If you are not also in love with Gary Sullivan,
you might want to undertake some serious self-reflection.
I LOVE YOU POOKY
happy valentine’s day…………..
Category: Uncategorized
Panic.
Overwhelm.
Anxiety.
No time for this blog or sufficient stretching, breathing.
Resentment of those who have time.
Between the piles of student papers, the endless prepping, the time on the subway lugging my heavy wheelie backpack, trying to get ready for my reading on the 19th which probably only seven of my friends will come to anyway — why do I bother?, struggling to write a song for said reading, going to belly dance class and all the de rigeur cultural events (I shouldn’t complain but… it’s too much), trying to keep the house together (we have no groceries, the cats are mad, got to buy toothpaste and soy milk), and then hearing that I’m supposed to buy PLASTIC SHEETING and TAPE to make a SAFE ROOM to keep out CHEMICALS and NERVE AGENTS. FUCK YOU BUSH et cronies.
I never liked America, not as a child and not now. With the possible exception of jackalopes.
No time to return phone calls, write the necessary e-mails.
Anyway I don’t even have time for the therapy of this. I have to scan in some student essays. And then deal with my jittery hypoglycemic hormonally screwy pain-ridden human condition.
Kevin Davies told me at the Bowery Poetry Club today that he thinks I was too hard on Ron in my post of 2/4. He’s right. I’m not angry at Ron, I’m angry at power, and I attack the power that is most accessible to me. These are hard days. Everyone is tense and trying not to be hopeless. And I am stupid for attacking the elder statesman who’s on my side instead of the oligarchy that isn’t.
My job involves teaching students to write argumentative essays in the American style. They say to me, “It’s different in my country — not so clear. Americans talk in black and white.”
Teaching essay structure feels like teaching people to step inside an iron maiden. Sigh. But it’s “for their own good.”
Yo! Ron Silly-man be talkin’ ’bout my homie & bes’ girlfren Marianne Shaneen over on his b-log. While I am thrilled that he perceives the uniqueness of her piece, “The Peekaboo Theory”, that appears in the feature spot in Drew Gardner’s latest issue of _Snare_, his characteristic “external formalist” critical method adequately addresses neither its energy nor its content.
While he does point out some formal features that contribute to the onward rush of the piece (which is simultaneously novel, essay and poem, a trans-genre work whose classification I am surprised perplexes Ron) such as a missing article, long lines, etc., he says not word one about the subject the motivates and necessitates its compelling rhythm.
He also makes the odd assertion that he sees in it no evidence of “ear” — as if “ear” meant only assonance, alliteration, and the whole list of prosodic techniques we learned in English 1A. Wouldn’t “ear” also be rhythm? And doesn’t any instance of language have it, as any instance of language “has emotion” (for as Tom Mandel once pointed out in one of the talks in _Hills_ magazine, emotion in language is like calories in food)? And isn’t the peculiar rhythm of “The Peekaboo Theory” akin to that of a bebop drummer (how fitting its appearance, then, in _Snare_), banging madly, making the sound of falling down stairs over and over and over again? And isn’t that the sort of rhythm that Marianne’s subject — obsessive love — proprioceptively demands? To talk about this piece without mentioning obsession is a little like talking about today’s paper without mentioning Iraq. Or just off the mark, like calling Alan Davies a surrealist instead of a NY School practical-language philosopher Zen formalist-sensualist.
When I introduced Marianne’s reading at the Flying Saucer Cafe, the interdisciplinary reading/performance/lecture series I ran with Alan Sondheim, I looked at Marianne’s work in terms of The Loquela, a term that I learned from Barthes’ _A Lover’s Discourse_:
The Loquela
loquela
This word, borrowed from Ignatius of Loyola, designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound or the consequences of an action: an emphatic form of the lover’s discourse.1 Trop pense me font amours — love makes me think too much. At times, result of some infinitesimal stimulus, a fever of language overcomes me, a parade of reasons, interpretations, pronouncements. I am aware of nothing but a machine running all by itself, a hurdy-gurdy whose crank is turned by a staggering but anonymous bystander, and which is never silent. In the loquela, nothing ever manages to prevent these repetitions. Once I happen to produce a “successful” phrase in my mind (imagining I have found the right expression for some truth or other), it becomes a formula I repeat in proportion to the relief it affords (finding the right word is euphoric); I chew it over, feeding on it; like children or the victims of mercyism, I keep swallowing and regurgitating my wound. I spin, unwind and weave the lover’s case, and begin all over again (these are the meanings of the verb meruomai: to spin, to unwind, to weave).
Or again: the autistic child frequently watches his own fingers touching objects (but does not watch the objects themselves): this is twiddling, which is not a form of play but a ritual manipulation, marked by stereotyped and compulsive features. As with the lover suffering from the loquela: he twiddles his wound.
