{LIME TREE}

Writers' Routines

2012-01-09T12:21:00.001-08:00

http://writersroutines.tumblr.com/post/15051771867/k-silem-mohammad

Twenty Recommended Poetry Titles from 2011

2011-12-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

Twenty books of poetry from 2011 that belong on your shelf. (This was originally two posts of ten titles each, but I've consolidated them into one list.)

Chris Alexander, Panda (Truck Books)
It's like conceptual poetry, only fun. From the very conceptualistically-oriented Truck Books, which also released Kristen Gallagher's We Are Here (also recommended) this year.

Bruce Andrews, You Can't Have Everything ... Where Would You Put It! (Veer Books)
Another hopped-up avalanche of hard-Language hooks from the King of Pop!

Rae Armantrout, Money Shot (Wesleyan UP)
Win the Pulitzer Prize, then name your next book Money Shot. Badass!

Guy Bennett, Self-Evident Poems (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions)
Not much more than a series of dumb reflexivity jokes. I couldn't put it down.

Megan Boyle, Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee (Muumuu House)
Like Tao Lin, only a little less absurd and with more sex. Published by Tao Lin. Fortunately, I like Tao Lin. And I'm kidding, sort of--at any rate, Boyle's style stands on its own.

Brandon Brown, Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya Books)
Disclosure: I haven't really read it. I ordered it from SPD a few days ago and it hasn't arrived yet. It's on this list because of how freaking EXCITED IN ADVANCE I am about it.

Sommer Browning, Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC)
It's like poetry, only fun. Includes cartoons!

Robin Brox, Sure Thing (BlazeVOX [books])
One of my weaknesses as a reader is to glance at things on the page sometimes and lose interest if no obvious flash catches my eye at the level of diction or reference--in other words, if the work is heavily dependent on voice. Big mistake! When these poems are read attentively (preferably aloud), they thrum with textural and tonal intensity.

Benjamin Friedlander, Citizen Cain (Salt Publishing)
It's like flarf, only good. Seriously, though, this book fearlessly explores the zones of inappropriateness that flarf sometimes is only rumored to explore, and comes out of them with something like scars. There are structures of feeling here that don't have names yet.

Uyen Hua, a/s/l (ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni)
It's like, a great example of how a poet can be visibly influenced by O'Hara and not just sound like one of countless NY School retreads.

Ish Klein, Moving Day (Canarium Books)
Ish Klein isn't like anyone else! This book is superb, and if you've never seen her read live, you should as soon as possible.

Bill Luoma, Some Math (Kenning Editions)
It's like having your brain Simonized with meth juice, only legal (so far). Do it! Do it!

Donato Mancini, Buffet World (New Star Books)
With this collection, vispo whiz Mancini departs from elegance and craft dazzle in favor of whacked-out dadaist abandon. It's all over the map, but it's a cool map, so no problem.

Bern Porter, Found Poems (Nightboat Books)
It's about time a sizeable selection of this amazing writer's works were made widely available in a highly attractive print edition. The only flaw is that the pages are just thin enough so that the images on the back show through a little bit.

Ariana Reines, Mercury (Fence Books)
Passionate, painful, unafraid.

Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion (Fence Books)
Yes, Reines is on the list twice. And this book is actually a reprint of the Mal-O-Mar edition from 2007. But it still has to be on here. For some weird reason, her 2006 debut The Cow didn't resonate with me when it came out; thankfully, her two releases this year have caused me to go back to it and see how powerful it is too.

Steve Roggenbuck, Download Helvetica for Free.Com (www.downloadhelveticaforfree.com)
This was available as a paperback too, but as far as I can see it's now just online. Roggenbuck is a precocious showman, and I think about twelve maybe, but there's a real visionary textual sensibility at play here. I love this work!

Camille Roy, Sherwood Forest (Futurepoem)
It's like New Narrative, only in verse. Actually, some of it is prose. More to the point, it's got everything you want from that genre: swagger, melancholy, and lush personal expression as raggedly formal as an old hotel's velvet-lined foyer.

Dana Ward, This Can't Be Life (Edge Books)
I can't even begin to do justice to this remarkable collection here. If I am worth anything as a human being I will write a full review soon, but for now, let me just quote from his poem "Between Here & There": "I want to / tear the heart out of style / & put it between / utter thrall & the infancy / of all things impure." Without being entirely sure what that means, I'm pretty sure he's achieved it.

Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP)
It has some problems, as others have pointed out. But it's still a chunky hunk of interesting texts. Also, I'm in it.

For publishers whose sites contain no info for the title, I link to SPD.

West Wind Review 2011 Fall Sale!

2011-11-19T11:23:00.000-08:00

FALL SALE!!

Go to West Wind Review for BIG SAVINGS on the past two years' issues!

2 Readings & a Parade

2011-10-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving two readings in New York state next week:

First, UB Poetics is sponsoring a reading by me at Rust Belt Books in Buffalo on Friday, Oct. 28 at 8pm;

Then, the Stony Brook University Poetry Center is hosting me at 2pm on Monday, Oct. 31.

Also, I'll be in the Halloween Poets' Parade in the West Village sponsored by Bloof Books on Sunday, Oct. 30. It starts at 6pm at the Four-Faced Liar, 165 West 4th St. (more here).

Sonnagram in The Nation

2011-08-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

My Sonnagram of Shakespeare's Sonnet 53 ("What is your substance, whereof are you made") appears in the August 15-22 issue of The Nation. (They failed to identify it as a Sonnagram, however, so for readers who don't know about the procedure, it just appears to be a random piece of doggerel.)

PBS Newshour

2011-08-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

I was poet of the week on PBS Newshour a few weeks ago.

Emergent Forms: David Lau

2011-05-16T09:53:00.001-07:00

EMERGENT FORMS: A 21st-CENTURY READING SERIES

presents

DAVID LAU

David Lau is a poet, editor, and essayist. He is the author of the poetry collection Virgil and the Mountain Cat (U of California Press 2009) and the co-editor of Lana Turner: A Magazine of Poetry and Opinion. He lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, CA.

TWO EVENTS:

READING
Thursday, May 19th
7:00 p.m.
Schneider Museum of Art
Southern Oregon University
FREE
suggested donation: $10

and, earlier that same day:

INFORMAL COLLOQUIUM
with the students of WR 441 (Advanced Poetry Writing)
followed by Creative Writing Student Recital @2:00 p.m.
Thursday, May 19th
1:00 p.m.
SOAR (Southern Oregon Arts & Research) celebration
Stevenson Union Room 319
Southern Oregon University
FREE

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

2011-04-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

Friday, April 29th
602 Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, New York

What are contemporary poetry's formal and conceptual engagements with the poetry of the past? We’ve invited four poets--Kimberly Johnson, Maureen McLane, K. Silem Mohammad, and Eleanor Johnson--each of whose work reconfigures, re-imagines, or reinvents poetic forms from periods prior to the twentieth century. They will be joined by four scholars--Jeff Dolven (Princeton), Erik Gray (Columbia), Heather Dubrow (Fordham), and Michael Matto (Adelphi)--in a day of readings, responses, and roundtable discussions.

We are planning four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, lasting an hour and a quarter apiece. Each session will feature one poet, who will begin with a short reading, to be followed by a brief response from a scholar. The session will then finish with a roundtable discussion between the scholar and all four poets.

Organized by Michael Golston and Molly Murray

Program

Session 1: 10:00-11:15
Maureen McLane and Erik Gray

11:15-11:30 Break

Session 2: 11:30-12:45
K. Silem Mohammad and Heather Dubrow

12:45-2:00 Lunch

Session 3:
2:00-3:15: Kimberly Johnson and Jeff Dolven

3:15-3:30 Break

Session 4 3:30-4:45
Eleanor Johnson and Michael Matto

5:00—6:00 Reception

Michael Nicoloff & Alli Warren, Eunoia

2011-04-07T11:02:00.001-07:00

Together again for the first time since Bruised Dick: Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren bring the hot poetry action with Eunoia, new from Abraham Lincoln Press!

Using only the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet (and a few Arabic numerals and assorted punctuation marks), Warren and Nicoloff have created in Eunoia sixteen poems of a certain number of letters each that when read by English-speaking readers can be experienced as a series of intelligible or semi-intelligible words, phrases, lines, and sentences referring or seeming to refer to various things.

22 pp.
$5 + $1.50 s&h

I Have to Itch His Subaru

for Erika Staiti

I've got this ukulele
in a plastic bag
I'm saving it for the clungheads
and spoadies and I hope
this brave decision will be followed
by others Now yell at the sandwich
with the consistent narrative voice
your mama gave you
Sandwich, how'd you get in them jeans?
by failing to signal while holding
hands in the time of the Perseids
with the weird dude who owns
those cabins the dude who invented
coinage What a clown!
clogging the sidewalks of the republic
I remember when this bar was a horsehair
love mat or another man's noodles
what did you do to it
I harumphed
repeatedly
I missiled I'm sorry
I was high
and I totally bricked it

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

2011-03-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing
Edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith
Northwestern UP, 2011

Amazon
Northwestern UP

Publisher's description: In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today's writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E [sic], and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.

Authors include: Monica AASPRONG, Walter ABISH, Vito ACCONCI, Kathy ACKER, Sally ALATALO, Paal Bjelke ANDERSEN, David ANTIN, Louis ARAGON, Nathan AUSTIN, J. G. BALLARD, Fiona BANNER, Derek BEAULIEU, Samuel BECKETT, Caroline BERGVALL, Charles BERNSTEIN, Ted BERRIGAN, Jen BERVIN, Gregory BETTS, Christian BÖK, Marie BUCK, William S. BURROUGHS, David BUUCK, John CAGE, Blaise CENDRARS, Thomas CLABURN, Elisabeth CLARK, Claude CLOSKY, Clark COOLIDGE, Hart CRANE, Brian Joseph DAVIS, Katie DEGENTESH, Mónica DE LA TORRE, Denis DIDEROT, Marcel DUCHAMP, Craig DWORKIN, Laura ELRICK, Dan FARRELL, Gerald FERGUSON, Robert FITTERMAN, Lawrence GIFFIN, Peter GIZZI, Judith GOLDMAN, Kenneth GOLDSMITH, Nada GORDON, Noah Eli GORDON, Michael GOTTLIEB, Dan GRAHAM, Michelle GRANGAUD, Brion GYSIN, Michael HARVEY, H. L HIX, Yunte HUANG, Douglas HUEBLER, Peter JAEGER, Emma KAY, Bill KENNEDY and Darren WERSHLER, Michael KLAUKE, Christopher KNOWLES, Joseph KOSUTH, Leevi LEHTO, Tan LIN, Dana Teen LOMAX, Trisha LOW, Rory MACBETH, Jackson MAC LOW, Stéphane MALLARMÉ, Donato MANCINI, Peter MANSON, Shigeru MATSUI, Bernadette MAYER, Steve MCCAFFERY, Stephen MCLAUGHLIN and Jim CARPENTER, David MELNICK, Richard MELTZER, Christof MIGONE, Tomoko MINAMI, K. Silem MOHAMMAD, Simon MORRIS, Yedda MORRISON, Harryette MULLEN, Alexandra NEMEROV, C. K. OGDEN, Tom ORANGE, PARASITIC VENTURES, George PEREC, M. NourbeSe PHILIP, Vanessa PLACE, Bern PORTER, Raymond QUENEAU, Claudia RANKINE, Ariana REINES, Charles REZNIKOFF, Deborah RICHARDS, Kim ROSENFIELD, Raymond ROUSSEL, Aram SAROYAN, Ara SHIRINYAN, Ron SILLIMAN, Juliana SPAHR, Brin Kim STEFANS, Gary SULLIVAN, Nick THURSTON, Rodrigo TOSCANO, Tristan TZARA, Andy WARHOL, Darren WERSHLER, Christine WERTHEIM, WIENER GRUPPE William Butler YEATS, Steven ZULTANSKI, Vladimir ZYKOV

Emergent Forms/West Wind Review Lollapaganza

2011-02-21T12:57:00.001-08:00

EMERGENT FORMS: A 21st-CENTURY READING SERIES

presents

a WEST WiND REViEW LOLLAPAGANZA READING
with

BRIAN ANG
JOE ATKINS
DERECK CLEMONS
CHRISTIAN NAGLER
ESTEE SCHWARTZ
WENDY TREVINO
JEANINE WEBB
& special guest stars
DAVID BRAZIL
SARA LARSEN

7:00 pm
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25th
SCHNEIDER MUSEUM OF ART
Center for the Visual Arts
Southern Oregon University
1250 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR

FREE ($5 suggested donation)

Abraham Lincoln 6

2011-02-12T16:04:00.000-08:00

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
issue the sixth
winter 2011
50 pp.
$5 + $1.50 s&h

Later, awkwarder, stickier, and number-sixier than ever before, the new issue of Abraham Lincoln wants desperately to be held tight to your heaving thoraxes (thoraces?) as you get so excited by the poems it contains that you gnaw the staples out WITH YOUR TEETH and commence slobbering at the moon. Can you afford NOT to throw away your hard-earned shekels on this splendid rag?

featuring work by

Sandra Simonds
Catherine Wagner
Marie Buck
Ish Klein
Lacey Hunter
Estee Schwartz
David Brazil
Sam or Samantha Yams
Ton Van 't Hof
Uyen Hua
Lindsey Boldt
Brian Ang
Micah Freeman
Anna Vitale
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Adam Katz
Nicole Taylor

Unsolicited submissions ate my dingo.

Rod Smith, You Bête [SOLD OUT]

2011-02-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

Abraham Lincoln Press presents Rod Smith's You Bête: twenty-six pages of mind-wrenching, gut-expanding poems from the man many consider the Rod Smith of contemporary poetry.

[SOLD OUT]

The New Apparent You

NBC's Kings is a modern-day telling of
elf-inflicted Biting and Voting.

Nothing more.

Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay

2010-06-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay, newly released by Faux Press. The blurb I contributed:

A life in, of, and for poetry: Michael Gottlieb generously lays bare the one he has led, putting in plain terms the measures by which the discipline asserts itself as a constitutive force, a shaping regime of identity and counter-identity, community action and individual reflection. In his recounting of his own experience coming into poetry in 1970s New York, as well as his meditations on poets' work (the work of poetry itself and the work that poets do in the world), Gottlieb gives us an immensely valuable document in the annals of Language writing and contemporary literary autobiography generally.

Purchase it at SPD or at Faux Press.

Rethinking Poetics: Some Post-Conference Thoughts

2010-06-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the Rethinking Poetics conference held last weekend at Columbia University. I spent several days, both during and after the proceedings, engaged in sometimes heated discussion with people about the event's merits and shortcomings, and now several comment streams on Facebook continue to dispense the fallout.

I won't talk about the specifics of the panels or the particular issues that aroused the most controversy (or lack thereof?), except to say that as with any conference, there were some panels I found interesting and some I didn't. What I'm most struck by are what seem to be the two prevalent types of overall post-conference discontent as expressed by both those who were there and those who weren't. I think these reactions point up two very different desires/anxieties within the larger poetic community, one having to do with its design as a group event and one with its execution on the level of individual presentations.

1) That it was too exclusively academic, and "exclusive" also in that it was perceived as invitation-only (though I think this was more a factor of insufficient pre-publicity than of any exclusionary intent on the parts of the organizers)

2) That the talks were themselves unsatisfying in various ways, including that they were either too academic, or not rigorously academic enough; that they were either antagonistically wrongheaded in being over-committed to a narrow poetic vision, or too centered on broader things like ecology or sociology instead of "poetics per se"; that particular trends or concepts were under-represented, or that (often the same ones) were over-represented.

Some of these objections are inevitable with any conference, but I think this one, for some reason, touched a particular collective nerve. Based on my own and others' experiences of the event, I think the whole thing raises two crucial questions:

1) Is there a coherent or even usefully diffuse "we" within contemporary poetry? Should there be? Or has even experimental poetry splintered into different communities with aesthetics and objectives that are irrelevant or even antithetical to each other? Further, if the latter is the case, what are the divisions that mark these different communities? Are they academic/non-academic? generational? stylistic? something else?

