell, I think it's clear that any portrait of thought and emotion that claims, as Sarah's work does, to be "close to the bone" is going to involve some choice of conventions.

You can see this in Joyce's portraits of thought in Ulysses. Does Joyce provide an accurate image of consciousness? It's the wrong question. What he does, instead, is torque the usual argument-making sentence in a new way and names it "thought". As does Virginia Woolf, a writer I can't yet enjoy but that's certainly important for Sarah.

In any case, the torque that a writer applies is going to be influenced by whatever she thinks about the psyche. For Joyce (for example, and scholars please correct), that's a big lump of Freud.

We, on the other hand, live in one of the most pscyhologized societies in history; every third day it seems the New York Times releases another article on depression, bipolar disorder, talk-therapy, and psychotropic drugs, and it immediately hits the most-emailed list. Its a discourse that's been wrested from the humanists, a matter for neurologists and when it comes to words they're treated like instruments and quantified, as in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

So a reading of the mind such as Sarah is doing is of necessity going to be an insurgent one. It's going to take some things seriously &mdash feelings under duress — and dismiss other things — the supposed challenge to the autonomy that effective medication provides — that "we" as a society don't.

That alone is worth the price of admission, I think. Sarah's certainly not alone in writing out of, instead of about, emotion. But I think she is unique in doing so in such a sustained, uncompromising, fashion. Woolf was not the first to make her characters conscious, but she was the first to let them remain so. I think it's the case that Sarah is doing something as radical, and important, as that.

the youth of today

Mark Wallace over at Thinking Again has some nice remarks about "absent magazine and the youth of today." I'd like to elaborate on the comment I dropped in his box, which I quote here:

***************

Hello Mark -- well I certainly can't speak for anyone but my entire generation.

I think a crucial part of the poetics of the YOT [youth of today] definitely comes in prose or pseudoprose form. As for what this prose does — I think a large part of it is us recovering notions that are out of date or out of fashion in the contemporary academy. You can see this in my essays in absent, as well as for example in Small Fry's remarks [in a previous comment]:

It was the phrase "transparency of affect" that made me think of Kristeva's idea of the "ethical text," which no one seems to care about any more.

Quantifying over Kristevas, Small Fry is definitely not alone in having this sensation that the most important ways to talk about poetry have been pushed aside or even hushed up.

To put it another way, YOTs are smart and often prosy and theoretical, but I think the biggest contrast is that despite all of this they feel themselves to be in opposition to the academy. (We YOTs have stories we tell of the old days when avant garde poetry was happily a wing of the comp lit department.)

To put it a third way: "recovery projects", and the notion of neglectorinos, are crucial parts of the moment. Take Juliana Spahr's recovery of Inger Christensen, for example.

***************

Other great YOTs engaged in recovery projects both ex- and implicit include I think Eugene Ostashevsky (explicitly with his translations of OBERIU, the "last avant garde" of Soviet Russia) and Lara Glenum.

Not suprisingly, one of the journals most in touch with "the moment" — Octopus magazine — has an entire section each issue devoted to "recovery projects". Meanwhile, it was CA Conrad who invented and popularized the notion of the "neglectorino", which has found such an audience that I doubt there are many readers of rhubarb who haven't encountered the word by now. I think the universality of this, where it seems like everyone has a neglectorino, is driven by two things:

1. recovery projects are a necessity of the moment. We have followed for far too long the shifting tastes of an academy that has increasingly marginalized notions of poetry, and poetry itself, that do not fit comfortably within a narrowing consensus. Despite the exponential rise in scholarship within the academy, the domain of concern itself has narrowed to exclude a great deal of value: for me, as you can see in my absent essays, one of these is the question of innate language capacity.

2. technology has allowed insurgent readers and readings to come to the fore. "Lost" journals can be scanned and uploaded; "lost" books can be found at amazon and the other used-book stockists, often for a fraction of their original cover price — then their discovery can be promoted by a single reader on a blog or listserv without the need to pass the same filtering that's made them neglected in the first place.

My latest favourite neglectorino, Victor Segalen, I found browsing at one of the dying breed of used poetry bookstores; readers today who want to follow along can find more than a dozen copies of his work, sold online, in that particular edition alone; Wesleyan press, in charge of the new edition, can use the internet to put up facsimilies of the original French/Chinese edition.

One of the nice things about this moment — that distinguishes it from "recoveries" of the past — it that it's largely an outsider affair. We're not the first generation to do this, but I think we are the first generation where someone like me, a reader with hardly (!) an encyclopedic knowlege of poetic history, and certainly no connection to a school of a previous generation, can join in. Previous recoveries were driven by the acolytes of the same forgotten geniuses that were being recovered; technology I think has democratized this to a great extent.

reading Victor Segalen

I was out on the East End a few weeks ago and stopped by Canio's Books in Sag Harbor; Canio's, run now by Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka, has the best, hands down, selection of poetry used I've ever seen in a small-town bookshop, and if you're ever in the neighbourhood, stopping by is an absolute requirement.

Browsing at Canio's I picked up a copy of Segalen's Steles, in a gorgeous edition by the Lapis Press from 1987. It's been republished by Wesleyan with a different translator [1] ; to read along with rhubarb, this is the edition you want, translated by Michael Taylor (apparently there were only one thousand copies printed.)

Victor Segalen is not much known, I'll wager, by most readers of rhubarb (although my impossibly well-read companion of the last few days has not only read him, but read his bizarre novel on the Forbidden Palace — and I'm sure I've missed some posts out there in blogworld: please advise in the comments.) Perhaps the most surprising fact is that Steles, which reads at first glance like a blogburst Pound, was originally published (by the Lazarist fathers at Beidang [2] in Northern China) in 1912, three years earlier than the first pages of the Cantos. Here's the opening passage from the first poem, The Sealless Reign:

To honor the recognized Sages; to count the Righteous; to repeat to each and all that this man or that once lived, and was noble, and his countenance virtuous,

All that is well. But it is no concern of mine: so many mouths are filled with those words! So many refined brushes toil over set phrases and forms,

That the memorial tables piar off like watchtowers along the Imperial hghway, five thousand paces on five thousand paces.

Segalen's few opening poems circle, in an almost science fictiony way, around the Christ myth — they read a little like the opening of Robert Graves' I, Claudius:

Reason is not offended: certainly, a western virgin conceived two thousand years ago, since two thousand years before her, Chiang-yüan, a maiden without blemish, became a mother among us: having trod on the spoor of the Sovereign Lord Heaven.

Note the dating here: like the Buffy fanatics who have continued to produce episodes and even seasons of their show long after cancellation, Segalen is writing what is essentially bizarre fan fiction continuations of the Chinese empire — "the Promulgation of the Empire of the heart in the dynasty of no dynastic accession," the literal reading of the ideograms that open the book (and printed to the right here.)

Segalen's poetry in Steles has a certain air of chinoiserie: telegraphic where the West would be expansive, expansive where the West relies on context. At points there's a strange air, just below the surface of perception, of a long row of green-striped Penguin classics.

But it's below the surface, something you only notice turning on your highly-tuned C21 exoticism sensors. Reading Segalen qua Segalen is a stunning experience: more than crazy enough to keep his strange dialect going at a fair clip above parody, you buy moments like this by the bushelful: In the Empire West of the center of the world:

Everything is miraculous, unexpected: confusion reigns: the Queen of shifting desires holds court.

Segalen's structure — this is no man to issue a miscellany — is based around the funeral steles found in the Chinese countryside. An absolutely incoherent description in the introduction gives no help picturing them, but their role is intensely symbolic — Segalen is mostly interested in the vast world-through-the-wardrobe that they mark — and it's no great matter.

According to Segalen — and, unlike Pound, he was actually an anthropologist, with a University in France named after him now — the orientation of a Stele mirrors its content; Southwards is for the decree (and this section opens the book, and includes the remarks on the virgin and the center of the world quoted above.) The introduction continues,

Out of deference, the Steles of friendship will look due north, the pole of virtuous black. The Steles of love will face east, so that dawn may embellish their softer features and soften their harder ones. The Steles of war and heroes will be raised towards the blood-soaked west, the palace of red. Others, Steles by the wayside, will follow the casual sweep of the road.

(A final section rounds out the book — Steles of the "perfect" Middle.) Segalen has a lot of the things one associates with Pound's moment: obsession with the counter-reformationary; an intense, laser-like focus on a small (but diverse) vocabulary; a fondness for apostrophe and exclamation; a complete disregard for the contemporary connotations of words when they happen to have precise ancient meanings. [3]

On the other hand, it's hard to avoid, especially on a second reading after you've gotten used to the relentless intoning, that Segalen is a romantic in a way that Pound is not; Segalen lives in the "Empire of the Heart" and he plays both Emperor and Subversive. It's hard to imagine Segalen developing a theory of usura, but he has cet obscur objet du désir:

I have exhausted my life inventing ways to gratify her. Though drawing night to the utmost limit of my strength, I am still hunting for ways to satisfy her.

It amuses her to tear silk: I will give her a hundred feet of singing fabric. But she has heard it shrill too often.

It amuses her to see wine flowing and people reeling in wine: but wine is not pungent enough, and its vapors no longer go to her head.

To humor her I'll offer my threadbare soul: tearing, it will sing beneath her fingers.

And I'll spill my blood like wine from a goatskin:

And a smile will bend over me then.

The Steles of friendship are strong, heady stuff; perhaps it's my writing this on the CTA to O'Hare, and thence to Tucson, that makes by the wayside (Steles for travellers) which merges with the final section, Steles of the middle, particularly attractive. It's not that Segalen does not travel well: it's that he doesn't travel at all, and perhaps his peripatetic life at the time (as a medical officer in the French army) required a kind of poem that sits, that branches nowhere, a writing that meets the ultimate of non-associativity:

Let the wise Lord of Lu count his ponies with pride; they are stout, round, many horses in the plain: some yellow, some black, others both yellow and black.

Let him harness them as he will, in pairs or by fours; let him be driven in safety wherever he wishes.

I am driven by the unbridled mares of my thoughts— one by one, two by two, four by four, drawing my ceaseless chariot.

Beautiful mares of every hue: one purple and roan, one pale black with hooves of copper.

I do not lay my hands on them. I do not steer them: their breakneck pace makes me avert my eyes from where they are taking me.

Decrees, the first section, speaks in the voice of the Emperor; it's a partial solution to Segalen's problem of how to run a world that no longer exists. But here, with this yellow, black, purple, roan, copper: there is nothing to take you anywhere but along with; it is in this last, highly I-centered section that Segalen's work comes completely alive as the voice of a One, a Subject who is the subject of an Empire. That, in the end, is Segalen's first appeal to the reader — inhabit the world I have founded — and definitely an ecopoetic moment.

Segalen, I think, is of most interest to readers and not critics, who would need in their writing to push past the Fenollosaesque baggage that Segalen (it seems it must be true) carries along. If anything, I think the most inspired reading of him would understand him as one of the greatest examples — since Prospero — so far of the academic mind gone deleriously, traumatically wrong. Segalen's work — considered deeply, as I have yet to do — may best be interpreted with him in the frame, as "about" the pitfalls of knowing so hard that telephones and truck stops disappear.

[1]. Wesleyan, I have just discovered, have a massive amount of critical information on the Steles and Segalen — all of it online at steles.org.

[2]. There is bizarrely little information about Beidang online. Wikipedia mentions it not once; google maps does not recognize it. Creative googling uncovers that it is a populated place in Zhejiang province. More information sought! (The Lazarists, by the way, are responsible for De Paul in Chicago.)

[3]. Excepting the first in that list, a debased form of such writing is what I've called in a number of blog posts, and now in an essay in absent, Swensenism, after its major practicioner, Cole Swensen. I've hammered enough at this point and at some moment you reach, in negative criticism, diminishing returns. I hereby break my staff on this issue, and happily refer the interested to past posts on the subject — e.g., silence == freedom?, the defeasible pause and Cole Swensen's The Glass Age.)

the end of wikipedia as we know it

I used to be far more involved in wikipedia than I am these days, so it was a surprise for me to learn about flagged revisions [1]. There's a lot of jargon and coining in the roll out: "surveyors", "sightings", "flagging", as well as a great deal of secrecy -- "ordinary" users were notified only by accident and the notice was quickly taken down. [2] The executive summary is that "edit this page" will now become "suggest an edit to this page." [3]

Editing privileges, now nearly uniform across all users, will be restricted so that a small number of people -- an as-yet undertermined number, but I estimate around 1% 0.4% [4] of the userbase -- will be able to veto any content change before it's shown. You will be able to "edit" a wikipedia page, but the edit will not appear to the world at large until it is approved by this new class of "surveyors."

To understand wikipedia, you have to understand the bizarre class system that has evolved. There are on the order of five million "editors" -- people who contribute under usernames or anonymously -- who create and edit content on the site. "Above" them is a class of "administrators": these are less than 0.04% of the users on the site, and they have what are (accurately) known as "janitorial" privileges -- they can edit more closely to the bone. (There are also a tiny number of "bureaucrats" and "stewards": these people are in regular contact with the people who fund the servers -- I know very little about this rather secretive group.)

A recent New Yorker article noted that the administrators contribute the vast majority of edits to the site, and claimed that the "true" editorial control rests with these particularly active group; other articles have even attributed the majority of the content to a "Gang of 500." In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: the administrators do contribute the most discrete editing units, but actually create or modify very little content.

Much of their time is spent not on the "mainspace" (as the bulk of the wiki is known -- all of the articles), but in the "project" space, where they hang out and discuss administrative matters. Nearly all of the actual content is contributed by anonymous users and editors who show up, contribute a great deal in a small number of edits, and then disappear -- you can read more about this at Aaron Swartz's blog, where he does a detailed study of this phenomenon.

Give someone a badge, and they'll act differently. While administrators contribute very little of substance to the encyclopedia -- the overwhelming majority of any article you read will have nothing to do with them -- they do have to occupy themselves with something. Until now, that's included catching trolls and carrying out long legalistic "arbitrations" against them, managing article deletions and acutally -- let's be fair -- carrying out a number of important janitorial tasks the position was created for.

