Month: February 2009

Immune system a wreck! Coughing/asthma attack on the subway home: almost panicked. Hives at the base of my spine, and on my face, or ankles, just moving around any which way. Deep circles not just under but actually around eyes. (It’s one thing to feel like hell, but to have to look like hell, too: ugh! Unfair.) Thyroid slightly high (no wonder I post too much, and can’t sleep). Still anemic (by about two points). Vitamin D low. Cough. Cough.

Egads! I want to get on a train to a mountain sanatorium. Tucked into my seat with good wool blankets, looking out the window at the lovely countryside. I’ll wear a high-collared white dress. My trunks bound with leather straps. Maybe I’ll have a lhasa apso? Or a shih tzu? I could spend all my time in recuperation writing letters. This is so unlike my life. Sigh.

Senegalese peanut soup for dinner: fairly elaborate recipe. Peanuts are a good source of salmonella, I hear.

Gary reading tomorrow night at the Poetry Project.

Will have to venture out into the night cold for that.

I know “intellectually” that this is the home stretch of winter, but that doesn’t make it any easier. How do I endure this year after year? A decade now! I did notice the tulip bulbs coming up in the little patches along the entryway to our building, and will try to take some small consolation in them, despite feeling so wretched.

Poor poor poor pitiful me!

For some reason I feel I have to weigh in on “greatness and poetry,” although I thought the Times article was pretty irrelevant (with the exception of the Milosz quote that Orr very amusingly trashes in the last section).

I admit that “greatness” is important to poetry in the sense of, well, you know when you are taking the garbage down to the basement in the elevator? and the bag is full to bursting with smelly stuff you finally got around to cleaning out of the refrigerator, cat shit, coffee grounds, etc.? and just as the elevator door opens some piece of the tacky elevator paneling snags on the garbage bag and rips it way open, spilling half the garbage inside the elevator and half the garbage just outside? And you know how the only thing you can say at that moment is, OH great.

That would be the kind of greatness we’re talking about, yes?

