Month: May 2005

After watching City of Joy tonight, looked around for info on leprosy.

Also did a search on “City of Joy”+ “Problematic” that turned up some interesting discussions like this one.

Maybe I’ll read this on Thursday, for a change of pace. I wrote it in 2001 and haven’t got myself to keep going with it. Anyway:

An Autobiography of the Author
(to the age of eight); written after
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Aurora Leigh

Of writing many books there is no end —
nor of discoursing on them deep into the night
in dingy bars and crampéd living rooms
where books pile into towers like limestone
strata, and keep on piling up,
and while we are alive we want to read
them all, and write still more –
on subjects bright and puzzling, each book
a gesture in its right that falls upon
a heap of gestures, each with its desired effect –
and still we write on — more, write more, and more!
though we distrust the language, having learned
the pleasure of disjunction and the thrill
of battling to be ever newer. ‘Tis from
a world so tormented we write, our pens
do hope to save it – if in vain — but still
we wish upon them some utility. Try we
must, and do, as each new fevered movement
spawns new followers, like baby spiders
spinning through the air – in legions –
each convinced of its efficiency. I don’t deny
it – no manifesto this – but in this world
of irony and torque I want to write
— tho’ not as well – as Elizabeth
did –– just for a spell, and use
the writing for this selfish end:
to tell my story. Yes, I, who’ve written
much in verse in various manners,
will write now of myself, will write the
tale of its construction – as when you scan
a portrait of yourself for a friend, who keeps
it on his desktop to click on now and then
when he’s obsessing, to hold together
what you were to him and he to you.
I, writing this, am still what men call young,
and women premenopausal – neither thrashing
in nubility nor drying like a crust, rather
”on the cusp” of ages, and willing to tell all
that might be of interest. I’m not so old
I can’t travel inward; I still can hear
the murmur of the outer infinite
which unweaned babies smile at in sleep
when wondered at for smiling; not so old
that I’ve forgot the feel of crib bars, or sound
Of rumbling voices in the other room, where
light was, or the giddy spin of mobile o’er
my hairless head. Quite round I was, and bald,
with eyes almost Chinese, and always laughing –
‘twas not till later that “the melancholy” set in –
and as I sat inside my bassinet they took
my photo with a guide to birth control,
for no sooner had I been conceived than
they’d made plans t’abort me. Not sure
what made them change their minds, but here
I am – I lived to tell this tale! My mother
had a full-time job – at Lawrence Radiation.
Her water broke while yet she worked –
I showed up two weeks early – just two weeks
after the Fab Four made number one
on US charts, when JFK was
freshly killed. She likes to tell
of how she’d bring me, when a babe,
to the UC campus (near our Berkeley
cottage), to watch the scaling
of the walls by “pigs” – it was a time, oh yes,
it was a time – of fervent demonstrations –
they were like mother’s milk to me.
Her hair, I do recall, was straightened
and pulled up in a fall like Marlo Thomas.
She’d been a student at the campus, for love
of Emily and Blake, when she conceived me.
My father was a warehouseman,
or so it read, at least, on my certificate
of birth. In fact, he was a poet –
barely nineteen, unshaven — heavy
of brow and step, and careful with
his words – tho’ not so careful that
he didn’t make a too-rash promise
to support me. His feet were plagued
with wanderlust — and soon went off
to see the world. My mom and I moved
to Chicago (where she was raised) – and
Father tried to join us for a while before
the lure of going elsewhere grew compelling
once again. There was so much to distract
me. I had a guinea pig, name of
Guiseppe, and a parakeet or two. There
was an ant farm, and Leggo blocks, and giant
balloons in th’ shape of birds. There were art lessons
in summer, and green linden trees whose leaves
the fuzzy caterpillars loved as I loved my art teacher:
”I have a secret,” I told him, and as he bent down to.
my dwarfish height I whispered to him, “I love you.”
In the class there was a girl named Joy
who wrote her name all o’er the blackboard.
The leaves in summer smelled like summer. There were
mulberry bushes with real mulberries. There was a
vacant lot. There was “The Icky Lady”, a local
alcoholic who cackled and hiked up her skirt;
she wore, I think, nylon thigh-highs. There were
clown costumes and folk songs and Little Golden
Books (The Poky Little Puppy) and Dr Seuss.
There were birthday parties with miniature
hamburgers, and trips to the zoo where for
a while my father worked. There was a record
”Hooked on Phonics” that so addicted me –
by three and a half I well could read the novel
Charlotte’s Web. My dear nurse Terry helped
me while my mother taught in ghetto schools –
still she talks of how the food would fly
through the dismal cafeterias. One day
she took me to her class – so thrilled was I
that I threw up all over my ruffly dress with
apple pockets! And as I stood before her class
I said, “Now you do this, and you do that,
and Marilyn (my mother’s name) do this.”
A born pedagogue! with copious curls
upon my head and such precocity of manner
that all adored me, I am told. “You used to say
the cutest things,” my mother tells me still,
”like ‘meganoun’ (for merry-go-round) and
‘cigabutt’ (for cigarette)” I remember wondering
about the family, that is, who was the oldest
living relative. Once, at table, my mother accused
Great –grandpa Joe of being a bigot. “Ahh!” I
exclaimed, “he’s the biggest! I was wondering!”
and all the family laughed. Of those Chicago days
most memories are pleasant, tho’ I do remember
some concern with whether I could control
my bowels – so that at nursery school I kept
my hand inside my tights in back, “just in case”
and I remember the Down’s classmate who barfed
on the picture of the candle we were meant to
color in (now as certified vomitophobe no wonder
it’s the puking that stays so vividly with me. The last
time I truly chucked it up was on a Greyhound bus
when I was fourteen. I’d been up all night
drinking screwdrivers in the city – but that’s
another story. Pardon the digression). I loved,
even then, the zeitgeist. There was my mother’s
big black floppy hat, and necklaces of shells and
beads, and Jackie O sunglasses. There were
these little statuettes in shops, with popping eyes
and bobbing heads and little catchy slogans – perhaps
some connoisseur of kitsch would know what I refer to. There
were on Laugh-in little doors from whence strange heads
would peek – “Very interesting, but stupid”– and the
Smothers brothers and Rowan and Martin. And there
were demonstrations. We lived across the street
from Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago Seven that
so famously disrupted the Democrats’ convention.
His daughter was a friend of mine, and my mother
shared joints with him, I think, sometimes. The year
was 1969. The force of those beguiling times grew ever
stronger. And, turning on, tuning in, and dropping out,
my mother quit her arduous job, and moved us back
to San Francisco.

