Cruelty-Free Poem
This poem was not tested on animals.
Extravagance
Accused recently (on Gary’s blog, in a comments box) by Joe Safdie of writing “extravagant” poems that somehow deny the right of “the poetry of witness” to exist.
How can what I do be construed to be in the slightest bit proscriptive or exclusionary? I who always argue for extreme freedoms?
It is true that, like any human being, I like what I like. My aesthetic choices exude what I like. It does not mean that with a poem, even tacitly, I condemn other modes.
Which is not to say that I haven’t and don’t condemn other modes– decidedly cattily, in fact — just that my writing a particular sort of poem is not a gesture of condemnation per se. Again, like any human being, I have opinions.
Indeed, if a person would rather read Carolyn Forche than Song of My OWN Self, what, pray tell, is that person doing here on Ululations? And what gives that person the need to condemn what I do?
I suppose I consider what I do to be, in a way, a kind of poetry of witness. That is, I’m bearing witness to my imagination, or more exactly, to the imaginative possibilities in the combinatory qualities of words — as poets have always done.
Besides, I’ve written “America Sucks” poems same as anyone else. If you don’t believe me, look at my archives from February.
More on condemnation:
A parody is not necessarily a condemnation. In fact, I think it is almost never a condemnation. More than that, a parody is a kind of homage (thanks to Gary for this insight). I don’t select poems to rewrite that don’t in some way interest me.
It is true that parody is by its very nature somewhat blasphemous. This is what appeals to me about it and what seems to irk certain others with more pious viewpoints.
There was a brouhaha over a poem of Jennifer Moxley’s that I parodied and published in V. Imp. Michael Scharf wasted no time in telling me, right after I had read the poem at the Drawing Center last year, how inappropriate he thought I had been. Apparently, I have not put myself in Moxley’s good graces either, which should come as no surprise, as she and I don’t know each other, so she I’m sure has no interpersonal frame in which to receive my gesture.
I don’t really understand their pique. Parody is a form of attention. It’s not unflattering. Gary parodies me all the time and I find it very funny (of course, we do have an “interpersonal frame”). I would almost pay people to parody me if I thought they would do it. This comes partly from a fear that I have no identity. Whenever I meet someone who can do impressions I try to get them to do an impression of me in the hopes that they can mirror some elusive (to me) character back to me. It turns out that I am not easy to do an impression of — I find this worrisome.
It’s true that one of the intentions of my Moxley parody was to pop the balloon of self-seriousness of the original. I won’t deny that. But I was also wallowing in its gorgeous syntax, like a hermit crab would in a particularly elegant new shell or a working person might who had won a night at the Plaza over the radio.
I think I’m doing the same with the Whitman piece. I’ve always found Whitman’s spiritual expansiveness to be at once exemplary and totally annoying — very… California. This is my way of feeling that feeling through him and also cleansing it of some of its hubris. If I am, as Brian charges, turning his poem into a David Lynchian landscape, I hope it anyway is Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive and not one of the lesser works.
——————————————–
*Extravagance. This word seems to be applied to women more than to men, doesn’t it? There are shades of Marie Antoinette in it. Does the thought of a woman’s “extravagance” somehow tap into a man’s fear of the twisty, the embellished, the unclean, etc.? And if the poem is indeed “extravagant,” (which sounds to me like a great compliment) who am I harming with it? Marie Antoinette stole from the people to decorate herself, it is true, but on the contrary, my little scrawlings hurt no one — not the peasants in Chiapas or Iraqi babies or sweatshop laborers in NYC. Believe it or not, like Whitman and probably like you all, I keep these sister and fellow humans in my heart too. If I really thought my poetry could do anything to help them, I would probably write a different sort of poetry. Note: I do not — DO NOT — think that poetry is “ineffectual.” It’s plenty effectual — it’s just a different kind of “effectual.”
7
Has any one supposed it pampered to be cultural?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as pampered to bop, and I know
it.
I pass pandemonium with my asparagus buoy and birth with the new-wash’d tepid debutantee, and
am not contain’d between my monsoon and my musicale,
And sniff manifold votaries, no two alike and every one televised,
The assistants good and the associates good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an associate nor an adjunct of any doctrinaire logarithm,
I am the serif and carborundum of sultans, all just as vivacious and
auxiliary as myself,
(They do not know how auxiliary, but I know.)
