Otohime

SUCCUMB

The daily world verbals far.

Believe in my heat — how their art divides on you.

Dance of the greeting draws to the bottom at an end like the crane of music.

Behind the smiling veil their frontage dissimulates.

It overloads us all with the tension and in it one is astonished, which is subjacent.

A fear that luminosity is to surmount us.

She discovers that which is dissimulated.

Et elle fit que tous, petits et grands, riches et pauvres, libres et esclaves, reçussent une marque sur leur main droite ou sur leur front,

et que personne ne pût acheter ni vendre, sans avoir la marque, le nom de la bête ou le nombre de son nom.

C’est ici la sagesse. Que celui qui a de l’intelligence calcule le nombre de la bête. Car c’est un nombre d’homme, et son nombre est six cent soixante-six (666).

Some experimental remarks: macaw adjusts the prickly clay.

It is a separate thing but it binds the music to this world.

In a balance it advises the alarm clock of the body.

Bursting with nimble pride, the love water dances among toenails.

The water and solar molarsplendor dappled me, the such deep ocean, in which your vague NAKED coralreef lips nestled on brown sand words.

Your clay melodic waves.

A night clock starred up my puddle pool of corn.

A woman links amorous worms with the dance of the loves.

Their hands opalescent, music in their odorous silver-plated bones.

The joke in the verbalistic colors of fresh bagels, their elbows postpone supple in the air.

Your curves of belly equal in direction to the clouds.

Your long hands hold the ground. Your pupils turn over now.

I have basins on my fingers and money on my hips, and I would like to dance.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I believe in Wesley Clark. He makes the right sounds but him being an ex general is very cautionary. If he fumbles I will probably switch back to Dean, but I dont expect either of them to be any more of the righteous than any other politician. We talking nuance and degree here.

I am however desperate to get Bush out of there and unless he does something I just cannot stand, I believe Wesley Clark is the tool for the job.

Lets do it.

Even in tears it is a photocopy. It slips by in the worlds, the impact bright burning coal of comets, with the extreme forging mill in the heart of the mass.

However, it is as narrow as a candle.

Memory of the old secrecy, a verdant hot brown river in which he sky is an elbow lapis lazuli lazuli.

Dissimulated, rolled up in the foam rubber and the fog.

Open up like lotteries, as a queue, like a falcon.

My dance is a gift and a victim and an honor and a load.

It increases brilliantly.

The fear usually begins to build itself up around lunch time, and by the time I have to go to bed I am but a shell of a man. It’s just that distracting. When my friends come over in the evenings, I can bearly talk… I take my pulse every few minutes to make sure I am not going into a panic. Sometimes my hands are so shaky by the end of the day I can’t steady them enough to take my pulse… this really does scare me, because then I have no idea if my heart is well or not… It would be missing beats, and I might be well into a heart attack because of my shaky hands.

It’s most embarrasing at school, because I take evening classes, and some assignments require the written word… well by this time I can bearly even write my own name… people sitting next to me ask what’s wrong but I can’t give them an answer. No one can…

Three cornered green and yellow succulent rises up, glistening with hexes, hexed vexation.

The legs glow green in the universe.

I don’t know much about intercessory prayer.

Angelidiocy: the bunny is the object of study, then the victim, then the leader, then the drugged baby.

The doll: she is the guardian of the brain in despair. The science men put their spatulas to it.

The woman whose job it is to guard the brain wants to stop the ‘ineluctable’ march of progress.”

Took pics of a red tent spider which was in full view, surprisingly, for they are usually hidden and well-concealed in one of the many dried leaves that are suspended in the middle of the web. It may have just spun the web, and had not went around collecting leaves yet. It was a pain to photograph – near it was a suspected black ants’ nest, and so I kept having the irritating black ants crawling around my legs and back, biting their little bites… the spider was also right smack in the centre of the web structure, so it was difficult getting the camera close enough for a good macro without destroying its web.

Discovered these clusters of small pinkish round balls that were stuck onto the freshwater plant stalks, by the Eco-lake. They look like eggs, but of what type of animal, I am not sure.

