Matthew Landis: Abecedarian

New Blog and X-Posting

2012-01-12T12:28:00.001-08:00

I have a new blog (which also has some stuff from this blog x-posted onto it) located here. This blog will still be actively, just used more infrequently and for different purposes. It will focus more solely on poetry and more occasionally, observations about pop culture. I've also started a Tumblr which will contain a lot of the ephemera (videos and such) I've posted here. I'd expect this blog will be used solely as a forum for more extensive pieces. Enjoy!

What Do I Like/Hate About Musical Artists and Their Records; and Why Do I Feel That Way?: LIKE, pt. 1—HONEY WATTS (Liz Fullerton)

2011-05-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

As part of a new series I'd like to start analyzing records which I doggedly love or hate, as well as records by friends of mine who I think are wonderful, I offer up this consideration of Liz Fullerton's project Honey Watts as a first installment...

Full disclosure: I've been friends with Liz for a couple years and played on the Honey Watts debut record. I've played live with her. And I'm not going to try and evoke the pretense of objectivity here. Liz is a great artist. What I am going to do is tell you why and try to give you a context in musical pop culture history in which to place her. As a synthetic thinker and a cultural genealogist, the more interesting one's creative lineage, the more interesting they are. This isn't always the case but...well... here...just keep reading.

Honey Watts self titled debut marks the first studio offering of Philadelphia songwriter Liz Fullerton. Folks may know her due to her involvement with the trip hop project Dutch (featuring Stoupe of Philly rap collective Jedi Mind Tricks as DJ). And you can hear elements of Liz's background in trip-hop on this record. But in unexpected ways. Because this record is decidedly NOT a trip hop record. What it is, is one of the most startlingly plaintive, atmospheric, and dark (as in earth-toned, not goth) folk/country records you'll ever hear.

Sonically it hints at PJ Harvey, Under Byen, even Kate Bush just with the inclusion of very subtle and able acoustic guitar. It really blends the warmth and emotive quality of folk and country with avant-pop atmospherics. It's got the integrity of low-fi but with the high production quality of the aforementioned artists.

It's sonically like PJ Harvey because it uses similar ambient sounds common to much of her early work. She doesn't use the processed beats, but a lot of the white noise Jeff generates with the Juno and the icy reverbs remind me of her early stuff.

It reminds me of Under Byen because the arrangements are sparse enough to leave space for the more plaintive/introspective moments in Liz's voice, yet layered and not-simplistic. Liz's instrumentation isn't as varied as Under Byen's though (lack of mallet percussion, conventional drum sounds).

It's sonically like Kate Bush because so much of Kate Bush's 1985 record Hounds of Love was influenced by Peter Gabriel's early 80's solo work. Gabriel was aware of the record (Hounds of Love inspired him to use Kate Bush on "Don't Give Up" on his 1986 record So. Some of the vocal processing, some of the atmospheric/electronic pads and washes are reminiscent. Also, the way Jeff treats the piano reminds me in some ways of a less 80's sounding version of the piano on certain songs on Hounds of Love (e.g. "Mother Stands for Comfort"). The production's similarity with Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, and Under Byen is not surprising. Jeff Hiatt (our able producer) is a great admirer of Daniel Lanois and the other great producers of that era of avant-pop (Lillywhite, Eno, Padgham), but he adds a distinctively modern and personal spin on the production. He gives the record depth and air, grain and polish, and then let's these seemingly conflicting elements engage in dialogue throughout the record which is why the record can be both so unsettling and so comforting.

Another interesting comparison is Coco Rosie. Emerged from the freak folk scene, but pretty early on tended to throw in dark, atmospheric electronics and even (on their last record) hip hop as a part of the production. The two girls who front the band's voices are also similar to Liz's (though they lack her richness and resonance) in the sense that they too revel in odd note choices and trilling, melismatic phrasing....melismatic by the way is a great adjective to use when describing some of Liz's vocal turns. But really, these comparisons are just a way of getting you to become pre-emptively familiar. It's difficult to really prepare for or describe the instrument that is Liz Fullerton's voice, however.

Her voice is unique, not quite jazz, not quit country and her songwriting has a certain darkness to it at times and a certain whimsy at others. Some of these unique voices/artists you could reference: a less minimalist—i.e., maximalist—Scout Niblett; Jolie Holland; Beth Gibbons; Kate Bush; Cat Power—historically, the sort of unique approach to phrasing and the unique timbre of her voice might even reference people like Billie Holiday, Karen Dalton and Elizabeth Cotton. The reason I mention Billie Holliday, Elizabeth Cotton, and Karen Dalton is because all three singers took simple melodies (jazz standards, blues, folk/country respectively) and found ways to alter phrasing or throw in an odd note choice and make it work within an established traditional style of vocals. Those three genres (blues, jazz, folk/country) are the three operative touchstones, in a traditional standpoint, of Liz's record. The 4th is 80's/90's avant-pop/trip hop (same style, different name for different decades) a la Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Massive Attack and Portishead.

The Kate Bush comparison however is particularly instructive. The vocal qualities she shares with Kate Bush are the keening quality of her upper register, the way in which her note-shaping and enunciation is used as a stragecially emotive device...the way she draws out a vowel, or muffles a a vowel, or gets a little lazy on a consonant or snaps off a crisp consonant in a quiet moment is all a way of manipulating emotion and Jeff's treatment of her voice highlights that. BUT, the difference is while Kate Bush's voice is VERY trebly, Liz's voice is more resonant. That resonance and soulfulness is what reminds me of Cat Power. Beth Gibbons, the lead singer from Portishead, is another good reference because she and Liz both use the spaciousness of an arrangement (pads, drones, ambient noise) in order to develop motivic ideas thru phrasing. You can turn an odd note choice when you've got the sonic room and open harmonic space. Gibbons did that expertly in Portishead. Liz learned from it, I think and brought Bush's hermeticism and sophistication to it.

Lyrically, the thing Liz does so well is find interesting ways to relate personal experience to the listener without being trapped in the singer/songwriterly "I" (a more annoying persona has yet to be developed in pop music by the way than the courageous, solitary singer/songwriter)—whether it be tragic or joyous—and write songs that clearly reflect that experience. She does so by using very hermetic imagery or very evocative, allusive language. It's not confessional so much as it is EMOTIVE. The "I" in her lyrics is complicated by the aesthetic and imagistic edifice of the lyrics— "chattering stars", "palace of owls", etc. And it's fascinating because this symbolism and dense imagery is than juxtaposed with stark declarative statements "shut their mouths", "i don't live here anymore", "this day was perfect". The whole record jumps back and forth, from song to song or within the same song between these two poles.