Docu-poetry: I too, no, it isn’t that I
dislike it, but it troubles me. Maybe
I feel threatened by it? I mean, I mean
no proscription or buzzkill or any dis-
respect of those who practice it, just that,
what, I see it… grasping for mimesis
and reportage at the expense of verbal
imagination, I feel in it a kind of
shoehorning of didactic social message
into poetic forms that have no intrinsic
connection to, or maybe add no value to,
the often compelling and important
narratives that are being conveyed in these
pieces. Maybe the added value is entry into
the still privileged aura of the category of
“poetry” and the [sometimes] warm
communities that form within it? Anyway,
the poetic devices in these pieces, it strikes me,
if anything, distract from the reportage, which
in itself is genuinely heroic, making it sound,
to my ear, a bit preciously or artificially heroic.
Poetry, by definition, is precious and artificial.
The preciousness and artifice can be dealt with
in many ways: with an embrace, or with mockery,
or with attempted rejection. Still, the preciousness
and artifice are always there, I mean… here.
Am I just too reactionary? The poetics stances
I have taken in my decades of “practice” and
in the seven years of Ululations certainly
should make it clear I’ve no objection to
artifice. Artifice is the riotous center of my
work, for better or for worse, but then I don’t
aim to be particularly heroic, and my approach
to social message is, like my approach to
everything else, never head-on. So no, it’s not
the artifice per se that I “have issues with”; it’s
the mismatch, maybe, between the flat reportage of the
information and the form of verse itself, whose very
lines serve as little spotlights to the lexis and
the syntax; if they are broken, they should, I guess,
be broken for some reason, as Milton broke his lines
to keep you reading breathlessly throughout
his mighty saga. It’s not, you know, that I believe
information does not belong in poetry; I’m all
for data. I write, a couple posts down from here,
my mantra: “everything is material for
poetry,” and I do quite earnestly believe that.
So what’s my beef exactly? Is it resistance to
didacticism? Because it imparts to docu-verse
what I experience as a kind of deadness of
the already decided, the foregone conclusion,
a kind of “positive capability”? It’s funny,
when I think about what docu-poetry is not,
I think of Keats. When I read Keats, and even,
oddly, when I read about Keats, I feel almost
as if I’m reading porn, except that I don’t really
like porn, so that would mean something much
better and much more effective than porn, if by
effective we mean not perhaps creating ripples
of social change but rather making one’s heart race,
one’s senses stir with transferred longing, with
beautiful “slippery blisses.” Perhaps my pupils
dilate, too? I haven’t checked. How does he do
this to me? Like a lover! The answer is simple:
he does it with form, as any artist does, with form
so organic to the content and content so organic
to the form that really there is no duality.
I don’t mean to wipe the rust off that old
Olsonian saw as there, sure, are plenty of
examples of form and content that very
interestingly conflict, and I don’t like absolutes
of any kind. It’s just that, what, when I come
into contact with, uh, docu-poems, especially
on the page, I ask myself, why are they line-
ated? Just to buy into the impotent validity
of “poetry”? Because the category is hallowed,
somehow? And I ask myself, how does en-
jambment work in the poems, and repetition?
Why so much anaphor? I guess that’s a nod
to Stein, yes, but without her libidinal force,
the sense of words massaged in the brain into
new shapes and other syntaxes, without, so often,
a forward rush of rhythmic necessity. Why, I ask
myself, am I lineating this? should be the question
you are asking of me right now. Do you have any
questions? Anything you would like to ask me now?
If I were you, I would ask, what poems, exactly,
are you talking about, what do you mean, how is it
you have got this far with all these vague cat-
egorizations and no exemplification? Right.
Well, what occasioned me to write this was
Juliana Spahr’s poem, “The Incinerator,” that appeared
today at the top of Ron’s link list. And I am think-
ing of a reading I saw in San Francisco of C. S. Perez,
as well as sections of Stephanie Young’s film narration
she performed here last Saturday. I suppose we can
deduce from this that there’s a kind of coastal split
in operation here, a facile explanation of which may
well be the actual physical environments: here
in the grimness of wintry Brooklyn, sick in my room
(did I mention I’m sick?), I only want the consolation
of fantasy. There, where iceplants cover sandy slopes
and pop out bright pink blossoms, where rosemary
bushes bloom all year round, where the very breezes
smell sweetly of peppery nasturtium or the most
girlish alyssum, perhaps there’s nothing to do but
“take the beauty down a notch,” inject some flat
realism into all that sea air and florabunda. OK,
I’m doing here what I said I wouldn’t do maybe
five posts down, I’m not describing, I’m eval-
uating, I’m conjecturing, I’m being categorical,
and that’s a problem. That is not a good way
to proceed. So here, more or less, is my experience
of reading Juliana’s poem, “The Incinerator.”
In the first section, a narrator describes a sex
scene in a garden. Naturally, I liked this part,
and I liked it even more as I continued reading
and discovered that her sex partner was in fact
either her Appalachian hometown or a namesake
of her Appalachian hometown. It was her TOWN
upon whose face she seemed to be rather enjoyably
writhing. A metaphor! Cool! I thought they were taboo!
Really an engaging start to the poem, I felt. From there
it moves into data that piles up to form the narrator’s
(clearly, at this point, Juliana), self-awareness with
regard to class, race, gender, Appalachia, and global
politics. All of this information interests me. As an
essay, it’s brilliant, and as a memoir, too, but there’s
something about its sheer factuality that, to me,
rejects “poetry” even while inhabiting it as a mode.
In fact, the piece is mostly not lineated, (so much
for my objection above) except in its epilogue,
and mainly is composed in sentences. There is,
however, a lot of repetition. I could just as well
call it prose. Do I care about genre? It seems here
that maybe I do. How backward of me. Why?
I guess I want to preserve poetry as some kind
of autonomous extra-rational struggling space? Why?
And what IS docu-poetry, anyway? I throw this open
as a question, as I’m beginning to confuse myself.
Mayer’s Moving? Kenny’s Fidget? Maybe even
Swoon is docu-poetry; I don’t know. What about
Ed Sanders? I have to admit that most of his work
bores me, except when it’s sung, and I love “Yiddish
Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side,” not least
because it’s an operetta. Can I even say that any of
these pieces are not didactic, or that they are didactic
in a different way than Juliana’s poem? Is her
political materialism incompatible with my aesthetic
materialism? Is that a twain that rarely if ever meets?
Oh god, my fever’s going up again, 101.4. Did I mention
I’m sick? And writing this in bed, Dante curled beside
me satisfyingly fleshy like a big raccoon, cherry Ricola
on the night table. I really do want the information
these writers impart: whether it’s C.S. Perez’ family
history during the Japanese invasion of Guam or the scary
data on BART tunnel construction and disaster scenarios
that Stephanie included in her film narration last weekend.
And I want also the sharp, smart lens of Juliana turned
in this way onto her own life and onto the world. It’s
just that, it’s just that, there’s something else I want
from poems, something not so controlled by the superego
(thanks, Toni) or by external conditions, something that rolls
about in language and gets covered with its secretions,
something undeliberate, unrefined, unplanned, something
that foils the message instead of making it more
transparent, something that forefronts cadence.
Think of cadence as a kind of skipping through
a little bit of time, just that much duration and the
sound and meaning and syncopation in it. Material.
I mean I think my poems have themes and motivations,
too, they are not “just cadence,” but I don’t think
that in any discernible way they have lessons. Are people
longing for lessons? Grasping at them? It struck me
reading the new magazine that Andy Gricevich kindly gave me
last Saturday, Cannot Exist, that every poem in it seemed
to include some sort of heavy-handed socio-critique.
Isn’t, um, aren’t the lessons already in the fabric
of the language? Can’t we just assume that, and write
inductively, forefronting the senses? Or am I just clinging
desperately to my schtick? I don’t know. Look, I’m not
proposing something so simple, despite all the Keats
and porn stuff that precedes this, that we should only
write “for pleasure.” That would be boring, finally. Just
like Juliana, and C.S., and Stephanie, and Bernadette,
and Kenny, and Ed, and all the rest, I write to navigate
my existence, to explore my mental contours and the
nuances of language and experience. But the poetry I see
coming out of this west coast tendency is so different
from the poetry I am moved to make that I can only
stop and ask myself, What’s going on here? Why
so different? And what’s next?