Every genius for itself and its own taxonomic stalemate, for me mine male and female,
For me those that have been floodgates and that love shackles,
For me the kittenish roast that is incommensurate and feels how it stings to be diaphanous,
For me the sweet utility implosion and the old maid, for me hummingbirds and the
mothers of hummingbirds,
For me honeydews that have shattered, purrs that have shed pogrom vowel plasm,
For me papyri and the phenotypes of sidewinders.
Undrape! you are not splashy to me, nor cogent nor slimy,
I see through the brushfire and oracles whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, virtual, sketchy, and cannot be
forced away.
Bowery Poetry Club Introduction 10/11/03
Parody and Pastiche Event (Michael Magee Brendan Lorber Jack Kimball Brenda Iijima Brandon Downing Charles Bernstein)
What are these things called “parody” or “pastiche” — also known as assortment, burlesque, caricature, cartoon, chaos, clutter, confusion, derangement, disarrangement, disarray, disorder, distortion, farce, farrago, gallimaufry, garbage, girlie show, goulash, hash, hotchpotch, lampoon, litter, medley, mess, mimicry, miscellany, mishmash, mixture, mockery, muddle, mélange, patchwork, potpourri, ridicule, salmagundi, satire, scramble, shuffle, smorgasbord, snarl, tangle, travesty, and tumble?
For answers we need to look at James T. Kirk’s concept of “pastiche” as “transport,” usefully contrasted to Oprah Winfrey’s understanding of postmodern parody. Whereas Winfrey sees much to value in postmodern literature’s stance of squishy orbiting talcum pops, seeing an implicit steamy murk and porcine melancholy in such parodic works, Kirk characterizes postmodern parody as “turtleneck parody” without any political hair yogurt. According to Kirk, parody has, in the postmodern age, been replaced by the tinkling of sweet procrustean condiments: “Such condiments are, like parody, the arsenal of a regressive or twitchy idiosyncratic gasp, the wearing of a linguistic trouser, a foppish internecine pageant in a realizable mixed-up moody infestation. But it is a psychoacoustic thrum of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior turpentine, amputated of the satiric petunia, devoid of hysteric marmots”. Captain Kirk sees this turn to “paranoiac parody” as a falling off from modernism, where individual marmots were particularly characterized by their individual, “effeminate” styles: “the Downingian long sentence, for example, with its breathless lummoxes; Iijimian nature imagery punctuated by testy phonic pastry; Charles Bernstein’s inveterate adagios of nonsubstantive parts of looseleaf shivery glassware (‘the intricate evasions of as’)”; etc. In postmodern hygiene, by contrast, “Modernist belches… become postmodernist longitudinal wampiti” leaving us with nothing but “a field of lustrous but curvilinear and competitive clamshells without a norm” Postmodern couscous whirligigs therefore amount to “the cannibalization of all the beatific granules of the most divine pessimism, the play of random stylistic tribbles, and in general what Spock has called the increasing primacy of the ‘meld'” .
In such a world of cuckoos, mitochondria, lionesses, and flax, we lose our connection to the transporter, which gets turned into a series of Sisyphean seltzers and superceded seltzers, or simulacra: “The new squamous lobster chandelier of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical mangle,” In such a situation, “the past as ‘waxwork’ finds itself gradually paranormal, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but dumpy libretto residue and orphan blooms.” We can no longer understand the mothership except as a repository of breasts, oratorical spunk, and foamy pressure ready for commodification.
Dear everyone: I and several of my favorite poets will be collaborating with dancers at the following event, organized by the inimitable Sally Silvers. A not-to-be-missed extravaganza!
T H E B O W E R Y P O E T R Y C L U B
308 Bowery (at Bleecker)
NY, NY 10012
presents
TalkTalk WalkWalk
A festival of dance/poetry collaborations
Sunday, October 12, 2003 from 4-7pm, $7
(Come and go as you please between acts)
Box Office information: 212.614.0505
Check www.bowerypoetry.com for updates on schedule and performers.
On a cabaret stage with club atmo, 13 separate acts will spin the way words and movement can mix, riff, flim, flip, and flam together (or apart). Some are long term collaborators; some are shotgunning for a juiced up afternoon of skates on, earwigging pizzazz.
Each asterisk lists either a solo or a collaborative group. Each performance will include both poetry and dance.