But any bureaucratic class will attempt to gain more control, and the administrators are no different. While anonymous and drive-by users contribute the actual substance of value, the administrators have now pushed through a fundamental change in the project that will make them second-class citizens.

While I'm not a particularly active user, I do have more than ten thousand edits and have spent time "hanging out" in the project space; the "flagged revisions" proposal has been very little publicised (the notice that drew me to it was taken down within a few hours by an administrator who claimed the decision needed no more input from the userbase at large.)

It is claimed that it will not be implemented "against the community's wishes." However, the proposal has the support of the Foundation itself, and the new code has already been written (and paid for -- an outside contractor was hired.) There is no question that flagged revisions, barring some massive user revolt, will become fact by the end of the year.

---

[1]. In the two days since this post was made, various pages have been moved around, breaking links in this and other blog posts, without removing or significantly altering their content. In addition, various contradictory "tags" and misleading "nutshell summaries" have been added. Despite all of this activity, the proposal itself remains unchanged. New claims at the top of the linked page, made since this post went live, that "everything is in the very early stages" are false: everything has been written and paid for and it's a matter of when, not if. See remarks by administrators here; Erik Möller, a trustee of the foundation, discusses "deployment strategy" here.

[2]. Within three hours and then a single hour, with the edit summary "*sigh* ... we went through this debate months ago. We do not need to advertise this to everyone -- at present time it's about solidifying a proposal rather than bringing in the useless banter with ads". Right now, only rhubarb and Chris Lott have noted the imminent roll-out of these features. Consider this post, then, a rhubarb near-exclusive; follow the controversy here.

[3]. Although a number of administrators objected to my description in those terms, the substance of my discussion here has been confirmed repeatedly. I doubt you will see the iconic phrase changed, of course, for public relations and ideological reasons if nothing else.

[4]. See this estimate in the discussion. The idea that 20,000 users could keep up with "reviewing" the massive number of articles seems absurd of course, and I think something much higher — perhaps 5% — would be required to allow for reasonably instant (on the order of days) updates. People are still arguing over exactly how the rights are to be granted; while the version the co-founder Jimbo Wales signed his name to (and that some comments below are based on) required individual approval of each new surveyor and no specific criteria that would allow one to estimate the population of surveyors, some administrators have been more specific, with a recent version proposing a criteria that would extend the privilege to roughly 0.5% percent of the wiki userbase.) One of the many contradictory "nutshell summaries" floating around the proposal claims this includes "almost everybody."

---

Update. Jimbo Wales, wikipedia co-founder, accuses me of FUD at the top of the proposal, claiming that flagged revisions will only be applied to semi-protected/protected articles — in direct contradiction to the proposal itself, which proposes flagged revisions for the entire wiki with this only as a first "experimental" step. (One of the common phrases, that Jimbo in particular likes to use, is that "this is not unwiki" or even "this is true wiki" — "unwiki" being the wikipedia analogue of "unAmerican".)

Update. Conrad Dunkerson, an adminsitrator on the English wikipedia, continues to make false and misleading claims here (as an unregistered user), and on Chris's blog, regarding this proposal. I've banned him from further comments on rhubarb; readers interested in being told additional counterfactual things by him will have to go elsewhere.

Update. I have had to close comments completely on this post. If you have something to say either in support or opposition to this article, please post on your own blog, wikipedia user page, or what have you. I of course would appreciate a backlink to this post, especially if you criticize me; if you wish (trackbacks sometimes break), e-mail me at glas[at]freeshell.org and I will happily include a link to your article here if it can be in any way construed as a contribution to the discussion and not purely a personal insult. (If you think this is heavy-handed, you can always use blogsearch to pull up all stories related to this proposal.)

absent magazine issue two now online

absent magazine * issue two
now online at http://absentmag.org/issue02/

featuring poetry by Jasper Bernes, Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, Jack Boettcher, Tim Botta, Julia Cohen, Shanna Compton, John Cotter, Shafer Hall, Lisa Jarnot, Pierre Joris, Joan Kane, Noelle Kocot, Jason Labbe, Kathleen Ossip, The Pines, Matthew Rohrer, Kate Schapira, Mathias Svalina, Kathryn Tabb, Allison Titus and Betsy Wheeler.

in translation with Sergei Kitov and Octavo Paz.

musical work by Aaron Einbond.

prose by Joe Amato, Peter Ciccariello, Simon DeDeo, Adam Golaski, Kent Johnson, Amy Newman, Davis Schneiderman and Tyler Williams.

edited by Elisa Gabbert and Simon DeDeo; with great gratitude to Irwin Chen and his class at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

work solicited for issue three: please read guidelines at http://absentmag.org/issue02/html/guidelines.html * letters to the editor solicited: please read http://absentmag.org/issue02/html/letters.html

rhubarb at the YearlyKos

Unbeknownst to all of you, two of my roommates in college have become major bloggers and progressive movement types: Justin Krebs and Matt Stoller. Both are at the Yearly Kos (in Chicago this year) and I stopped by what appeared to be a continuous afterparty last night at the McCormick Place Hyatt. As -- I believe -- the only representative of the avant garde poetic community at the Yearly Kos, I did my best to promote your interests. Because that's what I'm all about.

rhubarb: So who are you supporting in the primaries?
New York Democratic Party State Chair: Hillary Clinton.
rhubarb: Ha ha ha good one.
(stony silence)
New York Democratic Party State Chair: I am the New York Democratic Party State Chair.
rhubarb: Yeah, but, come on, Hillary? She's awful!
(more awkward silence)
rhubarb: Wait, I get it, Hilary is Senator from New York, you have to support her.
New York Democratic Party State Chair: It's not that hard.

Talking Points Memo Guy: So poetry blogging huh?
rhubarb: Yup! It's changing everything. We're doing for poetry what you're doing for politics! I've even heard poets use the phrase "blogosphere"!
Talking Points Memo Guy: How much traffic do you get?
rhubarb: Well . . . some weeks I break twelve hundred.
Talking Points Memo Guy: We get over two hundred thousand visitors a day.

American Prospect blogger: What's the poetry blogosphere like?
rhubarb: It's great . . . very vibrant . . . kind of like a pyramid, you know, in terms of traffic, everyone visits Ron Silliman's blog . . . it trickles down from there . . .
American Prospect blogger: Who?
rhubarb: He was big in the 70s.
American Prospect blogger: What is it like politically? Do you guys get involved in politics?
rhubarb: Well, you know, most poets are like "whatever you are, I'm slightly more left wing."
American Prospect blogger: That's cute.

Campagin Manager for Mark Udall: So what do you do?
rhubarb: I'm a scientist.

silence == freedom ?

While waiting for my code to finish running on the mainframe (I love saying that, mainframe, mainframe, mainframe), I thought I would pick up the train of thought I started in the defeasible pause.

Nature is continuous; man is discrete. It's a continual tension, going back to Heraclitus and Democritus, in the history of science; today the conflict continues in the public battle between String Theory (Heraclitan) and Loop Quantum Gravity (Democritean.)

While the underlying metaphysical issues may never be settled, what is clear -- though forgotten -- is that there will always be gaps in our measurement of, and reporting on, our experience. [1]

This is not a lesson easily learned; as a young scientist you absorb very slowly a kind of necessary, not horror vacui, but rather a respect for the gaps in your data. Take the plot to the right of this paragraph, for example (click to magnify.) I've generated some discrete data (the ten Xs) from an underlaying continuous process (the solid line -- a damped harmonic oscillator.) The dashed line is just one of an infinitude of different ways that a foolish man might "connect the dots" to, seemingly, learn more than what came before -- one is taught by the school of hard knocks that, in the absence of understanding, you will draw plenty of dashed lines before you ever draw a solid one.

This simple picture, I think, hits at the most profound center of science and, indeed, the natural world that certifies it: the relation between the infinite (the continuum, the solid curve) and the finite (the Xs that mark recorded knowledge.) For some reason, we believe -- and have good reason to believe, the success of our technological society depending on it -- that we can reconstruct, from a finite number of Xs, a true solid line. Indeed, this is true of both our knowledge of the damped harmonic oscillator and our logical laws -- laws we believe hold absolutely even though we have arrived at them by necessarily finite means.

That's a side point however, because such a transition, from the finite to the infinite, works only in the exact sciences. There's no equivalent move in, say, psychology: there are an infinite number of curves that one can draw between the finite data of an experienced psyche.

The dialectic of finite and infinite -- something that Alain Badiou drops headfirst into in Being and Event -- preoccupies poets today even if they don't know it. You usually don't hear these two terms in poetic discussion: instead, the discussion focuses on silence (or, more pretentiously, the void) and freedom.

Freedom -- the heritage of the language poets who wanted to give readers the (entirely imagined, I believe) freedom of the writer -- and silence -- the heritage of, in the beginning, the visual poets -- center on this marked problem: how to draw a curve through the Xs. Contemporary poetry today I believe is still foolishly thrilled by -- enthralled to -- the idea that the fewer Xs there are, the greater number of curves you can draw [2].

I think it's time for us to admit that this story is dead, died, an ex-story. It no longer is producing good poems. It is instead producing books of poems like Elizabeth Arnolds' or Cole Swensen's, books whose goal is to choose the most rare and exquisitely produced Xs to lovingly place down on a massive sheet of graph paper.

The problem with such an aesthetic -- indeed, I think it's less an aesthetic than a particular performance whose running time is now far too long -- is easily seen in the blurbs and pobiz review that accompany books like these. Blurbs that, like the infinitude of curves through those Xs above, seem totally interchangeable, totally arbitrary.

Perhaps there are some people who, like the doodling undergraduate, like to draw random curves through points. I think a large number of readers today have sometimes forced themselves to do it to justify the price of another $20 hardcover. I think, also, that behind the bluster of James Matthew Wilson's recent essay is a hearty sickness with this kind of work.

Indeed, for all of Wilson's love for bizarre 19th century aesthetics, his frustration with contemporary poetry seems to occur in part because he's reading the way the silence=freedom crowd have told us is the only modern way to do so: painstakingly connecting the dots. Go back to Wayne Koestenbaum's poem: I think the way we should be reading here is for the Xs, so to speak: we should be looking at the data, the experiences, the reported finitude -- instead of making irritating stabs into the unknown void, constructing one of (literally) innumerable "readings" to satisfy some critical apparatus that should long have been discarded.



[1]. To fit in with the phenomenologically loaded manner of speaking in poetry criticism, I use this term, experience, for which you may substitute "nature" depending on the degree of realism in your metaphysics.

[2]. Mathematically, because of the bizarre properties of infinite, this is untrue. However, it's an intuitive idea that in practice is actually a useful belief to hold.

the defeasible pause

One of the few print journals I read "for the poetry" as well as for the articles is the Boston Review. I used to read Pequod similarly, but it is very hard to get and as far as I can tell (my only source is Labyrinth Books in New York City) hasn't come out in a long while; the only other journals I am sure to get the latest issue of are Conjunctions and the Chicago Review.

In any case, the poetry editor at the B.R. now is Ben Paloff, who is not only a terrific essayist, poet and translator but also (for those tracing the network) an Old Boy -- we studied together as undergraduates in a class with Peter Sacks. [1] I dropped Ben a line a while ago and agreed to write a "microreview" of Elizabeth Arnold's Civilization -- it should be appearing in the July issue, on the stands soon.

As much as I love the B.R., I have found the microreviews to be -- more often than not -- simply extended blurbs (blurbs without a back cover -- a sad sight similar to that of over-dressed women lining the back of a nightclub they shouldn't have been admitted to.) In taking on the strange task of reviewing an entire book in a single paragraph I hoped to shake things up a little.

I found Elizabeth's evenness of tone an interesting book-long choice -- although a more unsympathetic reading would be that "choice" is the wrong word and Elizabeth's range is simply limited. Civilization seems deeply phoned-in, and whether you consider that a sort of aggressively minimalist endeavour, or just par for the course in contemporary poetry depends on whether or not you see the glass as half full. But since I wrote that review -- nearly five months ago now -- the kind of poetry that Civilization represents has not worn well on me.

Bored with its subject matter, bored with language: in a book ostensibly celebrating its author's wide arena of concern (civilization!) we spend more time -- as if on a Greyhound ride with a tedious companion -- letting things drop. I don't have my copy to hand, and I don't want to re-excerpt lines from the microreview itself, but three of the poems from the book appear on Verse Daily.

My Father's Face

a civilization
falling out of its accustomed

stand amidst the world.

He is a happening in the air around him
happening less

even as his face regains its youth
though he is dying.

Why not grimace?

He never liked to travel.
But his likings and dislikings going,

he could care less that he'd ever cared --

File under -- at best -- failure of nerve. Writing about her father's Alzheimer's, Elizabeth seems, well -- bored; the most powerful rhetorical effect here seems to be the encouragement given to the reader to care as little as her father does. It begins with such a bang -- a civilization falling out of the sky like the opening of the Satanic Verses -- only to end with a shrug.

Well, not quite a shrug; we need a new entry in the handlist to describe this emergent rhetorical device. Call it the defeasible pause. The defeasible pause is different from a weighty pause, in as much as the weighty pause has an unambiguous referrent. You know what a weighty pause is on about, whereas the meaning of the defeasible pause, well, infinitely defeasible.

Regular rhubarb readers (the trip-Rs) are probably learning that my bête noir these days is Cole Swensen and the vaugely-assembled literary movement one might term Swensenism [2]; the defeasible pause is a critical device for them, but Elizabeth may be the first member of the circle to write a poem that is entirely a defeasible pause (and to publish it in a book!):

Solstice

We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun!

What does Elizabeth mean? Is she amused? Shocked? Does she mean "how awesome to have such a bizarre belief"? Or perhaps "how awesome that history threw up such a bizarre belief"? Or perhaps we are simply enjoined to laugh along with the rest of the "we"? [3] Or to scrunch our eyes critically at them?

The defeasible pause, at first pass, means whatever you want it to mean: it means "fill in the reading", it means "work for free." It is an invitation to a kind of complicity with the author, a kind of strict liability of language in which to read a defeasible pause is to already be committed to its relevance. The language poets never used it, but perhaps they can be blamed, à la Marx, for the conceptual ground they laid for its current day prominence.

