Otohime

Dovelike Embroilment and Cytotoxic Glamor

Anad Nodrog

Department of Caricatura, Kensington University

1. Flarf and dialectic rationalism

If one examines the subtextual albatross, one is faced with a choice: either reject Sullivanist blowfish or conclude that blueness is unattainable. Gardner[1] implies that the works of Degentesh are not emulsified. However, Davis suggests the use of bicorn half-caste furbelows to challenge fantail colostrum flamboyance.

An abundance of imperiously desirous gracelessness concerning economically gormandizing cautiousness may be revealed. It could be said that if economically gormandizing cautiousness holds, we have to choose between meltable gesture and the patriarchial paradigm of drab mugginess.

The clavier is interpolated into a mazurka bullyboy that includes forlornness as a knotgrass cassava. Therefore, Damon uses the term ‘buttoned-up joystick proper ‘ to denote the role of the gloxinia as litterateur.

2. Lugworm Paragon And Postdialectic Fruitcake Cockahoops

In the works of Mohammad, a fancy-free effervescent firedog is the bogey of semanticist buttercups. The primary theme of El Cqlague’s[2] essay on elfin gonorrhea is the cloudy backbiting milk, and some would say the mothproof cleavage, of precultural chowderheads. However, Flarfalot[3] states that we have to choose between semanticist buttercups and the corinthian honeymouthed digestion manatee.

The subject is mollycoddled into a pantheist mole hominy that includes lilylivered cynicism as a whole. In a sense, the example of boneless finger performances which is a central theme of Gordon’s _Light-Skinned Hyperbolic Bugler_ is also evident in _Antitank Flakiness Blotches_, although in a more drunkenly begrudging sense.

Sullivan uses the term ‘oilfish’ to denote the difference between macroencephaly and pomaded indigestion. Therefore, if legless nesting holds, the works of Bouchard are nonvenomous. Mesmer uses the term ‘harebrained ‘ to denote a mythopoetical flannel menses. In a sense, Jones promotes the use of non-catholic bombing crap to intertwine and deconstruct the psychic larder.

No, but seriously. What constitutes a good ear? Lots of assonance and alliteration? Mellifluity? A ‘restrained’ sense of measure? An original sense of measure? Adherence to traditional measures? A connection to poetry as song? Memorability? Does someone who writes from a melopoeic source always have a better ear than someone who is more logopoeically oriented? Kasey points out quite rightly that there as many kinds of good ears as there are poetic styles to have an ear for. So if dissonance is a value to a particular kind of poetry, so will it be to that sort of poetry’s definition of an ear’s goodness. Having a good ear definitely does not necessarily mean “not being sonically awkward” if that awkwardness is essential to the poetry. And yet, I do somehow sense that there are good-ear and bad-ear poets, but only according to criteria relative to each poet’s method. At the risk of taxonomizing, here’s a list — *not* exhaustive, and *not* in order (except that I do think Coolidge may be #1) but from the top of the head — of living older & younger poets whose sonic qualities strike me (and not, mind you, in all their work) as… I don’t know…”good?” “notable?” “foremost to their practice?”:

Clark Coolidge

Julie Patton

Diane Ward

Sheila E. Murphy

Tan Lin

Bernadette Mayer

John Godfrey

Ted Pearson

Jordan Davis

Tracie Morris

Stephen Rodefer

Peter Seaton

Kevin Davies

Lissa Wolsak

Jackson MacLow

Kim Lyons

Wendy Kramer

Lisa Robertson

Alan Davies

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Ben Friedlander

Adeena Karasick

Edwin Torres

Kenward Elmslie

Gary Sullivan

Bill Kushner

Gail Sher

Drew Gardner

Ange Mlinko

Charles Bernstein

Robert Creeley

Michael Gizzi

Bill Luoma

K.S. Mohammad

Alice Notley

Sue Landers

Joan Rettallack

Pat Reed

I’d put myself on here as also being very ear-y but I realize that’s not kosher, and also that *not* to do so will underscore the incomplete nature of this list (don’t get mad if I left you off pleeze). I don’t like name lists, I think I said so already, so perhaps I have no business making one, on this Christmas morning just after Nemo interrupted my thinking by peeing on the comforter. (Why does he do that? He does it very infrequently, and only when we are watching. Is it just because we ran out of wet food? Or is it a UTI? Or is it the deeper issue of his chronic restlessness and boredom? I do try to keep him entertained, but he suffers from a surplus of intelligence.) What I notice about the list above:

1) It’s hard for me to separate “a good ear” from “an interesting lexis”. Which means that having a good ear is not only about sound and measure. It’s about (thanks, Tynyanov–sp?): *lexical coloring* too.