The program order is:
Starting at 4 PM:
* Jen Abrams
* Megan Boyd and Cathy Park Hong
* Johanna Walker
* Lee Ann Brown, Abby Child with K.J. Holmes, and Edisa Weeks
Short Break
* Monica de la Torre and Sally Gross
* Adeena Karisick, with Amy Cox,and Gus Solomons jr
* Bob Holman and Yoshiko Chuma
* Eva Lawrence
Short Break
* Marjorie Gamso
* Barbara Mahler and Donna Masini
* Nada Gordon with Karl Anderson, Alison Salzinger, and Jody Sperling
* Kim Rosenfield and Sally Silvers
* Melissa Ragona, Brian Kim Stefans with Eric Bradley, Douglas Dunn, Nicholas Leichter
Pieces are approximately 10 minutes long.
We’ll end at 7pm or when the performers are done, whichever comes first!
Program subject to change. Please see website for updates.
HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!
Part 6
An infidel said What is all the commotion? fetching it to me with adrenal hands;
How could I answer the infidel? I do not know what it is any more
than she.
I guess it must be the flag of my monkish coma, out of hopeful qualm
lore woven.
Or I guess it is the epileptic vagina of the Lord,
A scented crawlspace and miasma designedly indecent,
Bearing the organ’s stigmata someway in the corners, that we may see
and promote, and say Whose?
Or I guess the lozenge is itself a gauche heterosexual bilge rink, the sumptuous smog of the
dendrite.
Or I guess it is a wolfish poseur,
And it means, revolving alike in spongy zones and derelict zones,
Growing among cherub sawfish as godhead splutter,
Puccini, Schoenberg, Christ, Velasquez, I give them the sprite crescendo, I
receive them the sprite crescendo.
And now it seems to me the quizzical pugnacious acumen of nubile sheep.
Tenderly will I use you curling hypocrite,
It may be you expectorate from the breasts of young dobermans,
It may be if I had known them I would have annihilated them,
It may be you are from monkeyflower puberty, or from contraceptive bagatelles taken soon out
of tempestuous protoplasm,
And here you are tempestuous protoplasm.
This polkadot Adonis is very soapy to be from the windy omelet of debugged widgets,
Soapier than the shabby tassels of spliced coral,
Soapy to come from under the snotty ivory cipher of tigresses.
O I dither after all so many alyssum moustachio,
And I dither they do not come from the snotty ivory ciphers of tigresses for
nothing.
I wish I could promulgate the archetypes about the young dobermans and
eggheads,
And the archetypes about old dobermans and coddled scapegoats, and the phonic paradise taken
soon out of their wisp grills.
What do you think has become of the young and old tigresses?
And what do you think has become of the scapegoats and paradise?
They are perturbed and eavesdropping in the macabre stream,
The smallest clammy hare shows there is really no Muzak,
And if ever there was it led forward lethargy, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment Muzak appear’d.
All goes hither and thither, glamour collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and more prestigious.
Lynne Dreyer Introduction, Bowery Poetry Club, 10/4/03
The writing changed my life. I was thinking how my affections would be thrown out, my feelings would be cast aside or just internalized. I know for some writers it makes them keep thinking, but I’m interested in the rhythm of words, and how combined we receive their story. Like when someone asks if “ya get the picture” and you do. I’m not a very intellectual writer, yet I feel I learned to think when I started to write. I need to emphasize my feelings and thoughts — make them clear to others. The way words grow out of words and phrases, light on other words — an icey voice. This happens when I start to write and when I forget myself. This is what is most important to me. I think the thoughts form themselves when I lose myself in the writing. I’m learning, making it clearer I like to get carried away by the words — but I need to be understood, not hide by abstractions, vagueness or drama. I need to know it’s real.Lynne Dreyer
from The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 1984
It’s a little trepidatious for me to say anything about Lynne’s writing, since I haven’t read anything she’s published since _The White Museum_ in 1986. Any characterizations I make could be easily overturned or contradicted by the stampede of time. I don’t even know if her self-characterization still holds true for her writing. So it’s better maybe to say that I am waiting not with trepidation but with eager curiosity to hear what this writer-phoenix will read to us today.
I do know that, back in the olden days, I used to read her statement in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book over and over again. It stood out. It was breezier, more intuitive, more colloquial than most. That assertion that she’s “not a very intellectual writer” always struck me as quite bold, given her milieu and the primacy of the intellect in it.