Lyrically, that sort of subtle hermeticism (intensely personal symbolism and stark imagery) and direct address & it's diffuse confessionalism reminds me of Kate Bush (who hid her own thoughts about her sexual awakening within a song entitled (& about) "Wuthering Heights"), Joanna Newsom, Coco Rosie, Scout Niblett (who I mentioned earlier...she tells personal tales and wraps them in alchemical language—and there is a sort of alchemy going on in Liz's lyrics too), and even early Peter Gabriel (I'm thinking of songs like "Here Comes the Flood"). But ultimately, what would her songwriting be without that voice. That voice is what carries these songs off into the ether. Liz knows how to use her voice and use melisma, and ambiguous voice leading, and cryptic melodicism to work as a PART of her lyrics, as an instrument within the song. It is in this way that her lyrics transcend mere poetry and become music themselves—as if transubstantiated by that voice of hers. And sure, Liz's songs have quirks, and humor. And her voice reflects that. The difference is her voice isn't just quirky. It's strong and pure and displays an impeccable sense of pitch awareness, control, and resonance…but her ear for things like phrasing, melody, and note choice as a composer is what makes her voice "quirky" or unique. It's a matter of aesthetic choice and of feeling, not some ironic hipster pose. Liz's voice is sincere and you can hear it in every trilled vowel, every elided consonant, and every modal shift in her melody. What's significant about that is the following: All of these things (Liz's voice, her compositions, her lyrics) are not a gimmick—they are evidence of the surprising precociousness and unquestioned ability she displays as a composer and melodist.

Scoring Speech & Scoring Song in Michael Cross' IN FELT TREELING

2011-01-30T21:16:00.000-08:00

Michael Cross' in felt treeling is a series of eclogues in the form of a libretto. The musicality of the language is evident in the internal assonance and the shortness of his lines. It lends itself to song and to melisma, encouraging the reader to embellish and to cut away. The short verses lend themselves to intense structural and formal analysis and aestheticized considerations of image and representation.

The verses sung by the two characters in the libretto, Eumenides and Lavina are scored not only with line breaks, but virgules. The virgules are meant to alert the reader to phrasing which extends beyond the practice of acknowledging line breaks as a sort of added punctuation in poetic performance. This lends itself to a sense of phrasing that reflects the realities of vocal performance and the way the voice—especially in contemporary classical/theatrical music (as libretto hints at)—is not treated as a purely sing-song device, but rather as an instrument functioning within an ensemble of structural, tonal, and aesthetic considerations.

e.
hath added water / to the sea
hath disengaged our sight / it's teeming brink
and naught our watch / upon your lips
anon / kindly met and tempt
tempt such / purely sharp in fragrance
that we propelled / that those around can see

l.
not paper / nor brittle
in that stolid / posturing
in brandish crux/
so brackish / as to splendor
I, helpless / I am
within the chamber / of my mouth
of what became / a remedy
within that even / night

(Michael Cross, in felt treeling, p. 42, Chax Press 2008)

It is interesting to note the difference between the rhythmic devices and aural consilience in each characters verse. Eumenides' repetition of "hath", lends a certain amount of archaic grace to his address. The first two lines are nearly, but not quite, halved by their virgules. Five syllables then three in the first. Six and then four in the second. This sense of the elongation of the line gives the stanza a sense of momentum which is maintained by the even split in the third line (four syllables on each side of the virgule) but the momentum is halted in the fourth line by "anon", which stands as the lone word on the left side of the virgule. There is a deferment here which is then thematically suggested on the second half of the virgule ("kindly met and tempt") and the meter is balanced by how nicely the "k's" glottal stop plays off of the ephemeral "m" and the repeating dentals of the "t". There is also the strong, short "e" in "met" and "tempt", a perfectly rhymed assonance which restores the sense of momentum, which is built by the repetition of "tempt" in fifth line. The stanza then opens up into the neatly constructed six syllable line on the right side of the virgule (one 2-syllable word, two 1-syllable words, one 2-syllable word) and ends with the longest line in the stanza, the eleven syllable final line with four syllables followed by the longest syllabic grouping of seven. This sense of peak and valley and the knowing manipulation of momentum in this stanza pushes and pulls the reader much as Eumenides' himself is pushed and pulled by the temptation and anxiety hinted to in the content of the line ("teeming brink", "tempt such", "that we propelled"). It is a stanza about unrealized momentum, a paradoxical inertia which is both "teeming" and "tempting"—replete with possibility and yet somehow also fraught (the "teeming brink" after all, implies an overflowing, yes—but that overflow might result in emptiness). In this sense the formal construction may aid the reader in the same way that the dramatic construction of opera aids the spectator. Even though I don't understand Italian, I can understand Puccini sung in Italian due to the formal features of the music: its tempo, a major or minor key, the preponderance or absence of dissonance, how lyrical or disjointed the melody may sound, sharp & stabbing staccato or warm & rich legato.

Lavinia's stanza contains many of these same formal elements (though it is more sparse than Eumenides'). Let us instead focus on the aural qualities of this verse. One of the striking things about Lavina's verse is the third line. The lacuna after the virgule clearly signifies a longer silence. The sense of silence absolute due to the terminating consonant "x" in "crux". Still, the lingering "s" sound at the end of crux could—I suppose—be drawn out for effect. The "s" sound is repeated when Lavaina's voice re-enters in the fourth line and is reinforced by the glottal stop in the "k" in "brackish". The device is even more accentuated due to the repetition in the words "brandish" and "brackish" themselves. The "-nd" is substituted for "-ck" and the suffix remains the same. Our "s" sounds then return "as to splendor". The following line "I, helpless / I am" lends itself to dramatic moments in the frequency of pauses combined with the invocation of the lyrical "I". We are made aware of whose voice is silenced in these pauses, of whose "helpless" voice was absent in the previous lacuna. We are then propelled forward by the longest lines of the stanza before we are halted in the last line, on the right side of the virgule with the single word "night" and its definitive terminating consonant. Lavina's stanza is more sparse, there are more internal silences and thus more chances for dramatic phrasing. One can imagine the way one might "sing" these pauses. As I mentioned before, drawing out the "s" in crux, putting a little ritardando over the entirety of the line "I, helpless / I am", and then snapping back a tempo into the next two longer lines—as in Eumenides stanza, we are "propelled" to the final line where an even more dramatic ritard awaits "within that"; setting up the drawn out elongated "e" 's in "even" and finally climaxing on the "ah" of "night" (if one were singing anyway—best not to sing out of the back of one's throat as the "aye" in the "i" sound of "night" implies; a nice open "ah" is better), closed off with unambiguous finality in the crisp, consonant "t".

