On My Desk

So many new books and journals that I would like to review individually, but if I don't just do a quick run-down, I'll never get around to any of them.

New from Rod Smith's Edge Books, Anselm Berrigan's Some Notes on My Programming:

to a cricket ghost who planted me

into innocuous sympathy

so be it "poet," blue lightning

purrs from fingertips

now that the war is forever

(from "In the paint")

Also new from Edge, Jules Boykoff's Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge:

Oh how handy these traits
become for de-localized honcho
logic for logistical regression
analysis for statistically
significant witch doctor
predictions of history
as communicable disease
(from "Eric 'Sleepy' Floyd Meets Horace 'Sleepy' Hinds in the Capitol Rotunda the morning before the evening after Ronald Reagan was shot in order to discuss the servility of civility, the utility of docility, & the convergent discrepancy of extreme mediocrity")

Also also (fairly) new from Edge, Mel Nichols' 2005 chapbook Day Poems:

everything

snow cones

25 cents

please knock on door

two bolts in the mouth

and a pie in the face
(from "Day Poem" [2])

From Suzanne Stein's Taxt Press, Kathryn L. Pringle's chapbook Temper and Felicity Are Lovers:

the Nation is about farming
according to OUR body.
to you. you think you find them

my name is felicity. i used to be like you.
I'm not now. I used to be like you
before the light.
prior to the suction.

From Bear Star Press, Craig Wright's first book of short stories, Redemption Center:

Makes the meaning go away. Even in a story.

But maybe it'll mean something this time.

Or maybe all you see are words. It's not even real.

That's the thing. This story'll sit here, untold. Like when you're riding other pages.

But you want this story to mean something, or will. You will want that. When somebody's reading or listening, more than anything you want meaning in the mean old world.

Fine.
(from "Footprayer")

From Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales by Norman M. Klein:

We are also reasonably certain that Freud went to Hell, not only the Hell Gate in Dreamland; but also Darkness and Dawn (with Hell as Darkness) in Luna Park. He enjoyed watching the Chicago Fire (with women jumping from flaming windows). Nearby, he claimed his hair was nearly singed when the riverboat Prairie Belle burst into flames along the Mississippi. He even yawned his way down "Stygian chambers," to the River Styx; and saw the Flood at the Crack of Dawn.

And from the same people who bring you Otis Books--Otis College of Art & Design--vol. 3 no. 2 of The New Review of Literature, edited by Paul Vangelisti and others. In this issue, work by Steve Katz, Mac Wellman, David Antin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest, Octavio Paz, Matthea Harvey, Alice Notley, Rae Armantrout, and more. Here, an excerpt from Catherine Wagner's "Everyone in the room is a representative of the world":

Keep nestling myself down in my name
wriggled my bottom for a more perfect reliable seat
I got up and rode away on my bike
smashed on a fence, a car underwhelped me
I became a person picked up in a van
I became--I could not get a job
I became hurry hurry, nuzzle
back into my name, before the bowels open

And more journals: Magazine Cypress 4, edited by Dana Ward, featuring Brandon Brown, Michael Cross, Drew Gardner ("Chicks Dig War"!), K. Lorraine Graham, Brenda Iijima, Larry Kearney, Ange Mlinko, Kerri Sonnenberg, Chuck Stebelton, Christina Strong, Stephen Vincent, Matvei Yankelevich, and Stephanie Young. From Iijima's "SPINE/DIVINE/SUPINE":

O pupils
Of oppression
Destroy your want of big things
Inscrutable personal nothingness
Or have a cheap machine. Nude
Harmonious now out of scale

Balking at physics
I bite into the big picture

This tease is on view at the
American Folk Art Museum

The beautifully handmade Cannibal 1, edited by Matthew and Katy Henriksen, contains work by Lisa Jarnot, Joseph Massey, Brian Howe, Clayton Couch, Jen Tynes, Anne Boyer, me, Tao Lin, Sandra Simonds, Bruce Covey, Erica Kaufman, Brenda Iijima, Laura Carter, Gina Myers, Edmund Berrigan, Jim Behrle, and many more. From Andrew Mister's "Liner Notes":