Katie Peterson, friend and poet and potential blogger, thinks quite differently about Elizabeth's work in a detailed essay in Harp and Altar. I'll use a passage she chooses to excerpt:

(outraged) "Why can't we just--"
(she hangs up) "talk?"
And the door slams in my head: No way through that.

Or when the kitchen's swinging door brushed
past and past its frame the mewing disapproval, distrust

unfaced-up-to, wordless--so that,
nothing to contain it,

   instantly

      it's everywhere

         throughout my being.

But if I call her on it,
nothing. Insist?

The line between us axed: No way through that. [4]

To me there are many infelicities in these lines, the most pedestrian being "throughout my being," whose uninflected, earnest silliness would, one thinks, not have escaped an editor's pen if poetry books were actually made to sell poems instead of careers. [5] But at least the speaker has a stake in "throughout my being" actually meaning something, whereas "no way through that" is this poem's defeasible pause, the phrase whose true freight is implied and never given.

I call the pause defeasible (not to belabor the point) because the sense one has is not only that the reader is asked to invest it with a meaning, to "fill in the blank" and finish (or continue) the poem, but also the creepy feeling the poet herself lies behind it all, guarding the curtain. "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all," the poet of the defeasible pause says to us whenever we produce a reading that makes the poem ridiculous, or pretentious -- and such readings, when it comes to the defeasible pause, are in abundance. No exception here, where the phrase (and context) itself seems clipped from a Chick Lit novel ("There's no way through that," she said to herself in the taxi home from the party, as Richard's incapacity for emotional intimacy became clear.)

Indeed, the defeasible pause is, in the end, a pause that never actually means; such a creature exists in limbo, a kind of negative theology. It means everything and nothing; its true purpose is to generate an aura of depth, of beyond-language, to attach to the poet. At best, it's a gnomic utterance for the psychoanalyist to unpack over the course of therapy -- but you'd struggle to find it in the Confessionals, who were all too frustrated with totemic personal touchstones to drag them into the Dream Songs. I've written critically of the 20th century commonplace "end on an image and don't explain", a suggestion from I believe Richard Hugo's Triggering Town; here we don't end on an image but rather a sigh.

It's interesting to note -- while we're slinging mud these days at poetry bloggers -- that Elizabeth's blurbers come exclusively from the "traditional" print world. Agni writes "For this commitment to both autobiographical honesty and aesthetic risk, [Arnold's first book] should be valuable to anyone who has been waiting for where contemporary American poetry is going". I was unable to find the review from which this was taken, although the quote from the previous sentence, however, has had quite a life online -- which seems like a rather usual fate for most reviews whose wallowing praise seems designed, like a virus, to inject a small packet of blurb DNA into the body poetic.

The notice paid to Elizabeth by blogger Nicholas Downing ("not his real name" [6]) in Galatea Resurrects has been more detailed, but less enthusiastic: "sincerity is not enough." To me, the diagnosis of sincerity is perhaps too kind.

***

[1]. In my peripatetic voyage through academia, I've had the chance to observe up-close the poetry scenes at a number of Universities. Harvard has produced a number of excellent poets lately, although I think it's clear that they tilt towards the more traditional "clarity" forms -- undoubtedly due to the influence of Helen Vendler. Helen (as we proudly referred to her out of earshot) is a necessary port-of-call for the impressionable young; her appreciations of "the canon" are for many the first encounter with the put-your-hand-in style of reading that -- for all my post-college slay-the-father avant garde tastes -- I try to carry through on rhubarb.

Cambridge University and environs I've talked about elsewhere; recently some of the poets I met there were featured in a special issue of the Chicago Review, which I highly recommend picking up. The influence of the University -- where students still have units on the New Criticism! -- means that the Cambridge scene feels like some bizarre counterpoint of Harvard and Buffalo. It's interesting to note that the scene is very open; Americans like myself who voyage over are happily absorbed into the language amoeba; Cambridge poetry, like paper and anarchism, has a broad back and can bear anything.

Princeton's poetry "scene" is negligible; many of the writing faculty (Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison) are present only in a highly theoretical sense, and the only writer I met and studied with as a graduate student was Paul Muldoon. I am a great fan of Paul's work, but his class was deeply uninspiring -- in part because the undergraduates filled the Princeton stereotype (when seeking knowledge, they do so with trepidation and a concern for the canon, and when not seeking knowledge -- most of the time -- they are looking for a job at Merrill Lynch, or a marital alliance with someone who has), and in part because Paul for some bizarre reason structured the class around the imitation of forms.

Informants tell me that there is life elsewhere on campus, poetically speaking, but I never saw it. The "independent" support for poetry is nil -- the recently deceased Micawber's, for all the good things I could say about it did precisely zero for poetry readings and the community; now that Labyrinth is opening a branch, perhaps they will shake things up.

My most recent appointment is at the University of Chicago, where things are very interesting. The Chicago culture is dominated by a kind of academic fetishism that far exceeds the Ivys and in its sadder forms devolves into a kind of neuroticism of influence; though you might expect that leads to some pretty traditional verse, I've seen fantastic work come out of the community (and reviewed some on rhubarb -- Kathryn Tabb and Jenna Coughlin.) Thibault Roualt, another recent U of C graduate is now at the Brown University avant garde epicenter, and I'll be looking at his work later in the year.

[2]. Sometimes I think Swensenism is the dark side of elliptical poetry.

[3]. As with all "we"s in poorly constructed poems, the only possible meaning is "people like you and me, you know."

[4]. There are loads more spaces in the original, but the blog column is too narrow to reproduce them, and when it comes to massive amounts of artfully constructed whitespace, "in for a pound, in for a penny" seems to be the rule.

[5]. As I've been yammering on people all over these days, one of the main reasons for the failures of contemporary poetry has to be that before a poetry book is even published, it's been paid for through the collection of contest (and now "reading") fees. How on Earth we can expect an art where the end product is a financial epiphenomenon to produce much of worth is beyond me; scratch that -- it's clear we don't.

[6]. "Word on the street" is that saying something mean about a poet who outranks you will harm a career; nothing could be further from the truth (unless you plan to make a career on blurb-vapor alone -- a choice I do not recommend.)

C. D. Wright : from One Big Self

(pub. Copper Canyon)

Prepare to exit the forest of men and women

Louisiana bumper sticker: JESUS DON'T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT US

It's a great day to die, a great day to leave the body, he told the press before his Easter execution

When I go, I want my lips Smyth-sewn, none of that perfect-bound crap it doesn't last

And burn me up I don't want any more real estate

No one promised you the light or the morrow

Mother Helen predicts you will be doing better moneywise between March and May

In your past life you had something to do with animals
She sees you in a hosptial with animals way back in the 1800s

After all, you are not Gramsci, she said

Qui facit per alium facit per se

Sounds dirty doesn't it

I wanted to offer you the bread of charity,

Mercy, etc.

When she said she would write the book
he said what direction

Take this down, then burn it

My faulty exchatology pardon my french

The lovebugs hitting the windshield like something electric

Jack and Jill the pastor at St. Gabriel calls them

Wonderful news Sissy had seven little catahoulas
Mr. Redwine in ecstasy

@

With lasting gratitude to Deborah Luster and to Jack Woody, and to the men and women of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, Transylvania; Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, St. Gabriel; and Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola.

"In a capitalist country," as Frank O'Hara once remarked, "fun is everything. Fun is the only justification for the acquisitive impulse, if one is to be honest." -- Steven Evans, The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises

I've quoted these lines from Steve before, and I keep coming back to them because they hit at the heart of a lot of my own reading of contemporary poetry, done, mainly, in the spirit of "fun". Most poetry, read right, is indeed loads of "fun"; I think it's important to decide in those cases whether one is equivocating on the notion as it appears in O'Hara's quote. Even in a book like this connection of everyone with lungs, fun -- or "joy", or "pleasure" -- is lurking like a depth charge.

C.D.'s new book you might consider a corrective; a book about something so defiantly unpleasant -- prisoners doing hard time in Louisiana -- that the question of fun never arises. The pleasure -- and here's there's no question of accidentally conflating it with fun -- comes with an edge of deep discomfort.

aestheticisation looms when talking about a poem made from this "material", if only because of the hack writers who, lacking the ability to write something taken seriously, hide behind a weighty subject. It's difficult to excerpt C.D. because there is a narrative, a desire to tell stories ("I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech" she writes in the introduction) that falls flat when an excerpt is read (as it always is) in the lyric mode.

Indeed, reading One Big Self I find myself reading twice: once for myself and once for an excerpt that will allow me to make the case for C.D.'s work in a few lines. These are difficult to find. Take this, from early on (the em dash C.D. has established as a way to attribute direct speech):

We're both here because of love. -- Zobonia of herself and her best friend

I am highly hypnotizable.

I would wash that man's feet and drink the water.

These lines, taken out of context, fall apart; hypnotizable in the text is arbitrary, a surprise, just as much as it is in excerpt, but is inflected as it cannot be out of context, a kind of lifting off. Here as a third of three lines, it just seems like a fragment we'd have no trouble calling pretentious if encountered in a single page poem. As for I would wash . . . -- well it's again the case that, excerpted, these lines seem staged, hard to account for as real whereas within a much larger stream they power along.

It's not to say that every line of C.D.'s 80-odd page poem is golden; there are lines here that do seem unworthy of their subjects, that seem too far removed, that take conceptual, intellectual angles it seems out of fear-to-touch. Then there are the successes; here are both on the same page:

The septuagenarian murderer knits nonstop

One way to wear out the clock

In Tickfaw miracles occur

This weekend: the thirteenth annual Cajun joke contest

They will/will not be sending the former governor to Big Gola

I pinch a cigarette and stare at Rachel's wrist scars

By their color they are recent

That the eye not be drawn in

I suggest all courage is artificial

Her sister did not fail

Noses amuse us and hers not less so

I think it's clear here where C.D. is drawing on a direct line to unimaginable experience, and where she is dropping the partition, shutting off this line, to speak in the voice of the seminar leader ("That the eye not be drawn in", for me, is this second mode, the elevation of the grammar clashing with any sense of the demotic so laboriously constructed; in later passages, shriven, a strangely unevocative piece of cant clashes similarly.)

I think this slightly longer excerpt gives a sense of the difficulty of the excerpter's task: "This weekend: the thirteenth annual Cajun joke contest" could be taken from any hack's catalogue poem. I'm talking a lot about hacks here, I think one important way to read C.D. is as a flirtation with hackery, with stream-of-consciousness journalism, with the idolization of random fact. C.D. is not constructing a solid archetecture out of what she has recorded, for sure, but neither is she simply generating another interminable list poem.

To return to "this weekend" -- I think what lifts this is the collision with the immediate tangibility of the pinched cigarette and Rachel's wrist. The joke contest is observed, but the cigarette, and the scars, are experienced, and it's that motion that gives these lines a life within the reader's mind. Another way to read C.D.: as someone who wants to write a poem about oscillating between these poles.

These oscillations can last longer than a line, and as a reader attuned to the compact lyric, these are the harder ones for me to read, the ones that require I suspend the critical resources of the Imagists we've all internalized. When C.D. spends, say, a long essentially prose paragraph recounting, in clipped, relentless and -- to my ear -- dulling syntax the decay of a neighborhood, I read resentfully.

It's a different pacing from the usual -- let's call it "fun" -- reversals and pullbacks of the contemporary Typo poem I myself have written, but that particular resistable paragraph rounds out in a clipped, gnomic but definitely unprosodic moment:

Ready or not. Ø exceptions.
Don't ask.

[The phrase returns in later passages as a leitmotif, addressed, not as above to the "affulent reader", but to the inmates: "In some prisons the last cigarette is no longer permitted / Ø exceptions Don't ask."]

It's not, in other words, that C.D. cannot because of the material write as a poet (a common, pointless gambit -- "this is beyond words" -- that's a main failing of Brian Turner's Iraq war Here, Bullet), nor, even, that C.D. does not want to write as a poet, but rather that she is going to pace out these moments, give them space to breathe among facts, to connect to facts, to root around in them.

The excerpt at the top of the page, coming just after "My Dear Affluent Reader" is I think a place for an affluent reader to begin when trying to get to grips. C.D.'s game is a tricky one, and she moves from high to low, from doctoral to inmate, rapdily. I've brought up an inexpert moment above, but the Latin and what comes after -- sounds dirty doesn't it -- to me is pitch perfect. It's not quite the sound of the pedagogue -- something stranger; not the self-conscious shrugging off of education, but almost as if the speaker discovers the uneducated voice within.

Fun, so is C.D. fun? The book is one of the most readable poem-projects I've encountered in a long while; the language is syntactically light, semantically loaded, in such a way that you are unbalanced forward by the facts:

Prison towns prison motels prison movies prison books prison dreams

Voices in the air conditioning

Convict hate convict sweat convict voices in the toilet tank

this cell your dwelling; this grave your garden

Mack trapped a spider

Kept in a pepper jar

He named her Iris

Caught roaches to feed her

He loved Iris

When Iris died

He wrote her a letter

There's a careening in C.D.'s lines, a sort of unconscious recklessness, a disregard for the subtle modulations of language, and I think this is how fun is approached and redirected. Fun poems today have a grammatical humor, a kind of twisting of language, that gives them their jauntyness; C.D.'s lines here simply refuse to resolve.

They sound, in other words, like a long lead-up; we read so quickly -- these eighty pages flew by in ninety spaced-out minutes -- because we are waiting for a wrap-up, for assurance that we are still within a normal poem. We're not, at least, we are in the hands of an expert poet with little left to "prove" -- there are few, if any, baroque, unnecessary moments -- and enough skill to renounce most of the "intelligent" devices of the 21st century avant garde.

It's C.D.'s genius here that she manages to write a poem with intelligence about deep, tragic folly, and in doing so neither separate herself from the material nor give the unpleasant sense of "going native." I think that the first great -- American -- poems we recover from the direct witnesses to the invasion and occupation of Iraq will have to learn some of the things C.D. has picked up in the hell's outposts of our own country.

playing soldiers

As an offshoot from a quickly -- though not quickly enough -- deleted comment on Kasey's blog, Joshua Clover (a.k.a. Jane Dark) and I had a brief e-mail exchange about Marxism, revolutions and "The Terror", related to Kent Johnson's note that such fashionable thinkers as Alain Badiou[1] have disturbingly uncritical relations to such figures as Mao and Pol Pot.