I don’t know much about intercessory prayer.

Heaven is not a gypsy tearoom.

Heaven is not a gypsy tearoom.

Heaven is not a gypsy tearoom.

Life is not a succession of moonlight and music, and every night is not a fiesta.

Feathered rumps mooning the good is an idiot. And wonderful

So boring, that golden cloud called the hand

Sure beats the question of whether there are two skulls of me.

Barbarians are mostly women: distant ululators in the metro.

His heart ticks like he spells my goal… to be an octopus

Aubergine fishnet stockings… Gargoyles

Kiss the pixies goodbye, they’re never coming back. They’re going back to the fiery pits of hell they came from. Their sweet smiles mask sharp teeth and black hearts and their innocent sparsely-clad bodies are an invitation for people who follow Christianism to ravage them. They are sirens whose only allegiance lies with the murderous little beasts humans like to call children. So say farewell and watch their backsides disappear into smoke while you stand and reminisce on the good times you had.

The past is to rather pleasantly bury lines in sand dunes.

An understanding is to form a terrible thing.

The linen of the bed of the enemy is a suitable adaptation and sometimes it smells so good.

If clothing of the revolution obtains to us, taste the nakedness of the monuments.

My fluctuations of step of skirt, by the veils increase and take me on a magic voyage.

“Us” trembles those windripples remaining in the shower of the paddle.

Sand tears small marks, grinding in the wind.

Comprehension is overrated.

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.

This woman is Nada Rizk. Gary has the tape of her with her photo above on it. It’s not great, but not awful, either. Gary freaked out when I read him this, which I found via Google:

Female singer convicted of collaboration with Israel

The Military Tribunal has convicted in absentia a singer who performed in Israel of collaboration with the Jewish state and sentenced her to 15 years in prison at hard labor. Nada Rizk was also fined LL2 million for “serving in the (Israeli) enemy army, contacting its agents and entering the country without prior permission.”

The verdict was handed down Thursday and posted on a court bulletin board Friday.

In February, the court accused Rizk of frequently visiting Israel, giving an interview on Israel radio on Oct. 24 about her singing career, and of marrying Abdel-Basset Ahmed bin Oudeh, an Arab-Israeli whom the military claimed worked for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.

Rizk is believed to be living in Israel.

Her brother, Beshara, has been serving a six-month prison sentence in Lebanon for collaboration with Israel and the South Lebanon Army, a militia that helped Israel police the border zone.

Here’s a poem I wrote before going to Paris. It came to mind because I was doing my laundry today:

DRAWN FROM A RAVELL’D STOCKING

The Muses are turned gossips

      

       come, then

             curds and cream

drowning flies

       with rueful face

             come, Muse

the very cat

       the wet kitchen

             remains of quiet

dirt and gravel

       linen horse by dog thrown down

             or study swept

or nicely dusted

       stockings mended

             snug recess

all crushed beneath

       of course check’d apron

             mar thy musings

jelly or creams

       or butter’d toast

             eldest of forms

tended the little ones

       oft the pins

             my mother’s voice

to fold, and starch

       why washings were

             and sent aloft

thy silken ball

       the sport of children

             the toils of men

This is the last thing I’ll say about all this and then I’ll shut up

I like my poets loony and orphic — can you blame me? Maybe that’s why Bernadette Mayer and Joanne Kyger are more important to my poetic universe than, say, Joan Retallack or Susan Howe — both of whom I nonetheless respect and aspects of whose work I unabashedly imitate.

Retallack and Howe are academics — interesting ones, to be sure. My preference for the likes of Mayer and Kyger has, I suspect, a great deal to do with my resistance to the growing professionalization of poetic culture. My roots are in punk, in grassroots, do-it-yourself modes and communities. Language poetry at its outset was such a model community, although it evolved into an entirely different beast.

Of course, I have no problem with “professionalization” when it comes to actual professions such as law, medicine, and education, where “professionalism” means putting the interests of the client, patient or learner foremost, and behaving according to a commonly-agreed upon ethical code.