We don't want writers to tell us about their lives, we want them to show us something about our own. Maybe that's why I'm ashamed to tell you about my life. The irregular appearance of points on a surface. Maybe that's why no one talks about themselves in poems anymore. I was at a party and this guy kept interrupting himself, saying, "But me, me, me, it's all about me, anyway," in an ironic, self-deprecating way. But he said it many times to different people so all night he really was talking only about himself. Maybe that's why we get tired of our own lives: they're all about us.

Fence vol. 9. no. 1, edited by Rebecca Wolff and Charles Valle, features poetry and fiction by lots of writers including Matvei Yankelevich, Sawako Nakayasu, Lisa Lubasch, Mathias Svalina, Nick Twemlow, Macgregor Card, Etel Adnan, and Joseph Donahue. It also features a witty and colorful selection of art by John Lurie (including the cover). From Robert Fitterman's Myopera: a libretto:

Rachel: I'm not entirely sure, but I might be a tad uncertain of myself.
Robert: Amazing Ass Trilogy.
Chorus: My shed has collapsed taking most of the fence with it.
Rachel: I don't see the point in sex toys.
Robert: English Spanking Classics.
Rachel & Robert together: Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
Chorus: Together they conspire to take control of a secret society.

The Tiny 2, edited by Gina Myers, has among its many contributors Joseph Lease, Andrew Mister, Stacy Szymaszek, Shanna Compton, Dan Hoy, Matthew Henriksen, Anthony Robinson, CA Conrad, James Meetze, Kate Greenstreet, Donna de la Perriere, Sandra Simonds, Ken Rumble, Jim Goar, Amy King, and Jess Mynes. I hope neither Gina nor Jonathan will object if I reproduce Jonathan Mayhew's "Self Parody" in its entirety:

I play the drums but only on rubber practice pads
My fetishes are lipstick and Language Poetry
Hi-hat cymbals and alcohol
I live in Kansas

Without attaching any emotion to this fact
This is a pantoum with half the lines removed
I am easily humiliated yet feel the need to be heard

Finally for now, the first issue of Soft Targets, edited by Daniel Feinberg and Dan Hoy, features Ben Lerner, Richard Greenfield, Linh Dinh, Brian Howe, Martha Ronk, Lara Glenum, Carla Harryman, Sabrina Orah Mark, Dennis Cooper, Allyssa Wolf, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Joan Retallack. There are lots of translations from and into Russian and Hebrew and Arabic, many of them with facing texts in the original language. The journal also comes with a tiny little CD that I'm afraid to stick in my Mac because it looks like it might never come back out. From "Shut Your Sass Hole, Squirrel Man," by Paul Killebrew:

I am not your dental floss.
You are not my good time.
I don't see why all the tanned children
have to grow up to say, "Fuck off, snowman."
The sky spills only what you allow yourself to swallow
and the trees only grow as high as you're willing to look
and the computer will never express yourself without
a paperclip of resistance.
To name the offense was weak, to take offense was weak
but nobody is as squeamish as the news.
I am not hardened to the word processor.

"Un-PC"?

So much has been written about the term "politically correct" and its general meaninglessness that it would be pointless to resurrect the conversation, if it were not for the current discomfort among certain honorable and respected members of the poetic community surrounding the use some time back of "un-PC" to describe one of the characteristics of flarf. First of all, Gary, what were you thinking? OK, that's out of the way. Second, now that it's been said and there's no taking it back, let's try to put it in context.