Josh and I didn't have a very friendly exchange once he discovered that I thought Karl Marx, whatever his relevance to pleasant armchair thoughts, was entirely discredited as an economic thinker. For Josh,

Marx's descriptive abilities in re economics seem hard to gainsay even now -- do you really not think that profit comes from the differential between what what labor is paid and how much the products of that labor are sold for, less fixed infrastructural costs? I am excited to hear about your alternative description. Lacking one, it remains the case that the common *modifiable* source of misery is wage relations . . .

Josh's notion of the essential Marxist thought -- which to me seems to be just a fragment of algebra and a commonplace from the progressive movement entirely unrelated to what I understand as the torqued Hegel that is our friend K.M. -- aside, my own thoughts are that actually advocating any kind of structural economic change based on the details (as opposed to definitions?) of Marxism is akin to treating a broken leg with medicinal herbs (or, to push perhaps the one or two buttons that remain, treating schizophrenia with Freudianism instead of Abilify.)

Josh and I disagree on a great number of theoretical issues (though I doubt, for all the talk of "violence", that he actually would like to see more of it); Josh, for example, thinks violence is the "franchise of the state" whereas I think it's pretty clear from reading, say, the police reports in my neighbourhood (Hyde Park, Illinois being apparently more dangerous than Davis, California), that the overwhelming majority of violence is practiced by the poor, on the poor.

It takes a certain kind of intellectual involution (or a massive self-imposed system of censorship on your newspaper reading) to believe that the violence -- not metaphorical violence, actual violence -- in American cities is dominated by the state. Meanwhile, I think it's pretty clear that our invasion of Iraq was driven primarily by greed and a bizarre cultural confluence à la Edward Said's Orientalism than by a highly specific inexorable narrowing of profit margins at the final stage of capitalism (or some Leninist notion of the autonomy of the periphery in colonialism.)

When you talk about Marxism, it's important, I think, to abstract the data from the theory. Marx and Engels were perceptive observers of working class misery, no doubt; but their bizarre notions of how profit and wage relations progress and interact with culture seem to be, again, something interesting to think about, fertile in the same way Saint Thomas Aquinas is. (For Josh, on the other hand, my work on the Howard Dean campaign and my donations to him, Kerry and various Senators and Congressmen through actblue is "veritably theological".)

As vague as "tenured radicals" like to be about what they actually mean by "radical action" or (even more amusingly) "revolutionary" thought made praxis, to me it seems just a lot of boys playing soldier. Indeed, the country that produced Dad's Army produced also a wide array of Oxbridge corporals in the Marxist army, Eric Hobsbawm among the most famous.

Leszek Kołakowski , on the other hand -- a man who lived through the horror of iron curtain Marxism -- ends his Main Currents of Marxism with pretty much the same assesment I give: that it was, and only further developed into, an intellectually curious absurdity. A little like reading Heidegger or Nietzsche, reading Marx is a slightly nervous pleasure akin to disappearing down the rabbit hole.

It's important to note that those who play soldiers often don't like to meet them; as with Josh's (and apparently Slavoj Žižek's) reiterated complaints that demands for "revolutionary change" seem to unfairly get ordinary people to refer to Pol Pot and Stalin, simply suggesting that Kołakowski might have better insight than Hobsbawm into both the theory and pragmatics of Marxism because he lived in a Communist hell is considered an unfair move -- this from a intellectual segment likely to claim in other areas that direct experience (of being a woman, of being African-American, &c.) gives knowledge otherwise inaccessible.[2]

Which brings me around to my own writing -- on the "violence" of capitalism, on anarchism, on (forthcoming) ecopoiesis. I think Josh was confused by of my own writings -- I suppose I needed more scare quotes if, unlike Noam Chomsky, I'm going to evolve notions such as anarchism beyond the politically reasonable.

I think it is clear, for example, that there is a great deal of "violence" in captialism; what I am most engaged by is that this is a deeply indirect violence, a violence done to the psyche, to the soul, to the spirit. It's an armchair thought in many ways, but I, at least, am aware that the greatest suffering of this psychic violence are precisely those that we -- meaning people like Josh and I -- are most concerned with politically.

I am concerned, when I take political writings -- such as those from the anarchists -- that I think are often dangerous suggestions for actual political change to remake them, to give, in Harold Bloom's terminology, a strong misreading. In other fields this is not the case: for example, I think that Chomsky's notion of generative grammar is true, is factual, and that it's a fact that poets (or at least their critics) need to confront and acknoledge.

I think in the realm of the capitalist impovrishment of the spirit "all bets are off"; the quack medicine of Marxism is a tool just as much as the insane, egotistical or megalomanical, manifestos and poems that are produced by much of the avant garde. In the meantime, those who transpose what I think are reasonable, noble politics into poetry are usually some of the worst dullest poets around. You can't take Martha Nussbaum or John Rawls and make a manifesto of the anti-real.

Perhaps it's an occupational hazard that poets who engage, like me, in what I think are strong misreadings of the Western political tradition to think that they are actually thinking about politics. If there isn't a legend about the poet who wrote about having wings and thereby died falling off a tower (or, escaped from a Pisan cage, in an asylum), I hereby begin it.

---

[1]. The only Badiou I've read is his Being and Event, an insane metaphysics based around set theory. I highly recommend it both for the language, which is gorgeous, and for the fact that, indeed, if you read it and understand it you will actually learn a hell of a lot about mathematics, all the way up to Paul Cohen's set forcing. Whatever else you can say about Badiou, he's not lazy.

[2]. At least Terry Eagleton, with his distain for identity politics, is consistent on this point.

encountering the sublime : a recipe for poetic competence

Thinking about competence is easier when you're teaching. Thinking about the sublime is easier when you do it in Aspen (where I'm attending a workshop on galaxy clustering, if you want to know.) The mountains come right up to the town center; they do more than loom, they tower. They bring -- when you're not expecting it -- a slight panic of scale, a latent agoraphobia.

The encounter with the sublime -- in as much as the sublime is a name for a universal experience, just that intake of breath, the sensation of fear -- is a distinctly unpopular topic for the pomo crowd that really wants to challenge such essentialisms. In any case, if you don't know -- from direct experience -- what I'm talking about when I say the word sublime, don't read on.

Opposed to the sublime is, at this poetic moment, the musical-syntatical: the conjunction of phrases, their internal composition. Most poems that function well, that function with a certain level of competence in the ordinary sense, do most of their work here. I don't know why Gnoetry isn't on everybody's lips continually, although Anne's got the notion, but the Gnoetry machine is an example of an ordinarily competent poet.

There's nothing too mysterious about Gnoetry and how it functions; there is, however, something mysterious about why we read it as such. The power of Gnoetry comes from its database of source texts, and it has the book-keeping power to draw out the surface grammar patterns, find two instances, and cross them, chromosone-like.

Here's a gnoetic example:

I want the money
now. She brightened at the hand
on his arm about

her social frame, faced the young
man’s air of a family

weekly, as they had
no homes, immovable, how
on earth is it was.

I think it's undeniable that this single sentence, broken nicely and not quite leaving you out of speaking breath, reaches some baseline competence. To be a compentent poet today means just that you've read enough, with enough attention to the syntactical properties of what you read, that you can draw on this bank of knowledge to make new connections.

(That the Gnoetry source texts are usually "normal" things like Heart of Darkness I think explains in part why there are more writers than readers: you don't need to read your fellows much but you do need to be continually absorbing new source texts.)

While the example above was guided in its production by Eric Elshtain, I think people who feel uncomfortable with a machine competence are somewhat off-base. I think it's a coincidence (and not some sign of a coming artistic apocalypse) that our current moment allows a machine to perform at a human level in some part of the endeavour. I mean this problem with tools goes all the way back to writing-speech and the legend of Thoth and all of its Derridean recovery.

Note that gnoetry doesn't lack for meaning. There is meaning in the poem above, it means in the sense that you and I are totally comfortable allowing the words to refer and the grammatical elements to combine them into sematic structures.

What gnoetry lacks, of course, is the sublime (although it doesn't lack for a strange kind of metasublime, the sublime you experience upon learning a fact about the poem's production, viz., that is was written by a computer.) And that's a deficit that no amount of competence can overcome.

Again, it's important to be specific here. Gnoetry does indeed produce meaningful poems -- it is just that most of the semantic labor is done by the reader. And it's not even that the meaning is "too silly" or arbitrary: as I noted in my phenomenological review of a different Gnoetry poem in the Chicago Review, one's own mind is endlessly fascinating, and not silly at all if you don't want it to be.

What the division of labor does, however, is ensure that the sublime cannot enter. The sublime is the external world, the contact with the inhuman (a notion I'm getting to in an upcoming absent essay), the terror of finding something outside of a solipsistic self (in the case of Gnoetry) or a solipsistic community (in the case of much of the 'experimental' work that appears in journals with a human author.)

The lens of Gnoetry goes pretty deep, in other words. In a carefree time where reader-as-writer is both a theoretical and sociological given, our notion of meaning and its reading is certainly flexible enough to allow for gnoems. And I think, if we're honest with ourselves, gnoems do look, sound, feel, and give pleasure like ordinary poems.

It just that what is missing when you put the reader as her own taskmaster is the unsettling sublime -- which is close, as Harold Bloom notes in Agon, to the uncanny. You cannnot create the strange because as soon as it's created it's known: all we can do is pass on these private experiences like coins in circulation. Since I've been thinking about (and chatting about on UB POETICS) a few langpo lines from Lyn Heijinian, I'll end with them:

Perhaps there were three things, no one of which
made sense of the other two
A sandwich, a wallet, and a giraffe.

You can't tickle yourself.

publishing updates

It's a bit of an exciting time here in casa rhubarb. We are putting the final touches on the second issue of absent, which for me means putting the final touches on my essay fuck you, aloha, ecopoiesis. The essay is an expansion on some of my thoughts here and elsewhere on Cole Swensen, Juliana Spahr, Lisa Robertson, Marilyn Hacker, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Anne Carson and Lisa Fishman. I didn't set out to go seven-for-seven on all-women authors, but that's the way it turned out. It gets even worse, because all of the various lenses are provided by the boys, Noam Chomsky, Julian Jaynes and Jonathan Culler. Expect more contention and controversy in the issue one vein.

On the poetry side, I have three separate poems, coming out elsewhere than absent, in the near future, with three more in the mail (a rare thing for me) to the Chicago Review. These are all post-Parallax/Chicago Ontologies, the manuscript I shopped around for about eighteen months, on-and-off, and that popped up as a Tupelo finalist last year and had some interest at Salt (Tupelo's also shown interest, this year, in doing SWAN as a chapbook, which I'm very excited about.)

A chunk of P/CO material has appeared in the magazines, and you can read it linked on the left-hand column here on the blog. The post P/CO work is really very different, however: the poem that began it all is The Fashions, an apostrophe of Allan Bloom to Willow Rosenberg that runs in tercets for more than seven pages. That was written in the early months of this year during a trip to San Francisco, at, among other places, the Revolution, when I stayed with Joanna Guldi and met Clay Banes.

[Update: Seconds is out, with an apostrophe, The Call Boy. horse less review is out, with two earlier pieces.]

[Update: Jim is gone? foetry is gone? Who is left to stir trouble? Me and my occasionally grouchy reviews?]

[Update: SWAN is pipped at the post for the Tupelo Snowbound, making the finals along with work by Molly Lou Freeman, Catherine Imbriglio and Kimberly Lojek, and losing out to John Cross. The judge I didn't realize was Gillian Conoley, who I reviewed on rhubarb way back in February 2005.]

Sarah Hannah : At Last, Fire Seen As a Psychotic Break

(versedaily / National Poetry Review)

It begins in the crux of beam and insulation,
Behind the sepia portraits of ancestors
On the bedroom wall. A wire burns through
Its cloth sleeve, overwhelmed
By demands of modern current.

It splits into two antennae,
Two probes in close space.
A spark shoots and sows in a post,
Then it starts to race --
Hungry, reckless,

Through the dry skeleton of the house.
Go to the wall. Can you see it?
Every episode is different.
Will it burn a seam or hole
To reach the open air?

You have to evacuate the family, but no one
Wants to go. And when they are dead,
And you are contemplating
The sticks, the wheezing ashes,
The iron pots melted to pools on the lawn,

The authorities will say it was structural.
Now that you think of it,
There were warning signs, gestures:
A flaming toaster,
A persistent aggressiveness.

On the littered ground in hindsight
You devise solutions.
What if you’d paid it more attention,
Sworn off sleep, made tea --
Could you have quelled it?

What if you’d stood nightly by the wall,
Felt around for the heat,
Drawn a cold, wet cloth across the surface,
And, speaking soft words,
Held it?

@

Sarah Hannah's passing was brought to my attention by a note from Jeffery Levine at Tupelo; I thought I would look through her work online to see what could be gleaned.

Sarah is not a poet one would count, on rhubarb, as in any sense experimental. By which I mean -- I think I mean -- that Sarah is not interested in the notion of a poetic teleology, a directed goal towards some larger, finer conception of language. A poem like "At Last" is, instead of a language object, a communicative one, something directed at (to take from Wittgenstein's Zettel) the passing on of information.

Re-reading that paragraph, though, I think I betray my own biases: it's that word, information, its abstract residue, that I think places my own reading habits in a context. A context of levels, of, as I just finished watcing last night, the levels of Lang's Metropolis: the idea that poetry is a vehicle of valences, a carrying-bag, drives one towards a certain kind of writing, and I would say, a certain kind of reading.

Yet on the other hand, I remember my first poetry anthology, from middle school: Heaney and Hughes' Rattle Bag, and so it is not entirely alien to consider poetry a tool of freight. If we're talking about rattling, Sarah's work here does rattle -- that transition, for example, in the antepenultimate, / The authorities will say it was structural has the kind of rattling one associated with, indeed Heaney, or perhaps Larkin: a streak of bureaucracy whose latin bangs up fey against the rude iron pots (which stubbonly refuse, in language, to melt the way they are told to.)