This is what—as both a musician and poet—I find most beautiful, most fascinating, and so thoroughly impressive about Michael Cross' book/libretto. He managed to score the speech in such away that the musicality of phrasing not only lends itself to the evocative, that is, implicit suggestiveness which music possesses but also manages to capture the way in which structural inventiveness and formal awareness can inform the musicality not just of lyric poetry, but of song itself. When one sings in a contrapuntal piece, you are functioning within a fugal structure; when Messiaen writes vocal lines in modes of limited transposition (scales which cannot be transposed into every key and thus are limited as to which keys they can be used in within a piece) then that singer, too, is limited in the range they may sing in and, depending on the tonal qualities of the scale (or the lack of tonal qualities) what stylistic or interpretative options are open to them; one may also think of dodecaphonic music (Boulez's strict serialism to Schoenberg's twelve-tone rows) as an entire school of composition dedicated to exploring the ways in which structural, formal, and conceptual "limits" inform the performance, style, and interpretation of a piece for a performer and fellow composer far more than the "average" spectator or listener. Cross' book manages to do the same for poets while still embracing the pastoral and elegiac tradition of lyric poetry—however, like the poet whom he studies (Louis Zukofsky), he has made great strides in helping to re-invent, complicate, and enrich the tradition of lyric poetry and what it can mean outside of the mainstream conception of lyric poetry as writing which is reader friendly and "not difficult" (i.e.—nuanced, subtle, elegant &c.). Michael Cross' in felt treeling is a brilliant, innovative and experimental contribution to lyric poetry and full of gorgeous pastorale and beautiful, concise writing.

Magic, Mysticism & Politics in Poetry: A Few Thoughts in Response to a Note from a Friend

2010-10-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

The following is an email I composed in response to an email thread that we at the New Philadelphia Poets have been kicking around amongst ourselves for a few days in preparation for an issue of Wheelhouse Magazine we're curating or something like that:

I wouldn't advocate squelching magic. And clearly I wouldn't advocate attempting to stem the ebb and flow of imagination. I also wouldn't want to say that one person's prosody was "wrong" or "foolish". And my rejection of the idea of disciplic succession, as it were, is more about the tendency for people to latch onto their chosen poetic lineage and to narrowly define the limits of the succession. I would count the Black Mountain Poets/San Fran Renaissance as an influence on my work as well. I'd also count Conceptual Poetry/Oulipo. I'd also count Cage and MacLow. And Langpo. And the New York School. And the Metaphysical Poets. And Patti Smith. And Gertrude Stein. And the Objectivists. I think we're on the same page here, in the sense that latching onto poetic camps single-mindedly is bunk , right? I know, for instance, that while you might see yrself as part of the lineage of Black Mountain you also would never say, "Well, I don't like John Donne or Jackson MacLow or Laura (Riding) Jackson because they're not closely associated enough with the Black Mountain lineage." You would never go about attempting to tear down the work of Language Poetry or Stein or Jim Carroll in order to advance the project of continuing the Black Mountain School's influence. It's that sort of rigidity I object to in the idea of disciplic succession. Because it is a choice and it is not destiny. Which is not to say an author's choices are the first and last word, or that an author's choices are destiny. I am certainly not obsessed with the individuality of the author. I'm certainly willing to admit something of an author function, a confluence of social forces which explain certain aspects of a writer's work and I am also a BIG believer in the importance of the reader participating in the construction of a work.

I don't object to the notion that we are not in control of our own universe (as writers or human beings of any sort). In fact, I'm rather convinced of it. What I am not convinced of is the potential for that lack of control to auger (the pun is deliberate) something potentially benevolent or enriching about that lack of control. I think the point made about Magic meaning different things to different people is quite true. It doesn't have to be spiritual or superstitious (although I constantly throw salt over my left shoulder while cooking and don't toast with water, etc...mostly because I LIKE the rituals even if I don't think they carry meaning, which I'm guessing is also part of why many poets engage in mystical practice, which is fine). I guess my reticence is sort of Nietzschean in nature, in that it is rooted in my suspicion of hierarchy (which necessarily presupposed by the spiritual...sacred/profane, spiritual/physical; it's not an equal playing field--one is certainly capable of some things the other is not, the primary difference being I have explanations & evidence for the limited capacity of the physical world and no explanations or evidence for the heightened capacities of the mystical world; ie, I've never experienced it and I've also found that the significance of coincidence or aberration tends to be something attributed only by those who have experienced such coincidences and aberrations, which means while it may be significant to that person and thus, have great impact, importance and REAL MEANING for them, it hardly constitutes evidence). It's also rooted in my atheism or rather, what I'd say is more like agnosticism with convictions—-the convictions being the belief that while the likelihood of there being a god, an afterlife, or any sort of mystical undercurrent to the world is highly unlikely, I also must simultaneously acknowledge my own inherent LACK of gnosis. I acknowledge that there are things I simply cannot know or understand. The difference is I don't choose to accord some sort of significance to the inexplicable, I don't try to read the tea leaves of ambiguous circumstance and liminal experience because I LIKE IT. I like the potential for wonder and curiosity, I like ambiguity and liminal experience. I suppose attempting to sift through it in a search for gnosis, or rather, to believe there is an ATTAINABLE gnosis to be had doesn't interest me personally. What's more, I'm fairly sure if there is such knowledge of god or of the universe or what have you...if there is such a kind of gnosis I don't presume to think I could ever be the sort of person to grasp it. I'm not sure that human consciousness is capable of it. Humanity's capacity to turn even the most beautiful and spiritual ideas into self-interested clusterfucks of violence and exploitation astounds me. Krsna consciousness, or Hare Krsna, a religion I studied extensively as a teen and found SO beautiful and open and free has been used, in some instances to swindle desperate and confused people out of money and material resources. The Gospel of Christ, one of the most astounding testaments on behalf of humankind's potential for good and beauty, has been an ideology of exclusion and extermination since it's institutionalization (never mind the fact that the Jesus Christ was not a historical figure). Look at what has been done in the name of Islam. And how the strife between Hindus and Muslims in India has been a fount of conflict and violence. Even Buddhism has been used as a front to maintain monarchical and feudal control.

I think that religion, mysticism and myth are important maps of humanity's collective experience. In a lot of ways mysticism and religion are sort of like an act of detournement; absorbing the images of the past, its time. When Benjamin wrote in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that each age was endowed with a "weak Messianic power" there's always been a sort of fundamental misunderstanding. It is not triumphalist, end of history rhetoric only the socialists win. That's why it's "weak". And the Messianism he refers to is fundamentally rooted in the Kabbalah's sense of Messianism—the Messiah never comes. Derrida addresses this in Specters of Marx as well. In the second footnote to the second chapter "Conjuring—Marxism" Derrida addresses Benjamin's concept of messianism. He writes:

The following paragraph names messianism or, more precisely, messianic without messianism, a "weak messianic power" (eine schwache messianische Kraft, Benjamin underscores). Let us quote this passage for what is consonant there, despite many differences and keeping relative proportions in mind, in a spectral logic of inheritance and generations, but a logic turned toward the future no less than the past, in a hetereogeneous and disjointed time. What Benjamin calls Auspruch (claim, appeal,interpellation, address) is not far from what we are suggesting with the word injunction: "The past carries with it a secret index [heimlichen Index] by which it is is referred to redemption [Erlösung]...There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has claim [Auspruch]. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that...". We should quote and reread here all these pages--which are dense, enigmatic, burning--up to the final allusion to the "chip" (shard, splinter: Splitter) that the messianic inscribes in the body of the at-present (Jetztzeit) and up to the "strait gate" for the passage of the Messiah, namely, every "second". For "this does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time" (Benjamin, p. 264)

Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 181

It's interesting here, the synchrony between Derrida's reading of Benjamin and Situationism. In the passage that this footnote is appended to, Derrida is discussing the concept of hegemony, specifically as it regards "critical inheritance", as he calls it. He writes that "a hegemonic force always seems to be represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, whatever may be the conflicts between forces, the principal contradiction or the secondary contradictions, the overdeterminations and relays that may later complicate this schema--and therefore lead us to be suspicious of the simple opposition of dominant and dominated..." (Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 55). What Derrida is also attempting to address in the text is the way in which "mysticism, spectrality" is folded into the logic of capital. Derrida speaks of the provocation of other ghosts, of the multiplicity of this "sociality" as he calls it. There's always more than one specter, more than one spirit. This mystical experience, this provocation of ghosts not only binds people together in a common experience (the mystical undercurrent), but it binds us together in the socialized relations not of but as commodities are bound together. Producing this "mysticality" (I'm thinking of the "phenomenological conjuring trick" as Derrida calls it...he refers to a passage in the first book of Capital where Marx describes how the table at an auction, seems to dance for the potential customers, how the commodity casts of an aura of exchange-value and mystically transforms itself from a table which can be used into a table which can be bought). "This socius, then, binds all "men" who are first of all experiences of time, existences determined by this relation to time which itself would not be possible without surviving and returning, with that being "out of joint" that dislocates the self-presence of the living present and installs thereby the relation to the other." (Derrida, p. 154) Derrida is referring to Marx's labor theory of value when he refers to "men" as experiences of time. People are transformed, mystically, into commodities endowed with use-value in the capitalist system. Derrida goes on to explain how if the "'mystical character'" of the commodity...is born of the 'social form'", we must understand this mystical character, this secret. It's worth, again, quoting him at length since any paraphrase would lack his eloquence:

There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. Men no longer recognize it in the social character of their own labor. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. The "proper" feature of specters, like vampires, is that they are deprived of a specular image, of the true, right specular image (but who is not so deprived?). How do you recognize a ghost? By the fact that it does not recognize itself in a mirror. Now that is what happens with the commerce of the commodities among themselves. These ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts.

Derrida, p. 155-6

Derrida's point (or more precisely, Derrida's phenomenological distillation of Marx's point) is that while mysticism or spiritualism (remember, Derrida is essentially discussing Marx's Saint Max section of The German Ideology, the section on mystical experience, Fourier, and Spirit and Marx's refutation of Stirners "mystical anarchism") can offer a transcendence of "spectacle" (Derrida cleverly notes that the market is a "front for all other fronts"), but that this transcendence itself is still a reflection of the social system it is enmeshed in and engendered by. It's not a question of whether mysticism pre-dates capitalism or vice versa either, it's a question of whether mysticism is somehow singular in the fact that it has not become a reflection of the capitalist system. In another section of the book, Derrida reminds us that even ghosts must be given a body, that the return to the body (revenant) is what makes the ghost visible, that the transformation of the visible into the invisible the arrival (arrivant) of the ghost IS a revenant, a return to the body. It's another of Derrida's characteristic double binds, the arrival/return and the departure (the ghost must have left the body, the departure/arrival of the spirit). I wonder however, is atheism too, a reflection of the capitalist system? One would immediately argue not, since it is fundamentally a rejection of hierarchical organization and foundational principles. Still, it can be said that, ultimately, mysticism is not necessarily a hierarchical organizational principle. It can be an event, a transformation, non-hierarchical, completely subjective and unattached to any religion, faith or school. It can simply be an event. As Derrida would characterize it, the event of an event, the spec(tac)ular event of the event of transformation, the anticipated future event. However, if this future does not include a radical change in the social system which it arrives in, I wonder what the transformation means...is the arrival of a return a transformation at all? It reminds me of a passage by Vaneigem in his The Revolution of Everyday Life:

For Power the future is simply a past reiterated. A dose of known inauthenticity is projected by an act of anticipatory imagination into a time which it fills in advance with its utter vacuity. Our only memories are memories of roles once played, our only future a timeless remake. Human memory is supposed to answer to no requirement save Power's need to assert itself temporally by constantly reminding us of its presence. And this reminder takes the form: nihil nove sub sole--which being interpreted means "you always have to have leaders."

The future they try to sell me as "different time" is the perfect complement to the different space they try to sell me in which to let it all hang out. They are always telling us to change time, change skins, change fashions or change roles: alienation, it seems, is the only constant. Whenever "I am another", that other is condemned to hover between past and future. And roles never have a present. No wonder they can supply no comfort, much less health: if a person can create no present--in the role, here is always elsewhere--how in the world can he expect to look back on a pleasant past or forward to a pleasant future?

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 230

I'd add another question to Vaneigem's closing interrogative: how do we know we are not just ghosts who cannot recognize ourselves in the mirror?

NOTE: The edition of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx I used is the Routledge edition from 1994 translated by Peggy Kamuf. The edition of Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life I used is the Rebel Press edition from 2003 translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Happy Labor Day

2010-09-06T18:11:00.001-07:00

Got this quote from something Rep. Alan Grayson posted somewhere and then Michael Moore posted that somewhere. Both Rep. Grayson's and Mr. Moore's writing is far less interesting than Bobby Kennedy's in this instance, so I'm just going to include the part that Bobby wrote. Sometimes I wonder what America would be like if he had never been shot. Sometimes I wonder why the Democratic Party tries to run so far from the legacy of one of it's greatest minds & most beloved leaders.

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

"It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Help Me Press My New Record, "Emotional Alchemy"!

2010-09-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

PLEASE. I can't do this without YOUR support!

A Few Untitled Pieces from the Summer

2010-09-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

We are feral and better yet, we are plain.
The war inside is a daguerrotype; it
is spectral photography whittled into
a wooden spoon or perhaps a soup ladle.
Quietly, humming our own, new national

anthem—I am off key but am determined
to hit that high D (I think?) at the climax.
This is surprising, how quietly I am
singing. I am aware, I must breathe low. There
are more pressing matters, such as remembering:

We are feral and better yet, we are plain.

***

Sovereign posture
a lightcradle, collapsed
ligature while injured hailing
a parked taxi

wail of birdsong in marshland—ovular
forests of winter passing
Lift up sinew, bone
& larynx, hold onto the call
into fractured simile; have
never arched limbs like irrigation

corridors, cruel Days—happy accidents—
halting estuaries
Take up and read, a storefront

No way of knowing dissonance
from home: a new theme,
hanging in the basement.
Come let us

close the light, catalogue
his keepsakes—swinging above the concrete

He's not breathing
He's not breathing.

