Month: September 2003

Prickly

Here’s more of the prickly exchange between me and Brian that you can find over on Free Space Comix:

Nada: My arguments, as always, eminently puncturable. You are correct that I am an eternally jerking emotional knee. I often say things as a instant-reactive counter to extreme positions, although I might not entirely mean them. I try — though not hard enough — not to get involved in these things for that reason, and I’m going to restrain myself from responding one by one to each of your counter arguments, although I’m sure I could find plenty of loopholes in them out of which to slip.

A question: do you think your intention in writing the original post on _Spin Cycle_, was really to *inspire*?

It looks to me a little more like a move, conscious or not, to “take out a contender.” It looks to me like a power move. Chris’ book preceded yours, and whether or not it is well-edited — I agree that it isn’t — it is undeniably a feat of intellectual energy. You don’t even give the book that much credit, nor do you give any even slightly appreciative strokes to the content, but instead condescendingly refer to it as a mere vanity publication. Not everyone has the luxury of thinking “properly” as you do, Brian, who are so readily accepted by the elders with whose ideologies you more or less harmonize. And while I think it is great that you pay people to edit your work (and I know you are not wealthy), I know for a fact that Chris was absolutely in no position to do so.

The fact is that we could all use better editing. I remember getting a piece from you once that to me was filled with unexemplified abstractions. I put a lot of energy into editing that piece, and you decided not to incorporate any of my suggestions. Of course, that’s your prerogative. Far be it from me to drag you down to earth if that’s not where you want to be.

It’s your Poundian move to be corrective that doesn’t sit well with me, I guess. It’s lofty, impersonal, and nasty. I don’t think I was so much being proscriptive of conformity but as reacting against your proscriptiveness.

It reminded me a little of when I published one issue of a magazine, “Aya”, in Tokyo, which included a couple of poems by Cid Corman. He sent me back a letter listing 17 “errors” he had found in the issue. Most of them were in my poem, it turns out, and they were deliberate re-spellings or twists in syntax. It doesn’t matter how helpful his intentions were, it was an obnoxious thing to do.

And really, as a chronic corrector myself, I should talk. What can I do? I’m a fucking English teacher, and I have to do battle with my love for students’ errors in order to correct them every day. That’s why I preserve and ELEVATE them in verse, I guess.

I like the term “precise,” actually, and I do aim for a kind of precision when I write prose about poetry, or blurbs, or introductions, etc. I am not therefore, in actual practice, advocating “superficial modes of differentiation.” My prose is, to my mind anyway, neither confused nor too terribly digressive. Come to think of it, it isn’t hesitant or stammery, either. So maybe I’m full of shit. Or maybe I’m projecting the qualities I find desirable in verse onto the category of acceptable qualities for prose. I’m sure that is what I was doing in Chris’ case. Maybe I think of Chris’ prose as a kind of verse-prose whose muddleheadedness I see as a pleasing syptom akin to a child’s sloppy handwriting when her thoughts move much more quickly than her hand. (And by the way, this is definitely informed by my being close to Chris.) It’s as if I can see a metaworld in his writing that doesn’t quite keep up with what he is able to articulate. I realize that sounds a little patronizing, but I don’t mean it that way. I like “man’s [sic] reach exceeding his [sic] grasp” — especially in the realm of ideas.

Aaaaggh… I’m being sucked into the vortex of rhetoric… hellllllp meeeeeeeeee!

Allyssa, women tend not to get involved in these things because they have other or better things to do. I know I do, but rhetoric is seductive. Actually, rhetoric is Lucifer. One example of its devilishness is that it can be hard to understand. I don’t think I understood what you were saying in your last post here, actually.

Speaking of Lucifer, you know I love all of you, even when you get my goat. Right?

Nada

Posted by: Nada at September 15, 2003 10:52 AM

Brian responds:

Nada… I like reading criticism — I’ve always enjoyed seeing how people think. It’s fun. I like thinking about poetry and literature. That’s fun too. The idea that someone else in the community took it seriously — there aren’t that many — was exciting and interesting to me.

I did lots of web searches and asked tons of people if they had even read Chris’s book — I didn’t even know it was out — and I could find nothing out about it. And this among his “friends” and those who purportedly like his work.

Why would a huge book written by a poet who so many people appreciate as an artist not make even a small impression on the “community”? Why, in the midst of all that eyewash about “the school of quietude” and the “post avant-garde,” was there no mention of this book which seemed to make some gestures of addressing this very breach? (Why do we always have to reinvent the wheel every time this stupid cultural issue comes up?)

And why, in your defense of this book — and I should point I hardly attacked the book at all, just two sentences, it was not phrased as a review of “Stroffolino” but was a blog post about editing and grammer, for the sake of asking questions about the “community” and how one can do work in it — have you not been able to say what it is about?