"PC" has been used chiefly as a term of derision virtually since the moment it first emerged in its contemporary sense (which I've heard was in some comic strip or other, but I don't care enough to research it). The force of the derision the term is used to invoke, however, depends on the fiction that it has some actual currency among leftists. If "PC" is used by the left (or liberals) at all, it is usually only in a semi-ironic reclaiming of the expression from the right, and that semi-irony has always made deployment of the term problematic at best. Example:

Liberal 1: Maybe I should choose a title for this seminar that's a little less "PC."
Liberal 2: Why are you bashing political correctness? What are you, some kind of reactionary?
Liberal 1: No, you don't understand, I was just thinking that although I stand by the content of the course, the jargony language could make it seem ... oh, never mind. I'm sorry!

Another example:

Liberal 1: I liked the new King Kong overall, but the depiction of the natives wasn't very "PC," was it?
Liberal 2: "PC"? Ugh! Why would you use a right-wing expression like that?
Liberal 1: I know, I was putting it in invisible "scare quotes" to suggest that ... um .... uh ... oh the hell with it! [shoots self]

To object as a matter of course to any and all satiric uses of "PC" is to cede all signifying power to right-wing users of the term: to reserve solely for them the authority to point out any absurdities in progressive language (to say nothing of the absurdities of reactionary language which attempts crudely to point out progressive absurdities). In short, if progressives can't claim for themselves a perspective which recognizes things as ridiculously "PC," only reactionaries will have access to that perspective. We have to be able to critique each other from within our shared set of political values, even to make fun of each other, or we really do become valid objects of ridicule on certain levels, not just for each other, but for anyone else who's looking.

An A Tonalist / Flarf Syncope

The A Tonalist reads the strength of a century into every "Prussian bellwether" argument, propped up always against/with the sparse but fertilely asymptotic term through/by which it is canted.

Standard Schaefer has adopted the flarfist (and Deleuzian) redaction of "transgression" (a suavely rendered change of heart), and paraphrases it thus:

If you see power as pure repression, if you live in a world that believes some language is politically correct or incorrect, and if you attempt to attack such a conceptualization by being incorrect, offensive, or just plain contrary, you’re reinforcing the idea that power is exercised from above. The danger is that you remain tied to the very significations you hope to transgress.

Schaefer, via Deleuze and the flarfist "Balzac" queue, recognizes the way in which oppressive power's directionality is continually packaged (by itself, for itself, toward others, from the manufactured vantage of a unitary proxied Other) as an up ---> down pressure on the subject being hailed, and further, the way in which any project of "transgressive" aesthetics imagined as a down ---> up counterpressure is inevitably a capitulation to that vertical hierarchization of power.

Power, as the A Tonalist Schaefer and the A([n/d][I-"Ron"-ic]) flarfist acknowledge, is multiple and collaborative (collusive). This is why, in the words of Drew Gardner, "there's really not much your personality can do / given you'll probably end up as the victim of an evil manatee / made of lightning, with a will but not a face" ("Fuck the World," unpublished). More optimistically, poetry offers a constructive space of (dis)assembling mentation where every moment of inclination toward transgression (a hollow impulse) can be redirected into an ecology of limitless aggression, beyond any restrictive binary of totality vs. resistance. As Rod Smith says, "if you haven't seen puppets fucking / yet then you need to get out more" ("This Is Such Total Bullshit," unpublished).

If you rearrange the letters in A Tonalist you get Latin oats. Or Stalin Tao. The following diagram is truly beautiful:

Sandra Simonds' Steam

Sandra Simonds has self-published a 20-page chapbook entitled Steam. It contains supercharged language like this:

it stung     the primate     in her burglary itch     (her withins
mocking) for she was
   so sunny

dank spoke your doorstep     in lavender climates     a coconut
glistened on a
common palm

and this:

My name is scrotum, Madonna,
Windex, tampon, Camp Electric Barb,
and I have a hard hat
made of jelly, crampons
welded to my gums

and this:

but won't you trust a fish palm statue so crazy bone bare
and you will urgency the fire fish's rainbow fin....

It also contains spare, taut, "plain" but evocative language like this:

        Nothing is what
I meant by the box car or

meant it to be. The moon has
her little ways, so why can't I?

and this:

and I am only a somewhere
that has walked
through the skeleton
of somewhere
slipping away

and this:

                    I've been studying what it's
like to be lost at sea
        pitter pat that diagonal weather....