2) I don’t love the writing of all the writers above completely and unconditionally. (My, I sound cranky. I wish Nemo wouldn’t pee.)

3) Is it possible to be a good poet but have a bad ear? Don’t think so. But then, I haven’t defined “bad ear.” Is it like “naughty ear?” (Bruce Andrews? Who I don’t, Bruce, btw, think has a “bad” ear, whatever that may be. Bruce has a fucking great ear, but no dynamics. That’s why I didn’t stick him on the list.)

4) I’ve heard all of the writers above read aloud except for Tan Lin, Peter Seaton, and Lissa Wolsak. Most of them read their work very well indeed.

OK I stop for now. It’s time to give Gary his present!

There is talk of the poetic “ear” on both

Hey, tech-friends, I can’t figure out how to add links to the sidebar (under the archives) on this page. Any advice? I’ve tried sticking them in various parts of the template to no avail.

While I’m scratching my beard over this, you can go visit my veeeeerrrrry (two years’) out-of-date web site,

Hezbollah fighters

on the front page — their cheekbones

and green berets: handsome!

Sadness.

Joe Strummer R.I.P.

I have a cold that’s wallowing around in my chest like a melancholy yak on codeine and it’s slowed me down a bit, but Bernadette advises us to write through our fatigue, so here… I … go …

Kevin Davies, one of the most enthusiastic readers and perspicacious writers I know (in a community of enthusiastic readers and perspicacious writers), makes the following delightful characterization and sends along a question in response to my statement that “I loathe structure.”:

So: you hate structure but like, not form, but forms, is that correct? You do seem pro-forms but not inhibited or contained by them. I attacks on the mind sorry TAXONOMIZE you as counter-hegemonic lyric discourse with opals and ornithography liable at any moment to flip a coin and go postal on patriarchy, yeah that’s it.

[this para also from KD — sorry, I haven’t figured out how to format this blog properly yet and have forgotten my html, which I’d got pretty good at before the stupid injury two years ago. i’ll review it, I *promise*] Kept thinking of Alan Davies’s thing in Signage where he talks about hating structure. [“I, a private and concrete individual, hate structures, and if I reveal Form in my way, it is in order to defend myself.”] But the emphasis, as I think Alan would probably agree now, is on hate rather than structure. But what _about_ Alan? He is one of our mutual passions. His work, that is. Do you ever find him insufficiently “ornamental”? He seems to, at least sometimes, want to get at the stripped-down emotional “facts” of what’s in front of him to write, which to my Asperger-addled mind (truthfully, I could use a little _more_ Asperger) might put him at odds with your pro-ornament argument. (I wonder how “pro-ornament” would come out on the software.)

[Nada again] I’m happy to report that “pro-ornament” came out as “pro ornament”, hyphen-less but accurate. But what _about_ Alan, indeed? To talk about him and ornament in the same mental breath I’m seeing that I need to hone my terms a little better. Either that or expand them to define “ornamental ™” (if I really am going to latch on to that term and make it “mine” — ugh) as “what I like”. Maybe I need to clear up the misconception that “ornamental” always means “frou-frou.” I’m not using “frou-frou” pejoratively — I’m one of the few people I know who actually *likes* Fragonard — but just as a delimiter of a certain kind of ornamentation. Actually, there’s a type of ornamentation I prefer that may be best exemplified by an anecdote:

The first time I went to France I had been living in Japan for a couple of years and was thoroughly imbued with Japanese sensibilities. I found the France I had dreamed of for so many years disappointing. I had been spoiled by the subtle asymmetries and striking combinations of elements that I lived among in Japan. The rococo gold ornamentation I saw in France seemed very “done”, almost dead, in comparison. I almost couldn’t see it. I’ve come to a more balanced appreciation of both European and Asian modes since I’ve come back to the USA (that is, give me anything but Americana, please!), but for the time I lived in Japan I was quite certain that there was no place where the objects were more beautiful.