***

(from a thus far untitled series)

9.

When the cold
cold is winter
chills the fruit
in the sunlight
and the mice
in the water
the water draining
out her belly

Says it remembers
says it sweetly
give your daddy
back his eye
and the shoulder
tanned and leathery
hard to chew
so swallow hard

Beneath the tressel
is breathing hotly
the sickly apple
is sweating hard
it's been running
down to Virginia
had to stop—
wash her hands.

Her skin glistens
in rest-stop lighting
sweet or sour
break or bend
only one way
to find out
fist or finger
on the men.d

Under the elm
Sat to polish
my father's eye
my mother's ovary
hard to tell
when you're sweating
whether to blame
the idle mare

Time to leave
Borrow some needles
and some thread
found my keys
drank the glass
of amniotic fluid—
inside your engine
is your animus

d.a. levy film trailer & brief clip

2010-05-21T23:06:00.000-07:00

Found this trailer to an apparent film about oft forgotten Cleveland native and a wonderful concrete (& lyric) poet (and buddy of the Fugs) d.a. levy—deceased these many years (since '68). Looked interesting, so I thought I'd share.

There is an excellent and shockingly thorough collection of levy's writings (as well as writings about levy and updates about re-publication of his work) here at this wonderful site curated by Ingrid Swanberg, Karl Young, and Karl Kempton. The Cleveland Memory Project also has a very comprehensive site, including details about levy's manuscript collection, newspaper clippings, and digital renderings of some of his poems at the link above. They also have a very rare & sadly, very brief video of levy reading his poem Beret: a concrete poem for the war monuments (the link is to a PDF of the typescript of the poem).

Jazz/Avant-Garde Saxophonists

2010-05-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

Charlie Parker (w/ Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Tommy Potter, Max Roach)—Donna Lee

Coleman Hawkins (on Nightmusic)—Indian Summer

John Coltrane Quartet—Alabama

Joe Henderson Quartet—Blue Bossa

Ornette Coleman—Germany 1978 (w/ James Blood Ulmer)

Eric Dolphy Quintet—GW (Berlin 1961)

John Zorn's Masada (Live at Tonic 1999)

Dewey Redman Quartet—Thren (Live in Germany 2000)

Anthony Braxton (w/ Chick Corea, Tony Williams and Miroslav Vitous)—Impressions (J. Coltrane)

Chris Potter's Underground—Ultrahang (Stuttgart 2009)

Joshua Redman (w/ Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Brian Blade)—Straight Ahead

Wayne Shorter (w/ Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Brian Blade)—Visitor from Nowhere

Tim Berne (on Nightmusic)

Kenny Garrett—Song for Difang

Branford Marsalis Quartet—Resolution (J. Coltrane)

Jazz Pianists

2010-05-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

Art Tatum—Yesterdays

Oscar Peterson (w/ Barney Kessel & Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen)—Boogie Blues Etude

Bud Powell—Blues in the Closet (St. Germain 1959)

Keith Jarrett (w/ Charlie Haden & Paul Motian)

Brad Mehldau Trio—Knives Out (Radiohead)

Bill Evans—My Foolish Heart

McCoy Tyner—Giant Steps (J. Coltrane)

Fred Hersch—So in Love (Cole Porter)

Jaki Byard (Jazz Piano Workshop 1965)

Cecil Taylor Unit (Germany 1983)

Thelonious Monk Quartet—Off Minor

Paul Bley

Andrew Hill Trio—And Friday

Jason Moran Trio

Kenny Werner Trio

Bertolt Brecht Seems Eerily Prescient Sometimes

2010-05-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

Meritocracy is not something I'm necessarily opposed to. I think that it's important, even if on an individual level, to assign value or worth to poetry—to stake a claim as to whether something is good or bad. I think Paul Muldoon & Billy Collins are fucking awful. I think Hannah Weiner & Phillip Whalen are great. I think When the Sun Tries to Go On by Kenneth Koch is a vastly underrated book. I think Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg is kind of an overrated book. I like Melvin B. Tolson better than Langston Hughes. In these judgments, admittedly subjective, I think some poets/books exhibit more ability and talent than others. This isn't even to say that in some instances, the poets or books Im not as fond of are bad (you'd be a fool to say Hughes or Ginsberg are not good poets). So maybe it's not meritocracy, maybe it's a matter of preference. Still, calling it meritocracy is so much more provocative, isn't it? In the end, it's about more than preference or talent or ability as well. It's about the nature of the social, the nature of poetic community.

I think the merit or values/judgments assigned to poetry (i.e., good poetry, bad poetry, topical poetry, confessional poetry, "innovators", "hacks", etc) are largely social constructions (much in the way that gender/sexuality and race are social constructions—none of this is particularly novel). However, I think that using those power nexuses as sites of resistance are a valuable strategy; so adopting a "counter-meritocracy" or a "satirical meritocracy" or a "pata-meritocracy" are interesting and valuable ideas to my mind. I think that the sorts of social systems that reify the commodification of art are rather engrained in our consciousness and social being, but instead of trying to seek the Northwest Passage out of the morass of this capitalist clusterfuck without any sort of cartographical assistance, I think these different structures provide valuable clues as to how they can be dismantled and subverted and eventually worked out of/overcome. I'm all for tearing down the values of capitalist culture and the current system of reification engendered by both academia and the art world (i.e., exclusion/inclusion in a canon): however, I feel as if it's important to pose values in their stead—I just believe that these values should be transitive, self-subverting, ephemeral, dialectical, dialogical...they should be like wabi-sabi in Japanese design; their own crumbling and destruction is built into their design—they are meant to fall apart & then to be re-assembled, turned into mosaics or grotesqueries or cast aside or replaced.

These judgments or values are NOT necessarily exclusionary. And I do not propose that poetic communities be cutthroat, solely competitive, or backbiting. I just think that it's okay, that it's GOOD as an individual AND as a community to make judgments, to stake claims (& also to realize that these claims are not monologic, are not gospel, and should be subject to scrutiny and revision).

I think that poetry and friendship and the ways they overlap are investigations worth making & claims which are worth staking as well. Friendship in the poetic community is admirable and valuable, without question. I would never say that the intersection and interplay between the two were not important or, indeed, fundamental to the sort of "transvaluation of values" necessary in the social politics of poetry. In actuality these "counter", "satirical", or "pata" meritocracies I'm advocating (without details or explanation, I know, I'm sorry!) are an addenda to claims of inclusiveness, friendship, and community (one might call it non-competitiveness, in the best sense of the term) rather than an alternative to them.

Ultimately, these judgments, these claims will (I hope) result in confrontations between ideas, dialogues, exchanges, vibrant and (again, hopefully) civil debate. Because in the end, our individual opinions matter far less than those opinions ability to generate discussion and debate and maybe to generate consensus or even action and MAYBE, MEANINGFUL action. These individual opinions could subvert themselves, could be conducting paths to communities.