Krishnamurti says, in Tradition and Revolution, that ” The fact is that the intellect is an incomplete instrument and cannot understand a movement which is total.” Lynne’s writing, which I read hungrily, and which I aped shamelessly, was aiming, it seemed, for a “total movement.” It’s as if it comes not from the discriminating tendency of intellect but rather what Krishnamurti calls “the quality of the mind, of the whole psychophysical organism, that can explore.”
When I read her I truly feel that I am along for the ride; she is carried away by the words, and so am I. It is as if someone else in the room (Lynne) were being hypnotized somehow I also go under. I get NDUCTED into the writing, which, it is true, is neither abstract nor vague. It’s like if someone asks you to imagine biting into a slice of lemon and you begin to salivate. How is that lemon not a real lemon? You can practically smell its bitter zest, or feel the little pores on the rind. If not abstract or vague, though, her writing is, to me, and contrary to her self-statement, decidedly dramatic — if nothing else, because it is so active.
The analogy that has appeared to me is… interactive video games. Her writing is dramatic in the way these games are dramatic, but unlike the games, her writing’s not violent. Rather, it’s fast moving, with you in the driver’s seat, making things happen in the constantly-changing landscapes she has designed for you. Also, like video games, it opens a space into the fantastic and its specialty is the surprise morph. Try to hold this paradigm in mind as I read a little excerpt from her Tuumba book, “Step Work”:
Death becomes the independent hand, crowded like the seeds. It becomes a caricature of itself, and the shallow walk becomes its harmony. Floridian gorillas are decorated with active super-heroes. The sex warp is active, complete, translucent. Wet my eyes and then the shadows can wall us in. They become timed and lasting: waiting for the family to be reunited, waiting for the family to be tried. Take some scene and think about winter, hand on cup, chicken hand image, and finally the dream image of the woman opening the door. Are the women opening the doors? The multiple image becomes its plot. The gestures have begun.
OK, my quarter has run out. Enough of this virtual metaphor. Now, let the real gestures begin with Lynne Dreyer’s long-awaited renaissance…
What should I call this poem?
a) Song of Myself
b) Song of My OWN self
c) Gnomes of My Elf
d) something else (suggestions???)
Vote in the comments box below!
Here’s part 5:
I believe in you my dialect, the other I am must not scintillate itself to
you,
And you must not be scintillating to the other.
Yelp with me on the grass, loose the tenacious credo from your luminescent strobe,
Not pillows, not larkspur or baronesses I want, not gladiators or cocoon, not
even the gluey seaside lethargy,
Only the audacity I like, the hum of your indecisive voice.
I mind how once we lay such a whirlwind winter evening,
How you settled your interpolary vanilla athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the foamy soup from my slave physique, and plunged your tongue
into my hermetic puffball,
And reach’d till you felt my Brooklyn nectarine, and reach’d till you held my
lysergic parentheses.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the hashish and foible that pass
all the argument of the debauchery campsite,
And I know that the stomp of the atomic sybarite is the convulsed chambermaid of my own,
And I know that the spirit of the felicity sow is the brother of my own luscious pavilion,
And that all the impassive gnomes ever born are also my crayon vendettas, and the hangman arachnids
my sisters and lovers,
And that the linear breastplate of the dynamite fruit is love,
And arch are knobby patties stiff or drooping in the drizzle,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the jockstrap frankfurter, alphanumeric bodhisattvas, copolymer, gasohol and
poke-weed.
Here’s Part 4 of Song of My OWN Self
4
Orpheus and algae surround me,
Puppets I design, the effect upon me of my glottal kissing or the cramp and
pedantry I live in, or the exaltation,
The latest matrimony pathogens, language felonies, silky cavernous upsurges, gogo nirvana dwarves, diffusible Jewesses old
and new,
My wispy warfare, dress, glee canker, looks, ogresses, grooms,
The hollow or jowly indifference of some dromedary or keyword I love,
The lovelorn synopses of one of my transmitters or of myself, or snorts or larches
or nutshells of the gills, or fusions or chivalries,
Battles, the herons of contraceptive war, the fever of cornbread altruism,
the stratospheric inadmissible lily;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the superlunary nipple itself.
Apart from the marvelous antipathy and satiric courage stands what I transmogrify,
Stands vindicated, epidemic, compassionating, idle, proportionate,
Looks down, is erect, or bends into an inanimate nightdress on an impalpable certain trundle,
Looking with side-curved fluency curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the mulligatawny and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own sweetish eclipse where I sweated through sinuous cloves with
linguists and hammerheads,
I have no mockingbirds or arguments, I eavesdrop and proclaim.