2) If there is still something like a "we," what rudimentary definition of "poetics" would satisfy a significant percentage of its members, at least as a starting point for continued discussion? Is this even a desirable goal? Is the problem with "rethinking poetics," when "poetics" is posited as a concept across which multiple subcommunities are supposed to be able to hold some coherent conversation, that it hasn't been sufficiently thought in the first place?

One anecdote, I feel, demonstrates the difficulty in question. At one point during the conference, Marjorie Perloff admonished the organizers for not involving other representatives of poetry within the academy: namely, the creative writing community, for instance the Columbia MFA program, which, as she pointed out, was "right down the street." I sensed that the suggestion was widely perceived as ridiculous (partly, of course, because increasing the number of academically aligned participants hardly felt like the solution to the problem many sensed with the conference's makeup), and in fact, I admit that this was my own feeling at the time. What could someone like, say, Richard Howard possibly have to contribute to a meeting like this one? And why would he ever consider it? In fact, I still feel this way, but upon reflection, this feeling provokes uncomfortable further reflections. Yes, the values and priorities of the "mainstream" creative writing industry and those of the experimental community are so fundamentally at odds in so many ways that the thought of a room full of half one, half the other, all struggling just to figure out why they were even bothering to try connecting with each other in the face of their obvious antipathies, does seem absurd and gratuitously painful--or, alternately, in what might be a "best-case" scenario, like a recipe for the worst kind of compromise built on a platform of bland eclecticism or "hybridity" (which, based on several of the presentations at the conference, it seems clear "we" all oppose). But one could ask, as I guess I'm asking right now: how is that not already the case?

As far as I can see, the current experimental poetry community, as represented both by the participants in the Rethinking Poetics conference and by those who have been commenting on it before, during, and after its proceedings, is full of exactly the same kinds of prejudicial conflicts and bad-faith rapprochements (I was, two days ago, accused by someone, perhaps justly, of being myself an "accommodationist") as those that mark the mainstream/experimental schism. Sometimes the conflicts are dramatic and pronounced, sometimes they're sublimated, but we all know they're there.

And yet, of course there is still "community." Eco-poets and conceptual writers, abstract Marxists and Wittgensteinian neo-idealists, all often have perfectly satisfying friendships with each other, brought about by their mutual involvement in the poetry community, despite what is sometimes their complete lack of sympathy or even tolerance for each other's poetics. Sometimes, of course, they hate each other's guts, but that can also be said about members within a single movement. So my point is: maybe we shouldn't expect that "poetics" can be the coherent and cordial object of discussion across subcommunities which are, after all, often defined by the radical difference of their poetics from each other. Maybe the best we can hope for in the way of mass convocation--if we must have mass convocation--is a provisional and occasional space of conviviality in which we recognize each other as driven by a related passion (e.g., for "poetry" considered in the broadest sense), but make no attempt to reconcile, define, or even discuss our incompatible poetics. Something, that is, like the AWP.

K. Silem Mohammad, Crush

2010-06-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln Press presents K. Silem Mohammad's Crush, a 21-poem chapbook.

$5 (includes s&h)

MY MONEY

I've become better with my money
I never seem to have any
today I departed for London yesterday
that's about it for yesterday

I was sad that I lost my backpack
with my camera and my money in it
it pretty much sucked
on the camera/profit front

older, chillax-ier sea turtles are getting all my money
because it's such a good environment
there is a video on YouTube
of lions attacking a giraffe

if you want to view any of these things let me know
PayPal will keep my money

The Front Reviewed in Rain Taxi

2010-05-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

Morgan Myers reviews The Front in the spring online edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Flarf in the Wall Street Journal

2010-05-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Gary Sullivan

In today's Wall Street Journal: "Search for a New Poetics Yields This: 'Kitty Goes Postal/Wants Pizza,'" by Gautam Naik. (The uncredited title phrase is from Rodney Koeneke's "Pizza Kitty.")

Fact-Simile Trading Card for May: K. Silem Mohammad

2010-05-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Fact-Simile Trading Cards: collect 'em all.

Conceptual Writing

2010-04-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

CONCEPTUAL WRITING

Conceptual Writing is allegorical writing.

Conceptual Writing is the poetics of the moment.

Conceptual Writing is more interested in a thinkership than a readership.

Conceptual Writing is prominent among emerging writers in the U.S.

Conceptual Writing is framed through the discourse and economy of poetry.

Conceptual Writing is made of language but not of what we use language to produce.

Conceptual Writing is only one sign of the recent interest in the tensions between materiality and concept.

Conceptual Writing is an art of appropriation.

Conceptual Writing is failure.

Conceptual Writing is writerly.

Conceptual Writing is dry.

Conceptual Writing is good only when the idea is good.

Conceptual Writing is achieved by relating concept to concept instead of concept to people.

Conceptual Writing is populist, political, etc.

Conceptual Writing is a movement of the 21st century and the future, not the late 1980s.

Conceptual Writing is the writing of the new new formalism, and far from being a relic of the period.

Conceptual Writing is a crisis in interiority. A crisis in interiority is a crisis in perspective.

Conceptual Writing is not utilitarian.

Conceptual Writing is automatic. It operates most efficiently.

Conceptual Writing is infinitely flexible. It is obvious yet discreet.

Conceptual Writing is as much a form of literature as it is.

Conceptual Writing is the same as it is.

Conceptual Writing is as difficult to define as electronic writing since much of it is also considered part of the conventional art.

Conceptual Writing is actually even more comprehensive.

Conceptual Writing is mean't (emphasis on mean) for screenplays. So here is the same scene problem, oh I mean the problem seen time and time again.

Conceptual Writing is best left to screenplays.

Conceptual Writing is to some extend used in PAS (Partitioned Annotations of Software).

Conceptual Writing is important to success in Stage 6 studies.

Conceptual Writing is made to engage the mind of the reader rather than her ear device.

Conceptual Writing is what hipsters do.

Conceptual Writing is the comments section.

Conceptual Writing is necessarily exploratory.

Conceptual Writing is not necessarily logical.

Conceptual Writing is feminist.

Conceptual Writing is likely to find a more sympathetic audience.

Conceptual Writing is secondary to speech.

Conceptual Writing is helpful.

Conceptual Writing is a bit over the top in places.

Conceptual Writing is not as easy as it looks.

Conceptual Writing is sometimes called speculative. Here the metaphor of the mirror (speculum) recurs.

Conceptual Writing is elegant, and because the book is written to teach, and for use in practice in the social agency.

Conceptual Writing is writing that is extracted from other writing, cut out of its point of origin. This may be the point in language.

Conceptual Writing is the government’s.

Conceptual Writing is Andy Warhol. No matter.

Conceptual Writing is to conventional poetry and other forms of creative writing what gruel (we’ve all heard of it but hopefully never tasted it) is.

Conceptual Writing is Apollo B. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf. Flarf, Arf, Arf, Arf!

Conceptual Writing is usually more like talking.

Conceptual Writing is only one sign.

Conceptual Writing is, could we define what it is not.

Conceptual Writing is that it is elitist and out of touch ... 3 hours ago.

Conceptual Writing is writing.

Conceptual Writing is still imperfect.

Conceptual Writing is rocking my world right now.

AWP 2010: Flarf & Conceptual Poetry Panel Intro

2010-04-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

Katie Degentesh, Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, K. Silem Mohammad, Mel Nichols, & Mathew Timmons (photo by Lisa Howe)

Flarf & Conceptual Poetry
[AWP panel, Denver, CO, 4/10/10]
K. Silem Mohammad

It’s been remarked that Flarf and Conceptual Poetry are the poetry of our time because they are the poetry we deserve. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, a mysterious airborne event causes huge segments of the human population to do away with themselves in horrific ways, and at one point the main characters hole up in an exclusive residential complex with a billboard outside that says “You Deserve This.” Kind of like that. But at other times I think of another film, Unforgiven, in which a vengeful Clint Eastwood growls down the length of his gun barrel, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Flarf and Conceptual Poetry are just what we get, which may or may not be the same as what we’ve got coming.

But what is it exactly that we get? The origins of Flarf are well-rehearsed: Gary Sullivan tried to write a poem so awful it would get rejected by online vanity press Poetry.com and failed. Drew Gardner added Google to the mix, and a movement was born. Conceptual Poetry, as imagined by Kenneth Goldsmith, includes the attempt to create texts so dry and tedious no one could possibly read them straight through. Flarf’s badness and Conceptual Poetry’s boringness are some of their most salient features, and they are what much of the critical (and uncritical) response has focused on.

In practice, it is often difficult to demonstrate intra-movement aesthetic coherence across the work of different poets in either group. Katie Degentesh’s skewed version of “confessional lyric” in The Anger Scale, a book composed by feeding questions from the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory (MMPI) test (used for gauging the mental fitness of persons applying for government and military positions) into Google, is a far cry from Mel Nichols’ aggressively shapeless poems about Ben Franklin’s man-boobs and Smurf-fisting. Mathew Timmons’ compilation of credit card offers and dunning notices entitled Credit—a book so unlikely to be actually read, and so costly to acquire ($199.00 a copy), that it barely even exists—bears little resemblance to the elegant modernist stylings of Vanessa Place in Dies: A Sentence, a prose piece consisting of a single, 130-page sentence, which in turn is very different from many of Place’s own more blankly transcriptional or appropriative writings. At times, the distinction between Flarf and Conceptual threatens to dissolve: Christian Bök and I both work with Oulipian procedures such as lipograms and anagrams: for example, Bök’s Eunoia, whose five main chapters each contain only one vowel, and my own Sonnagrams, wherein I anagram Shakespeare’s sonnets into new, formally traditional English sonnets. On another scale entirely is Bök’s ambitious Xenotext Experiment. Bök plans to encode poetry into a sequence of DNA and implant it into a bacterium which will become capable of producing further poetry and, eventually, wiping out the entire human race.

Flarf and Conceptual Poetry share a capacity to irritate. Some critics object to the movements’ engagement in group identification, self-definition, and self-promotion. Some resent the idea that work produced with a minimum of the kind of effort associated with traditional notions of craft might receive more attention than expressivist work that is painstakingly shaped and polished. Some protest the techniques of wholesale appropriation often employed by both groups, either because of intellectual property issues, or because they feel such a practice is condescending to those whose language is sampled, or both. Some argue that appropriating language steeped in racism, sexism, and homophobia perpetuates the destructive potential of that language rather than critiquing or neutralizing it. Some argue that writing methodologies which avail themselves of Google and other corporate sources thereby subscribe to the capitalist logic that underwrites the technology in question. Some avant-purists take exception to the groups’ willingness to take advantage of “mainstream” organs of publicity such as Poetry Magazine, which hosted a Flarf and Conceptual Writing feature edited by Kenny Goldsmith last summer, or this Conference. Still others just think Flarf and Conceptual Poetry are fucking stupid.

It has been pointed out that where Flarf and Conceptual Poetry tread, movements like Dada, Language Poetry, Oulipo, Fluxus, and others have trod long before, and indeed, not much is original about either group at the level of technique or general aesthetics. Like Dada, Flarf is anti-art and willfully absurd; like Oulipo, Conceptual Poetry involves rule-based chance operations and language games; like Language Poetry, Flarf draws on the materiality of language as a way of challenging notions of referential transparency and “naturalness”; like Fluxus, Conceptual Poetry attempts to destabilize the framing devices by which we distinguish art itself from its external contexts. Neither movement fits the expected mold of avant-garde poetics by being invested in innovation as such. Instead, they recognize that the innovations of previous formations have not yet had their full impact. Whatever the case in the spheres of visual art and music, in poetry, the lessons of the historical avant-garde have still to be internalized. Contemporary poetic avant-gardes merely recycle the gestures of past avant-gardes because, the first times, they didn’t take. Flarf and Conceptual Poetry perform the opposite of damage control: they try to do the damage that didn’t get done enough before.

In fact, it may be impossible to puncture the thick protective balloon skin of today’s poetic establishment: an establishment that is no longer merely stuffy and unadventurous, but that slickly assimilates superficial elements of the non-stuffy and adventurous into its bland, lifeless expanse, where they too become safely stuffy and unadventurous. It’s like fighting the Blob: your fist gets sucked into the corrosive slime, and soon you’re just part of it. After all, here we are at the AWP.

Gary Sullivan’s early definition of Flarf as bad, offensive, or “not OK” has been interpreted at surface level as a simple description of verbal content that exercises a jejune libertarian disregard for social decorum, but really, we were past that stage as a culture before Flarf came along. Practically everything’s “OK” now in mass media. In retrospect, what’s not OK about Flarf has less to do with the language itself (especially in our current post-Flarf phase, when so much published poetry exhibits decidedly flarfy characteristics) than with a perceived bad communal faith. Flarf’s crassness lies not in what the poems say, but in what Flarfists are willing to do to situate their practices as central within a constellation of communities who either try to lay claim to that centrality by ancestral right, or who eschew the very notion of centrality as poisonously chauvinistic.

Similarly, many Conceptualists show a suspect interest in “relevance,” in what positioning or postures will result in the maximum amount of coverage and/or controversy, by any means necessary—even if it means OCR-ing an issue of the New York Times, making a 900-page book out of it, and calling it art. This willingness to violate the implied Categorical Imperative of poetry in its contemporary state as a liberal humanist pseudoreligion (to adapt Kant’s phraseology, “Write only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal aesthetic,” or “Only write things you yourself would want to read if someone else wrote them”) has perhaps some bearing on Place’s as-yet unpublished conception of an unabashedly self-interested “poetics of Radical Evil.”

Cut-and-pasted Google text, poetic bacteria, overpriced photocopies of credit card offers, Smurf fisting—are Flarf and Conceptual Poetry truly evil? Probably not, but they probably should be. That way, we would all get the poetry we truly deserve. As it is, what we get is what we get. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.

West Wind Review 2010 Available Now!

2010-04-01T13:36:00.001-07:00

NOW AVAILABLE:
WEST WIND REVIEW 2010

Featuring Shane Allison, Brian Ang, Nathan Austin, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Daniel Bailey, Dave Barrett, Franklin Bruno, Marie Buck, Clint Burnham, Dereck Clemons, Jordan Davis, Nick Demske, Tiffany Denman, Brittany Dennison, Christopher DeWeese, Andrew Dieck, Brandon Downing, Cathy Eisenhower, Laura Elrick, Phil Estes, Michael Farrell, Angela Genusa, Judith Goldman, Jack Granath, Rob Halpern, Morgan Harlow, Uyen Hua, Katryn Hurtado, Genevieve Kaplan, Nicholas Karavatos, William Knight, D Sprung Kurilecz, Reb Livingston, Adrian C. Louis, Donato Mancini, Adam J Maynard, Philip Metres, Carol Mirakove, Christopher Mulrooney, Sara Mumolo, Sawako Nakayasu, Lance Newman, Amy Ng, Douglas Piccinnini, Ernesto Priego, Jessy Randall, Nicholas Michael Ravnikar, G. David Schwartz, Marcus Slease, Dawn Sueoka, Andrew Terhune, Wendy Trevino, Anna Vitale, James Wagner, and Grzegorz Wróblewski (trans. Adam Zdrodowski)

Editor: Greta Mikkelsen
Faculty Editor: K. Silem Mohammad
229 pp.

sample:

MARIE BUCK
Sometimes I Talk Like an LOL Cat

Pieces of machinery
Visualized me without a dress
On
Inside a mansion

I visualize how my organs work
And in my stomach sits a little
Jar Jar Binks
And in my colon sits Captain Howdy
Inhabiting my little-girl brain
By running amok in the body
And making the blood the servant boy

---------

Send check or money order for $12 + $2 s&h to:

West Wind Review
Stevenson Union Room 333
Southern Oregon University
1250 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR 97520

BOMBLOG "Phoned-In" Podcast: from The Sonnagrams

2010-03-26T12:34:00.001-07:00

Kurt Freyer, "Little Death," 2010.

I read from my Sonnagrams in this BOMB Magazine "Phoned-In" podcast and am interviewed briefly by Luke Degnan.

Sonnagrams 1–20

2010-03-20T17:30:00.001-07:00

K. Silem Mohammad, Sonnagrams 1–20: now available as a chapbook from Slack Buddha Press.

Abraham Lincoln #5 [SOLD OUT]

2009-12-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
issue the fifth
summer/fall 2009
55 pp.