Literature and other forms of cultural production should be exempt from such requirements.

A writer can be politically committed or ethically sound and choose to have those commitments and ethics reflected in her work. I might value the work all the more because of it. But that does not make such commitment a requirement, because writing is not a profession. Even when people do it in exchange for money it is not a profession the same way that law or education or medicine are professions. It is different because “reader”, in the case of literature (as opposed to propaganda or texts whose primary purpose is to “inform”) is a wholly different category from “client” or “patient” or “learner.”

This is one reason I don’t buy the role of critic as a “more knowledgeable” person with “better judgment” who screens works of literature for the reader-consumer. Nor do I believe that as poets we need to be concerned with “principles” (except, of course, in our lives), or have an overweaning need for “prose we can trust.” If anything, our work seems to come out language’s inherent untrustworthiness. That’s exactly what we are working with so productively!

Unlike journalists, we are not obliged to be “responsible” to our readers, or to tell the truth. We are not, as it were, fiduciaries for our readers. We are not even obliged to be fiduciaries for our own ideas, for their clear and precise conveyance. If we want to express something awkwardly or obscurely, we have every right to. Writing is the only place we have to fight for “true autonomy” — whether we can achieve it or not. (Think of the Buzzcocks here, if you please.)

Let’s try a thought experiment. Try to conceive of literature, as I do, as a giant SANDBOX where we can play however we want as long as we don’t hurt anyone too gravely. Take it as a given that we play within the confines of pre-existing meanings and with some (occasionally oppressive) familial supervision. Aggressive behavior is, for better or worse, natural and unavoidable in such an environment. There are those who will choose to play cooperatively, others who will sit in a corner autistically counting sand grains, and still others who come whapping at your sand constructions with a shovel.

In the sandbox, you’ll see natural tribal corrective behaviors such as Brian’s (“we need to build better, more structurally reliable sandcastles”) or mine (“who are you to set the standards and indeed what are your motives for trying to so?”) or Kasey’s and Stephanie’s (“No fighting, guys.”)

Personally, I will always stand up against what I see as a repressive call for “standards” in the literary sandbox. Doesn’t mean I don’t have standards or very strong opinions about what is worthwhile and what isn’t. I just don’t see the point of imposing these notions on others. Why not? It has a great deal to do with my world view — what’s the point? As long as I get to play in the sandbox, I don’t particularly care whether I am the boss of it. And, as Brian pointed out in his lovely if a leetle beet condescending review of _V. Imp._, my world view is heavily colored by a (to him) “tiring” sense of reductio ad absurdum. What alternative, I wonder, does he propose? Reductio ad technos? And what does that get us but more — sigh — “progress”?

It seemed like Brian could see neither the forest nor the trees in _Spin Cycle_, just a few bits of lichen, a gall, and maybe some termites here and there. Hence his myopic, nitpicking example. He’s a great reader, but maybe he could learn to read certain texts more holistically.

The first thing that we learn as ESL teachers is that in the theory of communicative competence there are two poles: fluency vs. accuracy. No learner really ever manages to achieve 100% perfection at both ends of the communicative spectrum. ESL teachers, therefore, have to learn to tolerate and work through a lot of ambiguity to try to understand exactly what it is a learner wants to communicate. It is helpful, but not necessary, to be able to speak the native language of the learner as well, so you can understand her errors from the inside out. I don’t think Brian is really fluent enough in Chris’ conceptual language to be able to read his book holistically and fairly.

Let me now posit a somewhat outrageous assertion. For poets, one’s native language is in some sense always a foreign language –definitely a site of struggle. Murat Nemat-Nejat has written much the same thing. The struggle may be visible to various degrees.

Clear prose may be evidence of a kind of “mastery” (O most loathed word) over that struggle. On the other hand, it can be a method of ssssseduction or persssssuassssion, an impressive feat of formal, grammatical, and rhetorical clarity masking the fact that the ideas it is so “successfully” conveying are not really all that (to some readers, anyway) interesting, useful, or even accurate. I do have a specific essay to exemplify this in mind, not one of Brian’s BTW, but I won’t be so petty as to name it. Backchannel me if you really want the dirt on this.