This all reminds me of an introduction to an late 40's edition of Bertolt Brecht's selected poems. I read it and found it eerily familiar. I think it speaks to this re-valuation and subversion, that the present social/economic milieu we live in might engender in poetry.

"Now that the 19th century lassiez-faire economy (*MY NOTE: substitute 20th century) has patently broken down, leaving doubt and confusion in its wake, all values are being challenged; and since automatically the state is encroaching more and more upon private life, the position of the individual is indeed perilous. Even our cultural individualism, dating from Renaissance civilization, is on trial. While it would be hazardous to prophesy just what modifications may take place in our concept of the individual, there is no doubt that contemporary thinking is in a state of flux."

—H.R. Hays, Introduction to Bertolt Brecht: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1947)

I find the dilemma not only familiar but equally pressing. After the introduction, I read the first poem in the book and found myself feeling even more eerily at home in our present moment with Brecht's: post WWI, in the midst of the Great Depression, on the precipice of catastrophe (Nazism, the Holocaust, WWII). Perhaps we're in the midst of our own Weimar Republic. Hopefully it doesn't end as badly as it did the first time around...

Here's that Brecht poem I mentioned; however, I like this translation better than Hays'.

CONCERNING POOR B.B.

1.

I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.

2.

In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
To the end mistrustful, lazy, and content.

3.

I'm polite and friendly to people. I put on
A hard hat because that's what they do.
I say: they are animals with quite a peculiar smell
And I say: does it matter? I am too.

4.

Before noon on my empty rocking chairs
I'll sit a woman or two, and with an untroubled eye
Look at them steadily and say to them:
Here you have someone on whom you can't rely.

5.

Towards evening it's men that I gather around me
And then we address one another as 'gentlemen'.
They're resting their feet on table tops
And say: things will get better for us. And I don't ask when.

6.

In the grey light before morning the pine trees piss
And the vermin, the birds, raise their twitter and cheep.
At that hour in the city I drain my glass, then throw
The cigar butt away and worriedly go to sleep.

7.

We have sat, an easy generation
In houses held to be indestructible
(Thus we built those tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And those thin aerials that amuse the Atlantic swell).

8.

Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the
wind!
The house makes glad the eater: he clears it out.
We know that we're only tenants, provisional ones
And after us there will come: nothing worth talking about.

9.

In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I shall keep my cigar alight, embittered or no
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried off to the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.

—Bertolt Brecht (trans. Michael Hamburger)

New Philadelphia Poets May Events Schedule

2010-04-26T01:48:00.000-07:00

Check out the flier I made and all the details over at Greg Bem's blog.

[Huzzah for cross-promotion & plugging yr friend blogs whilst surreptitiously advertising!]

My Contributions to EDIT Series w/ Tan Lin at Kelly Writer's House

2010-04-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

On April 21st, 2010 I participated in a fascinating event curated by Danny Snelson. I was an editor as a part of his EDIT series at the Kelly Writer's House at UPenn. The event I took part in was an extended networked publication intended to expand upon Tan Lin's excellent new book 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004.The Joy of Cooking (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). A critical compendium to the book, a bibliography, an appendix, selected essays (microlectures) about a series of topics relevant to the book (decided on by Tan himself), a film, a Chinese edition of the book (using Google Translate) a wine & cheese reception, a Q & A were all produced—some these in both online form (as PDF's for Lulu.com) and print for (POD books on Lulu.com & xeroxes we made on-site). For a for more elucidatory summary please visit Danny Snelson's site for the series located here. Below you'll find my two essays included in the book I helped edit (with a team of AMAZING people: Kareem, Diana, Sarah, Gordon, Kristin THANK YOU...it was a lot of fun and a pleasure working with all of you; especially since you were all far more capable from a technological standpoint then myself). I'll be posting info about finding this & other publications on lulu.com as soon as they're available.

Enjoy the essays and please do look at the entire book as it was a labor that required a LOT of energy, enthusiasm and dedication not only for the team I worked with but for EVERYONE involved. It was more than worthwhile.
_______________________________________________
The Wine and Cheese Reception

According to Google Timeline, the first wine and cheese reception to have any- thing to do with America proper, that is the liberated colonies, was held at Al- lentown’s Liberty Bell Shrine, which commemorates where the bell was hidden from the invading British (1777). The reception was held to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the shrine and the 210th anniversary of the Liberty Bell’s arrival in Allentown.

Just prior to the war of 1812, in the Connecticut Courant an ad in the clas- sifieds listed “a few tons of good Cheese, and 100 Barrels of Cider Brandy” as part of a ships contents. One presumes a fine time was had on board. Shipping disputes were considered a partial cause of the eventual war with Britain and naval battles figured heavily.

The wine and cheese reception during the Civil War has a somewhat somber connotation, the only possible occurance I’m aware of is recorded in the Rich- mond Enquirer in December 1863 when a toast “at the expense of the Confed- eracy” is mentioned where soldiers list both cheese and wine as part of a bill of fare presumably destined for Confederate prison camps.

Around the time of World War I, a Boston news report on July 3rd, 1916 la- ments the long-gone tradition of opening the White House to the public—and Jefferson’s penchant to celebrate the holiday with spirits (including, one would presume, wine) and a “mammoth cheese”.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor on Dec. 13, 1942 the Chicago Tribune suggests more austere holiday celebrations due to the holidays. The more somber meals menus might include, they suggest, “mulled cider or wine” and “mild cheese sandwiches”.

During Vietnam, on September 12, 1966 the New York City Ballet was celebrated as the “social event of the season” upon their Montreal premiere, a surefire treat for draft dodgers anxious for a touch of American culture.
During the first Gulf War the Colorado Springs Day Nursery celebrated be- ing added to the National Register of Historic Places with a wine and cheese reception. Colorado Springs houses several divisions of weapons manufacturer and Defense Department contractor Lockheed Martin.

During the 2nd Gulf War the Columbia Republican Committee held a “casual” wine and cheese reception at local artist Tom Mermansader’s house on Oct. 2, 2004. An important fundraiser no doubt for the Republicans, running for re-election that November based on the merits of their military efforts in Iraq (and to a lesser degree) Afghanistan at the time.

_____________________________________________
The Artist's Book

When browsing the Wikipedia page about artist’s books and other sites, a common definition of the artist’s book is something like this: a book which functions primarily as an artwork or an artwork which is packaged as a book. Another key feature of the artist’s book is the author’s control over not just the written parts of the book, but it’s packaging and design.