A feat of “intellectual energy” — is that all it takes to be a writer?

Anyway, by your standards, my response here should be filled with tons of vile thoughts I am having about you that are related to your life and how petty or devious your motives are and not what you are writing in this comments section.

If you really think that I am trying to “take out a contender” — I guess that’s why I created a .pdf file out of all of Steve Evans’ criticism and posted it on my site, or why I always refer to Drew Milne as the best writer on poetry right now and send people to Jacket to read him, or why I’ve tried to get all sorts of poets down from Toronto and elsewhere who I think blow me away intellectually — you are truly the self-centered, inept monster that you celebrate being. I think 200 more people know about this book now than before I posted about it.

The only thing I’ve learned in my interactions with you (and Gary) so far is how low you think I am — very nice. Next time, be more honest in public.

……………………………………………….

My response — here on my turf:

Brian, I don’t think you are low at all. I think you are a hero for writing your little reviews and for doing Circulars — only two of your many accomplishments. I also think you are far more open-minded than most people give you credit for. And aside from liking you personally, both Gary and I have supported you in many ways — Gary much more than me, for certain. I’m sorry that you think I might truly be a self-centered inept monster (what kind of monster? I do hope it’s a jabberwocky — or at least some fabulous sort of composite beast like a jackalope).

I definitely think we represent rather different aspects of the current poetickal specktrum and as such we a) have a lot of things we could say to each other, and b) our previously held convictions might set up a tendency for us to clash.

So tell me this — if I am so self-centered why am I sticking up for the underdog here? Chris is a maverick underdog and so is the poet about whom he was writing in the piece you excerpted. I don’t know why more people have not read _Spin Cycle_. One reason out of many could be that Tod Thilleman, bless his heart, has a lousy distribution system which locks Spuyten Duyvil books out of SPD. I did see some Spuyten Duyvil books at Barnes & Noble once (tho not mine or Chris’) — for what it’s worth. _Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?_ is the most ignored of all my books.

Of course, if I’m a self-centered inept monster, I don’t really deserve better, do I? Sigh.

I haven’t said what _Spin Cycle_ is about because that wasn’t the point of my post, just as it wasn’t the point of yours.

Anyway, I don’t think my post was filled with “tons of vile thoughts”. I do think I was being honest.

And I’m not totally sure “what it takes to be a writer,” as you seem to be. It seems to me that “a feat of intellectual energy” is a pretty good start.

An Open Letter to Ricky Martin

Dear Mr. Martin,

I just came back from the local taco joint, where Gary and I had dinner. Our seats were right in front of the jukebox, which was played at a volume high enough to vibrate all of my membranes, although not, I’m sorry to say, to pleasurable effect. I find the bass lines in mariachi music inexorably moronic, making me wish that the technology was such that I could at least speed up the rpm. I said to Gary that those bass lines reminded me of a man trying to walk through a desert with a bad leg, dragging his bad leg behind him as he pulled forward on the other.

Then a song came on that I found I liked a bit. It was in English, and sounded at the beginning like some weird kind of surf rock. What is this?, I wondered — is it from the 80s? and moments after telling Gary that I sort of liked it I recognized the chorus of “La Vida Loca.”

I have to say the chorus really ruined it for me. The surf-rock ambience of the first verse just got washed away in the struggle for the hook. But that was only the beginning of my disappointment. Never having heard the song so loudly or clearly before, I had been unaware that the line you penned to rhyme with “Living la vida loca” was “Her skin was the color of mocha.”

First of all, this line just doesn’t scan. Secondly, it fetishizes skin tone in a way that is simply not done in these days of willed color-blindness. The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” was really the last song to get away with doing that, and not even really successfully.

I am well aware that you were desperate for a rhyme, and that not many rhymes for “loca” can be found in English. May I suggest some alternatives?

If you wanted to continue to use “mocha” as your rhyme, you might say,

“Sipping a cup of mocha”

This would give the woman you are discussing (and whose choice of beverages you had already addressed earlier in the song, saying that she would never drink the water, but only French champagne) a kind of cozy, intellectual air that the other lyrics don’t really grant her.

Alternatively, you could play on the “inside outside in” section of the hook and have her,

“Sipping a cola-coca”

Clever, no? Or perhaps you’d rather stress her wild, lawless, superfreaky nature. Why not something like,

“Chewing a leaf of coca”

which would make her not only an intriguing user of recreational drugs but also someone who is in touch with the ethnic heritage with which you seem to want to bestow her.

My overarching question, though, Ricky, is this: why are you singing about this woman if you are gay? Or do you swing both ways? Is swinging both ways, in fact, the “vida loca” of which you sing?

Well, I hope I have been of help. If perchance in the future you think you might want to write a song whose lyrics not only scan but make beautiful webs of sense, too, please do not hesitate to contact me by clicking the link at left.