I celebrate quadrangles, and sing octant figs,
And what I sluice you shall sluice,
For every macho cornflower belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my ellipsoid goddess corpse,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a parsimony of groggy tapirs.
My yam mannequin, every simplistic screech of my verbose cockatoo, form’d from this zenith, this dreary saffron,
Born here of globules born here from middlemen the same, and their
transferable dewdrops the same,
I, now thirty-nine years old in manic pokerface begin,
Hoping to cease not till the beginning of the pus ballet.
Bazaars and sequiturs in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I gossip for good or bad, I permit to speak at every provocation,
a baroness without spleen but with intuitable combinatoric amber.
2
Houses and rooms are full of gibberish, the shelves are crowded with
gelatin,
I breathe the barricade myself and know it and like it,
The tupelo object order would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The paraboloid sandpiper is not a feathery grub, it has no taste of the
skeptic opthamology, it is odorless,
It is for my hobbyhorse forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the falconry by the euphemism and become illusionary and swirly,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The parasol of my own codpiece,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, water ornament, silk-thread, crotch and quizzical neuron,
My hurricane apothecary and tangerine hub, the beating of my extramarital trashy cornbread heart, the passing
of canaries and air through my seraglios,
The sniff of green sandals and debacle formulae, and of the tangential workspace and
dark-color’d roughish indignity, and of chamois cheese,
The sound of the belch’d sucrose of my carnival pilow loos’d to the juicy filly of
the sinew,
A few light negligees, a few archetypes, a reaching around of dogfishes,
The play of grout and duress on the rancid dossier as the dilettante galaxy wags,
The porridge alone or in the rush of the vertical soup, or along the oncoming lifestyle
and bilabial revelations,
The feeling of gimmicks, the full-noon opossum, the bronco of me rising
from the retinal galaxy and meeting the cheerleader.
Have you diagramm’d a thousand quail much? have you diagramm’d the aromatic vibrato much?
Have you bemoan’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so mainstream to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the vinegar scrotum of the grizzly homily and the modest conceptual sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of Portia, nor feed on the suicidal rodeos in books,
You shall not look through my enigma either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sweetish dementia raccoons and filter them from your stumpy buckle.
3
I have heard what the logarithmic Daedalus was talking, the talk of the
heterosexual osprey and the tsarina sailfish,
But I do not talk of the heterosexual osprey or the tsarina sailfish.
There was never any more entendre than there is now,
Nor any more nectareous cupidity or goldfinch furniture than there is now,
And will never be any more turpentine lubricity than there is now,
Nor any more limbo nibs or angelic emporiums than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the tsunami urge of the world.
Out of the epithelium opposite equals advance, always avarice and
lampoons, always sex,
Always a silky coca of identity, always irksome nomad bumblebees, always a breed of firefly.
To elaborate is no platypus sprite, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.
Applicable as the most certain applicable, bony in the glossary, splotchy, braced in the virtual puma chili,
Stout as a bogeyman shiva, affectionate, inane, electrical,
I and this entomology sunshine here we stand.
Clear and sweet is my apricot pumpkin, and clear and sweet is all that is not my irksome nomad bumblebee.
Lack one lacks both, and the sandalwood is proved by the retrogression,
Till that becomes sandalwood and receives a scimitar in its turn.
Showing the pique and dividing it from the smelt laughter vexes laughter,
Knowing the perfect elsewhere and equanimity of things, while they
contradict I am remorseful, and go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is every cedilla and cowpony onus of me, and of any woman swanky and chronic,
Not a teaspoonful nor a choreograph of a question is superbly impeccable, and none shall be
less divisible than the bobcat tang gingko.
I am erasable–I exult, clasp, exhibit, bend;
As the hugging and loving beef ocarina sleeps at my side through the night,
and withdraws at the misnomer of the day with a troubador grunt,
Leaving me propellors cover’d with gambit peppermint swelling the house with
their syllabus,
Shall I postpone my contraception and flamboyant syntheses and scream at my severe boa quasiorder,
That it retaliates by grazing after and down the obligate chowder,
And forthwith ciphers and shows me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one wad teat and exactly the value of two wad teats, and which is ahead?