2. Humboldt calls the sign’s freedom volubility. I am (inwardly) voluble, because I cannot anchor my discourse; the signs turn “in free wheeling.” If I could constrain the sign, submit it to some sanctions, I could find rest at last. If only we could put our minds in plaster casts, like our legs! But I cannot keep from thinking, from speaking; no director is there t interrupt the interior movie I keep making of myself [NB: Marianne is a filmmaker!], someone to shout Cut! Volubility is a kind of specifically human misery: I am language-mad: no one listens to me, no one looks at me, but (like Schubert’s organ-grinder) I go on talking, turning my hurdy-gurdy. [pp. 160-61]
I can’t put it any better than Barthes does in my favorite of his works. But to me it is essential to go beyond looking at any text’s formal features to its raison d’être, or at the very least to its motor, or its generator. I ask myself, “What makes it go?” “Whence its energy?” and proceed from there.
There are of course many web sites devoted to hermaphrodites. Here’s one I found interesting:
If you haven’t been to the Mainstream Poetry Blog, you haven’t really lived.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’ve got to be at least a little hermaphroditic to play this game (poetry). Two great readings recently by women with good proportion of yang: Jeni Olin & Kristin Prevallet. I can’t write more right now… have to prep my classes…so busy…
Jordan asks in his blog,
Whatever happened to defeating both the assumption of mastery and the ever-asserted canon of white guy writers? Was that just a lot of dry ice and ventilation? To judge from the typical poetry blog prose style and set of preuccupations (I’m keeping that typo), it shore was. (That one too.)
And I say, NOT IN MY NAME!
Just Back from the Peace Demons
Just back from the peace demonstration at Dag Hammerskold (sp?) Plaza where with a couple of hundred others stood in the 6-degree weather and listened to rousing speeches by members and affiliates of NOT IN OUR NAME. My impression was that I was part of a minority demographic there — most people seemed to be either twenty years older or twenty years younger than me. Understand that I say this speaking only from a very rough impression, and that everyone there was so thoroughly swaddled in coats and scarves that it was difficult to tell their ages. The people I saw on stage, however, with the exception of one man who was the leader of a group against racial profiling (and who very engagingly led us in a Sly Stone “War/huh/What is it Good For” chant), were definitely either much younger or much older than me. (Where were my poet-friends who work right around the block?) The older one was the far-left defense lawyer who was recently held for defending the privacy of her client (I’ve forgotten her name, but she’s much in the media). The younger ones were a coalition of articulate high school students, one I think a chapter leader of the RCYP, and a few others who took to the mike with much hip-hoppy gesticulation and empassioned exhortations. On the whole a tightly organized performative event (dare I say, it almost felt like MTV at moments), but as demonstrations go it felt a little awkward, probably because it was so cold. Hiphop afficianados, who did the Not in My Name song?
Earliest memory of a demonstration: Chicago, 1967 or so. At a park — Hyde Park? Everyone clapping. I clapped too. A tall man (but then, when you are three, all men seem tall) turned to me (I think I was on someone’s shoulders) and asked,” Do you know what you’re clapping for? You should always know what you’re clapping for before you clap.” I have been very judicious about my applause since then.
Meanwhile the women of the poetic left are tearing each other up like Oscar Wilde characters over on Brian’s site. What’s to be done?
Nuncupative catfight
harshes out pores,
in gleaming codes of hostile
similarities…
Kali is Calliope (Cruella)
in the vicious circling
of protective similars
copping grownup voices
in the internecine mist…
Friendly fire…
rallying cries
of infants
in the glow…
The dissolution…
of the left… a glass of Listerine…
where’s…
the party… ?
To silently manipulate
a mood… or populate…
a demonstration…
what is…
all this populism???
Objects appear
and disappear, making plans
for our annihilation… like Marsh Arabs
winging to Mars…
No end in sight… of the crux
of matter… asteroids… four-winged…
dinosaurs… uterine… cringing…
A population
explosion.
“I don’t really like… HYPOCRISY”
(or the total annihilation of innocents…)
Populism ( a sandy fiction)
beaks an utterance.
The butter runs clear
into the bank of guns,
burnishing their cocks…
In that moment,
when I am more genuinely a charlatan
than all the other charlatans…
when I come to you with love again —
my hands saying “namaste”
my eyes saying “cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo”…
…………………………………………..
New issue of How2 up online. Why doesn’t it compel me?
I can’t deal with preciousness, people. I just can’t fucking deal with it.
Especially now.
…………………………………………………
Nick’s torrent of nostalgia for obsolete technologies triggered a big wave of a nostalgia (for Japan) I feel continuously, almost like post-nasal drip…
and it gets more intense the more horrible this country’s policy, for which I am infinitesimally responsible, becomes…
not that Japan is beyond reproach… hardly… but at least living there I was able to detach… I like… fantasyland… this horrible… ambivalence…
Each American is forced, or privileged, to carry a globe (not THE globe — A globe — of responsibility) like so many Atlases… the only problem… is that those globes, for all their heaviness, are fake, hollow, and useless — all for show… the giant shadow puppet’s… got the whole shadow world… in his shadow hand… and his shadow puppeteer…filing his shadow nails… couldn’t care less…
but I don’t want to talk about my BAD ideology and my BAD faith (not to mention my BAD writing) anymore, because I know it’s wrong, and that’s why I went out today in the freezing day… to stand there fighting my lack of conviction and hoping…
a new bright orange badge reading NO WAR ON IRAQ…
would lift me out of that mire…
……………………………………………………
Otohime 