I’m getting into the “mom, I’m bored” stage. Eyes hurt trying to read graphic novels & poetry magazines, especially poetry magazines, and I’m too bored to sleep, although that is probably what I should be doing. I’m generally not so skilled at sleeping even in my non-sick life.

Maybe I should watch something on a screen but I’m too sick to navigate the complexities of Gary’s DVD collection.

Maybe I should… look at pictures?

I certainly can’t do anything constructive. My fever is dancing around 101/102. Shivery. Boring boring boring.

What do you do when you’re sick?

1988, just a couple weeks before I left for Japan.
What can I say.
I needed the money.

photo by Eric Webster

After going to my doctor yesterday and bragging to him that I never get sick, suddenly this afternoon I was seized by a rattly cough, and now I have a little fever and feel, as they say, miserable.

Whaddya gonna do.

I want before too much time goes by, though, to report on last Saturday’s Stephanie Young/Steve Benson Segue reading.

Stephanie first performed an extended narration to a film collage drawn (largely?) from, I think she said, Touchez pas au Grisby, but I could be wrong. It began with a very impressive lip-synced sequence that dramatized the conflict between a male and a female character as well as the female character’s (it’s Jeanne Moreau, who I think we can pretty safely read as Stephanie, at least in this first section) phobia of being on BART under the bay if an earthquake were to hit. This was followed by non-lip-synced sections, many of which had horizontally or vertically split screens generally showing scenes of interpersonal abuse, interpersonal tenderness, and class resentment. The text to these sections varied but were, I would say, a little more prose than poetry, and included data about the BART’s construction and safety, local gossip, discussions about carnivalesque feast days and orgies, and audio of the environmental sounds that preceded a police shooting on a BART train. David Brazil narrated, with a multitude of nasal sighs, part of the piece in absentia, touching partly on some of the local gossip that formed one aspect of the piece. She isolated sound effects, some of them startling, like the sound of a thrown rock breaking a glass cucumber hothouse. There were nods as well as explicit references to community throughout, and this was something I appreciated but also felt a little uncomfortable in the presence of, partly perhaps because it is not exactly my community, and partly perhaps because it was sort of explicit, at least to me, who has been clued into some of the narratives. I’m not uncomfortable being a voyeur; that isn’t it exactly. I think instead I was uncomfortable with the centrality of the gossip to the piece (although, why? It’s not like I’m uncomfortable with gossip), and I wasn’t sure how it was meant to intertwine with its other strands: class, engineering, phobias, brutality, and so forth. No sooner have I typed this than I realize that class, engineering, phobias, and brutality actually have a great deal to do with gossip, so maybe that is, you know, “something I should look at.” On the whole, the effect was at times very clever, and certainly intricate, and certainly masterful indeed. I’m interested in how Stephanie seems to use her benshi characters as mouthpieces and even as tools towards her own personal catharses. Too, I did see my mantra, “everything is material for poetry,” enacted in it, and that was pleasing.

