Topics left too long are tiresome, I know, and I apologize to you, Dear Reader, for the unsightly gap in these entries. I’ve been a trifle indisposed, what with what my friend Marianne calls “monstruation” and the need to watch Bollywood videos and help produce the Po-Proj newsletter. When last we spoke, I had posed a question (see previous entry) to Kevin Davies, about his use of the term “organicism” on a post to the sublist, in which he referred to a conversation he and I and Deirdre had had on the F train (and, as he remembers it, on the platform as well) about “organicist” vs. “formalist” poetry. He makes this extraordinary statement in his post:

In fact, the “organicists” are _the most_ formalist poets of the previous century.

and, in an e-mail to me, Kevin writes,

The last line was intended as a provocation but no one took the bait. [except, apparently, ME!] It is one of a series of statements I’ve made lately that range from the semi-serious (“The New York School had a profound effect on Canadian poetry”; “_nox_ is a long poem even though Ron didn’t think of it that way”) to the ridiculously arbitrary (“Language writing ended in 1987”) to the absolutely true (“Jack Spicer invented the clap-on clap-off lamp”). I would put the last sentence quoted above in the “absolutely true” category, despite the fact that it harbours yet another obnoxious binary.

Provocation for its own sake! I love it! Kevin, you’ve made me very happy with this admission. And as the only rainbow trout to go for this lure (I typed first “lyre” — groovy), I should say that the reason I suspect that we are using the terms organicism in different ways is that I, in fact, am not entirely sure of what it means when I use it. I have a sense of some kind of wavy, protozoic, membrane-y, shape-shifting, tentative & INTUITIVE (sorry, cynics) modus operandum. Not that the “”organicist”” (double double quotes for doubt’s sake) poem has no rules (rather it might generate them in the process of becoming), but that it doesn’t, as in a narrow, unreflective, and binaristic definition of formalism, have its rules and parameters as a starting point or a raison d’etre. I’m not against “proceduralism” — for indeed, what isn’t procedural? — and for that matter, what isn’t “formal”? — but I am bored with people falling more in love with HOW someone put a poem together than with the poem itself. And maybe not even using a term like “falling in love” with a poem in the first place, but rather someone saying he is “interested in” or “intrigued by” its “project,” etc. etc.

Inasmuch as I admit that I don’t know what my ill-defined notion of organicism is, I think that I have recently found it articulated in Madeline Gins’ and Arakawa’s Architectural Body. It’s a little frustrating to read sometimes, for all its genius, because, well, I’m a Capricorn — a double Capricorn actually (sorry Adorno), and although I have a lot of visionary and conceptually imaginative Aquarius in my chart, the Capricorn in me needs to see proof of the practicality and usefulness of ideas before I can really “fall in love” with them. Gins and Arakawa’s notion of the architectural body is extremely hard to visualize, although it makes me think a little of childhood trips to the Exploratorium’s “Tactile Dome” and of Batman costumes:

Everything that can be done in an ordinary house can be done in this one, but some maneuvering may be necessary to reach the point of sitting pretty. Each piece of material on the pile has ribs or spokes that open like those of an umbrella. Ready-to-be-activated expanding mechanisms lie at four-foot intervals. (p. 29)

….

[“Robert”, a ‘character’ experiencing the architectural body, says,]

If feels as if the material will go from only clinging to my back to fully engulfing me. With each thrusting of my limbs, or head and neck, or torso against the house that sits on top of me and drapes over me, I find myself in drastically changed circumstances.

When people, or “organisms that person”, in Gins & Arakawa’s terms, adjust their movements, they create the spaces for all of the functions of life to take place, including cooking, showering, etc. It’s ineffably nifty, and you should absolutely read this obdurately brilliant book, but I’m still not convinced of the practicality of the architectural notions contained therein.

UNLESS, of course, we are speaking of the architecture of the poem, in which case Gins and Arakawa make crystal clear perfect sense to me, obdurately brilliant sense. Here are some passages I earmarked as if to say YES YES, that’s EXACTLY what I wanted to say:

Because bioscleave {Gins and Arakawa’s re-naming of the biosphere ‘to stress its dynamic nature”] itself occurs as a demonstrably tentative constructing toward a holding in place, architectural works[poems] constructed into it cannot be anything but tentative; furthermore — and it is for this reason that we have chosen tentativeness as an organizing principle in our practice — it is not enough to know that in deep time all architectural works [poems] are fleeting things; it is necessary to construct architectural works[poems] that reflect bioscleave’s intrinsic tentativeness. An architectural work [a poem] that will serve the body well will maximize its chances of drawing on and blending with bioscleave, positioning the body in such a way that it can best coordinate itself within its surroundings. Simply, pretending that architecture[poetry] is not tentative is just that, only a pretense. Architecture [poetry] will come into its own when it becomes thoroughly associated and aligned with the body, that active other tentative constructing toward a holding in place, the ever-on-the-move body. The tense of architecture [poetry] should be not that of “This is this” or “Here is this” but instead that of “What’s going on?”

Here’s one more relevant quote (but I’ll say it again, you really should read the whole book):

A person moving through a tactically posed surround will be led to perform procedures that may or may not be recognizable to her as procedures. All of a sudden, what seemed a group of disparate actions, the doing of this and that, may strike her as the steps of a procedure, If these procedures, which have a lot in common with medical procedures, elude their performers, they do so openly, or are constitutionally elusive. Always invented/reinvented on the spot, they exist in the tense of the supremely iffy. Not a fixed set of called-for actions, an architectural procedure is a spatiotemporal collaboration between a moving body and a tactically posed surround.

The time when we may be able to live in such houses may be far off, but at least we know that we are able to live in such poems. (some kind of musical flourish here…)