What’s curious about this article and the history of the artist’s book as it presents it, is its primary association with experimental or avant-garde artis- tic movements. Reviewing even a generic source like Wikipedia might lead you to believe that a mainstream author never involved themselves with anything in book publishing beyond approving the galleys. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t really matter though. What matters about Wikipedia’s cursory glance at the artist’s book is that it demonstrates an interesting trend. The author isn’t shackled to a typewriter or inkwell; the typographer or typesetter is more than the red-headed step-child of literary production. If Marshall MacLuhan’s famous quote “The medium is the message” counts for anything, than the history of artist’s books as a medium sends a clear message that modern literary produc- tion has a long history of breaking down the barriers between wordsmith and booksmith. The “art” part of language arts now refers to more than the beauty of the prose, the inventiveness of a metaphor, or the lucidity of description—it refers to how creatively literature is presented as an object.

When Marinetti first published his “Futurist Manifesto” on the cover of a 1909 newspaper front page, he sent a clear signal that it should no longer be left to publishing companies to decide how an author’s work is packaged and presented. The sound poems and occassionaly illegible collage work and typography experiments of the Dadaists and Surrealists freed authors from the shackles of the typewriter and pen and opened the possibility of presenting their work so that it was actually LESS readable and more difficult to comprehend. Fluxus’ boxes full of “scores” (boxes of cards with instructions for “events” or “happenings” and other guerilla performances printed on them) took the book and transformed it into a toolkit for performance. Authors rose up and took the “machinery” of publishing over for themselves and produced work as they saw fit, even if it was “unreadable” or “useless”. Visual artists, who for so long were alienated from the written word, rose up and occupied the world of language, re-packagining it for their own ends. So, are Blake’s illuminated manuscripts or Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit art? Or are they a book? Or are they a script? Does it really even matter? Still, given the paradigm shift from book as solely linguistic object to book as art form—that is reclaiming the book as craft— I suppose the history of the artist’s book could also be seen as a sort of microscopic Marxist fairy tale.

Benefit Reading for Molly's Bookstore

2010-03-04T22:03:00.000-08:00

The New Philadelphia Poets
present:

* BYOB DINNER PARTY *
* POETRY READING * OPEN MIC *
to benefit the legendary
MOLLY'S BOOKSTORE

featuring:
JOE ROARTY & LUIS HUMBERTO VALADEZ

PLUS: Free Body Painting by Stephanie Stoner!
"There is no canvas more magnificent than that of living human flesh."
Images and text from beyond the imagination, custom for anyone.

WHEN: Sunday, March 28th, 7:00-11:00 pm (reading begins at 8:00, open mic to follow)

WHERE: Molly's Bookstore, 1010 S. 9th St. (between Carpenter and Washington, in the Italian Market)

WHY: You love poetry and people! You want to support local, independent bookstores and build strong communities around them!

COST: $10 gets you a delicious vegetarian/vegan dinner cooked by Molly herself! Proceeds go to support renovations of Molly's Bookstore.

This is a casual event--please remember to BYOB!
(The most convenient Wine & Spirits is on South Street between 7th and 8th).

JOE ROARTY, by way of bio:
born on a mountain
raisd n a cave
fukkn & fiten
is all i crave

LUIS HUMBERTO VALADEZ writes poetry and plays music and is from Chicago Heights, IL. He received his B.A. from Columbia College Chicago, where he studied Sound Recording and Poetry, and an MFA in Writing and Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. His influences range from Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, Harryette Mullen, Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka, to Chino XL, Saul Williams, Anne Waldman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. His first collection of poems, "what i'm on," was published by the University of Arizona Press in March of 2009. His first CD "wat ahm on (ep)" was released in conjunction with the book by Last Minute Records. He currently works as AmeriCorps VISTA Leader for Chicago Public School Students in Temporary Living Situations Program, leading the management of their homeless shelter based after-school tutoring program Chicago HOPES.

Like a Moth From His Dead Mouth Available Now!

2010-02-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

Like a Moth From His Dead Mouth, my first chapbook (which I published myself) is now available through, well....me!

**************************
Table of Contents

Our Fathers Were All Thieves

Glossolalia No. 1
Glossolalia No. 2
Glossolalia No. 3

Aphasia No. 1
Aphasia No. 2
Aphasia No. 3

Modern Priapeia in Pseudo Middle English
(with Special Reference to GodHatesFags.com)

Cresting

Addenda

Two Translations of a Poem by Paul Celan
Democratie/Democracy by Arthur Rimbaud (tr. Matthew Landis)

****************************

The chapbook is 20 pgs with a vellum cover and black cardstock backing, printed on semi-thick marble gray paper with black ink. Typesetting and binding was done by K.H.S. of Selcouth & Liripipe Inc. This is the First Edition, in a limited run of 30 (future runs are planned as funds allow) of which there are 23 left I believe.

You can get yourself a copy by reaching me through this blog or email me at boatload.of.madmen@gmail.com.
Shipments can also be arranged by sending $14 (cash or money order only, please) to:

Matthew Landis
1196 West Woodcrest Dr
Vineland, NJ
08360

The $14 covers the actual cost of producing the chapbook and the shipment. The chapbook will also be for sale at readings I will be doing as well as readings sponsored by The New Philadelphia Poets.
********************************
While we're on the subject of The New Philadelphia Poets and chapbooks, you should all go over to NPP member Greg Bem's site LoneByte Creations, where he's begun a monthly chapbook series and his first two chapbooks are from NPP members Deborah Morkun and Carlos Soto Roman who helps run the great collaborative on-line anthology for contemporary US poetry Elective Affinities.

Happy Birthday James Joyce

2010-02-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

New Philadelphia Poets at the Bowery Poetry Club, January 16th

2010-01-11T20:16:00.000-08:00

Yes, I and the rest of the New Philadelphia Poetsare taking Manhattan, as per Leonard Cohen's suggestion. We'll be reading at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, NYC) on January 16th from 6-8pm. I hope to see you there as we launch a Redemptive Strike (the title of our piece) on the decade. Contiguous readings & collaborative poetry abound as we re-consider the decade that was.

Video from the MLA Off-Site (in which you can see me read)

2010-01-11T20:11:00.000-08:00

Well, this was so much fun and such a wonderful night of amazing poetry. I believe videos of all the poets are available on You Tube (you'll see links to them on the right if you're looking at the You Tube page) I encourage you to watch all of them. However, in the interest of expediency (and self-promotion and laziness) I am only including the video which includes me in it (at around 2:01...which is not to say you shouldn't watch Mr. Toscano, you should...just sayin'.)

The first poem I read is from a series I'm writing, it's called "Aphasia (II)". The second is entitled "Nicotine Fit".

Enjoy!

2009 MLA Off-Site Marathon Reading in Philadelphia

2009-12-26T21:36:00.000-08:00

I, and some of the other New Philadelphia Poets, will be reading at the Rotunda on Tuesday, December 29th some time between 7 and 10 pm as part of the MLA Off-Site Marathon Reading. Directions and further info can be found on the official blog for the MLA Off Site Reading and for the 5:15 panel at the Philadelphia Marriott, "Coming in from the Cold: Celebrating Twenty Years of the MLA Off-Site Poetry Reading" [speakers for the panel will include: Charles Bernstein, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Tisa Bryant, California Inst. of the Arts; Patrick F. Durgin, School of the Art Inst. of Chicago; Peter Gizzi, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Laura Moriarty, Small Press Distribution; Bob Perelman, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Rod Smith, Bridge Street Books; Rodrigo Toscano, Labor Inst.; Tyrone Williams, Xavier Univ., OH; Elizabeth Willis, Wesleyan Univ.; Timothy Pan Yu, Univ. of Toronto].