There's something deeply attractive about Sarah's work here, something that is strangely at cross with the somewhat simple arc, the torqued narrative that gradually turns to metaphor. What I like deeply about this final passage --

What if you’d stood nightly by the wall,
Felt around for the heat,
Drawn a cold, wet cloth across the surface,
And, speaking soft words,
Held it?

There's something here about how these words lift off from their meanings, like pale overheated stickers on a lunchbox: they are no longer mundane referrents, but become else instead. If you are, like me, a metaphysician of the avant garde, someone who reads Juliana Spahr for the articles, you have all sorts of medieval ways of viewing such a moment, but I don't think you have to have such elaborate views on language to appreciate that Sarah's moments here are something beyond the completion of a metaphor.

Ron Silliman : From Zyxt

(milk magazine)

Fra il dire et fare
che il mezzo delle Mare
-- Mario Savio

For Lyn & Leslie

What I notice, my cock slipping into your mouth, is not (at least immediately) the physical sensation, but rather your freckles, your startling eyes wide open

Behind the old manual cash register the owner of the diner, tall and husky, young though bald (fringe but a shadow) holds both hands high over his head, applauding loudly
These blue walls so old it is not wrong to call them colorless
Fragments not of knowledge, but of knowledge acquisition



Freud's garden:
Case studies in wisteria
Instead of parliamentary I saw paramilitary -- today the carriage house is a visitor's center -- golfers run to escape the sudden outburst, sandtraps already converting into ponds



Morning as an emotion
Hollywood romance: a woman making bad choices is called a happy ending
An office which, when I walk in, has one blue parakeet, loud, chattering, atop the long, hanging cool fluorescent lights, radio on too loud to Motown oldies station
The duck ravioli was fine but for the watery pesto
Nothing venture, nothing have


My own handwriting, larger and more crude than I'd remembered
She walks flat footed, the wet swimsuit visible under the pale cotton dress
An intolerable sadness
Short definition of history

One less than forever

@

Lina, reviewed below as part of the City Visible anthology, is the web editor of milk magazine, and I thought I would take another look at a journal that I've read in the past but haven't read recently. There's no doubt that the queen -- more accurately, the head of court -- of the poems available online in issue eight is this excerpt from Ron's Zyxt.

Perhaps what is most affecting about the work here is the way it blends a certain kind of rapid, off-the-cuff pacing (the too-loud Motown station, the repeatedly-edited observation of the diner owner, the trivial misreadings elevated to point-of-interest) with a mediativeness that one might call risen-spiritual.

For contrast, here's one half of that cord, in another poem in the same issue, this by Sara Femenella:

I meant to have only one glass and look,
the Bordeaux's half-gone, though that's
like saying only one piece of chocolate,
isn't it, or promising yourself you're not
going to call or not going to smoke all day,
we never believe these vows, the heart's
just a figure of speech, might as well say
root vegetable, light bulb, tube sock, any
one of life's personal things, familiar,
well-worn organs.

There's the frenzy of live-editing just as in Ron's work, but there's not that sense of the strange that comes from, to take the most striking text in Ron's piece, the carefulness of observation during fellatio. In that opening passage one feels that Ron is not trying to get it out but rather trying to get it right.

It's the reader's conviction that Ron is indeed trying to do this that makes it possible I think to read without a sensation of pretentiousness his clipped references that finish this excerpt: assured that the speaker is really taking things seriously, is not simply laying things out for us, but laying things out for himself, we can read these images without feeling forced to do so, without feeling put through our paces as readers.

Lina ramona Vitkauskas : How Your Canary Tethers

(The City Visible, pub. Cracked Slab Books)

plum knees,
door jambs undone
for now his reach as tiring as

the circle of circadian death,
the geometry of homonym
or as blotto breath through a

pale understudy of Minsk.
She has been Eros, his
chambermaid this long,

an even cog and spoke,
trusty gale and centerpiece,
rubicund permafrost,

misty delinquent damsel.
How he has calibrated woman
with the livered beak,

one that could not
be whet once more! How
each filigree innuendo

a phonograph torte
misguided lips a tortoise
she has hared anonymously.

@

Bill Allegrezza kindly sent me a copy of The City Visible, subtitled "Chicago Poetry for the New Century" and co-edited by him and Raymond Bianchi. At just under 250 pages, it's a curious volume in many ways. The most striking feature on a first flip-through is the extensive biographical material; for even though many poets have no more than two or three poems reproduced, all have at least a half page of biographical information, a photograph, and an artist's statement.

I've talked about this before in relation to the Legitimate Dangers anthology, where the same practice of extensive biographical information -- mostly a question of where the poet receievd her MFA, where she publishes and where she teaches now -- was in place. I don't like the practice, but I can't ignore it, and when I do encounter a poet I like, I enjoy having the picture and narrative handy. (Everyone should know that Joel Craig is way cuter than his photograph indicates, by the way.)

In the end, it is probably as harmless for the initiated as it would be harmful to the neophyte -- but few of the latter will encounter the volume. As I was giving the volume a first read at -- naturally -- Jimmy's, the Hyde Park bar where many of the poets in the volume have presumably knocked back a pint, I had one of those filmic moments where I saw the extensive cirricula vitarum fade gradually into the page, leaving only a murky residue between the poems: a visual demonstration of ars longa vita brevis.

Ray in the introduction describes the book as a compendium of "poets writing on the edge -- experimental, multi-lingual, internationally infused writing at the heart of the United States." It's hard to see, though, what is experimental about the untroubled lyric-I in work such as "63rd and Pulaski", by Erica Bernheim, which begins

It has been you I have wanted to look at,
proving my faithfulness to my home away
from home: the appendix: something I can
live without. I had forgotten there were stars . . .

or the didacticism of Johanny Vázquez Paz's "Our Revolution"

Since there are no longer wars for noble causes
and they have forgotten about defending the rights
of the poor, of women and children.

The anthology, in other words, is more defined by community than by any kind of poetic approach; more a sociological document than an aesthetic one. That said, Erica and Johanny are both somewhat out of place; the majority of writers appearing in the volume publish in many of the venues that serve as resource for rhubarb: Diagram, La Petite Zine, Shampoo, Moria, the Chicago Review and so on, and fit more comfortably into a notion of poetic project and experimentation.

But even with that in place, the work balances on a narrow beam between what might be called the mainstream engagement with be vivid and describe things, on the one hand, and the syntax detonation of the heirs to the 1970s. Here's the opening of neighbour Tim Yu's "I'm Pretty Sure Bison Art"

rules the rails, pretty

tracings holding
in the darkened station.

No smoking gun
from the shitpile, nor

hard-bore lender dubbed
man-in-charge.

Tim's work slides gently from that high-MFA "holding" -- the animation of aesthetic objects a classic move in that game -- to a rapid rattle of alliteration and syncopation that peels away from ordinary sense. Lea Graham is another middle term: her work is far more interesting that one would be led to believe from the Louise Glück quotation in her poetic statement:

I tell him "wine has no rudder" & so
we drink vodka tonics, watch the motions

of a bay: See how the current now moves
out, a sweet broom of moustache into

a collar.

Again, there is this sense of walking past the fulcrum of a see-saw aesthetics, in this case in the other direction, from the disclarity of rudderless wine to the descent into suburban narrative of drinking by the bay and the in-your-face lyric observation (coupled with nature-jargon) of "sweet broom of moustache."

At the risk of pressing the point too far home, here's Simone Muench, another aesthetician of the pivot-point, opening "Viewing Rain from a Hospital Bed":

Something sidles
up to me in the dark, I

taste it; this disease
I can't speak.

I listen to rain, tangled
branches, scar on my chest.

It shoots. You
lick it.

Like Tim and Lea, Simone plays both sides of the field, hustling the ball for a vividness and clarity of feeling-in-the-dark and writing-on-the-body before running interference for a distinctive, troubled eroticism that one places -- Its shoots. You / lick it -- in the territory of the experiment. Where she begins as a describer, a narrator of sensation, she modulates to the more-radical position of provider.

Two of the most interesting poets in the anthology are both Eastern European, and perhaps it's not a coincidence that they fit most carefully into the triple-niche Ray sets up as the thesis statement of the book. Ela Kotkowska's work -- too long to type in full, but more than excerptable [update: avaliable here] -- begins (after the unpromising title, "Song Without Words")

You always store pebbles under your tongue. There is no difference between root and cheek. Sublime collector without an archive, please forget the taste of milkweed and my face in the morning.

It's a sharp intelligence behind and between these words: something understated as a paring knife. The archive resonates with hints of a learned backing -- to me, archive is coterminous with Derrida -- without bashing you on the skull that we are talking about deeply intelligent things. The poem continues, lifting off like the skilled pilot of a rickety Aeroflot puddle-jumper:

In the dream, we dance off tempo. The chorus of gulls spits abject syllables and we pick up pearls.

You have anaesthetized numbers and defied heavenly calculus. Divine excrements forge new generations. Arctic lamp nourished by gale, don't judge the bone by the weight of flesh.

Lina, whose poem heads the review, is the other; not Polish, as Ela is, but Lithuanian, she with Ela generates some of the same feelings of too-casual fluency: her words unstabalize just as they are read. Given my affinity for Eugene Ostashevsky (look for my review of his work in the upcoming second issue of CAB/NET), it might be said that I have a circus-freak approach to poetry these days: I am fascinated by the queer deformations of language that seem to be coming from behind the curtain.

When Lina writes, in other words,

the geometry of homonym
or as blotto breath through a

pale understudy of Minsk

it's the collisions of homonym-blotto-understudy-Minsk that are both deeply strange -- new, unexpected, in extreme contrast to Erica's tired "home / away from home" linebreak -- and deeply right. It feels like a world is being assembled from the distinct bricks of the second-language intelligensia.

Both Ela and Lina are characterized by the above-mentioned fluency and not, as in much of the contemporary experimental work I read, by hesitation and erasure. Contrast these two writers with Jesse Seldess (or Laura Sims, reviewed on rhubarb awhile ago) -- Jesse's poetic statement claims an attachment to dynamicism, but his large and empty lines seem to press stuttering and hesitation instead:

End




And end


By past will




Hand talking

By Past will



Tend

Unfortunately, Lina and Ela are the only two examples of their kind of writing in the anthology, which does indeed function as a sociology more than an aesthetics. There's a lot of fantastic writing here -- beyond Tim and Lea and Simone, on the one hand, and the Eastern Europeans on the other, there is a diversity of expression that makes it a fantastic sourcebook. Perhaps the best way to end is with Ray's rattling "Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli," one of the few distinctively Chicago poems in an anthology defined more by academic than El-stop affiliation:

The pungency of those men who use bear
grease to keep their hair down while discussing
the Bel Canto. On that Saturday afternoon,
breasts were heaving and Comiskey Park green
was in my nose and cigarettes burned the vinyl
chairs. Hordes of monsters, offering plates of
food to garden statues next to faux
ponds . . . While talking and listening to Offenbach,
I think "fuck art, let's dance." I make a full
lunch of an Italian Beef Sandwich with nice
sport peppers and a really wet bun and date
stamping. G-string bikinis and a great piece of
steak, rare and bloody, give me indigestion and
a need for tea. The stripper's smell is in my
nose and the roof is leaking yellow National
Geographics.

Ellen Goldstein : The Instrument Room

(three candles journal)

Boxed in airless glass, instruments ache
to be taken, touched — their wood warmed,

their strings pinned to dark necks
by quivering fingers that press and slide

down the silver-scored fingerboard.
Horsehair whispers after fingers,

tugging tautness from the bridge, fine-grained
frames stretch and launch the melody,

varnished and amber-hued, soaring
over the range of human voices,

pushing into the carpeted hush.
Centuries of collecting stillness

the museum has never heard such noise.

@

One of my continual touchstones when thinking about and looking at contemporary poetry is the text adventure game, made famous by INFOCOM's tremendous version of the Hitchiker's Guide and propagated today by a small movement that calls it interactive fiction and is comparable in size to those who like to refit Model T Fords. I've gone over and over this genre on rhubarb; I'll just point people to the work of Emily Short, and the wikipedia entry on the subject. (A direct collision between the two worlds, of IF and poetry, is Graham Nelson.)

One wonders if the way in which a poem like Ellen's here does indeed feel in someways like a game script has to do with actual contact with examples of the genre. "My" generation -- I am just turning twenty-eight -- grew up with the Apple ][e (in the United States) and the BBC Micro (in the United Kingdom), and both of these machines, with their limited graphics relied greatly on the use of text to carry forward the reader's (gameplayer's) imagination.

There are uneasy moments in Ellen's poem here for me -- those non-functional intensifiers (such noise, quivering fingers) and somewhat clumsy alliterations (tugging tautness, silver-scored) in particular. In many cases, the functioning of the poem, the parts that work, sound crunchy, unpleasant -- in an engaging way -- and when Ellen descends to the melopoetic, it is sometimes to say something rather trivial (silver-scored? you are saying that there's a fretboard -- not a fingerboard, one presumes, if it's scored -- with silver on it? How . . . interesting.)

But Ellen's poem, despite these quibbles, functions, it gets off the ground. I've talked a bit about how that's all a poem needs to do in the cargo cult essay, and I think it's true, despite the ways in which Ellen is most definitely weighed down by notions of what and how a poem "is meant" to sound. It's that INFOCOM directionality of the work, the way in which Ellen is unafraid to lay a scene and leave it empty, leave it open for the reader to inhabit, that makes this worthwhile.

Erica Miriam Fabri : The Blood of the Fish

for Gustav Klimt
(Shampoo)

The painter is beautiful because he can see
the sway of a woman in a water snake. He names
a painting Hope and means with child. To him,
Eve is not the bedmate of a serpent, she is a soft,
china-colored body for Adam to rest on. What is
Voluptuousness? A pot-belly. Excess? A river
of red hair. Poetry is a girl swimming in a white dress.
Love is a gypsy. Sleep is a witch. The most beautiful
girl in Vienna gave him her first kiss. She went to him
to find out what beauty was. And so, he covered her
in a blanket of carnations. Every woman he painted
had daisies sewn into their curls. What exactly does
a kiss do to a girl? It makes her face fold over,
and her toes turn like scallops in the grass.