Well, it's ABOUT TIME. Abraham Lincoln #5 comes screeching and hissing out of its dark crevice in the earth just in time for whatever festive, many-feathered seasonal ritual you strange gentle people celebrate. This issue is so tasty you'll want to LICK it. Careful though: it's blistering HOT. Caveat emptor: some orders may be delayed a bit due to miscellaneous holiday-oriented BS.

featuring work by

Chris Alexander
Alli Warren
Dana Ward
Catherine Meng
Lytle Shaw
Keston Sutherland
Annie Finch
Joseph Mosconi
K. Silem Mohammad
Elisabeth Workman
Kim Rosenfield
Vanessa Place
Chris Funkhouser
Mark Wallace
Benjamin Friedlander

[SOLD OUT]

Unsolicited submissions will be stared at stupidly.

The Front

2009-10-09T14:50:00.001-07:00

Just out from Roof Books:

K. Silem Mohammad
The Front

Order through SPD.

The critics rave:

"...scraping the bottom of the ... barrel ... write it off as a big joke ... we are ... repulsed ...." --Kenneth Goldsmith

"...typical boring stuff ... can't appreciate The Front ... equate ... with rape...." --Katie Degentesh

"...monkeys chained to ... typewriters ... what it feels like to lose...." --Bob Perelman

Also new from Roof: Cathy Eisenhower, would with and (already discussed at Anne Boyer's new review blog Books of Poetry).

Boo! 1

2009-10-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Boo! issue 1 is online. Four of my Sonnagrams are in it.

Sandra Simonds, Used White Wife

2009-09-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

Sandra Simonds' new chapbook Used White Wife available from Grey Book Press.

Keston Sutherland, "Happiness in Writing"

2009-08-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

World Picture 3 contains Keston Sutherland's "Happiness in Writing," a sharp and illuminating essay on Wordsworth's Prelude and Adorno's advice to writers in Minima Moralia.

The Longest Poem in the World

2009-08-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

This program designed by Andrei Gheorghe is right up there with the most engaging and successful conceptual poetry projects I've seen to date.

Brandon Brown has been talking about prosody on his blog, and this project raises some resonant questions for me in that context: first of all, is prosody a useful term to describe a rhythmic and syntactic effect created not by one writer's sustained attention to sound as it unfolds through time, but by the randomly and mechanically generated rhyming of phrases from disparate sources? It's interesting how hard this effect is to tell apart from that of any of millions of "organically" produced poems by amateurs--or poems which mimic such work, like Ashbery's "Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox."

Nathan Austin in Sink Review

2009-08-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

Nathan Austin picks up on a discussion I started here about competence and wit in this post at Sink Review.

K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming

2009-07-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009).

Edge Books has got to be breaking some kind of record for the greatest number of stunning new books of poetry released within a year's time, what with recent titles by Kevin Davies, Cathy Eisenhower, Mel Nichols, Chris Nealon, and now K. Lorraine Graham, whose Terminal Humming came out about a week ago. All five of these books seem like shoo-ins for my 2009 Attention Span list when the time rolls around (my 2008 list is here).

The poems in Terminal Humming often take the form of an unregulated swirl of voices, as though from different sectors of some public space filled with furtive private dramas ... kind of like a humming terminal. Pronouns shift from singular to plural with breakneck suddenness, so that the speaker seems to be continually teleporting outside of her own embodied situation and observing its multiplication into disparate scenarios. This description makes it sound as if it could come off as a certain type of tired postmodernist "interrogation of the self," but it's much livelier than that. The emphasis is less on states of awareness than on unique actions and constellations of events--a continually shifting mise en scene for an unspecified production. From "An Attempt to Unleash Inner Badness Ends Thus":

As a person:

We are free and beautiful and assertive and we have a nice bike and nice bike gear. With organic vegetables we make jello even though we can't eat jello any more. Lob lob. Had several interactions, planning more, and also planning to put a roof on our cubicle. In this exercise I am alone, wearing flip flops or slippers, reading about Central Asian nomads, but I am not actually in Central Asia, unless it is the 1870s and I am a wealthy, virile and imperial anthropologist, sailing through the you-go-in-but-you-don't-come-out desert, Wagner on the gramophone, thinking of rooms of Rubens and breasts popping out of blouses, staring at the dunes.

As a thing:

In the supergirl outfit, I went to buy fruit to make a salad as a healthy dessert alternative to ice cream. In several fan fiction accounts supergirl and batwoman hook up. The supergirl cape is short and does not snag. What thing do we mean doing?

There has been a lot of talk about an emergent subgenre of "the Gurlesque" in the last few years, and in many cases I've felt either that the work attempting to effect it is superficially thematic and/or lacking in self-reflexive criticality, or that the truly interesting work the term is used to describe has been forced under its rubric by conceptual violence. I'm not sure if I'd want to call Graham's work Gurlesque (I believe she's somewhat skeptical about the category as well), but it certainly offers some of the most psychologically complex and arresting treatment I've seen of (among many other things) the concerns associated with that mode.

Bruce Sterling on Flarf in Wired

2009-07-07T15:41:00.000-07:00

And Bruce Sterling on Flarf in Wired.

Franklin Bruno on Flarf in Bookforum

2009-07-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

Franklin Bruno on Flarf in Bookforum.

David Buuck, The Shunt

2009-07-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

David Buuck, The Shunt (Palm Press, 2009).

Stuttering, hemming, hawing, failing, flailing, and flopping, the comedian tries to coerce the narrative ideology of wartime into a punch line, but the punch is always awready pre-packed by Big Brother's Big Other. As Beckett almost observed, nothing is funnier (or sadder, depending on your tolerance for correct allegorical apprehension of permanent crisis) than someone trying repeatedly to slip on a flipping banana peel and getting shut down every time. The Shunt puts the "tic Alpo" back in "political poetry." Buy here or here.

Benjamin Friedlander on Rachel Loden and Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

2009-07-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

Ben Friedlander discusses Rachel Loden's new book from Ahsahta, Dick of the Dead, beginning with this post at his recently launched American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson blog.

Loden's book can be ordered here.

Craig Dworkin, Parse

2009-07-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

Craig Dworkin's Parse (Atelos, 2008).

From the note at the back of the book:

Parse is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott's How To Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. First published in 1874, the book played a leading role in the pedagogic debate over whether English should be analyzed as if it were Latin, and thousands of copies were printed as textbooks in the last quarter of the 19th century.

When I first came across the book, I was reminded of a confession by Gertrude Stein (another product of 1874): "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." And so, of course, I parsed Abbott's book into its own idiosyncratic system of analysis.

What this means is that the bulk of the book consists of Abbott's sentences converted into descriptions of their own grammatical structure. Almost all the original content has been replaced by self-reflexive language like this:

Cardinal Roman Numeral period Preposition Noun parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis colon dash

(I believe the capitalized words correspond to those that are capitalized in Abbott's text, but I'm not sure.)

At nearly 300 pages, even the most diehard conceptualist might balk at the prospect of actually reading Parse front to back, and in fact Kenny Goldsmith has used it as an example of conceptual texts that don't actually need to be read: the idea is enough. As appealing as I find this notion in many ways, I don't ultimately find it fully adequate to an assessment of Dworkin's work (or Goldsmith's, for that matter). What I think books like this do is ask us to reconsider what it means to read, and to find ways of actualizing new reading practices. This might mean something as simple as flipping around here and there throughout the book rather than reading straight through. It might mean reading one or more sections in an intense state of attention, and generalizing outward from such readings to a larger engagement with the total work. It might mean submitting for extended periods of time to the monotony of the governing structure, so that when there is some kind of variation in the pattern, it takes on an added value of surprise, as when Dworkin occasionally retains an entire phrase or sentence from Abbott without "translating" it, often creating the effect of editorial comment ("plural first person subjective case pronoun used in bad faith to suggest a camaraderie with the reader auxiliary verb adverb" etc.).

The truth is that the more one looks into Parse, the more one discovers in it--not "depths" in the familiar sense, necessarily, but details and complexities that activate underused and underappreciated areas of the intelligence. Highly recommended.

Wag's Revue 2

2009-06-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

Wag's Revue 2 is now online. It features four of my Sonnagrams, as well as pieces by Kenneth Goldsmith, Gregory Betts, Matthias Svalinas, and others.

Twilight of the Idols

2009-06-25T20:03:00.001-07:00

Slow and Slower

2009-06-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

Special issue of Big Bridge dedicated to "Slow Poetry" (it's like poetry, only slow).

And then there's Even Slower Poetry.

Can Flarf Be Taken? Seriously?

2009-06-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

"Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?": an article by Shell Fischer in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers.

Poetry Magazine July/August 2009

2009-06-15T16:47:00.001-07:00

OK, not quite. But this issue really does feature Jordan Davis, Mel Nichols, Sharon Mesmer, myself, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, Gary Sullivan, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, and Vanessa Place in a special Flarf & Conceptual Writing section edited by Goldsmith.

Here's the real cover:

David Bromige 1933-2009

2009-06-03T14:45:00.001-07:00

Just heard that David Bromige passed away this morning. He was a wonderful poet and a lovely person.

West Wind Review 2009 Available Now!

2009-05-27T17:54:00.001-07:00

West Wind Review 2009

AVAILABLE NOW!

edited by Lacey Hunter

featuring

David Watson, Mel Nichols, Rod Smith, Catherine Meng, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Eddie Watkins, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Elisabeth Workman, Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert, Drew Gardner, Andrew Felsinger, Carol Guess, Jen Hofer, Brandon Brown, Stan Apps, Shane Allison, Nico Vassilakis, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Kaia Sand, Brandon Shimoda, Meg Hurtado, Alli Warren, William Knight, Dawn Sueoka, Lanny Quarles, Jim Klein, Michael Magee, Sandra Simonds, Jennifer Knox, Gary Sullivan, Rhoads Stevens, & Kevin Killian

Brandon Brown, "Talking's Money":

there's a hole in my pocket
but I'm talking with my mouth
the speech goes out into the arena
where sometimes it wields clubs
and sometimes tingles (in a good way)

most often it returns to me transformed
face to face with my own speech
in the form of ghoulishly melted
ore from the earth. What it says
I strain to hear. The sewer inside my neck
spits like a dog's mouth but it wipes
off clean, easy, shining.

Order through Southern Oregon University Bookstore.

WNYC's Talk to Me: Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing at the Whitney

2009-05-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

A recording of the Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing event last month at the Whitney Museum of American Art (with introductory comments by Kenny Goldsmith and brief interviews at the end by Pejk Malinovski) on WNYC's Talk to Me lecture series.

P.F.S. Post

2009-05-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

I have four poems up at P.F.S. Post (Adam Fieled, ed.).

Ron Padgett & Tom Veitch, Antlers in the Treetops

2009-04-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

The hilarious collaborative/appropriative novel Antlers in the Treetops (1970), by Ron Padgett and Tom Veitch, is now available in PDF form at the PEPC Library (portal at Charles Bernstein's Weblog).

The errata sheet compiled by Veitch is a good readymade in its own right.

Winer Reads Perec

2009-04-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Leslie Winer reads from Perec's Espèces d'espaces
.

Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing at the Whitney

2009-04-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

An Evening of Contemporary Poetry: Conceptual Writing and The Flarf Collective
Friday, April 17 7pm
Conceived and organized by poet Kenneth Goldsmith on the occasion of the exhibition Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT

This reading presents eight writers associated with two cutting-edge movements in contemporary poetry: Conceptual Writing and The Flarf Collective. The followers of both movements employ technology to write their works, often using strategies familiar to the visual arts: appropriation, falsification, insincerity, and plagiarism. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between the pages of a book and it continually morphs from the printed page to the webpage, from the gallery space to the science lab, from the social space of the poetry reading to social space of the blog. It is a poetics of flux, one that celebrates instability and uncertainty.

Featured poets: Christian Bök, Nada Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Kim Rosenfield, Gary Sullivan, Darren Wershler-Henry

This event is free with Museum Admission, which is pay-what-you-wish during Whitney After Hours on Fridays from 6-9 pm.

[Note: it appears that online reservations are no longer available, but tickets might be available at the admissions desk on the night of the event. Inquiries: public_programs@whitney.org or (212) 570-7715.]

Stephanie Young, K. Silem Mohammad, & Meklit Hadero at Studio One

2009-03-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

April 3rd
First Friday @ Studio One!
Come hang out and listen to readings and music from:

STEPHANIE YOUNG
MEKLIT HADERO
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD

Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland, co-curated with David Horton.

Meklit Hadero is a singer, musician, cultural activist and Resident Artist at the Red Poppy Art House. Born in Ethiopia, Meklit has lived in twelve cities and on three continents. Meklit has received commissions from the San Francisco Foundation Fund For Artists (for the ensemble Nefasha Ayer), the Brava Theater (for music for the world premier theater production, "Over the Mountain"), and Bay Area Friends of the Congo. This June, Meklit will be a de Young Museum Resident Artist, commissioned by the museum's Cultural Encounters Program. She is the recipient of a 2008 Individual Grant from the Belle Foundation for Arts and Culture. Currently, she is organizing a group of Ethiopian Diaspora artists from across North America to return to Ethiopia for a festival of traditional music at the end of this year. In 2007 Meklit released her first recording, titled Eight Songs.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). He edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and teaches literature and creative writing at Southern Oregon University.

Doors open @ 7pm
readings start by 7:30pm
365 45th St. in Oakland
(Cross street is Broadway, BART is MacArthur.)

Your donations are appreciated!

And many thank yous to the audience members who donate dollars every month to keep the series free for others check out photos from previous readings and more info here: workingforthecity.blogspot.com

3 Readings: Bard College, Bowery Poetry Club, Chez LRSN

2009-03-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving three readings between now and the end of the month, two in New York and one in Connecticut:

1.
The Bard Student Readings Series (with Paul Stephens)
Friday, March 20
9:00pm
Manor Lounge
Bard College
Campus Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

2.
The Bowery Poetry Club (with Lytle Shaw)
Saturday, March 21
4:00pm
308 Bowery
(Between Houston and Bleecker)
New York City

3.
House Reading at the home of Anelise Chen & David Larsen (other readers to be announced)
Thursday, March 26
8:00pm
527 Chapel Street, apt. D-1
New Havez, CT

"I Only Have Eyes" in Ink Node

2009-03-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

My poem "I Only Have Eyes" has been published in Ink Node.

Bad Bök

2009-03-05T15:04:00.001-08:00

Best bad poem ever?

A-New Poetry in Eugene: Rodney Koeneke and K. Silem Mohammad

2009-02-20T11:46:00.000-08:00

A-New Poetry presents
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21 at 7:30 PM
RODNEY KOENEKE & K. SILEM MOHAMMAD
DIVA (Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts), 110 W. Broadway
Eugene, OR

K. SILEM MOHAMMAD is the author of Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has appeared or is soon to appear in various journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004, Bay Poetics, and A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years. He maintains the blog Lime Tree and edits Abraham Lincoln, a magazine of poetry. Mohammad teaches creative writing at Southern Oregon University.

RODNEY KOENEKE is the author of Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). A new chapbook, Rules for Drinking Forties, appears from Cy Press this spring. His poems have been included in Abraham Lincoln, Jacket, New American Writing, ZYZZYVA, and other publications, and in the anthologies Bay Poetics and the forthcoming Flarf primer. He lives in Portland, OR where he curates the Tangent Reading Series with poets Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff.

Kareem Estefan on Breathalyzer

2009-02-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late getting around to posting on this, but Kareem Estefan reviews my Breathalyzer at Sustainable Aircraft.

Dale Smith Deals Death Blow to Flarf

2009-02-06T19:23:00.000-08:00

Most of you reading this have probably seen the continuing discussion initiated by Dale Smith about Flarf that is going on at Possum Ego as well as my own and several other bloggers' comment boxes. Dale, with the help of several of his friends, has leveled a series of challenges and indictments at Flarf which I have hitherto not answered. It is my painful duty to report that the reason for this silence is exactly what Dale and other anti-Flarfists have probably suspected: the incriminating weight of their arguments is simply too heavy to ignore or resist, and thus any attempts at self-defense must necessarily appear bloodless and ill-considered. In plain terms, Dale is right and we are wrong. Flarf is an untenable poetic adventure whose minor successes have only thrown into bolder relief the abortive misgottenness at its center. I take its most egregious missteps to be the following (I am confident that Dale will point out anything I have neglected):

1. Flarf appropriates the discourse of many persons, many of them undoubtedly disempowered, by scavenging the traces of their utterances on the internet for use in the composition of poems. Since no credit is given to these persons, and since some of said discourse is extremely stupid, it is evident that Flarf is mocking the underclasses.