Steve worked with lines culled from his recent reading, including Anne Tardos’ amazing and terrifying new book, “I am you,” and perhaps some of his “own lines” as well. He had written these lines on strips of paper (recycled!) on his bus trip coming down from Maine. He was onstage with his laptop, projecting the screen onto which he typed improvisations based on what was written on the slips of paper. As he typed, and between his typing, he spoke. Sometimes his spoken language took off, and then swerved, from what he had just typed. Sometimes it was radically different from the text he was typing. The typing was, naturally, full of typos that were interesting in and of themselves, sometimes allowed to stand, sometimes corrected. Sometimes he typed in the middle of a previously typed phrase, and sometimes at the end. The typing created a wonderful kind of suspense as we saw the letters unfold on the screen, and I would say that they were more poetry than prose in that we were totally engaged in their materiality as they appeared before us, and as we concentrated on them we were also concentrating on how Steve was speaking, and feeling very much inserted into the rawness of his process and the necessary openness of his mind as the language emerged both visually and aurally. Like Stephanie, he was inclusive. Bits of our conversation over and after lunch, about babies and songlines, for example, entered into the stream of his language. Somehow, it was very funny and very serious simultaneously, but neither the humor (as when he mentioned the “rectal breeze” one feels sitting on a bus toilet) or the gravity seemed calculated, because, you know, it wasn’t. I told him later that it has always seemed to me that he has many personae operating at once in these performances: one almost priestly, another very childlike, another philosophical, another intellectual… and he reminded me not to forget the anxious writer whose presence so much “in duration” we can’t help but identify with.

It would be trite to say “we’re all exhibitionists now,” because it isn’t true. It is true that those of us who have exhibitionist tendencies are seduced by this medium into endless revelations. Or do I mean Revelation (it’s singular in the Bible, oddly, maybe because it all gets revealed, if not all at once, in a relatively short time span).

I find that the people I envy most are those who can dwell in a rarefied hermeticism. Or those who shrink from confession. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be one of those people. It’s not that I don’t hold back. I do. But only as much as I can to keep life livable.

OK, here comes a hot flash, and I have to go to work.

Oh but first, a poem I don’t think I’ve posted yet:

Ding

Amy Winehouse lines her eyes
with the penis of mayhem:
a woman on the subway
plucks her beard. Anus fully
occupied by peace medallion,
like turquoise man-bracelets,
like ding, like sich.

The letter C first makes me
think of abjection – no not
first, or second, but third.
Hunched over in illness or in
laughter: take that, Abulafia!

Transforming the letters into prinking
nightmares. Autistic constant
biting with the lower jaw
and a blunt-tonguing the air –
and this is compulsion, too.
This is composition, too.

Race, fur hat, wig, president,
blow job, sanitizer, fur hat, calculator,
president, blow job.

Anus medley – shouting the sprout,
as the eyes grow tails. I like tuna
salad but not tuna.

The stock market sez: the poetry
is sublime, castles burning, etc.
They can’t take this sucky shit –
womanhood – away from me.

This feeling also, that if I don’t write the poems, and write this blog, and take the pictures, that, essentially,if I am not looked at, I won’t really exist. I suppose I need to talk to John Berger about that.

I’m not really here
except for the glowing red light
under my arm

Nothing foriegnn bodie p. 32

A voice resonates in my throat,
so i suppose it’s mine.

“Cats and Doves” foriegnn bodie, p. 54

Migrating hives and welts. Palpitations.