@

A fantastic issue of Shampoo made only more fantastic by its inclusion of some work of mine, #29 is crammed with good things. I picked up Erica's, though, because I've been reading a huge amount of stuff that sounds like Erica and I thought I would sit down with an example of the genre at a good pitch.

In my article in absent one, on anarchist poetics, I attempted to diagnose what I saw as a house style of a particularly crypto-pseudo sort, and pinned the use of italics as a major symptom. What, in other words, could Erica want to do with the italics of voluptuousness except to indicate some hidden source of significance that we-reader will never be privy to?

It was this "words as talismans" that I discussed as the third bullet in the chambers of the discursive poem -- a poem that stands in the etiology of contemporary work as the precursor to the Billy Collins jokester -- the jokester poem being precisely that which occurs to the writer when italicising ordinary words starts to feel a bit ridiculous.

Erica's work here pushes many, if not all, of the buttons of the discursive poem. Who today would say "with child" except someone at a Renassiance Fair[e]? And if not today, then when? -- for the inclusion of a dedication to Gustav Klimt seems too too, disconnected from anything vital, a strange kind of tip-toeing through the academy that someone like Cole Swensen would go in for (Cole, of course, presumably having a larger University library or less reluctance to use wikipedia, would choose someone more obscure -- perhaps Emilie Flöge.)

I feel, in other words, flogged by Erica's poem, and not in a sexy way. The painter is beautiful because he can see the sway? These kinds of moments seem infinitely replaceable. Perhaps the painter is gorgeous? Or pretty? It seems not to matter -- the valences are different, but there's not much sense that the poet is interested in the valences. Rather she has something inexplicably urgent to communicate (one hopes -- the poem is consistent, in the skeptical sense, with having been written for workshop) that is neither hinted nor unfolded, but rather pointed-at.

It is, in the end, this pointing-at -- again, a symptom of Cole, but also a symptom of the poems I looked at in my brief essay on cargo cult poetry -- that makes this poem lie, somewhat like Louise Gluck's work, on a butcher's block in a high-fashion suburban kitchen. Wrenched from any dangerous content, from any content that seems sufficiently difficult, upsetting, inappropriate to require verse, it glitters beneath the tracklights.

Seàn Ó Ríordáin : Freedom

(FULCRUM 5; trans. Greg Delanty)

I'll go out and mingle with people.
I'll head down on my own two feet.
I'll walk down tonight.

I'll go down looking for Confinedom,
counteract the rabid freedom
coursing here.

I'll fetter the pack of snarling thoughts
hounding me
in my aloneness.

I'll look for a regular chapel
chock-a-block with people
at a set time.

I'll see the company of folk
who never practice freedom,
nor aloneness,

and listen to pennythoughts
exchanged
like something coined.

I'll bear affection for people
without anything original
in their stockthoughts.

I'll stay with them day and night.
I'll be humble
and loyal to their snuffed minds

since I heard them
rising in my mind
without control.

I'll give all my furious affection
To everything that binds them
To every stockthing :

to control, to contracts, to the communal temple,
to the poor common word,
to the concise time,

to the cowl, to the cockerel, to the cook,
to the weak comparison,
to the coward,

to the cosy mouse, to the cost, to the covert flea,
to the code, to the codex,
to the codicil,

to the cocky coming & going,
to the costly night gambling,
to the conferred blessing,

to the concerned farmer tesing
the wind, contemplating
a field of corn,
to co-understanding, to co-memory,
to the co-behavior of co-people,
to the co-stockthin.

And I condemn now and for ever
the goings-on of freedom,
independence.

The mind is finished
that falls into the abyss of freedom.
There's no hills made by god there,
only abstract hills -- specifichilly of the imagination.
Ever hill crawls with desires
that climb without ever reaching fulfilment.
There's no limit to freedom
on Mount Fancy,
nor is there limit to desire,
nor any relief
to be found.

@

Fulcrum, or FULCRUM, now on issue five, remains as eclectic as ever. Within its 500+ pages is Ben Mazer's critical work on Harvard poets of the 1920s, various essays on the nexus of philosophy and poetry, and of course loads upon loads of poems -- a vast range stretching from the excellent (above) to the unbearable -- this latter category including Robert Cooperman's Prom Night, an anecdote-in-verse of his daughter's undiscovered return from, indeed, prom night.

Ellen, Robert's daughter, is apparently long past due to return. Robert panics! Bev does too. But indeed, we discover that Ellen is only sleeping discreetly on the couch downstairs. Don't you just hate it when that happens? I know I do. I love my daughter.

"Too tired for the stairs,"
she yawns, self-evident
to anyone with an ounce
of commonsense.

SO TRUE.

Michael Palmer has new work appearing, in the mode he created and that reminds me of billiards -- not billiards as a generic term for games on a pool table, but the incredibly complex games of pocket billiards, roundtable, &c. that one imagines played in velvet-papered rooms as spheres click discreetly in the September hush.

Michael's work, in other words, carries that sense of the calculated and the random, against a background of extreme urbanity. Even in extremis -- say, his poems that reference the Vietnam war -- one never shakes the feeling that what is horrifying in Michael's work is viewed as if on a Criterion DVD: sorted, framed, distinct from the observer, perfectly:

But first a round of billiards,
the Master said, to settle the nerves,

a game where silence matters
above all, or do I mean the sound?

Onto Seàn's work -- presumably translated from the Irish. Like most Americans, my reading of Irish -- or Anglo-Irish -- poetry today began with Seamus Heaney and ended with Paul Muldoon; both Seamus and Paul have much to recommend themselves. Despite the fact that much of what Seamus writes has the disturbingly repetitive sense of "resolve on an image", his work was the first I encountered as a grade school student in the United Kingdom ("between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests, snug as a gun" -- which, our teacher had to hammer into us, had to do with the IRA, dammit) and I enjoy it still.

Paul was a later discovery, made when I was a graduate student at Cambridge; his collected was terrifyingly fun, especially when put next to the then-opaque work of Jeremy Prynne that I had also purchased.

But to Seàn, via Greg: there are many traces of what as readers we look upon as Irishness -- those aurally-vivid neologisms such as stockthoughts that remind one of Joyce, the parallelisms, the gestures to a communal life of certain valence (contrast with what one would imagine to be an honest depiction of the American strain of the megachurch.)

But there is -- despite the fact that Seàn died in the 1970s -- a real kind of what one might call Ingerism in those repeated consonants whose meanings begin to submerge themselves beneath the sounds. Seàn's poem here, in other words, is something that for me opens up without discarding the kinds of voices we are used to hearing from what you might call the "Irish export" -- what poetry is high enough on the waterline to be visible across the horizon.

Ben Mazer : The End

(The Johanna Poems, Cy Gist Press)

A sense of growing, growing into growth.
Each day reflected in the window sill
growing together. Or at the heart
of growing in a moon's embrace.
All this, the heart of knowing, I laid waste.
Flowing out over the country, stopping
to examine the heart's flowers' places.
Stopping to renew acquaintances
with the old lives, creating new distances.
Finding that when all is said and done
it must erode into a being grown.
I love you. That's the only thing I've known.

@

Up in the Boston area for the weekend -- maximal chances to run into people I know from past (and being young enough, "past lives" as well.) In Pamplona, I saw Ben Mazer, who I've known since I was a freshman at University; I read Ben's book White Cities a long time ago, and Ben pointed me to his new chapbook, The Johanna Poems, still available at Grolier's in Harvard Square (and I'm sure directly from the publisher.)

Sometimes New Hampshire seems like the only place a poem can mean anything anymore; it's the one place I've lived whose social grid, whose language matrix, is not so frayed by commerce as to render the pointing (not pointed) poem strange and nostalgic. (In that sense, New Hampshire's neighbor is Poland, a country that even the most hardened anarchist can read without pity or sneer.)

So sitting down in a café to read Ben's book here -- Ollie's, in Exeter, just across the New Hampshire border -- and reading a poem like this, where "I love you" is not simply another move in the fraught checkboard of the French grammatologists, where it actually has a freight that is personal, not industrial, not the product of the text nor a product of the "age" ("the age demanded..."), I feel at home.

Ben's poem here reads like an impacted sestina, with the growings at first in a syncopated rhythm that meshes, gear-like, with the not unexpected introducing rhyme. And it's that waste in the heart of embrace (or inside out, a theme of the book, where the grave's inhalation is also an embrace) that torques[*] these early lines towards the sinister, although The End in many ways one of the less pathos-tic poems in the collection -- far less than this opening, from See How You Come Here: a simple girl, she took me to the cemetery / or to look at flowers, but that was all.

It's the progress that comes after, the flowing out over the country, that allows this poem to address what I described above as the personal freight, the freight that we as readers are invited to think of as the speaker's own, that we are asked to see as intrinsic, as something to be held up and looked at. Having just finished reading the Octopus chapbook series (review forthcoming in CAB/NET), the difference between this and the experimental trope rings out pretty clear.

It's tempting to rewrite Ben's work here in the Gnoetry-experimental house style. Call it the finishing, and simply remove the objects of distinct reference -- so that we read

Flowing out over the lawnchair, stopping
to majesculate the heart's bricklayers' places.
Stopping to retune the Chevrolet
with the wallpaper swing, creating new distinctions.
Loving that when all is said and done
it may admonish a Seventh Heaven.
I love you. That's the only thing I've known.

Now reading that is a strange experience for me because despite the absolute nonsense of the madlibs-like replacement, there's a ghost poem, a kind of residue left behind by Ben's lines. It's as if the syntax itself is haunted in a certain fashion: hauted by the spectre of the poem that does indeed assume that the beetle in your box is the beetle in mine.

[*] there was apparently some blogospheric debate as to what torque means. Torque means a force applied off-center. It means the same thing in physics as it does in poetry. I'm happy to clear that up for anybody who cared.

updates

If you are wondering where rhubarb updates have been: along with Elisa, my poetry time has been taken up getting things prepared for the second issue of absent, which is coming out very soon. It promises to be a fantastic issue: Elisa's picks are just wonderful, and I have a wide choice from the pile. We have a team doing our graphic design this time, led by Irwin Chen, a professor at Parsons.

If you are wondering what happened to your absent submission: we will mail out acceptance-rejection in the very near future.

In the meantime, you can see some of my own work up at Bill Allegrezza's moria. I honestly couldn't remember sending out these pieces, which are from the eighty+ page ms. that I've "retired" from circulation to editors; I read in trepidation when Bill sent the proofs, but was pleasantly surprised. I'm very happy with this work, and I'm especially happy with the final poem of the sequence, "Sonnet for the Air-Conditioned Republic".

Cole Swensen's The Glass Age

I reviewed Cole Swensen's book for a publication that kindly sent me a review copy. I didn't like the book, and I wrote a rather aggressive, blog-like review of it. I have been writing a lot of negative reviews lately, I don't know why, and I'm worried that I'm reacting not to the work itself, but to something within me. All of these reasons made me think twice and decide not to ask the editors to commit it to the printed, eternal page, but you can read it by clicking full review below.


There is a kind of writing about Cole Swensen that is a pleasure to produce. It's born of charity, forgiveness: Cole has profound -- according to John Ashbery's blurb, "invaluable" -- material to communicate. Be attentive, be patient, and she will lead you to dizzying heights.

It's a theology of perfection on Earth, a writing whose limit point is silence. And indeed, over and over, Cole's poems here enact a gathering together and a dispersion -- literally: from prose blocks to scattered whitespaced text. Here's one block:

When Leon Alberti published his De Pictura in 1435, he proposed the picture plane as an open window "through which I regard the scene . . ." through which the painting opens a world that was not there just seconds before.

Cole's flat, declarative, syntactically-lost mode -- capped with a cliché just seconds before -- brings little about Leon Alberti or paintings or worlds to us. What it does bring is the aura of the graduate seminar. Evocative at one remove, Cole's prose here is that of a dilletante, excited just to know, fantasising unsayable connections and implications.

Indeed, in the end, Cole is concerned with not so much silence as the unsayable -- at least, that is where she returns, repeatedly, repetitively, throughout the book. Sentences clipped at the end of a page, words spaced asymptotically to nothingness, and swervy non-endings as in this fragment from "The Open Window":

While in France, they built whole mansions of glass;
called orangeries or serres or vies, a conservatory can be


made, paned, claimed



I grew a lemon from a forrest of thieves. I grieve



still for the infinitesimal



difference between
what you can see and what you cannot see.

This is not, strictly speaking, a poem filled with silence. Nor is it really a puzzle-poem. It is, rather, a poem filled with a particular kind of presence: a hieratic voice whose salient feature is that it knows more than you do, and whose domination of the book makes it impossible to identify with anyone other than Cole herself.

There are what one might call "local" pleasures in this passage: I grew a lemon from a forrest of thieves. I grieve is a beautiful, strangely affecting moment. It is interchangeable, though, with any other well-sounding line; what is important here is not the particular language but the voice behind it. Cole is not in it for the beauty of the language -- as the prose passages make clear, she is rather lax with her words -- but for the voice behind them.

The great exposition ended. We remember the Thames, but not as a sequence



and then the Seine.

What is in the end the failure of Cole's latest book is not the language, nor the occasion -- the rather extended metaphors and plays on glass and light are well-taken. It is rather, this voice, the voice that can speak the passage above with no consciousness of how foolish its weighty non-sequitur sounds.

Not that the voice precludes, as we have seen, the beautiful local effect. Just that, even here:

Glass to glass. It makes of the fragile
an eyebone
            and why not entire
who could have run wars
            could have




stopped on the surface, a series
of mirrors of Marthe sliding into a bath.

the hypostasising "why not" and "could have" place this firmly in The Voice.

One forgives poets their voices of wretchedness, pride, self-pity, practically any vice that can be displayed in speech direct or inferred. What one cannot forgive is a voice that cannot modulate. If I say "Spring semester seminar leader" -- see the afternoon light on the formica -- I have finished with the range of the voice here.