2. Flarf deploys a wide sampling of sometimes tasteless and insensitive language under the guise of social critique, but in ways that make it difficult for some readers (particularly those who are ignorant of the use/mention distinction, or who reject flatly on moral grounds anything that resembles irony) to tell the difference between said critique and the injuries perpetrated by the original subjects who are the source of that language.

3. Flarf sometimes takes advantage of the media attention that is focused upon it (a relatively small amount of attention compared to that enjoyed by more commercially viable art forms such as music, customized T-shirt design, or those plastic testicles some people hang from the tailgates of their pickup trucks, but more than is usually focused upon the work of Dale or his friends, and therefore enough to throw into disequilibrium the fragile economy of all the poetic communities concerned), thus making no attempt to hide its complicity in the Spectacle.

4. Flarf commits the dual error of a) resorting to humor as a means of engaging its readers, in a social climate where humor must be considered a grossly self-indulgent bourgeois barbarism; and b) not always bothering to make sure its jokes are funny.

5. Flarf fails to provide a coherent theoretical apparatus with which to contextualize its disruptions of sense and syntax as acceptable modes of political intervention, and so leaves itself open to the charge of willful obscurantism. This failure is exacerbated by the apparently total lack of interest exhibited by most Flarfists in answering its detractors' demands for such an accounting.

It's not clear what the appropriate response for us, the defeated, is in a situation like this. It has taken some time for all of us in the Flarf Collective to agree on an acceptable course of action, but after due deliberation, we see no alternative: we hereby renounce Flarf.

Lest we be suspected of histrionics, we wish to make it clear that this does not entail an abandonment of either our individual poetic endeavors or our collective practice as a community. Flarf as an aesthetic concept, however, has proven itself irremediably vexed, and it must be jettisoned. In order to preserve the salutary creative energy we enjoy as a group, we will continue to collaborate and share ideas, but we feel that the following changes are in order:

1. Getting rid of the name. The word "Flarf" is probably the main thing that makes most of our opponents hate us anyway. A big part of the problem is that although it looks sort of like an acronym, it doesn't actually stand for anything (unlike that other FLARF with whom we are mostly unaffiliated, the FLoridA Renaissance Faire)--just as, politically, Flarf does not take a clear and determinate stand on pressing social issues. From now on, we will be called PORPO (Poets Organized around Responsible Political Objectives).

2. No more Google. Google is a tool of the hegemonic capitalist system that instantly contaminates anyone who touches it with its symbolically deficient statistical false consciousness of pseudo-hierarchizations. All PORPO composition will be undertaken in longhand, preferably with a quill-tip pen or other archaic writing implement. In this way, we will render our aesthetic compatible with the aims of Dale's own Slow Poetry, and related socially conscious submovements like Thin Poetry, Faint Poetry, Not Too Scratchy Poetry, and Extremely Difficult to Smell Poetry.

3. Being serious. The first step toward realizing a poetics with any potential for effecting real social change through motivated gestures of resistance and intervention is acknowledging that under today's grave global conditions, absolutely nothing is funny. We will thus immediately cease writing any poems containing references to squid, assclowns, chicken diarrhea, "pubic" apologies, diaspora-flavored breath mints, crotchless dolphin underwear, or David Hasselhoff (unless we can offer some reasonable political gloss on such references, enabling the free flow of liberatory meaning in a productive discursive context).

4. Never getting famous. Recognition and/or endorsement by any of the official organs of the establishment media (nationally circulated magazines, public radio, universities, museums, blogs that people actually read) indicates that the work in question is too susceptible to recuperation and cooptation by the system. To be seduced by the allure of "coverage" leads down the moldering funereal corridor of bad faith. And it's not fair to those other poets whose work is too steeped in integrity, too ideologically uncompromising, too dedicatedly slow ever to show up on the mass media's radar.

Thank you, Dale, for the tough love. It's no fun being made to confront one's own inadequate capacity for being assimilated into someone else's heroically erect code of right poetic conduct, and I know it can't have been pleasant for you to assume the burden of setting us straight. Thank goodness you got to us in time before we undermined the revolution any further by drawing impressionable young people to our side and away from the true cause.

Jordan Davis in The Nation on Kevin Davies

2009-02-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

Jordan Davis reviews Kevin Davies' thrillingly great The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Edge Books, 2008) in The Nation.

Studio 360 Podcast on Flarf

2009-01-29T17:55:00.000-08:00

Sean Cole does a feature on Flarf at Studio 360.

Flarf Q&A: Responses to Joe Safdie

2009-01-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

Joe Safdie posted some questions about Flarf in response to my last post, pointing to D. J. Huppatz's review of Sharon Mesmer's Annoying Diabetic Bitch. I will do my best to answer them below.

JS: Is Flarf really "one of the most challenging creative responses to contemporary American culture"?

KSM: Yes. I mean no. I dunno.

JS: Is Flarf "a literature of critical engagement"?

KSM: Little bit?

JS: Haven't you been arguing against any necessity for engagement and relevance lately?

KSM: I don't think so, no. Even taking into account my numerous annoying qualifiers and self-ironizing follow-ups, I think it would be a misreading to characterize what I wrote as an argument against either of those things. Rather, I was trying to break down some of what I see as the sloppy or dishonest ways those concepts get applied to poetry.

JS: (Not that writers of a collective need to write like each other--that would be too "earnest").

KSM: Does it follow from the irony implied by your scare quotes that you think writers in a collective really should "write like each other"? To what extent? I must admit, I wonder often myself about what makes certain movements or collectives hang together definitionally: what, for example, is the common "conceptual" thread connecting Christian Bök, Kenny Goldsmith, and Kim Rosenfield, say?

JS: And what do you think about what Huppatz writes is an ambition of Flarf, to "undermine any attempt to establish a clear polemical position"? Any position whatsoever? Are all positions equally absurd? "[T]he absence of transcendence in contemporary American culture” ... well, sure. Maybe Thomas Friedman was right after all: the world is flat. Sometimes. But what about when it's not?

KSM: Without saying that I think Huppatz is wrong here, I will just reveal that I am not, in my own writing, particularly concerned with undermining anyone's attempt to establish any kind of position, unless by that we just mean that I like my work to test the limits of certain tendencies toward overcertainty about various inherited attitudes--which I would think is the same thing any self-respecting author would say. Do I think all positions are equally absurd? No; all are absurd, but some more than others. As for transcendence, in contemporary culture or elsewhere, that's a matter of personal superstition, um, I mean belief.

JS: Using the links from the piece, I saw lots of hilarious videos from the Flarf Festival 06 (mostly contributed by Jordan), including your own, and you know ... I laughed a lot. Really. They were mostly very, very funny. (But can there be a "bad" Flarf poem?)

KSM: Flarf gets judged good or bad for the same reason other poetry does: because it succeeds or fails at what it sets out to do, whatever that might be. And that, like lots else, is generally a matter of opinion and/or mechanics. It gets interesting (for me) when there's disagreement over what it is that the work's trying to do, and therefore over what the standards of evaluation ought to be. I think most of the past controversy over Flarf--e.g., Mike Magee's "Glittering Asian Guys" poem--stems from disagreements about what the poems' intentions are, or from firm convictions about certain forms of reference always being unacceptable regardless of context, and not really from any coherent theory of aesthetic goodness or badness. An exception would be people who look at the work and just can't get past the surface "badness": readers who say, wow, that's not very good, and who aren't really concerned with the purposive impulse behind that surface affect. And this position is unimpeachable. No one should have to value badness if they don't want to.

JS: And what about the times when life isn't funny? Does Flarf have anything to say about that...?

KSM: It seems clear to me that that's what Flarf has the most to say about. Flarf, maybe even a little more than most poetry, wouldn't exist if it weren't for unhappiness. Of course, it depends on how you define "say."

JS: Could Flarf exist in Gaza? Afghanistan? For people who have lost their jobs and homes? Whoops, getting too earnest again, gotta stop.

KSM: Black humor exists in almost any crisis-ridden social situation you can think of that still somehow retains the vestiges of human consciousness (viz. concentration camp humor, etc.). But of course Flarf is a culturally specific form, like anything else. "Annoying Diabetic Bitch" isn't going to seem very relevant to someone whose children have just been bombed, and that's as true here in the US as in Gaza or wherever. But neither will most other poetry (or art of any sort), beyond a very small subcategory of genres (mourning songs, war chants, etc.), and it's unfair to assume that it should. I don't know why you keep invoking earnestness in the way you do. I don't think any Flarfist ever claimed there was anything wrong with being earnest. I can think of lots of Flarf poems that exhibit varying degrees of earnestness, and lots that don't--again, just like any other kind of poetry.

JS: Actually, even though Sharon's lines were often a scream, the most hilarious line of the review for me was that her flarf "exposes cracks in the culture of banality"--I guess I didn't realize that particular culture needed an exposé.

KSM: Like I said, I didn't write the review. But I can make sense of that statement, I guess: "the culture of banality" is one that doesn't know it's banal, and that tries to present itself as non-banal. The "cracks" occur along those fault lines where the effort to assert non-banality, at its most degradedly heroic, meets the most resistance from the opposing obviousness of banality. I see why you think it's funny, but even though the cracks are already obvious to most intelligent observers, the ways in which the culture tries to cover them up can be insidiously complex, resourceful, and/or pathetic.

D. J. Huppatz on Sharon Mesmer

2009-01-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

D. J. Huppatz reviews Sharon Mesmer's Annoying Diabetic Bitch.

Conceptual Writing vs. Keats

2008-12-20T16:47:00.001-08:00

CONCEPTUAL WRITING

To Land O’ Lakes® Country Morning® Blend (Sticks)

1.

Compos’d of milk and liquid soybean oil,
Eleven total grams of fat hast thou
Per single serving; in thy sheath of foil
Thou liest in a half-cup stick no cow
Did ever from its udder’s teats extrude,
Encourag’d by some dairy wench’s hand;
But rather in a fact’ry wert thou press’d,
So thou might lend thy savour to that food
Which else would be exceptionally bland;
Or moisten brittle cates as dry as sand,
That no breakfasting diners be distress’d.

2.

Who hath not seen thee offer’d at the store?
Sometimes whoever shops in one may find
Thee near the butter--butter which of yore
Did grace our palates in the selfsame kind,
Till we were taught to fear cholesterol,
And turned to thee in hopes that thou wouldst yield
A fit repast: in texture butter’s twin,
With taste as sweet, for nourishment as whole;
Whether thou com’st in cubes or plastic tin,
In all respects to butter art thou kin,
Save that of butter’s vices thou art heal’d.

3.

What of thy savage maid, with braided hair?
Chastely she kneels, like Pocahontas clad,
Displaying thee before her bosom fair,
Her countenance aglow, as she were glad:
And glad she may be, for in holding thee
She holds a smaller image of herself,
An image that in turn holds thee again,
And so on into vast infinity:
Repeated thus, although her frail form wane,
It never may from life be wholly ta’en;
In that regress forever lives this elf.

KEATS

Conceptual Writing vs. Haiku

2008-12-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

CONCEPTUAL WRITING

HAIKU

Poetic Relevance, Concluded

2008-12-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

A dear friend points out to me that my last post does not broadcast its irony loudly enough, and that some readers are taking it as an earnest declaration of my stand vis a vis relevance in poetry. From now on I will flag all my satirical intentions as such by writing in this ridiculously inflated 1923 voice. Or maybe I was doing that already. Oh, vexation!

I shall be perfectly clear: relevance in poetry is the concern of the Conceptualists. The Flarfists do not share this investment. Flarf strives not for relevance, but for Truth and Beauty, which as we all know are timeless virtues, beyond the fickle preoccupations of the quotidian news-mongers.

By the bye, another visitor to this blog has remarked of late that I am unfavorably inclined toward comments on this blog from those who disagree with me. This is not at all accurate. I am unfavorably inclined toward comments from those who displease me, which is not always or even usually the same thing. Furthermore, admission to my comments stream does not in itself necessarily signal that the commenter does not displease me; I may just not feel like taking the trouble to delete his or her insipid prating.

Poetic Relevance

2008-12-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

"Relevance" is a concept that's coming up frequently in recent discussions of poetic value [such as this one from back in June by Mark Wallace (thanks for the comment, Mark), which addresses so many of the same points as mine that I feel like I unconsciously plagiarized large portions of it.]. Case in point: Kenneth Goldsmith's recent claim at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog in his post of June 6th, 2008:

Today, we have immense information-moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary.

Responses by Michael Robbins, Mark Ducharme, and others in the long string of comments (52 at last count) following the post containing this claim are particularly relevant to the question of relevance, bound up as it is here with the notion of the "contemporary."

In one of his own responses, Goldsmith asks, "Can one write an earnest poem about how the sunlight is hitting one's writing desk today? Certainly. Whether that gesture is contemporary--or even relevant--is another matter." Most of us are familiar with the terms of the argument being rehearsed here: an argument in which it is posited that certain forms of expression (or anti-expression) are more appropriate than others to the particularity of the postmodern present, by virtue of their capacity for acknowledging certain material facts of existence--especially facts related to the massive technologico-consumerist apparatus whose mechanisms, illusions, and tangible effects pervade our every waking moment. In this case, Goldsmith invokes the "immense information-moving capabilities" of the internet and related digital technologies.

There are a number of directions one could take in responding to Goldsmith's provocations. Although this is not my major concern in this post, I will point out quickly that he appears to assume a direct correspondence between the technological nature of the information-moving forces in question and the actual writing being produced by Flarf and Conceptualism: a correspondence, that is, in which the contemporary "relevance" of the compositional instrument is automatically carried over to the work as such. This is for me a problematic assumption, and not all that different in many ways from the assumptions informing Dan Hoy's April 2006 article in Jacket, an article accusing Flarf of internalizing the insidious corporate ethics of Google by using its search results as material for poetic collage. There seems to me to be a kind of magical thinking involved here. By the same logic, one might argue that Bruce Andrews' use of a paper-cutter in constructing his poetry (the example that launches Goldsmith's blogpost) infuses that poetry with some essential quality inherent in the paper-cutter's mechanicalness, a quality that reaches all the way into the complex labyrinth of factors involved in the paper-cutter's design, manufacture, marketing, and distribution, etc. All of this may be very interesting and even useful as a metaphoric mode of thought, but I hesitate to assign it any substantiality as a rigorous analysis of the way in which poetry transfers relevance from its means of production to its finished product.

In fact, if I were asked to point to an important difference between Flarf and Conceptualism, it might be Flarf's explicit consciousness--and implicit critique--of such magical thinking (that is, when technology like Google is even involved in Flarf, which it is not always), in comparison to Conceptualism's tendency to encourage the figural transposition of medium and message. This is, of course, debatable. But I am more concerned here today with the criterion of relevance itself: with its relation to technology, for example, or even more importantly, with the force of aesthetic necessity it insists on for itself. What is so relevant about relevance? Is there a compelling counterargument for poetic irrelevance? Does such an argument inevitably become another argument for relevance, albeit in a negative form?

Off the top of my head, here are a few of the criteria I'm used to seeing for what makes poetry "relevant," depending on whom you ask:

* social thematics: does the poetry involve issues which are judged to be of immediate importance in the lives of actual people (war, economics, human rights, sexual politics, race, etc.)?
* formal innovativeness: does the poetry signal its departure from past traditions of prosody, formatting, etc., so as to stimulate reader response in significant ways (note that "significant" here is subject to the same sort of interrogation as "relevant")?
* positioning within a given tradition or traditions: does the poetry situate itself in relation to other poetry or aesthetic practices that have for whatever reason been deemed "relevant" in such a way as to generate interested response (from a given readership, one that is perhaps taken for granted in advance)?

I could go on, but what these criteria have in common is that they all appeal to some relevance-imparting factor whose relevance is in turn dependent on some always-contingent judgment--a judgment which cannot be reduced and limited to a capacity on the part of the poetry itself to demonstrate its relevance autonomously. What would a capacity like this look like? And is Flarf or Conceptual Writing or any other "movement" specially qualified to exhibit such a capacity--more so, say, than confessional poetry, or protest poetry, or cowboy poetry? If so, why?