At any rate it’s very difficult to say anything conclusive about the value for poetry and for poets’ prose of what we first called “clarity” and more usefully amended to “precision.” Does “precise” mean the same thing as “principled”? This is a problem of language. Would the poetic world really be a better place if we managed to eradicate faulty nominalization, comma splices, misplaced modifiers, wordiness, and unclear anaphor?

I’m not exactly saying that it wouldn’t — just that the assertion that it would reeks to me of Age of Enlightement- or Academie francaise-style calls for standardization and hence a very deep kind of psycholinguistic repressiveness. A comma splice in its onrush may for example say something that the mere words of the sentence cannot I know you know what I mean.

The push for clarity and correctness also reeks to me of, yes, I’m going to say it, a kind of problem of class. I’m not necessarily talking about actual economic class but of class identification and of how that identification is made manifest in language. One of the many reasons we appreciate a Brian or a Jack is for their aristocratic bearing, their diplomatic, even princely, language, and their willingness to further the art with many generous acts of (sometimes, but not necessarily economic) largesse.

Chris, on the other hand, figures himself as more of a working-class superhero, a Harvey Pekar deluxe, a “continous peasant” whose story is much more remarkable than Pekar’s in that it has taken him into conceptual and linguistic realms that I doubt Pekar would ever have access to. I simply take Chris’ prose on different terms than Brian’s or Jack’s. Am I guilty of making excuses for it? Dunno. Certainly, more than Brian’s (though not more than Jack’s, whose idiosyncratic combination of the fey, the learned and the blueblood feels almost priestly), it meets my preferred criteria of “loony” and “Orphic.”

For those who would wish to disregard the biographical coloration of my comments, I can only say that it is impossible for me to divorce the writings of these people from my personal experiences of them. “The person comes before the writing.” Well, the last thing to which I would ever make a claim is… objectivity.

Therein lies the differance.

“Prose you can trust.” What does that mean when everything — really everything — is subject to radical doubt? Frankly, I wish I didn’t feel that way. I wish I could sail ahead through life full of clarity, conviction, and certainty. But how can I? Can you?

1) “The darkness surrounds us.”

2) “Sooner or later, everyone disappoints you.”

and on that cheery note, I’m off to go play in the sandbox…

The Word is Becoming a Jackson MacLow Poem

Here’s how yet another viagra spam (yummy!) sneaked through through my e-mail today:

Subject: Illness

accumulated imbalances bessemer pop bowels hove microphone scrolling than crossers

tents powdering counsellors horseflesh theatricals adversaries bobbie blurring tee exculpate

courter belgrade accordant satisfy scattering bender scow i explosively boundlessness

polemics evened cremating taxonomic ibis eulogy 10th scrawled tetrafluoride accosting

postmultiply braes boldly ternary thawed microsecond ethos hopelessly taxation austria

acquires possessive sealer tasting poll sculpts playwright alcott aquarius positive

popularization hopple creating blumenthal bluffing cranky creditably achieving bookstore possess

braze tempering sane asilomar tampon adduct illusive tatty seaboard adductor

addend medal tapered acolytes hosted pore botulin breakdown polyploidy apr

athens portended tags plenipotentiary popularizing criticizing matriarch humidifier courtroom boner

anabel augean crossbars exam blunderings tarnish portland testicular schematically talks

plumbate astm hostages methodology plunging adjectives booklet boxcars tact hypothalamus

My world view, I suddenly realize, is waaaaaaay too Machiavellian.

This is one reason I am all too ready to attribute to people the worst possible motives.

Sigh. At least they have motives.

Song of Self-Doubt

Am I really nothing more than a “self-centered, inept monster”?

Should I just give up writing altogether?

Vote in the comments box below. Remember, comments can be anonymous, so, lurking enemies, this is your chance!

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.