Oh city of the undulating hills and rents no longer cheap,
of golden bridge not golden but rust-red, O home
to aberrations and eccentrics, how innocent we were then!
I then believed that life would always be the carnival
that you were – where adults wore tie-dye velvet
and didn’t go to alienating jobs, but listened to wild music
on their Victorian stoops, and overcooked brown rice
for their communal meals. We lived in the Castro,
on Seventeenth Street, with Nancy and her poodle, Grok.
and Hank who’d been in Vietnam (”cooking”, he told me,
when and asked). Nancy, says my mother, was neurotic,
blonde and wan, with Twiggy hair. She’d fondle Grok’s
gray canine balls. Her drawings, I remember, looked just like
Peter Max., with rainbows hearts and stars – like Yellow Submarine.
So dearly did I love that film that in my class at school
(where study was unheard of) I did a puppet show, all on
popsicle sticks, of that cartoon. And from a giant refrigerator
box (which students painted yellow) we fashioned our own
great submarine in which to play. So we sailed onto the sun
till we found the sea of green, and my Beatlemania grew
ever more intense into a singular identification, ‘til I wanted
not to marry John Lennon but to be him. My friends and
I played not house but Beatles, wherein which game we’d
go on tour, have fights and sex, and talk in accents. We were
mischievious youngsters. For fun, we’d shred our mothers’
diaphragms with scissors, and once I stole a comic book
from the bodega. The owner chased me up the block
but didn’t catch me – and the upshot? Did I ever go
into that store again, for bubblegum or Heath bars?
Did I return the stolen Archie? I don’t remember.
I do recall however the child lovers Greg and Carisa,
having “ sex “, it was whispered, in the tree fort,
and Audrey, whose mother was a witch (‘twas said;
a bottle of witch hazel had betrayed her thus)
and whose father played electric fiddle
in a psychedelic band. ‘Twas at this time
I first composed some poems, with Mother
As my scribe. Soon after she became entwined,
if only for a night, with the drummer for Hot Tuna,
on that very houseboat whose tie-dye velvet curtains
she had made, while I slept out on the couch
and felt the rocking of the waves.