I would suggest (and I think I am on a similar train of thought here with Goldsmith) that the only way any poetry has ever exhibited its "relevance" is by entering a measurably wide arena of circulation and reception. Put simply, poetry becomes relevant by getting acknowledged and discussed by a great number of readers. Originally, I typed "read" instead of "acknowledged," but it really isn't even required that someone actually read the poetry; it simply needs to become visible, to assert its presence.

I would further suggest that there are currently two chief strategies for generating poetic relevance as here defined. One is quite familiar, and is authorized by most of the "legitimate" literary establishments in existence. That is the conferral of distinction upon poetry and poets in the form of honors: awards, publication, institutional appointment, and so forth. Relevance in this case is a pure, self-sustaining condition--for as long as the honor is in effect. That is, until the award money runs out, or the book gets remaindered, or the appointment is terminated. In every case, the degree of relevance is directly proportionate to the degree of publicity and acknowledgment attending the honor. At its outer reaches, the honor may undermine its own power to confer relevance: being Poet Laureate, for instance, is in many ways less relevant than having a solid contract with a medium-size press, because the press has at least some level of guaranteed readership sharing a common range of attention, whereas being a Laureate simply means occupying a position in which there are suddenly a hell of a lot more people who have absolutely no idea who you are.

The main cultural mechanism which attempts to train poets in acquiring this sort of relevance is the MFA program. Its success is either considerable or pitiful, depending on how much one can imagine being at stake within the terms as set therein.

The other chief strategy is more nebulous and unstable. Like the first strategy, it involves the manipulation of cultural capital, and the invention of categories of value where they may not have previously existed. Its primary difference from the first strategy is its attempt to draw authoritative force from a model based on "cult" status rather than "official" status. In some (most?) cases, however, it involves a good deal of piggy-backing on the first strategy--having an academic position that supports one's writing and research, for example, or accepting funds from the insanely well-endowed Poetry Foundation to write a blog column. This strategy often adopts a posture of antagonism toward the institutions which in part enable it. Like the first strategy, it often includes antagonism as well toward competitors, an antagonism which in both cases takes the illusory form of solidarity within one's own camp when in fact the competition is spread fairly equally between camps. One can see where this line of description is heading: toward the proposition that there is really very little difference between these two strategies.

Where does that leave us, then? We have outlined thus far two main paradigms of poetic relevance: one based on an external network of reference and topicality, and another based on an internal network of self-promotion. Omitted in both paradigms is any consideration of what might make poetry per se a unique conductor of relevance, one that does things which cannot be done in journalism or corporate branding or ice skating or origami. To return to Goldsmith's example, what is there in a poem about the sunlight hitting a writing desk that either is or is not relevant, and why? The question gets asked a lot, but rarely answered: relevant to what?

My hunch is that any useful account of poetic relevance must involve both the internal and external axes discussed above. Reference and/or formal markers must interact dynamically with whatever system of social circulation they are inserted into. If a poem about sunlight on a desk is to be relevant, it must have a context for reception among a set of readers who are appreciably qualified to gauge its effectiveness on any number of thematic or structural levels, and to situate that effectiveness in relation to some additional evaluative factor based on the poem's usefulness in sustaining a social aesthetic. That is, it must succeed for these readers both as a more or less isolated signifying construct and as an instrumental playing piece in some larger, more abstract cultural game.

And even this inches us toward the conclusion that relevance, as an index of poetic value, is a red herring--or, more accurately, a MacGuffin. It is a motivating concern, but not one that can reliably be retrieved at the end of the poetic process. What finally emerges is not any one definition of relevance, but simply the requirement that at some point along the line, someone was invested in the idea of relevance.

Flarf and Conceptualism tend to share one standard of relevance at least: that the writing should exist in a particular relation to the contemporary--specifically, the late capitalist contemporary as experienced by those who have some stake in the privileges conferred by that contemporary at the same time that they are exploited by it (i.e., by far the majority of people who will ever read this post). Perhaps both movements provide a way for this bourgeoisie to write consciously and honestly within this condition. This form of honest consciousness is monstrous, of course, and many on either side might wish, for different but equally understandable reasons, that the bourgeoisie would either write less honestly and consciously, or that they would not write at all. For those who would wish the former, the only appropriate response is contemptuous pity. For those who would wish the latter, one can only declare one's selfish unwillingness to step off the cliff one second sooner than they are forced to do so by the angry, swarming masses.

Where, then, do Flarf and Conceptualism part ways? Which is the more relevant, more "correct" choice? Flarf, of course. Flarf and Conceptualism have the same admirers and detractors, by and large, and in most cases the detractors are the best evidence in either movement's favor. But even Marjorie Perloff doesn't get Flarf. It must be ahead of its time.

Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing

2008-12-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Kenny Goldsmith puts his money where his mouth is at Harriet.

I'd say the first round goes to Flarf, but, you know, I'm biased.

The Koch-Dupee Poetry of the American Avant-Garde Reading Series: K. Silem Mohammad

2008-12-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

The Koch-Dupee Poetry of the American Avant-Garde Reading Series
invites you to join them for the final poetry reading of the semester,
with our guest K. Silem Mohammad.

Thursday, December 4th, 2008, 8pm in 602 Hamilton, Columbia University, NYC.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of the poetry collections Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003); A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004); and Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008); as well as the chapbooks Hovercraft (Kenning, 2000) and Monsters (Abraham Lincoln, 2006). Mohammad is an associate professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Philosophy at Southern Oregon University.

The Strong Poem

2008-11-29T18:48:00.000-08:00

The strong poem announces its uniqueness exactly as emphatically as it announces whatever it has to "say"--no more loudly and no more faintly. To err in either direction is weakness.

The strong poem is inherently masculine. This is a condition of language, of language's history. Strong poems by women are necessarily instances of gender transgression.

It does not follow from this, as one might suppose it would, gauging the situation on the model of meter, that weak poems are inherently "feminine." In fact, there is no feminine opposite of the masculine strong poem. Masculinity here is to be understood as a calculated posture, whereas femininity is always construed as something inadvertently worn, like a tattered or tasteless garment. Hence to posture femininely in this poetic sense is almost a contradiction in terms. The actual opposite of the masculine posturing in question is yet another masculine posture, albeit a weak one.

In order for there to be strong poems there must be weak poems. Not all poems can be divided into the categories of weak and strong.

The relationality of the strong poem should not lead one to believe that its strength is not tangible.

The strong poem fully expects to be hated by many. This increases its strength.

The weak poem is reducible to a rectangle or rhombus whereas the strong poem resembles a parallelogram, or more exactly a trapezoid or irregular quadrilateral.

Conrad Aiken's "Morning Song of Senlin" is a weak poem. Charles Olson's "The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs" is a strong poem. The verdict is out on Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead."

Not every instance of the term "strong poem" is relevant to the definition at hand. Sometimes it is merely a convenient, informal, and largely meaningless designation, as in "Good, Susan, that's a strong poem compared to your earlier work."

The strong poem carries with it the undercurrent of a threat in the guise of robust confidence. It is always on the verge of violating something. As in "strong" (but not yet stale) sweat.

The strong poem is by its nature political, but as soon as that politicality turns tendentious, weakness sets in.

The weak poem is often closer to being an efficacious instrument of actual political change than the strong poem.

The strong poem makes nothing happen. Rather, it keeps things from happening in an extremely forceful way, like a bear hug.

As a loose general rule, the stronger the poem, the fewer metaphors.

Usually the strong poem happens without warning. To set out to write a strong poem is an act of extreme hubris and foolhardiness, even though this does not mean it is impossible. If your life's goal is to write one or more strong poems, you're an asshole.

Mlinko on Two New Dickinson Books

2008-11-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

Ange Mlinko in the new issue of The Nation, with a compelling review of two new books on Emily Dickinson. Catch the Terry Jacks reference!

Have you ever had the experience of being familiar with a poem for years, but not feeling its full power until a single sitting, in which its brilliance suddenly bursts upon you like a radioactive wave? I just had that experience with "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun." Poetry that is its own orchestral accompaniment, that hails you from a ghost-filled declarative space--like a prophecy that heralds no particular event, but transfixes the hearer in a grave state of apprehension nonetheless. Dickinson is one of the very few poets in history who makes me believe that a concept like "the greatest" could ever be justified.

Click to Play

2008-11-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

The unbearably dashing Patrick Durgin Click 'n' Play Toy Automaton, on sale now. Get yours while supplies last.

Or just follow the link at Charles Bernstein's Blog to see a Hannah Weiner presentation by Patrick and others at St. Mark's Poetry Project last year.

Does Obama Victory Mean Death of Flarf?

2008-11-05T10:32:00.000-08:00

Is Flarf dead? Gary Sullivan reports from Elsewhere.

Poetry and Stupidity Part 2

2008-10-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

My earlier post on stupidity, magic, and poetry was meant in large part as a flippant provocation, an indulgence to which I am at times lamentably prone. But like many such provocations, it lends itself to subsequent redaction. One form of said redaction occurs, inevitably, in the shape of a fourfold categorization, in this case, of types of application of language with the objective of making something come into being, or at least swim into our ken. Let's say: 1. Philosophy, 2. Poetry, 3. Religion, 4. Magic.

Philosophy has as one of its definitions a striving toward truth--the formulating of things that can be reasonably demonstrated or asserted through language. Language thus employed demands constantly its own chastening, its careful monitoring in the name of accuracy. Language is accordingly set against its own tendencies, its tendencies to profligate overdetermination and willful vagueness. Whether it ever succeeds in this goal we might debate, but that is its aim: through language, to strip away the occultations of language itself.

Poetry is an intermediate step, I want to suggest, in the transition from philosophy to religion (though, as I will elaborate, that transition is not entirely linear). But let me put the former aside for the moment and skip straight to the latter.

Religion, like philosophy, is concerned with truth--but whereas philosophy depends on the processes of rationality, religion depends on pure assertion. The Word is its own justification, its own evidence. Religious language presumes belief, and fosters that belief via mere gratification of the same. Religion is nothing but telling. Telling that everything will be all right, that things are whatever one hopes they might be. Language retains its communicative function, but jettisons the means whereby it might be challenged or questioned. Religion, like philosophy, sits uneasily in the necessary medium of language: but whereas in philosophy the uneasiness stems from an internal apprehension of language's fundamental fallibility, in religion it stems from the apprehension of others' ability to make that observation. Philosophy would purify language, rendering it free of context--dependency and arbitrariness; religion would have its subjects forget that language exists in the first place.

Magic is religion without the anxiety. In magic, there is no illusion other than the illusion itself. Everyone, except the very young and the mentally infirm, knows that magic is unreal. If it made any claim to the contrary, it would become a religion--or at least the basis for one.

So, back to poetry. Like magic, poetry makes no claims to an "authenticity" outside its own self-proclaimed parameters. Or, the authenticity it stages is always just that: staged, conditional, bracketed by artifice. And yet, like religion, poetry always solicits an irrational belief of sorts. But this is where it gets weird. Whereas religion demands that its followers forsake logic entirely in the pursuit of truth, and whereas magic sets aside the question of truth altogether, poetry wants to be understood simultaneously as fiction and, if not truth, something that draws from the same cognitive resources as truth. One might say that poetry aspires to the status of virtual truth (unlike magic, which only wants to create a falsehood whose remarkable similarity to truth is always--by necessity--recognizable and recognized).

What is this "virtual truth" to which poetry attains? Perhaps it might better be understood as a fundamentally ironic rehearsal of the conditions through which philosophy, religion, and magic all entertain the possibility of investment in some kind of truth. For even magic implies, by negative comparison, a solid truth against which its own facile machinations may be measured. And so we are revisited by the specter of stupidity: poetry deliberately invites us into dead ends of understanding and intelligibility, null spaces where the usual postures of certainty lose their power. What is this loss, this falling away of reason and faith, but a becoming-stupid, a gaping in the face of an agnostic void? Religion similarly fosters unknowing, but only as a recruitment feint, a way of coaxing the sheep into the fold. Magic too relies on its audience's ignorance, but only to the extent that ignorance is founded on an investment in an occluded but assumedly infallible system of knowledge.

Poetry's position, then, is one of radical pointlessness and aporia. Even--especially?--when it is enlisted in the service of a philosophical, religious, or magical "message," its underlying ludic structure points the way through the holes in that message to the absence of underlying ground. When philosophy encroaches upon this mode, it becomes a certain kind of self-negating deconstructive theory. When religion does it, it becomes heretical. When magic does it, it becomes absurd comedy (in a way, magic is always comedy).

Conversely, poetry could be thought of as philosophy, religion, and/or magic at their most self-ironized state. All the gestures of reason, faith, wonder, etc.--made as though in front of a funhouse mirror that one knows in advance will distort and discredit one's "meaning." What a stupid thing to do.

Lest it be concluded that I am trying to dissuade my readers from their poetic pursuits, I should say that I think stupidity, like wisdom, has its place. And there are different kinds of stupidity. Here again the other three disciplines of magic, religion, and philosophy are relevant. Magic encourages a local, temporary application of stupidity to a specific, staged set of actions. This stupidity is always already recognized as contingent and insincere. It is pretend stupidity, largely harmless but also largely frivolous. Religion encourages a total or near-total investment in the most dangerous kind of stupidity: the kind which leads one to surrender wholly to whatever powerful idea or feeling is presented as necessary, and in so doing to render oneself an unthinking pawn for whoever presents that idea or feeling. Philosophy encourages, like magic, a stupidity that is temporary and contingent: a voluntary placing of oneself into certain postures of unknowing, in the interest of isolating and clarifying those truths that are (hypothetically) knowable. Poetry uses all these strategies, but strips them of their practical applications. In poetry, we engage stupidity almost in the spirit of confession or ecstatic ritual. We stare it in the face and acknowledge it. We admit it as a fact, and don't try to control it. We simply experience it, like absurd laughter, or a surge of morphine through the veins. We own it in the hope that it won't own us.

Poetry and Stupidity

2008-10-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

I think a certain amount of stupidity is necessary to cultivate an appreciation for poetry. A certain amount, as in not too much and not too little. Too much, and one is not able to appreciate much of anything worthwhile. Too little, and one will bypass poetry's sleights of mind entirely, going on to industrial engineering or nuclear medicine or hotel management.

The susceptible stand before poetry like gullible five-year-olds before uncles who pull coins from behind their ears. Initially, it's very impressive--and being impressed in that way is a true pleasure--but if they are capable of learning, eventually they develop some savvy and learn to see the uncle as a schmuck unless he can come up with some more impressive tricks. Depending on the strength of the savvy, at some point no trick, no matter how spectacular, will make any impression, because even if one doesn't know how the trick was done, one knows it was a trick. This is why only children and idiots like magic acts. Or other magicians, who are always looking for new techniques to use on their own idiots.

One thing you don't see much of in the magic business, I'm guessing, is magicians who fall for their own tricks. That wouldn't just be stupidity; it would be psychosis. In poetry, however, it's fairly common. Draw your own conclusions.

Let's grant, however, that there are some important differences between poetry and stage magic. For one thing, poetry often comes with an entire apparatus of histories and contexts with which not only its practitioners but its readers--depending on the poetic tradition--are encouraged to become familiar. There is, as I said earlier, a limit to the amount of requisite stupidity. One must be stupid in some ways and not in others, and the ways in which one is not stupid must be carefully monitored so as not to counteract the ways in which one is stupid. Accordingly, one learns things about the lives of individual poets, the development of movements, the applications of specialized theories to given poetics, and so on; but, in any event, this learning must not be allowed to impinge on the maintenance of certain crucial blind spots. For instance, there is the blind spot that allows one to entertain the notion that placing words in a certain order, making them sound a certain way, etc., will result in some kind of transformative state of awareness or spiritual (or pseudo-spiritual) receptivity.

Visualize Emily Dickinson's famous quote about good poetry being that which takes the top of your head off. We're basically talking about a lobotomy here, or a shotgun accident. Note that she never says anything about putting the top back on.