Sandra's poems ricochet snappily between these extremes of wild verbal play and lucid meditative precision, alternately messy and gorgeous and pointed and oblique, but always vivid and intense. I don't know if she has any copies left, but if she doesn't she should print up more--or better yet, anyone out there looking to put together a longer collection should get in contact with her.

Poetics Report

A couple of interesting examples of poetics-in-action from the blogosphere today: Allen, in a couple of short review-posts on Michael Magee's Mainstream here and here, coins the portmanteau term "disjuptive" to describe the disruptive effects of disjunctiveness, and argues for a consideration of the importance of tonal shifts over and above the attention more commonly given to the collage-based techniques by which such shifts are often effects. In other words, he could be said to be urging an emphasis on what Shanna, using a textile metaphor, calls the "right side" of the poem as opposed to its "seam side."

As sympathetic as I am to both of these posts (obviously so in the case of Allen's, which gives succinct expression to a sentiment voiced in various forms by several people in recent memory), and as delighted as I am by the vocabulary of Shanna's formulation, I have to question some of Shanna's broader claims. In particular, I'm puzzled by her opening thesis statement that "Process, as interesting as it may be, is irrelevant." There seems to be an ellipsis between this statement and the rich sewing analogy that follows. In fact, the analogy, as far as I can tell, belies the initial statement (or am I being deaf to a wry irony?). Shanna goes on to write (I'll reproduce the entirety of the rest of her post here for ease of reference):

If poetry were a garment, the poem would be what is known as the right side.
The process would be the construction details hidden on the seam side.

The right side requires a seam side. Sometimes a garment's construction is part of its right side. For instance, raw-edge detailing, frayed or distressed effects, an "authentic" patch, or decoratively serged or otherwise exposed (displayed) seams.

The right side and the seam side can be the same side, in this sense. But in that case the right/seam side is constructed by virtue of an additional undisplayed seam side.

This is one of those marvelously simple thought-experiments that promises to expand infinitely into ever more complex and useful elaborations. I love the idea of a "right side" and a "seam side" in poetry, and even more I love the final concept of "an additional undisplayed seam side." But I repeat: wherefore "irrelevant"? If, as Shanna proposes, the details of a poem's construction are always potentially details of the right side, doesn't this suggest that these details are always potentially of interest? And if the shift fo constructive details from seam side to right side always introduces another, "undisplayed" seam side, doesn't this speak for the relevance of yet further detail-shifts in which the undisplayed is continually un-undisplayed, thus resulting in further undisplayed spaces, ad infinitum? How on earth could anyone find this irrelevant?

Anyway, I'd love to see the right side/seam side model developed at greater length. I'd like to hear more, in particular, about "raw-edge detaiing" and "'authentic' patches" (what do the quotes around authentic signify, for example?).

And then there's the class dimension that the clothing trope opens onto: I don't think I've thought that consciously before about the meaning of the expression seamy, as in "the seamy side of life." What do displays of construction/constructedness as a marker of social position (both downward and upward), and public attitudes toward such displays, tell us about attitudes toward poetry that involves analogous displays?

Yemeni Poetry

Amin al-Mashreqi, author of anti-terrorist poetry

Anne sends me this link to a Christian Science Monitor piece about a Yemeni poet and his anti-extremist verse, and this extract from a 2001 Anthropology News essay by Lucine Taminian on Yemeni poetry and its role in the political arena. A very good general anthropological study of traditional Yemeni poetic traditions as they are practiced today is Steven Caton's 1990 UC Press study Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cutural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe.


Nabila al-Zubayr reciting "free verse" poetry at al-Alif Cultural Center, Sanaa

One of the fascinating issues raised in Taminian's piece is the tension between older traditional forms (qasida) and newer "experimentational" approaches in Yemeni verse. I'm going to go see if my school library carries the magazine with the full article, but I'd be curious to know if anyone has done more recent work on contemporary Yemeni poetics.