Dear roommate Hank bought a health food store
Across the russet bridge , in Sausalito, where Mother
And I soon moved, to a tiny pad among acacias. The glass door
Of our cottage opened out to rockroses , and happy I
Received a puppy, fluffy, white and wiggling,
With a charcoal patch across one eye . “Govinda, “
I named the bouncy pup, and in the pretty yard we’d play
With Bonnie of the strange narcissus breath and her gray kitten, Lotus,
While Roscoe, later Gabriel, hung out at our pad..
A kind neighbor had all the Oz books, in original
Editions, and these she lent to me. I read my fill
Of Ozma, Dorothy, Jack pumpkin head, and the patchwork
Girl. I read the books of Narnia too, and the Secret Garden,
And Alice, and little Women, O ! , over and over again.
Govinda ran away, we lost our voices calling him.
Mother donned a head scarf, and went to work
Packaging organic nuts and seeds for Hank. I loved
The little store, and would sit by mom, blowing up bags
Of air and stapling on a label, whereon I’d write,
“ organic air, 25 cents . “

Answers to Jonathan Mayhew’s questions are below, below Blake. Scrrrrrrrollllllllllll!

You are William Blake! Wow. I’m impressed. Not
only are you a self-made artist and poet, but
you’ve suddenly become a very trendy guy to
like. It’s not that we doubt that you have all
your marbles, it’s just that we’re not quite
sure what you did with them to come up with
those terrifying theological visions. The
people of your time were nowhere near as
forgiving as that, and all your neighbors
thought you were a grade-A nut job. But we
love you, so rest happy.

Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?
brought to you by Quizilla

1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range? What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?

Sometimes I like to think of time as fully simultaneous, looped around itself in countless points of overlap, however contrary this may be to common sense. Literary time is especially so, many-layered, oily, and frangible, like a filo pastry. The strangeness of old language is equally strange as the strangeness of new language.

My sense of “the” poetic tradition is fraught with doubt, however, because my sense of tradition is fraught with doubt. As a fifth-generation Jew so wholly assimilated and removed from any recognizable tradition that the concept of tradition itself seems not only irrevocably lost, but laden with injustices, the last thing I want to acknowledge is “the” tradition that any number of institutions have tried to make me accept.

That being said, I do come out of “a” tradition which is an eclectic tradition, a personal tradition, I suppose, woven of different, and not always harmonious strands. How far back? I hope as far back as the Fertile Primordial. What defines it? I define it, and then redefine it whenever I want to. Nationality, yes, although I detest Americana.

My nationality is the nationality firstly of the diaspora, secondly of the coasts, and thirdly of my erstwhile adopted country, Japan. My tradition has been heavily imbued with Japanese tradition, only because of my life history.

Language? Yes. English and Japanese-English and incipient-confused English – because of my vocation. Aesthetic posture? Yes. I do experience “writing” as a form of “vogue-ing” on occasion. I like posture – or more exactly, gesture. Works of verbal art are gestures, movements in emotion/thought and time.

I suppose my closest poetic collaborator is my husband. My poetic idiolect is more feminine, private-language, and nonsensical than his, although I notice, the longer we know each other, how our idiolects seem to be headed to closer convergence. He gets loopier, and I get talkier, with longer lines.

If I compare myself to close peers rather than my collaborators per se, I would venture that my writing tends to be more explicitly personal, campier, and possibly more vulnerably, impudently muscular. But I could be wrong. And it would depend on who I’m talking about. “Idiolect” may possibly be my favorite word, though.

2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alonside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the “past” (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?

I would define contemporary poetic practice as procedural spat occlusion survivor contrast muse procrastinate violet antwerp pixy integrity scheme santayana isfahan accord brent trenchant fan
jackie waterloo meticulous perseverance backwater acid
petrochemical mobcap toothpick

or do I mean

conferee destructor affirm kind mckee barony
result nitrous frayed brahmaputra huckleberry bowman
densitometer flange emergent smug contestant barkeep
winnipesaukee launch citadel sikorsky agouti hayden
grammatic adele characteristic?

3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?

I think I would have to say William Blake. I do not have the patience to read the Four Zoas. They are just too arcane. Hence, my understanding is hindered by my own laziness. I don’t think I could live without “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” though.