It is a voice, though, that many people are eager to hear. Cole is not faculty at Iowa because she satisfies some particular theoretical construct. Despite the constant flux of ideas throughout the book, she is not a poet driven by an Idea about poetry.

In many ways -- and let's tread carefully here -- Cole's voice in this book is the masculine fantasy of the dreamy, essentially female scholar-poet. It is a voice of constant receptivity and absorbtion, self- and outward. It is a voice that never argues back against the quotations and marks of a masculine past, but rather serves to ornament and enrich them, and spill them back to the obedient.

It is a constantly safe, untroubled voice (though it apes troubled at times), a voice hazy with one's own memories -- certaintly most of Cole's readers have them -- of just how wonderful that seminar really was. Perhaps this explains Cole's popularity.

After a century of legitimation struggles nobody wants to be in the position of foreclosing a mode of writing. As readers we are almost Christ-like in our forgiveness, in our willingness to watch, and understand and, ultimately, to reform the poet to our need.

In many ways, I enjoyed the experience of reading Cole's book. If you think about the things she tells you to, it's interesting, even provocative. That, at least, is one side of the reader. There is another side, equally in play in a reading-event, of ruthless judgement, an Old Testament God whose potential for outrage, anger and ultimately, vengance against the poet is unlimited. The reader disposes.

Jenny Boully : He Wrote in Code

(tarpaulin sky press)

Over the bridge, the narrow, single-lane bridge.

With a caution sign before it.

And somewhere, in California, you drove your truck over

You called it your Millennium Falcon, and from the rearview mirror you hung a miniature one in the same way the religious keep sacred.

You gave me parting gifts: a miniature dinosaur, a miniature Gorbachev, your miniature Millennium Falcon to keep me safe in the air.

When you crashed, you did not have

You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies.

Afterwards, a woman came out of her house to inspect; she asked your friend who survived if he shot her dog. And that was it. That was that.

A few years ago, a sculpture, called Kryptos, was installed somewhere in the center of the Pentagon. Kryptos is a sheet of green metal with Greek letters cut into it. The artist made it so that there were hidden messages in Kryptos, messages which would change with shadows cast by sunlight. Most of the messages has been decoded except for one segment, the very last. Kryptos still stands undecoded, unread, not completely understood. You said you would be the one to solve it; you said it like you were Arthur of the sword.

@

First off, two things before I get around to Jenny's wonderful stuff. Scroll to Onto if you just want to read about her.

One is that I've been writing what for me counts as an unusual number of negative reviews recently. I'm not sure why. Writing a negative review of someone weighs on me a lot, although not when I'm typing -- then there's blood in the water.

It struck me that one of the poets I gave a poor review to is a Chicago poet, and now I'm doubly scared of going to readings because I might meet him and if we did one way for him to totally fuck with me would be to pretend it wasn't his work I said mean things about (I have a terrible memory for names) but then only do it once we had struck up this great camraderie over beers.

In my ideal world, everyone would read rhubarb every time I posted, except when I wrote a negative review, and then everyone but the author would read it and it would be an anti-secret among us. I definitely do not get off on the idea of upsetting another poet (although I do, actually, get off on the idea of insulting another editor -- I think it's an editor's duty to prevent writers from publishing their B-game.)

Perhaps, in the end, that's it: negative reviews are a way for me to communicate with the culture -- the culture of editing and reviewing and discussing -- and not with the poet. I think if posting evaluative-analytical stuff on poetry to a blog has any value, it comes in I think raising the bar for readers and editors. It's an act of taking seriously.

Two is that I've all but retired my manuscript. It went out on the contest circuit last year. I was stunned that over the course of two years I had put together about eighty poems that I could simultaneously think well of. But I'm gradually moving on, and writing new things -- writing monologues and dialogues and really populated material -- and seeing my old work in new light -- seeing clearly its deficiencies and evasions and parlor game aspects -- and I no longer want to see it in print. I know -- a great loss to World Literature, thanks.

Onto Jenny. Tarpaulin Sky press sent me a batch of wonderful little books; they look fantastic (although I disagree with the decision to mix serif and sans-serif face in Jenny's book.) While I was paging through Jenny's book I was struck by He Wrote in Code (above is an excerpt) because it reminded me -- in its sort of propositional form -- of Carole Maso's Ava.

As it turns out, the debt to Carole Maso is deep enough that Jenny acknoledges it in the opening, which I didn't read until later (am I the only one who jumps around in books? -- the last time I read a book cover to cover was Graham Foust's, and that was because I was trapped on a plane and thought I'd try.)

Prose poem or short fiction? I think to read this as short fiction, if only because Jenny's interrogations are at the level of plot, narrative, time -- and not at the level of language, sound, breath. I liked this -- that Kryptos has some of the fun of a Richard Powers novel along with the Masonian (look at that!) seeming-brevity.

I like the way that Jenny here can pause -- video like -- and play the motion. This is pretty much guaranteed to be a tired move (I am reading Terry Eagleton's novel Saints and Scholars and literally groaned when he did it.) But Jenny really pulls it off in a subtle, understated way, so that you feel a kind of soft piling-up of detail.

I think it's fair to say that Jenny is writing out of the feminine, that she is taking "feminine" qualities from one of the hoary old binaries and giving them her own spin. The divergent, as opposed to convergent, moment seems to be one of these, and Jenny seems really aware of how to create divergence, branching, diffusion of attention.

Eric P. Elshtain : 18:49:46

(Chicago Review)

And on the wheel. While the
count of all we had
no doctor on board the
Pharaon towards the rue de

la Plata, the swindler,
the growing darkness: sometimes the
utterance of one of the lower
savages than upon

the surface of the human life,
on our right flank, and with
privations of darting, tossing
blue phosphorescence.

@

I've just gotten around to reading the Lisa Robertson issue of the Chicago Review. Eric's poem here -- "poem" -- is, as a note explains, actually written by Jon Trowbridge's program Gnoetry. Gnoetry appears to work on a dissociated press algorithm.

Joshua Kotin's note suggests that because Eric's poems resemble much contemporary poetry, because they are a replication and refining of "a period style", Gnoetry threatens to "render that style obsolete." It's a tongue-in-cheek note, of course, punched up with marketing speak and the obligatory reference to MFA students.

As a full-time scientist, I'm very attracted to these kinds of "experiments" in poetry -- further afield, I've always thought the Sokal hoax a fascinating sally into the tortured world of "high theory." One thing you learn from reading the responses to the Sokal hoax from the editors of Social Text is that the high priest[esse]s are never going to give it up: they will rationalize and provoke and generally break the rules in the defense of the indefensible.

I think Joshua Kotin's note is very well put. But I'd like to suggest that the problem here is not a particular style of writing, but rather a particular style of reading. After all, the issue is not that a computer can produce these texts -- we've known this for a long time -- but that we read them as poetry.

When encountering Eric's poem for the first time (I had seen the note beforehand) I couldn't prevent a flood of images and associations: for me, Henry James novels, the Piazza San Marco, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle -- all of these things occasioned by the text, or some structure my mind placed on the text, or some remnant grammatical sense from Gnoetry's source texts.

These are all pleasureable sensations. I found the final stanza a surface-effect of beauty:

the surface of the human life,
on our right flank, and with
privations of darting, tossing
blue phosphorescence

Because Gnoetry preserves some grammatical structures, it's actually far more readable and suggestive than the language poets. It's an associative machine.

The problem with how we read is that this is pretty much as far as we go. We are content to enjoy the honeyed words, to allow them to play in our consciousness, to isolate a few knots of apparently intellectual activity, and (if we're aiming for a blurb) assert a mystical union between these three effects.

What we are missing, I believe, is the experience of contact, of encountering not the raw material of consciousness, but the put-together nature of another mind. What I think can be definitively said about Eric's poem here -- on reflection -- is that it is empty, there is no presence behind the lines.

Of course, emptiness is taken by many to be a goal of poetry, a kind of game of chicken where poets peel away from the lyric-I and race their workshop exercises towards the cliff of erasure. If that is the actual goal of poetry, I think Eric's poem is, if not the counter-argument, the apotheosis. Here is the absolutely-devoid.

Nobody lives in Eric's poem. It's one of those decaying Southern gothic mansions, which is pretty cool to wander around in but at the end of the day you realize that what you really need is for someone to hand you a glass of water.

In general, when reviews of poetry are not simply over-the-top exercises in blurbing, or incomprehensible performances, they often acknoledge this in a rather attenuated sense. The critic divines what X believes -- usually a metaphysical proposition that can be interpreted as a poetics. (Sometimes X helps by writing essays: Dustin Simpson's review of Forrest Gander in the same issue can rely on Forrest himself for the poetics.)

There is, in other words, a disjunction between the author and the poem. The author has a set of ideas about how to go about making poetry, what she wants the poem to "do," and then goes about making such a machine. The problem is precisely when Eric can produce these poems at a startling rate: the McCormick reaper still reaps.

You can see what I'm getting at here, I hope. The idea that one can cleanly separate a poem from its author I think is wrong. And the idea that in discussing the author you need only engage in a certain amount of amateur psychology, devoting your critical attention to the surface moves of the language, is damaging for criticism.

What I'm arguing for is a new kind of reading -- or a return to an old kind of reading, with a little weary sophistication from the trip. A reading that asks not "what can this poem do for me," but rather "whom do I encounter in this poem, what life is she given?" Reading for the traces of the human -- this is something I think we need to recover.

Of course there is plenty of great stuff that is just obviously human and needs no kind of special reading. When Jim Berhle writes "I can no longer be friends with professors", it's pretty clear we have a poem and the poem has a person -- a somewhat angry, spidey-sheet-sleeping person -- inside. You don't need me to tell you that.

But take the opening of Jacqueline Waters' "Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard":

It is night. In the embracing happy man
Just released from ninja fights
Along a fallen tree
Over a madman's gorge
A short chop at the air
With the edge of the affected hand
Places the chops like flowers
Evenly along a central stem

I think paying attention to that hand as precisely a sign of another, a presence other than the reader, opens up Jacqueline's rather dense material.

Cargo Cult Poetry

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. -- Richard Feynman, 1974 CalTech commencement

The vast majority of poets are writing Cargo Cult poems. The vast majority of poems are doggedly lighting runway fires, strapping coconuts to their heads, and waiting for the airplanes to land.

I was reading Nicole Brossard's Blue Books on the CTA yesterday. Sometimes when your mind gets tired you just was some simple, declarative sentences -- I find this thing very relaxing and entertaining. There's a short retrospective Nicole wrote for the collection (originally published during the 60s and 70s), and it's very much what you would expect it to sound like:

Writing was a way to appropriate the world. This needed doing at all costs. Language has to be made malleable, mobile, fluid, able to withstand all experimentations, all stripping away; to be cut up into a thousand fragments, its Greek and Latin roots exposed; to be stretched and compressed so as to reveal the thousand facets of desire, the varieties of meanings and emotions.

We talk like this all the time as poets, if seldom so engagingly. I think it's fine to talk like this, but I think people get into serious trouble -- I know people are getting into serious trouble -- because they treat this kind of thing not as a pleasant way to relax on the CTA but as a guide to creative production.

Both as a coeditor for absent, and as a quasi-journalist for rhubarb, I spend time reading a broad sample of poetry. Sometimes a writer will really blow my mind and I'll set aside time to investigate her, track down her work, and so forth, but a big chunk of my reading is poems by people I don't know and probably won't encounter more than once or twice again. Conservatively, I've read poems by about five hundred different writers in the last two years.

Unless you're seriously confused, the kind of cargo cult poem you might send to absent, or that you might publish in the wide range of journals I fish for rhubarb subjects in, is built around descriptions of good poems produced by people like Nicole Brossard.

The poem by Michael Neff I talked about a while back is a particularly clean example of a Cargo Cult poem. Everything is there: observation and practice has allowed the writer to shave the bamboo antennae to the perfect tolerance. Here's another one, this time by Daniel Johnson in Verse:

[The Reflection of All Visible Light]

The faces are white.
The flowers white.

I drive around town
expecting the familiar--deer
lashed to trucks, kids
on skates, the metal scent
of winter--

but an empty stadium
floods with light, a sky full of geese
fails.

Time is white.
The yard white.

I turn in the driveway white
as the butcher’s bar of soap.

I don't think there's much you can say about this poem except that the planes don't land. While Michael Neff's poem has all the right rhetorical structures, Daniel's poem has all the right narrative arcs, all the right balances between abstraction and colloquial reality. There are three irreplacable moments (expecting the familiar, but and possibly light), but otherwise, well, here's my Hyde Park version:

The ashtray is clean.
The vase clean.

I take the bus,
expecting the familiar--radios
playing out of windows, ladies
carrying shopping, the bite
of early Spring--

but a cathedral
rises with light, a television
succeeds.

Space is clean.
The vestibule clean.

I stand off the bus clean
as the laundrywoman's basket.

These two poems are roughly interchangeable[*] because nothing in them matters. One is as good as the next. The poem isn't really about white, or kids on skates, or stadiums or even geese: they're just counters with a few brute valences that can be fit together. A kid is as good as an old lady.

In some broad technical-social sense, of course, they're both "OK" poems: they don't embarrass, they're not unintentionally hilarious, or ambiguous, or offensive. I think, unless you're in a bad mood, nothing would surprise you if either appeared in a magazine.

Here's another, less likely to appear in the absent box, by Stephanie Anderson in Diagram:

[Last Evening of the Year]

Bathymetric Map

      The boy leaves
his jacket backshore.
The river is icy—reddish
mood, shed as bench mark.

      The leadline
clenched in his left fist.
He knows the meander;
steers to levee as if

      sightless. Sounds
with wrist-flick, listens
for the undertow.
Considers the water

      level; tide
low. The boat shifts
as he picks up altimeter,
determines the sea.

      In his hand
he begins to hear
the bottom—its ridges
and canyons, every

      ripple and twitch
a shade he cannot
really reach; only feel
tugging from below.

If Daniel's poem can be boiled down to "an abstraction relates to a vaguely unexpected experience", Stephanie's poem is even simpler: "going out on a river, especially if you are fishing, is mysterious." If Daniel thinks the bamboo headphones of abstraction-reality play are what the planes want, Stephanie has a wooden air traffic control that repeatedly broadcasts close observation.