Obviously I'm included in this equation, as I continue energetically to pursue the writing, reading, and teaching of poetry. So what's my deal, besides clearly being stupid? I could come up with all kinds of justificatory apologiae, as many of us could. In fact, that's one answer: the elaborate self-justifications poetry forces us to devise are in themselves amusing distractions at worst, and mind-sharpening exercises at best. I also think of the process by which we move, if our imaginations are at all flexible and dynamic, from poets who engage us initially and even for long stretches to those we can eventually still tolerate. My theory here is that there are some poets who are especially valuable for their ability to interest us over long stretches of time, even though we ultimately (if we are not too stupid) learn to see through their crap. Ezra Pound, for instance. I think anyone who is serious about modernist and postmodernist poetry in the Western tradition should read Pound, and tackle his various difficulties (though not, perhaps, to the extent Pound himself insisted we should tackle them, seeing how short life is and all). I even think it's useful to spend a considerable chunk of one's poetry-reading life under the Poundian spell, as long as one doesn't also adopt his hideous political and social ideology.

As an extension of this, it's useful to check out what later poets like Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky and Allen Ginsberg did with their own immersion in Pound's poetics. But it's also useful, as one becomes more and more familiar with all of this, to leave oneself open to the realization that Pound was basically an idiot. So was Olson. Learned, creative idiots, to be sure, but just plain dumb all the same, in the sense that those who will not bother to wash themselves or realize that rabbits' feet don't work are dumb. For that matter, Ginsberg and even Zukofsky had some serious stupidity issues in some areas.

I say "even" Zukofsky because for me, he is the one of those I've mentioned who continues to interest me the most as a poet, who still offers what I consider the most intriguing strategies for both the enjoyment and production of poetry. To a lesser extent, Ginsberg still does this as well, though he has largely moved into the category of poets I am glad to have at one point had available as a formative model. It's difficult (though not impossible) to imagine an occasion in the foreseeable future when I will suddenly feel like sitting down and reading him again. I feel too much like I know how he does his quarter-behind-the-ears trick.

Even as I write, however, I feel compunctions: I would hate for anyone impressionable to read this and decide, well, that's probably right, Mohammad seems like a reliable voice, I won't bother reading Ginsberg (or Pound, or Olson--well, I guess I don't care if they don't read Olson). Don't take my word for anything. Don't be stupid.

Issue 1/Flarf Poll

2008-10-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Lots of people seem to think that the Issue 1 pdf has something to do with Flarf. Are you one of them? Take the quick and easy poll to the right [poll now removed]!

The Issue 1 PDF Thing

2008-10-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

I think there are three different basic kinds of irritation being generated by the Issue 1 PDF thing at for godot, on the evidence of the comment boxes at Harriet, Ron's blog, the for godot site itself, and elsewhere.

1. The simplest kind: outrage that a) one's name has been used without one's permission, and b) that the work attributed to one is not really one's own. Many, though not all, of the people who respond in this way appear oblivious to the fact that the project was clearly intended, at least in part, to provoke just such a response. These are the people who will try to start a lawsuit, or at least bluster about it for a long time. They are, in essence, the butt of the joke.

2. Generic reactionary resistance to the stuntishness of the hoax, and its typification of a certain "conceptualist," or more broadly "avant-garde" trickster mentality perceived as frivolous and contemptible. This response is not limited, moreover, to "mainstream" types; many so-called "experimental" poets are every bit as reactive in this regard, if not more so. One aspect of this response can be seen in a charitable light: as a protest of the way in which the experiment seems meant to produce the first kind of irritation, making the people who object on that level look foolish. The implied objection here is that it's just not very nice. In its most bullying form, this response plays a larger social-conscience card: "How can these idiots waste so much time on such a stupid, pointless joke when the nation/globe is in a dire state of crisis?" This criticism could be leveled just as intelligibly at poetry in general, of course, or for that matter at things like going to movies, eating ice cream, having sex, vacuuming the carpet, or playing with one's cat.

3. The anxiety induced by the pressure of worrying over whether one's response to the project will be perceived as naive, kneejerk, banal, or otherwise uncool. This blogpost could be taken as a case in point: notice how I have avoided, and will continue to avoid throughout the remainder of the post, any direct statement concerning my own individual feelings about the project. Notice too how I am attempting the preemptive social maneuver of formulating an inclusive social theory of the hoax that anticipates and defuses as many other responses as I can imagine. Undoubtedly, someone else will come along and trump me in some way, under much the same pressure. I take this to be a characteristic pathology of artistic/intellectual community on the web: the constant panic over whether one is presenting oneself in the most sophisticated and even-handed light, and whether someone else has outdone one in this regard.

Flarf at Walker Art Center

2008-09-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

Target Free Thursday Nights + Rain Taxi Review of Books
present
FREE VERSE: THE FLARF COLLECTIVE

featuring
Nada Gordon
Sharon Mesmer
K. Silem Mohammad
Gary Sullivan

WALKER ART CENTER (Cinema)
Minneapolis, MN
Thursday, September 25, 7:30 pm
Free tickets available at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk from 6:30 pm

Bachinsky & Mohammad on Anagrams at Lemon Hound

2008-09-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

I'm late putting up this link: Elizabeth Bachinsky and I discuss each other's anagrammatic projects at Lemon Hound: Bachinsky's post here, and mine here.

de Young Poetry Series: Bök & Mohammad

2008-09-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

Friday, Sept. 5th, 7pm
Christian Bök and K. Silem Mohammad
the de Young Poetry Series
Koret Auditorium
de Young Museum
San Francisco

$8 for FAMSF members, $12 for non-members
museum admission not included or required
tickets: 866-512-6326 or museumtix.com

100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

2008-08-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

William Shakespeare
SONNET CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

It's difficult for any intelligent person not to hate Sonnet 116 on account of all the damage it has done in the service of dull wedding ceremonies ... difficult, but not impossible. Underneath all the historical crust of accrued schmaltz, there is a respectable, functional sonnet.

The first line alone is a masterpiece of metrical license taken just to its limits:

let me | NOT to | the MAR- | riage of | TRUE MINDS

What have we got there? The way I've scanned it, which is by no means definitive, but seems reasonable to me, we've got a pyrrhic foot (two unstressed syllables) at the outset. If you like, it's a garden-variety initial inversion--a trochee (stressed, unstressed) for an iamb (unstressed, stressed)--but I have to strain to perceive any appreciable syllabic emphasis at all. Then, directly following that, we've got a trochee. So whether other readers agree with me about the pyrrhic opening or not, we've at least got solid trochaic meter for the first two feet. In the third foot, we get our first iamb--and our last, if you'll grant me another pyrrhic foot in the fourth slot. Finally, we close with a spondee (two stressed syllables). One unequivocal iamb in the whole line.

No big deal by itself, perhaps, but then in the second line we've got that strong caesura (effected by the period) after the first two words, another pyrrhic foot in the third foot, and a trochee in the fourth foot. For the first half of the first quatrain, the sonnet is basically indistinguishable from prose. The second half of the stanza (indeed, most of the rest of the poem) is in mechanically regular iambics, and we have to project this regularity backwards to hear how the rhythms of the first two lines accommodate the pentameter structure as a whole.

This almost anti-metrical beginning suggests that Shakespeare is intentionally drawing on the prose cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, from which he draws much of his vocabulary for the sonnet ("impediment," etc.). In a way, you could say that it is his fault the poem has become a wedding cliche.

Helping to counter this is the suitably grim third quatrain, which treats the mutability topos (all things decay in time, etc.) like an extreme sport. Check the "compass" of Time's sickle: that bitch is swinging his blade like a movie serial killer. Those "rosy lips and cheeks" just got a whole lot rosier, yo, lying there in a big dismembered heap. English Literature is not pretty.

(I omit commentary on the second quatrain for the sake of space, and because I have nothing terribly original to say about it, other than that I can't help but hear "every wandering bark" as an unintentional index of Love's indiscriminate nature: like, "any port in a storm" or something.)

The couplet is about as unstable a proposition as one could hope to find. Someone please tell me how the "if/then" logic is supposed to work in it. Why would the demonstration of the untruth of the proposition that true love is eminently constant enforce the conclusion that the author had never written, or that no one in history had ever been in love (or, depending on how you construe the grammar, that the author had never loved any man)? Am I missing something obvious, or is this just desperately giddy rhetoric?

100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet XCIV

2008-08-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

Again, this is part of my ongoing poem-by-poem commentary on the Dover Thrift Editions paperback 100 Best-Loved Poems, edited by Philip Smith (Dover Publications, Inc., 1995). "Edited" is a bit grandiose a term to describe the hasty hack-and-paste job Smith has done (if Smith isn't in fact an exec of some sort at Dover and the task wasn't just commissioned to a team of hirelings), but the whole thing costs like a couple of dollars, so hey.

William Shakespeare
SONNET XCIV

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

My insight on this poem is functionally worthless compared to that contained in a privately published (now apparently out of print), 87-page, 2001 monograph by J.H. Prynne, They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94. Prynne goes through the sonnet word by word, phrase by phrase, supplying the most exhaustive and informative explication one could wish of what is essentially fourteen lines saying "You're hot, and that's all the more reason not to be slutty."

J.H. Prynne

Prynne devotes, for example, nearly three pages (in pretty small, densely-set type) to "They," the first word of the poem. "'They': we do not know who they are," he begins. Prynne in fact knows that we do know, upon reading the sonnet in its entirety, who they are, in the loose sense that they are a general class of beings who have learned to self-regulate their "power" (in this case, the power of beauty) responsibly. His point is that the pronoun is deployed, as it and others so often are throughout the Sonnets, in a way that keeps us guessing and second-guessing our way through the grammar and context until we feel relatively sure of the web of relationships we have been drawn into--and then guessing again, as we deal with the sub-web of connotations and ghost meanings produced by such vague "shifters" (as Roman Jakobson called deictic pronouns like "they," "she," "it," etc.). As Prynne observes:

It is not that the human figures here are presumably dark within the inner world of the poem, since to each other they must at least have been extremely close; rather just that to the outside view they present as anonymous, beyond any reckonable perspective.

It is this anonymity that generates so many technically erroneous readings, or partial readings, of the Sonnets: the type of reading a reader may arrive at upon a careless or incomplete perusal, satisfied to have landed upon an explanatory apparatus that makes at least provisional sense, and temporarily blinded to the other pieces of context in the poem that would render this reading unworkable. I call such readings "technically" erroneous because although they cannot, as I've just said, be maintained upon a more complete engagement with the total syntactical and grammatical framework of the poem, the evocative textual details that inspire them sometimes appear to have been intentionally "planted" in order to generate shadow meanings that fall outside the major focus of the poem's "plot." Thus, Prynne remarks, almost as an aside:

If there were any prospect that these others might be political enemies (which the context mostly excludes), this power-holding anonymity could be very sinister.

I am certain that Prynne is not the first reader to whom the "prospect" in question has occurred (it has occurred to me, for instance, and more than one of my students). And if the context of the poem as a whole "mostly excludes" this prospect, it does so only in the logical, grammatical, and narrative senses. Words like "power," "lords," "owners," etc. can't help but conjure the register of aristocracy and governmental control, nor would Shakespeare have been oblivious to this fact.

Prynne's study explores these connotative dimensions of the sonnet in near-exhaustive depth, drawing along the way on both well-known and obscure early modern texts to provide analogues and precedents. It offers the same variety of hyper-detailed glossatory pleasure as Stephen Booth's commentaries in his Yale edition of the Sonnets, only even more rich in historical and linguistic nuance. It's a resource that no university library should be without.

100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

2008-08-22T00:42:00.000-07:00

I totally forgot about this project of mine, which suddenly seems really dull compared to Gary Sullivan's 101 Poets mini-essay series, which starts with this post. So go read that, and then if you still have a bunch of spare time and are willing to fill it with something less interesting, come back here.

William Shakespeare
SONNET LXXIII

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet is the first poem I ever wrote a college essay on (not counting junior college). I felt very proud of myself for figuring out the telescoping movement of the poem, the way the metaphors for the speaker's advanced age start broad in the first quatrain, with the idea of a time of year; then get narrower in the second, diminishing to a single day; then focus in on a dying fire in the third. I also felt proud of figuring out that each of the three main metaphors was accompanied by a secondary metaphor: the season by the boughs which "shake against the cold" as though they were animate; the evening by night who is "Death's second self"; and the fire whose ashes are a "death-bed." Later I would discover that every other halfway observant reader of the sonnet in history had commented on the telescoping thing, and at least half of them had noted the secondary metaphor thing as well. But I felt proudest of all of my theory that there was yet another layer of what I referred to as "tertiary metaphors."

I was reaching like crazy. The idea is only really applicable to the first quatrain, in which the boughs are first compared to shaking human limbs, and then to "choirs" where the little bird choristers used to sit and sing. I tried to argue that the night in quatrain 2, in addition to being "Death's second self," was also an undertaker who "seals up" the bodies of the dead as in a crypt, and the fire ... well, I spun some B.S. about the ashes (and the logs they once were) being not only a deathbed but nourishing food that morphs into a devouring mouth (which would, I suppose, imply still a fourth level of metaphor). I think I also tried to show how somewhere across or between or around the second and third metaphoric levels, the metaphor undoes itself and reverts to the literal meaning of a man growing old. Hell, I probably tried to argue that Jimmy Hoffa was hidden somewhere in the couplet.

And as for that couplet, what always gets remarked on is the ambiguity of its grammar, especially the way that "This" can point in different directions, etc. etc.: I thought this was all very impressive when I first read the close readings that argued in this way, but looking back on it now, the only truly strong paraphrase is "You perceive all this (that I have just said), and it makes your love stronger, so that you are better able to love things, like me, that won't be around forever." I won't rehearse the other possible readings, except to note that they're not all that different anyway, and they don't change the basic sense of the poem much.

There's one other thing that commentators always love to point out: the strange ordering in line 2, where one might expect the logical progression of "yellow leaves, or few, or none," but instead we get "yellow," then "none," then "few." Various claims are made for Shakespeare's psychological subtlety in staggering the sequence thusly, such as that the speaker is portrayed as making a vain qualification, and so forth. I think he just knew it sounded better this way: the right notes in the right order.

More on Poetry and Technology (Sort of)

2008-08-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

Some stimulating commentary by Stan Apps on the poetry/technology question I raised here. I'm generally persuaded that what he says about the shift from "pedagogical intervention" to "immersion and engagement" as strategies in recent poetry is accurate--though I'm not certain I'm as ready to find this a uniformly good thing as he is (if I read him correctly). I'm still holding out for the virtues of "critical distance" in the long run ... not as an alternative or corrective to emotional immediacy and all that, but to a blind participatory fervor.

And yet, I think Stan is also mostly right about how Flarf and other new tendencies adopt this stance of "immersion and engagement," even to the extent of throwing the pedagogical impulse into a hastily etched set of ironic brackets. But if there's a key phrase in his post that arouses my skepticism, it's "Poetry is now learning...." I understand that this is a metaphor, a convenient way of talking about patterns of adaptation and accommodation among communities of writers. At the same time, I want to resist any model of poetry as a single sentient organism that has its own agenda. I can't help seeing poetry as a function of surplus intellectual and imaginative energy: not a technology, that is, that operates either in direct sync with the machinations of any hallucination of human "progress," or with any critical apparatus designed to make intelligible--or remediable--the exact physical and psych(ot)ic coordinates of that hallucination.

Why make a case for critical distance, then, you might ask? Why not just a liberatory bacchanal of prosodic impulses, a shooting up of desperately ecstatic flares in the dark space of an ahistorical twilight? Maybe it's a demand I make on nothing more than principle. Maybe I just want my irrational excrescences to come with the added glaze of ideational exertion: the visible traces that one, as the Language poets used to like to say, has "done one's homework," because, like the base of the statue says in Animal House, "Knowledge Is Good." And maybe, even as I say that, I doubt my own convictions, and am ready to embrace this as the epicenter of resonant poetic tremors that actually manage to work up my spine, if not all the way to the brain, to some occluded organ that prefigures cerebrality's special capacity for gratification.

Is Poetry a Technology?

2008-08-05T20:33:00.001-07:00

In Heidegger's 1958 essay "The Question Concerning Technology," as in other writings of his, he rehearses the old relation between poiesis and techne--"making" and "know-how," in the most simplistic translation I can render. Without getting too far yet into Heidegger's notion of "enframing" (Gestell), the phenomenon he points to as the result of modern technology, that is, the "challenging-forth" of resources (including human beings) as a "standing reserve," I want to stop and mull over the poiesis/techne nexus, in ways that run the risk of stating the obvious, and/or simply reworking the gist of Plato's Ion.