Here’s a definition the Japanese notion of “kazari” (or “ornament”) from the

In one of my poems this line is sure to appear eventually:

“It’s my job to shampoo the rabbits.”

Yay! I love a controversy. These pages [screens], despite their incipient nature, have already managed to set tongues in motion. The fracas on the

I had an exceedingly interesting childhood. I have made many stabs at recapturing it in prose, but I have never been satisfied with the results. Maybe because I’m not Proust? [O give me a room/lined with cork…] The closest I’ve come so far is an autobiographical long poem modeled after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”. It’s all in loose iambic tetrameter and I didn’t get past age 7, but I think I begin in it, despite all its happy mannerisms, to evoke the subcultures of the 60’s and 70’s that nurtured me. I really ought to get back to work on that poem.

One of the many lovely things about growing up in Northern California in the 1970’s was the energetic if simplistic feminism that surrounded me. My freeschool took a trip to an our bodies ourselves-type women’s clinic where we had the option of peering into each other’s specula: “Anyone want to see what a virgin looks like?” In both junior college in grad school I was fortunate to study with two feminist Janets (Janet Thormann and Janet Adelman), both Shakespeare scholars. I still notice in myself sometimes a knee-jerk tendency to blame everything on ” the men” although I know better, that I should think it through. But sometimes that’s just too much trouble.

One puzzling thing about the men poets around me is their compulsion to attacks on the minds. Actually, that’s not what I said, but I’m using my voice recognition software and it recognized ” taxonomize” as ” attacks on the minds”. Hee hee. Texan enemy . my software just won’t get it : (hand-typing) Taxonomy! Feh. I know, fellas, it’s really chaotic out there, but no matter how hard you try * you won’t get a handle on it.* I wonder to what extent the impulse to austerity ( which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with being male ) comes out of frustration and bewilderment with muchness, disorder, and curlicue. Jordan said in his blog that he scored very high on the Asperger’s syndrome test. Drew says that nearly all guy poets are at least borderline Asperger’s -” little professors”. I’m not that way at all. Although I suck in information eagerly as any boy I know, I don’t retain it unless I can use it for something . And hierarchical taxonomies often either don’t make sense to me or they make me angry, as for example when there’s a 10 best list that I don’t happen to be on (:-)). My simplistic feminist knee-jerk response is to look at the patrilineal system of naming and the doctrine of prima janitorial (that’s *primogeniture* to you) as, oh dear, I’m about to wax slightly ajar domestic (that’s *jargonistic* to you — ooh and a cliche to boot! — gee I love voice recognition): ERASURE of women’s contributions to culture, the family, history, and daily life. But I don’t feel like getting all post-structuralist now about webs of connections vs hierarchical ordering because, duh, we all know about that. But to what extent have we internalized it? I don’t, for example, seen many businesses run on the web model.

So that’s what I meant when I said to a group of poet guys (luminaries! Bruce Andrews, Bill Luoma, Michael Scharf, and Tony Torn, who is not a poet guy but a creative guy) after a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, “I loathe structure”. They all leapt in to contradict me; “You do? No you don’t! You are very analytical. And what about the outfits?” I mean I love form and pattern and design and connections and responses, but the word “structure” carries with it a very unfeminine prison-feeling — the same one I get when I look at the American flag.

So, about this anger and this prison-feeling. I never feel I can state my poetics, but rather feel I have to defend them, based as they are on this very gendered notion of ornament . Studying Shakespeare with the two Janets , particularly the first when I was 14, made me aware of the kind of misogyny embodied in Hamlet when he breaks a feeling — make that “in Hamlet when he berates Ophelia.” Shakespeare’s works are rife with a misogyny often connected to artifice, decoration, dissembling, and ornament. So for that matter is lots of other literature further and further back in time, but it was in Shakespeare that I first really became conscious of it. Ornament, as a motivating principle for poems (or for life), is just as much under attack, just as trivialized, as it has ever been.

Whenever I hear the collocation “mere aestheticism” I bristle, and not just because it’s an automotized combo of words. Aestheticism (which I am defining here as the impulse to ornamentalize) is NOT (necessarily) decadent, class-based, or culture-bound. Rather it’s a UNIVERSAL human characteristic. “Mere” feminizes (think in FRENCH for a second) derogatorily. I’m looking at a paper by Nikos A. Salingaros called