The common denominator here is that nothing matters[**]. In both Daniel's and Stephanie's cases, I think it's a lack of attention to the particular valences of language and experience. Neither has a poor occasion.

For Stephanie, after you clip away some pretentious material about "know[ing] the meander" and "sound[ing] with wrist-flick", the irreplacable element is the altimeter -- by which she presumably means bathymeter -- but the valences of the mediation of experience by technology are ignored just as much as Daniel can't be bothered to determine why he thinks "Time" is white. Does anybody really think Daniel experienced time as white in any fashion at all, however vague or extreme? I think it's pretty clear -- if we're honest -- that it's just there to sound like a good poem that was written once.

Neither of these poems fail to look like poems. They just aren't. Cargo cult poems are the contemporary flu. Perhaps once upon a time people didn't write this way: perhaps once upon a time when poems failed they failed because their authors cared too much. I haven't seen a poem fail like that for a long time.

Coda. One very heartening thing that you learn if you sit around and watch the poetry world from the sidelines for a while is that writers who get the planes to land actually do very well. Off the top of my head I've seen Eugene Ostashevsky, Lara Glenum and Anne Boyer all gain an influence and a readership based on the fact that they write good poems that do not suck. As you might expect, their work is much closer to a Wright brothers' contraption then a polished air traffic control.

[*]: but I prefer mine.
[**]: and if that means I'm saying a good poem is where things matter, that's fine with me.

reading Inger Christensen's alphabet

Off the smoky L.A. streets of poetry there lies the rhubarb detective agency. Chewing on a stalk of rhubarb, I receive clients vetted by my leggy secretary (and by "secretary" I mean "e-mail client.") News reaches me by shady figures in shady bars who punch me with a fistful of nickels right after they impart it ("e-mail client.")

The latest violent whisper came over a shot of cheap whiskey and cheaper smokes ("e-mail client," but you get the idea I hope.) Somebody said that Juliana Spahr was breaking kneecaps and ran the Pacific wordtrade like a puppetmaster runs puppets (I am not good at this genre, you can tell.) I said I'd heard of this figure.

Aloha fuck you said a guy hunched under his trenchcoat like a stack of .38s (better? no?) You're looking at Spahr but you want the Danish connection. He handed me a little book by the New Directions gang. The next morning he turned up dead on the hood of a patrol car ("did not return my e-mail.")

Inger Christensen -- sorry, Inger Christensen -- is indeed a Dane, and little has changed since Eliot Weinberger blurbed her as "famous in Europe, unknown here." But a look at alphabet is enough to convince you that this piece from 1981's got a hand in some of my favourite 21st century work:

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;
bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

or, perhaps,

whisperings exist, whisperings exist
harvest, history, and Halley's

comet exist; hosts exist, hordes
high commanders, hollows, and within the hollows
half-shadows, within the half-shadows occasional

hares, occasional hanging leaves shading the hollow where
bracken exists, and blackberries, blackberries
occasional hares hidden under the leaves

You can talk about alphabet in terms of its large-scale formal constraint (related to the Fibonacci sequence), but unlike what I think is the highly overrated lipogram Eunoia, alphabet really transcends its circumstance.

It's that pedal note exist which gives the work its affective aspect, and the structural property that has not only this one point-of-return but organizes sound in semantic layers. Repetition, yes, repetition, but something greater than pure experiment.

As with Juliana's work -- and while I think my informant was more than correct in pointing out the debt owed by this connection of everyone with lungs to alphabet, the former has a lot going on -- Inger's is a fundamentally musical work, but it is also a recovery project.

It's a recovery project in the sense that until recently we believed that sound -- that attention to the texture of words over and above their ability to refer -- was dead. We were willing to accept that "composing according to the metronome" was dead, but thought that this meant the sublimation of sound into some kind of gassy essence that only the finest ear could detect.

What is thrilling about alphabet is the unapologetic foregrounding of sound -- a foregrounding that is, importantly, non-reductive: it has a complexity to it that undermines the received notion that loud sounds have no sense.

It's a fugue in many ways, with themes and counterthemes interpenetrating in a mode whose carelessness has an improvisational feel. But again, and not to produce a negative theology ("like this but not"), it's distinct from the mid-century melopoetic improvisation. Jazz, as they say of anarchy, has a broad back -- like paper it can bear anything. I wonder, though, if Inger is amenable to such an analogy. There's something calculated in a fashion that Bird, say, isn't:

metal, the ore in the mountain, exists,

darkness in mine shafts, milk not let down
from mothers' breasts, an ingrown dread where

whisperings exist, whisperings exist
the cells' oldest, fondest collusion

consider this market, consider this import
and export of feathers, half bullies
half tortured soldiers, consider

their barren last vanishing, metal
to metal, as the amount of unsown maize
grows and the water shortage grows

Inger Christensen.

Jeni Olin: Paxil

(EOAGH)

(No Animals Were Harmed in the Production of this Poem)

I drank the White Russian standing next to My Bloody Valentine
& in the moonlight, the oleanders looked like bosoms
heaving drowsily over the unexperienced lake
wait, I swear I'm coming it kept whispering
but you are "two with nature" and corks bob in our wine
like pageboys on the women on Park
as the piss-soaked sun burns over a flock of
buildings, your eyes are like the green pools
of drowned toddlers, your kneecaps
like the skulls of inbred dogs,
your penis which looks like a sun-burnt
baby's arm & smells of chlorine brings me to --
tears? No, thank you awfully much,
it's positively rain. Me I'm strong, can do
the Hercules One Arm Bed-to-Bed Transfer
I love my guardian angel, the last heathen
before the freeway.
Please take out the garbage of this poem &
If you've ever read a poem this bad,
Then welcome back.

@

Jeni's work here comes from a string of psychotropic-themed poems in Eoagh (EOAGH!) I was saddened to see that my favourite, Abilify, didn't make the cut this time.

Reading Jeni has some of the side effects of reading W.S. Merwin -- I'm talking about the distinct lack of periods to pace out the reading. I have a somewhat atypical reaction to this kind of breathless (literally breathless) prose, and I won't count it a fundamental defect.

What strikes me about Jeni's work here is the particular kind of relentlessness at work -- associativity taken to some kind of extreme so that by the time we're half-way through we're following a flock of buildings under a sun over a pageboy haircut which looks like a bobbing cork in the wine at a party that Jim Berhle was tape-recording for his blog.

What I enjoy most here -- despite the fact that I am, indeed, reading Inger Christensen and am loving the idea of taking a device and paying it out all the way to the end of the spool -- is the way Jeni is going to play one device off of another: the associative obsessive with the personal address.

If there's a mental disorder that correlates with this, it is probably the paranoiac: one has images of the talkative cab driver who intersperses monologues on the connection between 9/11 and Iowan ethanol with the direct boundary-violating personal address. I doubt Paxil cures that -- actually, Abilify might help more.

Michael Neff : Five Whales East

(Mad Hatter's Review)

Drowned together for days,
blind as a nose of lung, we hate noise,

suffer emotion. Outside,
the dumb noise of spray: every blue and hump

sperming down to Far Tortuga, oceans of breach
untouched. Light is a blowhole wetting us.

Why not go deep, perhaps a fathom or two?
Conceal from me a harsh timidity. Bubble up

to baleen the algae of sky between the horns
of my thumb and forefinger. Your sea-self opens,

floppy as a body empty of bone,
every swim by Miami a shell-song and oh-yah.

@

There are so many journals releasing new issues this month that I'm thankful we have absent slated for April. Mad Hatter's Review is out, and so I thought I would poke around a little. Interestingly, Michael and Joan (reviewed below) are linked through the Web Del Sol which really needs to get minimal on its homepage.

It's tempting to read Michael's poem here as pure set-piece: something you work at for a few minutes and then put in your diary as a memory of a singular intellectual-emotional moment. It makes me nervous, then, to start hammering at it. Michael has an experience that hooks into plenty of places in his psyche, he writes it down -- if you don't like it, little time is wasted, if you do, well, it's free. Enjoy.

Indeed, why complain? In my mental rolodex of rhetorical devices there are plenty of ways to justify a negative review of an ephemeral poem. There's the economy-of-attention argument: Michael's lightweight moment here is distracting the ideal reader from a better poem somewhere else. There's the standards argument: that the ritual enactment of critical acumen is a vital part of the poetic project -- just as the courtroom ritual of protesting a parking ticket somehow hooks into grand notions of justice and the law.

There's also what I would call the avant garde move -- that this kind of poetry is precisely the wrong kind of poetry and that its wrongness is injuring, in some kind of strange poetry-space, the good poems. (It's an avant garde move, but it's also a paleoconservative move -- both have mystical approaches to literature.)

My own gambit is that I take poems seriously, and when someone doesn't take poems seriously and, in doing so, writes and publishes a poem, I get upset. In the same way that some people get upset when they see a crappy painting in the Guggenheim, I get upset when I see a crappy poem online. Poets and critics need to wake up to the fact that we will never have a poetry Guggenheim.

Michael's poem is a charmless charm bracelet of moves from the last twenty years of marginally avant garde work. It swings wildly from the insufferably abstract "hate noise, suffer abstraction" to the catachresis of "harsh timidity." None of these devices are grounds for expulsion, so to speak, but it's the sort of mindless stringing together that bothers me on a visceral level.

Everything is here in the bazaar: the estranged colloqiual ("perhaps a fathom or two?"), the gnomic demand popularized by Jorie Graham, "conceal from me a harsh timidity" (with a bonus internal rhyme that feels accidental), a modernist alliteration ("bubble up / to baleen") . . .

It's almost a time capsule in its eclecticism, and it makes you long for a real avant garde writer like Inger Christensen who has the patience and love that allows her to pay out a device for miles. Reading this poem is, in the end, a little like channel surfing: each prepackaged syntactical moment worn flat and drained of danger.

Joan Houlihan : Unrelenting

(Boston Review)

If by succeeding you mean doing things right,
and exactly, then it has no future.
Ash blows from us madly and without cause.
To keep things the same, where do you stop
to worship and repair? It is natural to decline. I decline.

The modicum of life that strung the little necks
of crocuses, that lulled the feeble seed
into its disease called grass, that heaped the pious
branches with their only whiteness,
that broke silver from the jawbone of moon,

now walks me through the same lesson of snow
until I am humble, until I am grateful, until birches
lean far enough to undermine their spot, their root,
until aftergrass turns to wheat and rope, and what can I do
but walk over it, divine another origin, cast it off.   

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So we, and by "we" I mean poet-types who spend too much time on the internet, know Joan from her Boston Comment series. I usually dislike arguments of the form "if I have no point, why are you freaking out so much", but the shockwaves from Joan's critical writing there were immense and I think it says something that the poetic world of the avant garde, who sometimes post signs along the lines of "you must be this opaque to write criticism", reacted so strongly to Joan's plain, uninflected speech.

A critical act like "I=N=C=O=H=E=R=E=N=C=E" is tough to follow with actual work, but Joan does write. If it's tough to follow criticism with creative work, it's tougher to judge that work without reference to the criticism, and I won't try. Oh man, someone who looks exactly like Joan just walked into the café and it is freaking me out.

What happens in "Unrelenting"? I was surprised by the opening stanza, which is of a pitch-perfect flatness that one -- I think -- can only associate with the very people that Joan directs much of her critical acumen at. In particular, it is that opening citation of empty colloquialism ("doing things right") that struck me.

Unemcumbered by italics or quotation marks, it wants dangerously to assert itself as poetry, to undermine the very things that Joan's work here pushes, later, as Proper Poetic Speech. Pushing further, the entire opening stanza has an instability of reference, a profusion of unanchored concepts, that could easily appear in the most advanced text in Fence. That "ash" -- where did it come from? Where did it go? What did it mean? I guess we'll never know.

It's only Joan's uniformity of tone that rings a warning bell -- if you wanted to re-write this in a more Fencey style, you'd have to rough the surfaces a little (and dump that rather sentimental "decline. I decline" moment.) But even so, that opaque "it" (which appears to refer not to succeeding, but to the concept of succeeding) has a definite place in the avant garde playbook.

It's a moment, of sorts, and by "moment", I mean, "are we having a 'moment'?" Joan's four sentences divide neatly between this opening gambit -- a play of abstraction and colloquialism -- and a far more traditional extended coda where the "usual" rules of poetry assert themselves: no ideas but in things, show don't tell, etc. etc..

Joan is not a Nancy Kuhl, straddling two formal modes, but the syncretism is striking. Indeed, the closer one reads Joan, the more one wants to read the poem against itself, to make it a trajectory not of deeply-felt experience but of empty words. As readers have found time and again, Pound himself has plenty of lines that read like "dim lands of peace", and Joan, writing in the New Critical mode, is no exception.

"lulled the feeble seed": what can one make of that? It is, on the face, absurd, and because of its uncompromising absurdity quite distant from the Billy Collins mode, which would, should it ever produce such a term, be forced to jokily reflect on it. From the context, Joan's poem wants to parse thus:

an elemental biological urge [modicum of life] is separate from the organism itself [feeble seed], which is actually rather opposed to all of this reproductive business and must be tricked [lulled] into fulfilling its evolutionary duty [disease called grass].

One proceeds: this elemental urge also affects my psyche [walks me through the same lesson of snow], producing feelings of humility and gratitude [thus], but then at the last moment I also feel capable of overcoming this [walk over it] and seeking a new principle of psychic organization [divine another origin, cast it off]

Apart from the slight ambiguity of the final words (does "it" refer to "another origin" or to "modicum of life" -- I think the latter is meant, but like the former reading because of its abruptness) Joan parses very well. And, of course, I'm not taking this from nowhere: this paraphrasing-storyline is straight out of Joan's own critical writings.

So there is Joan. It is, despite the instabilities of that opening stanza, a book-of-codes poem, a poem that finds strange ways to talk about big ideas (the relation between culture and biology, essentially) and asks, I believe, the reader to take pleasure precisely in this encoding-decoding process.

Do I like it? Yes and no, I suppose. Yes, because I actually enjoyed readi