Poiesis is making; techne is knowing how to do things, including making. When the making in question is of an explicitly material nature, as in sculpture, architecture, carpentry, etc., the role of techne is relatively unproblematic. It involves a knowledge of materials, tools, and, physical techniques (hence the word techniques). The techne of the builder, the craftsperson, the designer, is measurable and finite, at least at a certain basic level that defines minimal competence.

At some point poiesis develops the specific sense of having-to-do-with-poetry, that is verbal poetry, that is an activity for which "making" starts to assume the status of a metaphor, something performed intellectually and/or emotionally that results in a physical artifact, but does not actually involve the manipulation of solid materials, other than a pen and paper (or keyboard, etc.). I say "other than" in order to point out that these materials, unlike, say, the marble used by a sculptor, do not inhere in the finished product--not that particular paper and ink, touched by the hands of the artist. The making performed by the poet is at a remove. It is a making that, for one thing, requires very little bodily exertion, things like repetitive-stress-syndrome aside. Most of it happens in the mind.

So poiesis eventually assumes this specialized sense. Or is this sense there from the beginning? That is, does poiesis from the very start stand in a relation of resistance to techne?

By invoking "resistance," I mean to ask whether there is some implied distinction between the practical functionality of techne and a dreamier, more perverse aspect of poiesis. And if there is, is it there from the beginning, or does it emerge only at a certain time, under certain circumstances?

I want to ask if there's a way of thinking about all this in which it becomes clear that poetry absolutely cannot be a technology, almost by definition. And at the same time, I wonder whether poetry assumes an ironic relation to technology, in which it exploits technological resources, explores technological themes, and generally behaves as though it were a member of the set "things that are intelligible under the rubric of technology," precisely in order to burlesque that relationship, to flaunt its total resistance to any subsumption by (modern) technology.

In looking at the tendencies of the past century or so that involve heavy interaction between poetry and technology, one observes a fairly constant perversity quotient. Almost never is the interaction one of straightforward cooperation or mutual embrace, and even when it sets out to be, as in the case of the Futurists, the results are hardly coherent as a smooth symbiosis of industrial efficiency and artistic epideixis or supplication (let alone the inverse). Rather, one is always aware of the absurdity of the union, as though vandals had broken into a factory and readjusted the machinery so that its gears ran in useless circles, or so that its mechanized arms produced frivolous and obscene objects. This, in fact, is almost the entire program of 'pataphysics: an indulgence in the rote motions of "scientific" procedure, but with the prior knowledge and intention that any equations or formulae thereby derived will be fit for nothing more creditable than the outfitting of ducklings with bullet-proof vests.

Now, it is true, we live in a time when poets use technology constantly as a convenience and an aid to composition. Certain poetic works are designed expressly to be viewed/heard/experienced via technological media. Their very existence, in fact, would be unimaginable in the absence of technologies like Boolean generators, Flash animation, and so on. Is there a fundamental difference between these apparent alliances and say, Bob Brown's "readie" machine, a little wooden contraption with rollers that allowed a spool of text to unravel its message in an anticipation of digital advertising marquees and cable news networks' "crawls"?

I suggest that when poetry puts on technological goggles and overalls, it does so ultimately to highlight its intrinsic incompatibility with the overarching agenda of modern technology--its capacity, perhaps, for "enframing" us all as a standing reserve of resources. This is in a sense yet another variation on the old "poetry makes nothing happen, and that's what's good about it" position. I'm tempted to push back further into history and suggest that poetry has also always had this relationship to philosophy, albeit in a necessarily subtler form.

Part of what led me to write all this was the idea that the writing of poetry is most "successful" when one knows least what one is doing: when the poet's claim to techne is least sustainable. It almost seems, however, as though there has to be some claim to techne in place, just so that claim can be travestied, either overtly or in some secret laughing chamber of the poet's mind. Therefore, poetry written by persons without any literary or craft sensibility whatsoever will almost always be negligible, because the poet therefore has nothing to misapply or subvert. But poetry written under the misconception that there is a reliable set of techniques one can use in some "correct" way will be sterile, inert. If there is a technology of poetry, it is a technology of failure--a technology of the failure of technology, except so far as technology can be made to succeed in assisting its own failure as a measure of poiesis.

Alli Warren & Michael Nicoloff, Bruised Dick

2008-07-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

A stapled chapbook of fourteen poems, none over a page long. No press name, date, or other publishing information other than the title page: Bruised Dick, Alli Warren & Michael Nicoloff.

Warren and Nicoloff collaborated on the poems by emailing each other back and forth--that's all I know about the process; whether the collaboration was line by line, or phrase by phrase, or some other method, I can't say. What I can say is that the finished poems are required reading. "Required" in that loose sense of if you don't you will be like the lone person in the room who doesn't know about the very cool thing that other people are having a wonderful conversation about, or like the first little mouse who drowned in the bucket of cream instead of the second little mouse who thrashed about, churning the cream into butter, and finally climbed out (I got that from Christopher Walken in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can--the perfect all-purpose analogy).

The language of these poems gets in your head and takes up residence there, bringing its own definition of habitus, which it guards jealously against the coercive grammatology of classical landlord/tenant ideation. I hope the authors won't object to my quoting an entire poem, the first one:

Bad Twin

and I was there
and fought him strangely on the roof of it
how men in each state voted
for us to mimic namesake features and how I
specifically was to be the one
to love to handle the kerchief
and I did I loved as if
a vivid and sympathetic policy
to breakfast out of doors
swathed my tats
in full light of appearance rearing
this drafty expanse
and I was facing forward
and I realized bread
not reclining tipsy on the sectional
severe to our employees
and employers denying a tidy message
of how to bruise the hands in public
in sight of baggage tractors and nationalities
of all persuasions--about a quart per hour
per worker goes the rate of toxic blight
need not marvel at the slump

I love the clausal movement of this piece, the way the syntax proceeds more or less unbrokenly down the length of the verse until it hits bottom and fractures at the last line. As a tissue sample, take the application and distribution of the word "and": it appears nine times in the poem, six of those times as the first word in a line, and in the first case as the first word of the poem. That first instance is followed hard upon by the second instance, in the second line. Having thus established the basis of an anaphoric pattern, the poem breaks the pattern by inserting the third and toward the end of the fourth line, where it engages in a subtle constellatory pirouette with the second of the poem's three hows. When and next emerges, it is again the initial word in the line, as though attempting to effect a temporary renewal of the anaphoric principle, but just as quickly deferring it again in the next line, where it is the third word. We then have the longest stretch of and-free lines in the poem (four of them), before we have the second and last instance of full anaphoric repetition: two more lines both beginning with and. The remaining instances are spaced fairly evenly across the rest of the poem, leaving three lines at the end in which it does not occur.

I've paid so much attention to and because a) it's the first thing formally that jumped out at me, and b) it's obviously an important word to discuss in the context of syntactical extension. I could go on from there to observe that in addition to the nine aforementioned occurrences, the word is also embedded in the words handle and hand, six lines in from the beginning and then five lines up from the bottom of the poem. Or I could note that in five of the nine main deployments of the word, it is coordinated with the subject "I" (six if you count the second line, in which the grammatical structure carries over from the first line). The important point, maybe, is that we're only at the first poem in the chapbook and already I can't resist playing Roman Jakobson. These compositions provide the reader with numerous low-key intricacies--designs, or design-like tendencies--that are almost impossible to separate from a general undercurrent of pregnant pre-sense, or motivated reference in a tightly wound state of potentiality.

They also have some great titles, like "People in Berkeley Need to Get Down with General Spatial Awareness," "Chiseling My Basket," "Tomorrow I Will Mow You," "You Hold It Right There While I Hit It," and "Alli and Michael's Institutional Critique." There's even one called "I Accidentally Domed Your Son," which I recognize as the title of one of the lowest-rated movies on IMDb. Should I put this on my Netflix queue? And of course there's the title poem, "Bruised Dick."

I guess you'll have to contact Alli and/or Michael via their blogs to find out if it's possible to buy a copy.

Flim

2008-07-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

Chris Piuma has made available the archives of flim. Fun!

3 Chapbooks

2008-07-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

I have two big stacks of recent publications flanking my chair as I type this, and a lot of them I haven't cracked yet. There are three chapbooks, however, that I have been neglecting to mention here for a few weeks now.

Rob Halpern's Imaginary Politics, a TapRoot Edition, contains some of the material that will be included in a longer work in progress, Music for Porn. It's thin both in its cover dimensions (about 5" by 10 1/4") and its length (fifteen pages of text), but not in its quality as a piece of poetic composition (or as a physical book--it's some of the nicest letterpress work I've seen). I saw Rob give a passionate, bracing reading at one of the open mike nights at the Orono Poetry of the Seventies conference, and I'm not sure if the work in here is from the same project, but it has the same intensity and complexity of emotional range.

From "Imaginary Politics, or The Towers as Architecture":

Now a word for all my Christian Zionist friends. Love, being a model for the war. Take the IMF, an AK-47 or machete, my purest intermediaries. Fuck me with the things our meanings make. Please take that burka off. You can be a manufactured non-event, but I am the towers! as architecture wipes out the commons. This is about the love we make.

For ordering information, call or email Blake Riley at 415-928-4753 or taprooteditions@hotmail.com.

Anne Boyer's Art Is War, from Mitzvah Chaps, is a small anthology of the author's conceptual oeuvre thus far: it includes her "Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry" proposal, an excerpt from "cities gardens houses villages systems of government or space colonies I have imagined," and several shorter works. Designwise, it's very hot-pink-and-pea-soup, and there are several layers of book-object apparatus I can't even process intellectually. Advanced. Here's part of the intro to "Difficult Ways":

...I have written, and then blocked out with thick black permanent marker, many difficult ways to publish that involve overt sexual content, like two or more attractive amateurs making love on film and climaxing with a punctuation mark of fluids (this is particularly useful for the many poems that involve punctuation points). Indeed, my advisers have cautioned me not to make public any difficult ways to publish poetry that involve human or animal fluids, including but not limited to ejaculate, urine, saliva, gushings, and leakages. I have not included any ideas about using the heat-fluids of fertile raccoons. I have not included my many ideas about Stallions.

It is difficult to say whether we, the reading public, are poorer or more fortunate for these omissions.

And from Kenning Editions comes Kyle Schlesinger's Pink, seventeen pages of carefully tuned, uncluttered lyric with a precipitate cadence that reminds me at times of Tom Raworth. From "Shedding":

And if you think
This is too fast
Try rereading
One phrase
Tear at this veil
At a time when
Bedeviling coevals
Ease into luke
Warm water together

Again when all else
Pales by comparison
Composition is a form
Of literary allusion
A makeshift blackbox
To kiss or cry
Shifts meaning over
To you the reader then
Gives you the shaft

With a striking, minimalistic, cardboard cover by Quemadura (which actually doesn't have as much pink on it as Boyer's, though it's got its share).

Nonconceptualism...

2008-07-07T20:17:00.000-07:00

is over. It's back to just being Flarf.

Nuisance Value and Slow Poetry

2008-07-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

I love this post at Poetix, which presents one of the more compelling recent versions of the claim that poetry operates via a negative principle of built-in inefficiency / irrelevance.

Interesting to compare this to Dale Smith's recent remarks on "Slow Poetry" at Possum Ego (here, to begin with, and in several subsequent posts). I'm all for loafing, so I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Dale says. I like his idea of a move towards a translocal (my term, not his) mode of poetic address based on commonality rather than a totalizing global one based on (largely ineffective) resistance. I wonder, however, whether there aren't some missing moments of exposition in his account, and whether slowness as such is really the most useful framework.

Dale writes:

By turning away from innovations that increase the speed of production, poets could rediscover valuable skills from older methods. Pace in this slow poetry sense becomes a greater concern. Value could be placed on the withholding of vital details and the slow release of vivid particulars within rhetorical situations driven by a desire to disclose new knowledge.

Dale starts to lose me at "turning away from innovations that increase the speed of production." Which innovations, exactly? In what way has the process of poetic production been affected by them? Is composition, on the whole, really "faster" now than at any other point in history? I don't think Dale means anything as trivial as that, for instance, we should write using pens instead of keyboards. So what does he mean, exactly?

Thesis (not quite a counterthesis): all poetry is slow poetry, practically by definition. Shklovsky's criterion of attenuation (and tortuousness too, really) as a key element of defamiliarization seems relevant here, and entirely in keeping with Dale's description of "the withholding of vital details and the slow release of vivid particulars." It's almost a commonplace that poetry by its nature is something read (and written) against the grain of more efficient, "practical," streamlined applications of language. Even some of the more souped-up recent examples of conceptual and pop-culture-tinged poetry are, at their base, ways of slowing down "fast," dominant-system-supporting language use and poking at it with a stick, no?

As for turning to technologies like letterpress and xerox, well ... isn't that already happening, and hasn't it been for a long time? Dale acknowledges as much, but then says that "these relatively inexpensive printing costs have produced a glut in term of over-production of work with an under-production of relative value." But doesn't the point then have to do not so much with speed as with economy and/or degree of circulation? And what is the point, exactly? That many poets write substandard work? Well, certainly. But when has this not been the case? And are there really detrimental consequences, in the larger scheme of things, to there being too much bad poetry?

I guess I'm not entirely seeing how SloPo defines anything fundamentally different from the actual current state of material poetic culture at the level of production and distribution. Even at the "corporate," "mainstream," "establishment" level, the circulation of poetry remains largely an archaic affair, rooted in pretty typesetting and anachronistic humanist rhetoric.

Nonconceptualist Manifesto

2008-06-11T15:33:00.001-07:00

The Nonconceptual originates in the narrow space between the (merely) conceptual and the (hollowly) anticonceptual, as a phantasm of the former's false consciousness and as an antidote to the latter's adventurist Weltschmerz. Its burden is not so much the impossibility of the conceptual, as the impossibility of the postconceptual, its would-be-proleptic elder sister.

The Nonconceptual artist must find an ideologeme absent of polemic, an interpellated, rhizomic core with no social exterior, from which to de-actualize the infinitely deferred moment of arrested poiesis that will fail to herald the uncloaking of a final asemantic absence. In its place, no chasm emerges but the space left by what does not become material as a result of either that initial deferral or the empty gestures at reversal that never follow it. This means that the Nonconceptual is always both outside the conceptual and next to itself--it "attends" itself as a proxy Other, since the specter of an actual Other cannot even be denied to it in any determinate mode of having-been-denied, but rather its denials arrive as peremptory pseudogestures, like little salutes from a poorly-drawn Belgian lieutenant in a child's book of subalterns.

We hold the central procedural tenets of Nonconceptualism to be:

1) total exploitation of the aleatory differend
2) rejection of any vulgar constructivist chauvinism whereby suture subtends torque
3) modal sensuousness over concretist heroics
4) occasional recourse to images of seagulls
5) at the baseline of practice, a constant shuffling of the predatory and the abject constitutive valences, so that "innovation" cannot be recuperated as "legitimacy"

Nonconceptual Poem #4A7.E7

2008-06-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Nonconceptual Poem #4A7.E7

Nonconceptual Poem

2008-06-09T00:49:00.001-07:00

The manifesto is still cooking, but here's an object study:

Nonconceptual Poem #4A1

Sundane 08,2008
3 Moays Util I am 30
No couting toay. Iam medium-ized dealout of this.

Iid a medium-lenctice on the bech yesterd. I like
hanstand on bebecaus the sad is sof and nic to fall

amstring/femoris is ore, but I leaned a few way
to mae it lessore.

tthe Celtics to n, but I don't thin hey will.

ne can drink alhol egally on Missin each anyor. Twere
00 less peole thehis past emoial Da weekethan th efore.

e fish stew. Yesn Sa Diego in June it isstill cold enoueat
It is 98 in DC.

t to a women' achers club meeting. Yes, I did.

oing to attend hour training seminar on critical
thinkithe ng of my bithday.

e is new constrtion in Carlbad. It willbe a mixed-use
ing. Thee aen't any highses here, altough therere in nside.

eading Anna Kanina. She did not die in hildbirth. ing scene
between Levin d Kitty is crazy and lon and ized and
charcters are yeauful and very either of them has eaten ery
much because ey are verwhelmed and love and clueless.

day until the enof my half/medum vaction.
d by K. Lorrainraham at Sundayne 08, 2008
s: 30, daily, foo weather
mments:

a omment
to this post

Ceate a Link
Older Post Hom
bscribe to: Pos Commen (Atom)

More examples here and here.