4. Are we over-invested in poetic “hero worship”?

Yes. Ugh! Blecch. Bitter bitter taste in mouth.

Is it necessary to have a poetic “pantheon”?

NO.

How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic “canon”? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?

Neither. A pantheon is personal, a canon institutional.

5. Is “total absorption in poetry” benign? How about “poetry as a way of life”?

It is benign compared to, say, weapons manufacturing, yes. I am not sure about the positive social contribution of such a total absorption, though. It may be benign, but not benevolent.

Poetry as a way of life sounds swell, not merely “benign.” But it also sounds very luxurious.

6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger “literature,” or is poetry itself the more capacious category?

Categories are pernicious. It’s all poetry to the proper receptors. The ideal state would be total receptiveness to the poetry everywhere in our verbal environment and imaginations. Literature is what’s on paper or digitized.

7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?

Yes, they are a sine qua non. Humor engages the visceral. We laugh with all of our organs. To make someone laugh, even internally, even not physically hawhawhawing, is a tremendously powerful act. I do not believe that humor, wit, or irony are necessarily trivializing. When I hear of poets who do believe so, I feel a sense of frustration and even horror. Humor can create in us a kind of chemical reaction somewhere in between fear and love. I’m extremely interested in this. I don’t experience humor as a defense mechanism at all. I think there is a distinction, though, between humor, wit, and irony, and “comedy” (but not comedy, without the quotes).

8. Is the poem the thing, or the larger poetic project?

Neither. Poems are ashes, dust motes. “Larger poetic projects” are either affectations or encumbrances. Our receptiveness and combinatory excitations are the thing.

9. What is the single most significant thing anyone has ever said about poetry?

I don’t know. Maybe “work your ass off to change the language, and don’t get famous”? Or “just go on your nerve?” Nah. I haven’t heard everything that everyone has said about poetry, and I wouldn’t be able to choose, with my loathing of absolute superlatives, the “single most significant thing.”

10. Which of these questions asks you to define yourself along lines of division not of your own making, in the most irksome way?

Most of them, I’m afraid. I think it’s because they all ask for a kind of totalization that I just don’t find very interesting and also because they reflect this weird contemporary obsession with literary genealogy. Actually, I find questions, the question form, incredibly sexy. There’s something about questions – personal questions — that make me feel as if the asker is really genuinely curious about knowing more about me as a person, and in turn I always want to know more about them, and that leads to deeper intimacy. Gary, at a key point in our courtship, sent me a list of questions, on 11/17/98, that totally clinched my love for him. They didn’t make it into Swoon, but I’m taking the liberty of reproducing them here:

Hi.

I wrote you a lot today, but is it
okay to write more? tell me
where do you think you got (or developed)
this novelistic impulse? and why
or how, can you remember maybe
when you first realized
you were drawn to written language
e.g., did you read to escape
did you read to create
did you read following some (then) un-
known drive, some experience of pleasure?
Since you have been drawing “perserverance”
what does that mean, really mean
to you? Is this what you mean by up-
heaval? An attention to things
not previously attended to? Asking
of yourself, or confronting
you used “confronting.” What, Nada
are you confronting? And why,
had you avoided it? (It is a gray day here
again, a “soup” day, I’m on my second
bowl. Yum-yum. It’s vegetable, I see & taste
squash, onions, green pepper, bay leaf.)
Tell my why love is a dog you send into space.
Did you ever see Dogs in Space? Did I
ask you that? What is the worst possible
thing that could happen to you?
The best? What do you most worry about?
What are you most concerned about?
Tell me three things you thought of today
that never occurred to you before. (I
realized how socially constructed love is
or do I mean culturally constructed?) (That
was one thing.) Do you use your journals
in your poems? And by that, I don’t mean
using the journal as a “first draft” place
but that you might go back to them
the journals, and find something, perhaps
an underlying structure, or theme or something
else you might tease out, for use
in a poem or series of poems? What is most
frustrating to you? How do you feel
inadequate. What things do you know, for sure
you’re more than capable of? What’s the
sappiest song you actually like? Do you consider
yourself an intellectual? A sociologist?
A psychologist? (Please do not use the word “artist”
or “poet,” but pick one of the above three
possibilities & speculate, please.) Nada,
why decorate an envelope? Why start a magazine?
Do you have any more copies of AYA? What
do you expect? (Very generally.) What do you expect?
(Of me?) Will you promise to tell me if
something I say pisses you off? Or makes you
feel bad? Or if you feel I’m not being properly
attendant? Or if you just want more? Or less?
Or something specific? What was the most
beautiful thing you saw today? The saddest thing?
The most mysterious? Tell me what the most
surprising thing that has happened in the last
couple days. Tell me the most frightening. Why
do things frighten you? Is it an issue of
“control” in one form or another? Is love impossible
in a “controlled” environment? Tell me about the
most intense experience you’ve ever had. The
most depressing. The thing that shook you up
the most. Have you ever seriously changed your mind
done a complete 180 about something you were
“convinced” about, prior?