Yours sincerely,

Nada Gordon

ENDS ‘N’ ODDS

Mexperimental is the postcolonial version of Spainstream. I want to write the postpunk version of —?—.

*

This morning I was cleaning the house, listening to Singin’ in the Rain, which I bought my last day in Paris.

“When I hear that happy beat

Feel like dancing down the street…”

And as long as I don’t listen too carefully to the news, it’s all good.

*

Can anyone guess who wrote this poem? I’ll give you a hint. It was published in 1922:

FLITTING WAVE

Three words I combine

Mix them like a wine

For the sea to drink:

Happy…merry…gleeful…

These are three words

That sparkle!

The wind sings with foam.

I, with my thoughts.

Another hint: this poet is Julia’s poetic ancestress.

*

Rachel Levitsky is just plain wrong when she says that Paris is sad.

*******

MY POETICS IN A NUTSHELL

“A dumb child needs a particularly emphatic partner if he is to be understood at all. Speech, on the other hand, is often used less to express genuine feelings and thoughts than to hide, veil, or deny them, and thus to express the false self.”

–Alice Miller

THE MASCULINIZATION OF PROSE

Over at Free Space Comix I wrote this in cheeky defense of Chris Stroffolino (for more on this, see Elsewhere:

Mr. Arras, might — I mean, just *might*… have

a problem with the [giggles embarrasedly[sic]]…

*feminization of prose*? I mean, I don’t know.

Maybe.

And Mr. Arras rather huffily replied:

“Feminization of prose” sounds like another one

of those non-starter interpretations pulled out

of a grab-bag of progressive critiques — next it’s

going to be a class issue, then a race issue, an

issue of those at the margins vs. those at the center

(or subaltern vs. the West), an issue of one’s relationship

to the popular culture vs. “classical” culture, an issue

of anal retentiveness and asexuality vs. the liberated

libido, etc. Try them all on for size.

I’ve been getting more and more peeved the more I think about this.

Brian, I mean Mr. Arras, haven’t we indulged your fantasy of being a “diplomat” in some high modernist space fantasy? You’d think the shakiness of that premise would lead you to indulge others in their fantasies. But quite the contrary, you’ve been pointing your finger with ever more glee at all us goofballs in our dress-up games.

And why NOT try ’em all on for size? I bet you like looking in the mirror as much as I do.

Anyway, what’s wrong with being “progressive”? And why not bring gender into the discussion? What’s next? Gonna call me a Feminazi?

Oh, phooey on you and the shockwave you rode in on!

The Gypsies —

— their hit song: “Jerk It” —

THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD

The other day I bought a dusty old book because a poem in it made me deliciously melancholy. I’m going to type out the poem, then tell you why I paid real money for the book ($12!). I have it right here beside me: the author’s monogram is embossed handkerchief-fashion

on chinese boxes on a tan cover, and the yellowing pages are uncut.

Here’s the poem that caught my eye:

POEM TO A TWENTIETH CENTURY BOY

You are nine now and will be ten when the leaves

have left trees bare.

This moment you are lean

and narrow hipped, your growing dreams are fair

and your words are honest as your dark clear eyes.

Planes you love,

and legendary horses and history-Indians

and fabulous kings and the smell of wind and your bike

and miniature armies from the five-and-ten.

Be not impatient:

in a few brief autumns you will learn to fly.

There will be no time for lazy dreaming then:

you will be trained to die,

but before you relinquish breath

you will be trained to be

deliverer of death.

I cannot even promise you seven years

of warm slow drowsy summer afternoons,

of grass to lie in while your bare brown knees

angle toward the argosies of cloud

drifting with innocent splendor on a sky

immaculate of war.

I cannot even promise you this small

fragment of time wherein to climb bent trees

and shake red apples down, to sniff the sharp

rime of frost on scarlet leaves at morning,

to bring your sled up from the shadowy cellar

and shine the runners against the first snow-fall.

Soon the clean

beauty of geometry will teach

discipline to your wandering mind and show

how accurate your aim must be to reach

the enemy below.

And chemistry will teach you something further:

how combining elements, you may

create a gas designed for magnificent murder,

and how with your mortal wits you may explode

the sun and extinguish day.

Therefore be not impatient: the time will come

and you will dream no more

of knights or music

nor struggle with a soft and foreign tongue.

I cannot even promise you seven years;

and I can give you nothing

save what I gave you first:

breath

and a certain thirst.

I found this poem in a book called Road to America, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1936. The author is Frances Frost, who was Paul Blackburn’s mother. Obviously, the twentieth century boy is Paul. Also, I checked the dates: they match the ages of

the boy in the poem.

I remember hearing once that Paul’s mother was a Yale Younger Poet, and that he was raised by his grandparents. And that they beat him. There’s an angry poem in his Collected Poems about his grandmother’s death:

MY SAINTED

–God has taken your Grandmother,

             they told me

              when I was seven years old.