Nonconceptualism

2008-06-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Goldsmith writes at the Harriet blog:

Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary.

Did everyone hear that? Flarf comes correct, yo. I take it that that's official, and there will be no petty dissent or disgruntlement.

Boy, I'm getting almost as tired of the word "conceptual" as everyone else already is of "Flarf." I propose to initiate a new practice of "Nonconceptual" writing. Nonconceptual writing strives, undoubtedly impossibly, toward a state of utter concept-independency, both in its procedural basis and its thematic applications. It may be objected that this is in itself a conceptual platform. Go ahead, object.

Since Flarf is already in place and is as good a starting point as any, I further assert that Flarf is the original Nonconceptual movement, and that anyone aligning themselves with Nonconceptualist principles is, de facto, acknowledging Flarf's primacy in this regard and accepting Flarfian tenets. In fact, I no longer see any reason to keep saying "Flarf." From now on the collective formerly known as Flarf will be known as the Nonconceptualists.

100 Best-Loved Poems: Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII

2008-05-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

William Shakespeare
SONNET XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Like Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd," Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet almost defies analysis by virtue of its sheer simplicity. Of all the Sonnets that use the eternizing conceit, this may be the most straightforward (as well as the most influential, I would guess, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Its referential essence can be paraphrased in very few words: You're even nicer than a summer's day, and unlike summer, you won't fade away, because I've immortalized you in this poem.

I could remark on is its particular variation on the standard structural breakdown of the English sonnet form (three quatrains and a couplet). The movement of the poem's argument conforms to the 4-4-4-2 movement of the template as follows:

1st quatrain: Initial pattern established, in which the metaphorical vehicle ("summer") is shown to be wanting in comparison to the tenor ("thou"), and the theme of mutability (change, entropy, decay) is broached in the fourth line ("And summer's length hath all too short a date").

2nd quatrain: Pattern continued, with treatment of mutability topos expanded to two lines ("And every fair from fair sometime declines, / By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd").

3rd quatrain: Pattern of comparison concluded, with further expansion of mutability theme to three lines ("fade," "lose possession," "Death," etc.), and addition of eternizing conceit ("eternal lines"). Not only has a third line been added to the mutability strain, but the lines have moved up the quatrain spatially, so that its last line (line 12) is now devoted entirely to the introduction of the eternizing conceit.

Couplet: Eternizing conceit expanded and concluded.

The effect of this gradual interweaving and expansion and contraction is to make the first twelve lines function in effect as one long stanza rather than as three discrete quatrains.

Am I trying too hard here? Maybe. You find something interesting to say about this poem. I mean, beyond the indisputable fact that it's a gorgeous piece of verbal music.

Speaking of gorgeous music, I can't read Sonnet XVIII with thinking of another haunting set of lyrics on summer and mutability:

100 Best-Loved Poems: Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

2008-05-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

Christopher Marlowe
THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

Marlowe's poem is perhaps the most well-known example of pastoral lyric in English, unless you count "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or "Baa Baa Black Sheep." According to the conventions of pastoral, lovers are poet-shepherds or "swains" and beloveds are shepherdesses: life is a big green illusion full of softly piped airs and classical symbology. Nymphs and satyrs roam the woods, and there are lots of echoes. Somewhere off away from the pastorality is the court, populated by a vaguely benevolent aristocracy that is still criticized (gently, usually) for its hypocrisy and pretension. That's the short lecture.

Marlowe is justly celebrated for making huge strides in the use of blank verse in drama ("Marlowe's mighty line," in Ben Jonson's words). Shakespeare is sometimes imitative of Marlowe's style in his early work. "The Passionate Shepherd" is about as far as you can get from the stirring bombast of plays like Tamburlaine the Great and Doctor Faustus. It's a fluffy little ditty, and little more. Not that it doesn't deserve its popularity: it belongs in the same category as "You Are My Sunshine," "Clouds Will Soon Roll By," "Please Please Me," or "Baby Love." Most of its prosodic chops are in the second stanza, where "shallow rivers" give subtle way to "falls," pooling gracefully into the four-word final line, which makes an elegant, near-chiastic figure out of the alliterative homology of "melodious" and "madrigals," framing the simple subject/verb core "birds sing." The rhyme of "falls" and "madrigals" is so muted as to be nearly imperceptible, striking the ear like the faint trickling of the water itself. From there on, the poem is mostly just a list of shepherd bling.

As with the Wyatt poem I discussed earlier, there are different versions of this text, and I'm not sure how much I trust the Dover editor in accurately reproducing any one of them, but it's close enough, and I'm just going to go with it. The Dover collection doesn't include any of the "answer poems" to Marlowe's lyric, most famously Sir Walter Ralegh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd": you can read that one here. You can also read both Marlowe's and Ralegh's versions, followed by all-new X-rated imitations of each, here.

Rodney Koeneke on The New Talkies in Portland

2008-05-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

If you missed The New Talkies Neo-Benshi event in Portland a couple weeks ago, the next best thing is reading Rodney Koeneke's just-completed series of blogposts on it at Modern Americans.

* David Larsen doing Logan's Run

* Maryrose Larkin doing The Passion of Jeanne D'Arc

* Leo Daedalus and David Abel doing Solaris

* Rodney Koeneke doing Mary Poppins (all he provides us from his own presentation, which he previewed at the Flarf Festival a week earlier, is a picture, but I can tell you that it's an elegaically whimsical treatment involving the lost language of the Etruscans, the perils of speaking for others, and the potential carcinogenic properties of Englishness--and Konrad Steiner has left a nice long discussion in the comment box)

* Cynthia Sailers doing The Passion of Anna

* Kaia Sand doing the home movies of midcentury Oregon machinist William Cheney

* Konrad Steiner doing Minority Report

* Mac McGinnes doing Judex (from a text by Norma Cole)

The Constant Critic: Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian, Situations, Sings

2008-04-23T00:24:00.000-07:00

My review of Situations, Sings, by Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian, is up at The Constant Critic.

100 Best-Loved Poems: Sir Thomas Wyatt, "The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed"

2008-04-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

Sir Thomas Wyatt
THE LOVER SHOWETH HOW HE IS FORSAKEN OF SUCH AS HE SOMETIME ENJOYED

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
    With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
    That now are wild, and do not once remember
    That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thank'd be fortune, it hath been otherwise
    Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
    And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
    But all is turn'd, thorough my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
    And I have leave to go, of her goodness;
    And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I so unkindly am served:
I fain would know what she hath deserved.

[Note that the Dover editor has very unprofessionally concocted his own hybrid text from the manuscript version and the one printed in 1557 in Tottel's Miscellany, but what're you gonna do.]

As it turns out, I've blogged about this poem here before. I don't have too much to add about it this time, except that it occurs to me that it's the inverse of Mike Jones' "Back Then."

100 Best-Loved Poems: "Sir Patrick Spens"

2008-04-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

SIR PATRICK SPENS

I. The Sailing

The king sits in Dunfermline town
    Drinking the blude-red wine;
"O whare will I get a skeely skipper
    To sail this new ship o' mine?"

O up and spak an eldern knight,
    Sat at the king's right knee;
"Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
    That ever sail'd the sea."

Our king has written a braid letter,
    And seal'd it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
    Was walking on the strand.

"To Noroway, to Noroway,
    To Noroway o'er the faem;
The king's daughter o' Noroway,
    'Tis thou must bring her hame."

The first word that Sir Patrick read
    So loud, loud laugh'd he;
The neist word that Sir Patrick read
    The tear blinded his e'e.

"O wha is this has done this deed
    And tauld the king o' me,
To send us out, at this time o' year,
    To sail upon the sea?

"Be it wind, be it weet, be it hail, be it sleet,
    Our ship must sail the faem;
The king's daughter o' Noroway,
    'Tis we must fetch her hame."

They hoysed their sails on Monenday morn
    Wi' a' the speed they may;
They hae landed in Noroway
    Upon a Wodensday.

II. The Return

"Mak ready, mak ready, my merry men a'!
    Our gude ship sails the morn."
"Now ever alack, my master dear,
    I fear a deadly storm.

"I saw the new moon late yestreen
    Wi' the auld moon in her arm;
And if we gang to sea, master,
    I fear we'll come to harm."

They hadna sail'd a league, a league,
    A league but barely three,
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,
    And gurly grew the sea.

The ankers brak, and the topmast lap,
    It was sic a deadly storm:
And the waves cam owre the broken ship
    Till a' her sides were torn.

"Go fetch a web o' the silken claith,
    Another o' the twine,
And wap them into our ship's side,
    And let nae the sea come in."

They fetch'd a web o' the silken claith,
    Another o' the twine,
And they wapp'd them round that gude ship's side,
    But still the sea came in.

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords
    To wet their cork-heel'd shoon;
But lang or a' the play was play'd
    They wat their hats aboon.

And mony was the feather bed
    That flatter'd on the faem;
And mony was the gude lord's son
    That never mair cam hame.

O lang, lang may the ladies sit,
    Wi' their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
    Come sailing to the strand!

And lang, lang may the maidens sit
    Wi' their gowd kames in their hair,
A-waiting for their ain dear loves!
    For them they'll see nae mair.

Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,
    'Tis fifty fathoms deep;
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
    Wi' the Scots lords at his feet!

Hell yes it's a "grand old ballad," as Coleridge wrote in "Dejection: An Ode," which sadly does not appear in the Dover Thrift Edition of 100 Best-Loved Poems. "Sir Patrick Spens" rocks hard from the first stanza and never stops kicking major ass. "The king sits in Dunfermline town / Drinking the blude-red wine." Blude-red wine! We all know that most wine is basically sort of blude-red (most red wine, anyway), but when you say it, it makes it extra special. And Dunfermline! Exactly the sort of name you would want for a place where a king sits drinking blude-red wine. That is one king-drinking-blude-red-wine-sounding name of a place. Try not to think about the fact that Dunfermline now has two McDonaldses and a Pizza Hut (really). And "To Noroway, to Noroway, / To Noroway o'er the faem"--don't you want to actually go to Norway just so you can say that as you go there?

Then there's the beautiful, much-cited passage about the new moon with the old moon in her arm, and the sardonic repetition of "silken claith" and "twine" and "ship's side" and the sea that comes in despite everything. The poem reaches the pinnacle of its dark, dry (so to speak) humor in this stanza:

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords
To wet their cork-heel'd shoon;
But lang or a' the play was play'd
They wat their hats aboon.

"They wat their hats aboon"! That's just cold.

"Sir Patrick Spens" stands better on its own without music than "Lord Randal," in my opinion: it's got that built-in swing, that piratic growl (like the sea on which Sir Patrick sails, it's "gurly," which the Dover editor glosses as "grim, surly." It's, like, riot-gurly.

The "plot point" of the Norwegian king's daughter is conspicuously unresolved. I mean, it's pretty obvious that she drowns like everyone else on the ship, but no mention of her is made after the first section. It's the men that are explicitly missed at poem's end. The ladies and maidens sit waiting for Sir Patrick and their "ain dear loves," just as, one imagines, all the "gude lord's son[s]" are expected by their fathers. But not a word about Miss Norway. You would think a king's daughter would be a bigger deal, especially as she was the main reason for the voyage in the first place. I can't help but draw a parallel with "Lord Randal," in which the "true love" plays a large part though her murderous act is mentioned only in oblique ways. Is there a misogynist implication that having a woman on board is what brings on the bad luck? Sir Patrick's bitter laughter upon hearing that he has to set out at a bad time of year to "fetch her hame" would seem to support this.

I didn't really mean to go in that direction, however. What interests me most about the king's daughter is just the way in which she, like so much else in the poem, serves as a minimally suggestive detail, hinting at a more complex narrative that never materializes. This is the haunting appeal of all those old anonymous songs. They're like Yorick's skull, whose very bareness spurs the mind to thinking of the fleshly life that once was.

100 Best-Loved Poems: "Lord Randal"

2008-04-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

I've assigned the Dover paperback 100 Best-Loved Poems, edited by Philip Smith, for my creative writing classes because it's only $1.50 and has a hundred poems in it, most of which I consider essential reading for any student of poetry. It has a hideously ugly cover, so I tore mine off.

I thought I'd go through it poem by poem in order, posting each poem with a short commentary, because, oh I don't know, I don't have enough pressing projects breathing down my neck.

The first poem is the anonymous early modern ballad, "Lord Randal."

LORD RANDAL

"O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?
O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?"
"I hae been to the wild wood; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down."

"Where gat ye your dinner, Lord Randal, my son?
Where gat ye your dinner, my handsome young man?"
"I dined wi' my true-love; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down."

"What gat ye to your dinner, Lord Randal, my son?
What gat ye to your dinner, my handsome young man?"
"I gat eels boil'd in broo'; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down."

"What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randal, my son?
What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?"
"O they swell'd and they died; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down."

"O I fear ye are poison'd, Lord Randal, my son!
O I fear ye are poison'd, my handsome young man!"
"O yes! I am poison'd; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down."

I used to think that most of the old ballads included in poetry anthologies were interesting more as historical examples of the development of a form than as actual reading material. I still sort of think that sometimes, and "Lord Randal" might be a case in point: this is clearly a text that is meant to be sung and heard, not just read on the page. Also, Dover reproduces the short version, which doesn't serve up the same closure as the longer version in which the last thing the young man says, when asked what he wants to leave his true love, is "hell-fire."

Nevertheless, all it takes is to read it aloud once or twice, and phrases like "I gat eels boil'd in broo' [broth]" implant themselves in your literary memory as richly evocative sound bites. (Let's pass over the observation that the prospect of eating anything called "eels boil'd in broo'" ought to raise a red flag vis-à-vis poisoning.) Actually, most of the lyrical energy of the song is in the repeated parts: "Lord Randal, my son," "my handsome young man," "mother, make my bed soon," "For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down." Whether it's the repetition that makes them so resonant, or any phrase repeated often enough becomes resonant, you could attach these tags to anything and it would sound good:

"O grasshopper sno-cones, Lord Randal, my son,
Aluminum siding, my handsome young man."
"Free-market ammonia; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wald lie down."

Also, I can't help picturing Tony Randall as the young man. So the poem's got that going for it.

Hejinian & Mohammad @ 21 Grand

2008-03-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

The (New) Reading Series @ 21 Grand presents

LYN HEJINIAN & K. SILEM MOHAMMAD

Sunday, March 30th
6:30pm

21 GRAND
416 25th St.
Oakland CA
$3

Sugarhigh on Immanent Critique

2008-03-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

Jane Dark's Sugarhigh:

The frictionless, immediate, and unremarked slippage from immanent critique to intentional fallacy is a useful index of the problematic of enlisting partial concepts from one philosophical practice to bolster a quite different aesthetic claim.

Agreed. And yet, this is a problem that haunts the entire field of criticism, or "critique," writ large, exactly because the definitions are at stake not only of intention, or aesthetic, but of critique, and whether critique necessarily touches on the aesthetic. Certainly this has been at the heart of many a dark and dreary battle over the aims of academic literary studies and theory in recent years. Or, put another way, who agrees on what is immanent? Isn't the very notion of an "intentional fallacy" an argument for the non-immanence of aesthetic intentionality? And isn't that in itself an argument that can be taken in different directions toward different ends, including both determinist and idealist ends?

What I'm trying to say is that I am skeptical about both the model of the poem as transcendent fetish object and the model of the poem as index of concrete material factors. But I don't have the mental rigor to take this position further. I have just enough brains to conceptualize a few things clearly enough to convince myself that there is no base capable of supporting those few things within the same ideational system, and that therefore everything is ultimately incoherent and disgusting. This is the conservative impulse in me, inherited from some Enlightenment orientation toward intellectual pessimism, toward the conviction that all philosophical effort, as yet one more luxurious symptom, inevitably collapses into farce and despair. I'm not proud of it. It's lazy and self-serving at the same time that it's profoundly depressing. And I think it has something to do with the same part of me that's bad at math.