How close do these questions come to the way in which you habitually think about poetry?

They don’t, really. Except that I do think about humor a lot.

What other question would you add to this list?

Any of Gary’s above, to start with.

One of my many terrific students, Natsue Okabe, has her own blog, daydreamer, in which she describes her adventures studying English in New York City. It’s a delightful blog with lots of pictures. She helped out at the Text/Styles event, and reported on it, and she’s also been writing a lot about immigration and New York’s diversity (the topics we’re studying in class). Have a look! It’s swell!

more:

Experimentation verifies the result of that combination. There are too.
With self-delusion. But somehow feeling warm inside because youre.
Consent must be informed. Pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure.
Elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should.
If I could be anything in the world, I would want to be a tear so I.
Most easily defeat us. Revolution begins with changes in the.
Officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. Be bold. If.
Not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since.
Good for you. But the greatness comes when youre really tested, when.
Men and the lvoe of children; who has filled his niche and.
A means of social control. Slipping into madness is good for the sake.
People… will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small.
Is an honest way to live. Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to.
Word when a diminutive one will do. Never wrestle a pig. You both get.
Mostly you should mind your own business. Mothers shouldnt make too.
Who think that the only thing thats right is to get by, and the only.
Time. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you.
Possible. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. Most.

Experimentation verifies the result of that combination. There are too.
With self-delusion. But somehow feeling warm inside because youre.
Consent must be informed. Pursuing pleasure for the sake of pleasure.
Elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should.
If I could be anything in the world, I would want to be a tear so I.
Most easily defeat us. Revolution begins with changes in the.
Officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. Be bold. If.
Not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since.
Good for you. But the greatness comes when youre really tested, when.
Men and the lvoe of children; who has filled his niche and.
A means of social control. Slipping into madness is good for the sake.
People… will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small.
Is an honest way to live. Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to.
Word when a diminutive one will do. Never wrestle a pig. You both get.
Mostly you should mind your own business. Mothers shouldnt make too.
Who think that the only thing thats right is to get by, and the only.
Time. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you.
Possible. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. Most.

more:

We foot, rain. Direct base, fall thousand chief hear. Bed since
six, rock brown as figure. Fit read could. Suggest path it that
are stick tire. Over color your head, flow. Came food close.
Mother who mouth, were who. Children, blow, area. Bird, sat
mountain. Shape find play. Mile if what people carry. Twenty
again heat pose.

more:

Earth ever show open huge will. Two chick unit. Bring play
instrument, them. Circle race in, which fraction of. Word which,
for how. Has help put. Wish, fast heat been then. Tail stead
family. Possible gold arm hot speak, hour. When rock noise. Cow
feel, turn. Place cook open cry, deal subtract. Many, hold very,
design one after. Toward, grand, I. Perhaps chair sound.

The strangest thing I experienced the otherwise very enjoyable and avant-glamourous Roof/Ugly Duckling/Figures/Granary book party last night was when Charles Bernstein, having asked me if I wanted to meet Marjorie Perloff, guided me over to meet the Grande Dame, who, despite Charles’ very kind and even flattering introduction of me, showed no recognizable acknowledgment that I was a human being standing before her. Instead, she turned to Charles and talked about MLA business. As she prepared to leave, I put out my hand to shake hers with a polite, “Nice to meet you,” (for although I have an impudent streak, I was more or less raised to act respectfully towards my elders), she whisked away, and I was left with an extended hand floating impotently in front of me. “Bitch!” whispered another prominent figure in the New York poetry world who was standing in the same huddle but shall remain nameless.

Is it terribly petty that at that moment I thought, “Well, she may be president of the MLA but I sure am prettier.”?