I wonder what the fuck he did with her?

And whatever it was, I

hope it was more satisfying

than anything ever happened in her life .

             How otherwise explain it? Good

             things and scenes

             happening ever since . then .

backyard full of vegetables, sweet corn, the

fence full of sweet peas, all

gone now, thank Grandmother .

………………………

What I find strange and unnerving about his mother’s poem is its quiet revelation that Frances fully expected Paul to become a killer. Think about that. Even though he was already a poet in spirit (a dreamer “of knights or music”), and already on his way to becoming a translator from Spanish (struggling with “a soft and foreign tongue”), she assumed that his “wandering mind” would weaken and lead him to become a murderer, a “deliverer of death” at his country’s command.

Frances was clearly concerned with the prospects of war in this book. The opening section is a long history poem called “Road to America,” which begins in 1500 with “The continent, nibbled by nations…dark in the east / with dried red streaks of death.” It ends in a speculative 1937 with “the proportions of infinite death” looming on the horizon. Another piece is called “Poem against War, 1936,” and there’s a “Poem to America” that ends:

              O lovely island

when will your people not deceive themselves?

When will

they grow to the stature of peace, and know

the worth of their breath in terms of root and salt?

But Frances wasn’t without hope, and that means that her poem to Paul wasn’t simply an expression of political anguish. For instance, she has a poem called “Enemy” that goes:

From slight new gold to storm

of sounding green, to dearth

of leaf, the planet turns,

is enemy of death.

Such repetition clothes

a valor hid and staunch,

intrinsic in the core

that births the avalanche

of breaking leaves. This faith,

this truth be man’s: the earth,

doom constantly endured,

defiant is of doom.

You would think, then, that Frances might have imagined her own poetry as giving “birth,” like the earth, to at least a TRICKLE of defiance, if not quite the “avalanche” that the earth musters. Why didn’t she? See Paul as, like herself, an “enemy of death”?

Unlike Gary, I’ve never been won over entirely by Blackburn’s work. I did like his troubador translations when I read them for Stephen Rodefer’s class at SF State, and I did grow to appreciate his (Paul’s) hipster observer thing after moving to Brooklyn. But even so, Blackburn is a poet, and a worldly one at that: a traveler, a translator, a maker of scenes. Definitely not a killer. And his mother’s misrecognition of his future saddens me. Rereading her poem, I feel as though I’m listening in on her as she tries to convince herself that was was right to abandon him when he was four. I don’t say this to judge her: I don’t know the facts and can easily imagine scenarios in which she would have been right. But what I can’t imagine is the state of mind that would have led her to project Paul’s future as one of obedient mass murder.

Here’s another poem by the twentieth century boy. I wonder what his mother would have thought?

FOREIGN POLICY COMMITMENTS OR

YOU GET INTO THE CATAMARAN FIRST, OLD BUDDY

y digamos que, pensamos que, like

it doesn’t work, you

talk of the war in Vietnam–only you don’t–

dear committee, you talk most about ways

of expressing your rage against it, only

you do not say it is rage, too

timid, baby, you are a beast in a trap,

              fierce but rational

              (maybe they’ll let me out?)

              You know they won’t

and there’s the persistent sense of animal rage, to

strike back, to strike out

at what hurts you, hurts them too, I mean the reality

the children who will grow up to hate us,

the Vietnamese girl blinded and burnt by our napalm and

        still / lives, has lost all her hair, is

       still pregnant

       and will bear the child if we leave any hospitals for them, if

not, whatever ditch or ricefield or building still standing, that

        10 Americans die

that’s her only wish

             I wonder why?

             here we are saving Southeast Asia, etc.

             And everyone knows this, every

             one feels it

             Bombs fall and are flowers

             the stamen is the whole village

             blossoming, the

             wood and tin and flesh flung outward

             are petals . Death

              is beautiful! Mussolini’s son-in-law, what

              was his name, Ciano? count Ciano

              has described it accurately . The

             image is true . That was 1937

How the villages explode under the blossoming bombs!

Lovely! the bodies thrown up like wheat from the threshing flail?

It sure as hell is poetic and this is 1966 and what shall we

do against it?

The dead horse

nibbles

dead grass

in a dead pasture     .     There

is no green anywhere, horse,

pasture, grass, it’s all

b   l   a   c   k .

              Whatsa matter with you?

              hasn’t anyone

              ever seen

              a black horse?

Jack’s evil experiments on Bernadette’s Experiments List is the most fabulous and delightful thing I’ve read on the blogs in a long while.

Jack, I salute you with awe and envy…

I’m in the second circle of hell with Cleopatra and Helen of Troy

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished me to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how I matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	High
Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous)	High

Take the Dante’s Divine Comedy Inferno Test