Guest Poet Dept.: Noah Eli Gordon

Flarf


It certainly can't explain or explicate
a close reading of the idea
of deep generative structure
as the argument that one's particular claims
produce and fuel a dialogue
which tries to respond
to weirdness as a classic struggle
of the individual against the cruel world,
against the city of Portland, or a public arts
and murals program spread out
in a Chinese poem promising
a battlefield inside the forces
for example if one took as evident
that I do not, in actuality, know all that much
about kitchen sink poetics, wherein everything
is falsely claimed evidence threatening to take over
or "take a stand" against books
along with getting ready to host
the opening event of atrocities
against civilians during the war
in former Yugoslavia, then it might
be helpful to offer a short history
about a couple of years ago
when Gary Sullivan, by doing nothing--something somehow
deemed new--and the verifiable practitioners
casting the lyric against the Iraq War
on behalf of corporate language
mobilized groups to violence
against Danish civilians

That our public was private
after a couple of paragraphs
on why everything I've ever drawn
gave my silent consent a set of cultural values
doesn't make a free service track your musical taste
to break the taboo against criticizing Israel's silent consent.
After all, just fucking around on the Internet
smashes a bag of smoky serendipity, which is part
of what informs the argument for and against narrative,
plus critiques of federal aesthetics
make some interesting new economic, political
and social ideas a huge mistake
like a weapon used against low-income Arab nations
and Jews, against short skirts and flashy jewelry
erupting with fresh injunction against the n-word
drawing an analogy from the natural world.

-----------

Ed. note: in other Noah Eli Gordon news, Mark Scroggins discusses The Frequencies.

Some of the A Tonalism

Here, Laura's A tonalist rules; here, Brent's village explanation.

A poetics whose "rules" are grounded only in the event to be described by each moment of its actualization. Out of its own indeterminacy, the potential for a sculpted consistency, but only one that always reveals itself as contingent to the consistency realized in/by the next event. And vice versa.



The significant distance between A tonalism from (received dogmatic manifestations of) Language Poetry is relatively easy to demonstrate: it can be seen, for example, in its provisional recuperation of the Aristotelian trope of mimesis (one of the less valued of the Langpo hierarchy of maneuvers that Brent mentions), and in its implicit recognition of Keatsian negative capability as something more meaningful than mere mystified sublimation of intolerable economic contradictions. The distance between A tonalism and flarf is more difficult to gauge, and Brent himself is careful to confine that distance within the tentative limits of "the moment."

The problem with theorizing (a pro[to]leptic, retro-jected haeccity in/of) flarf as an intelligible monad in the A tonalist multiplicity of allowances is that flarf has as yet insisted on its own hyper-expansive exceptionalism in relation to any conceivable program of practice: it exists par excellence as the perversion of whatever system might threaten to lend it coherence. And yet, since the A tonalist refusal of formal predictability not only claims for A tonalism the privilege of limitless auto-transgression, but admits into its range of practices virtually any formal device or tonal valence (which borderless territory of tones I take to be summarized in the amphibological A of its name--an A of representative identity at the same time as self-cancelling alpha privative), we have a curious standoff. For if flarf can exist under the terms of A tonalism, it must always be in some position of subtended minority, and conversely, if flarf is to accommodate A tonalism, it can only do so via a gesture that is ultimately itself a diminishing gesture of absorption, of satire or pastiche.

On the other hand, A tonalism is fairly recondite about its ontological convictions, suggesting that it might already have anticipated either its own instability as a materialistically-imagined movement best explicated via neo-idealist theory, or flarf's inevitable confrontation with the Chinese Wall dividing its own transcendentalist implications from its ostensible ethos of corrosive hedonism, or both. In other words ... A tonalism may be flarf, or what flarf is continually having to hide from itself in order to sustain the hypothesis that it has nothing to hide from itself.