So please come to the panel at 5:15 and then make the short walk over to the Rotunda for the off-site reading. Below you'll find a list of the readers thus far. I'm VERY excited to have the chance to read for and with such an impressive list of local and visiting poets and hope, if you have the time, you'll come out for a wonderful night of exciting and innovative poetry. Special thanks to Michelle Taransky (whose WONDERFUL fist book you should all buy here and to Julia Bloch for putting this great event together.

Readers thus far include the following:

CA Conrad
Frank Sherlock
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Ron Silliman
Gregory Laynor
Aldon Nielsen
Bob Perelman
Adrian Khactu
Danny Snelson
Bill Howe
Carlos Soto Román
Jamie Townsend
Laura Moriarty
Jenn McCreary
Chris McCreary
Lisa Howe
Tyrone Williams
Timothy Yu
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
CS Carrier
Ryan Eckes
James Shea
Eric Selland
Charles Cantalupo
Jennifer Scappettone
Thomas Devaney
Pattie McCarthy
Evie Shockley
Barrett Watten
Carla Harryman
Michael Hennessey
Ish Klein
Suzanne Heyd
Kim Gek Lin Short
Carla Harryman
Jason Zuzga
Nava EtShalom
Norma Cole
David Larsen
Julie Phillips Brown
Jacob Russell
Matthew Landis

[more coming...]

AUDIO OF NEW PHILADELPHIA POETS READING FROM HIGHWIRE GALLERY

2009-12-17T22:12:00.000-08:00

This was a really fun and successful reading/art show that the New Philadelphia Poets did with Cuddle Magic [terrific band] earlier this month. You can find links to all of the readings [including my own; I read some new poems and the end of the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter of Finnegan's Wake] and Cuddle Magic's spectacular musical performance. Do take a listen!

highwire gallery reading

NEW PHILADELPHIA POETS "IN(VISIBLE) KEEPSAKES" at PHILLY FRINGE FESTIVAL

2009-08-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

Doing a reading September 4th at Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens at 1020 South Street in Philadelphia with the New Philadelphia Poets. More info below:

We're (the New Philadelphia Poets: http://www.newphiladelphiapoets.com) doing a performance as a part of the Philly Fringe Festival September 4th called In(Visible) Keepsakes. The performance is at Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens on South Street in Philadelphia. The performance is divided into two parts, the first part being a sort of poetic carnival, different strands and booths set up with members of the group and musicians staging various poetic works...conventional readings, found text verse drama, poetic "ambushes" (unwittingly engaging audience members in conversation which is actually pre-prepared poetry and the poets stick to the "script" regardless of responses). The second part is a collaboratively written poem by the group. The way we wrote this poem is we adopted a guiding theme or principle (inspired by various poems by Robert Kelly, Celan, Artaud, Pound and others): the theme being alchemy as a way of understanding poetic practice, a language community, and social change. We used source text, our own work, and work we submitted from poets and audience members at various readings we sponsored. We then typed out each poem and cut out these individual lines and in a sort of alchemical experiment we are, without any sort of script, each constructing verse or dialogue out of these strips of paper and spontaneously responding using this pile of source text on these strips of paper. We've also gotten some musicians (myself included) to compose a musical prologue and epilogue, with the middle section being a sort of counterpoint and "chorus" of this communally generated found text.

Here's the link for the tickets to the event: http://phillyfringe.com/details.cfm?id=9048

UND KRAFT UND SCHMERZ: a Celan translation

2009-06-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

AND POWER AND PAIN
and what pressed on
and wavered yet embraced me:

echoing leap-
years,

sprucedrunk, once,

your typhoid, Tanja

the poaching conviction
that there should be another way of saying
so.

-Paul Celan
(tr. Matthew Landis)

UND KRAFT UND SCHMERZ
und was mich stieß
und trieb und hielt:

Hall-Schalt-
Jahre,

Fichtenrausch, einmal,

dein Typhus, Tanja,

die wildernde Überzeugung,
daß dies anders zu sagen sei als
so.

-Paul Celan

Ausgewählte Gedichte von Paul Celan
(alle zitiert nach: Celan, Paul (2003): Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Hg. und kommentiert von Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp)

For Memorial Day

2009-05-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

This prose poem was originally part of a longer piece. It's no longer a part of that poem, but I wanted to excerpt it here for Memorial Day as means of reminding people of the plight of our troops, coming home from an unjust war they were saddled with by our last President and also as a means of reminding people that supporting the troops does not equate to blind complicity and acceptance of unsound and criminal military or defense policy.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The oil fields are burning.

Orange flames pluming from the mouths of wells, lapping
at the feet of a blue-white sky. We smeared our faces with
vaseline.

The brush cannot even survive in the persistent
onslaught of sun, dust, and night-cold. We chew through
the shrink-wrapped plastic, cupping our hands over the
mess kits, but you can still taste the oil, thick in our nostrils.

I might as well have eaten sawdust
or a hand full of plaster. We are animals starving
in the wilderness, scapegoats driven into the desert
to exorcise the sins of this tribe, communicants
deprived of body and blood.

Picking thru the mess kit with a pocket knife.
Everything is the consistency of thick grease and blood.
Saturated with sweat and smoke. We cough thick
gobs of black mucus up through our nostrils and mouths.

Even now, I taste it leaning against the counter,
eating left overs, soaked in nightmare sweat, the sun just
peeling away the black rind of night. I hear them snoring in
the next room.

I don’t know her name anymore. She writhes underneath me,
nails digging into my skin. She draws blood, holding tight, afraid
that “I will leave again.” I am not even there as my
hips spasm and I slowly collapse against her.

My eyes dart through the crowd, my breath quickens.
Hands, feet, and faces, blur into one another, the applause
deafening, sweating beneath their insistent watchful eyes;
“Welcome home!”, my mother cries. I take another sip
of beer and sneak outside for a cigarette, shivering in the
summer heat.

The smoke around my head, heavy in my lungs beneath
the burning wells-- blood, oil, and expectorate coating the back
of my throat again. I gag on the memory, the after-ravages of the
plague. They find me in the grass, on my knees, dry heaving next
to the sandbox. I feel a hand in the small of my back, and shudder
after each convulsion.

"I Am a Human Being": Using Hermeneutics to Examine Cultural Manifestations of Third Sexes/Genders from Plato to Punk Rock

2009-03-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

The difficult and complex questions of gender, sex, and identity is not easily reconciled. Often contested, it is a construct which gave birth to the discourse of feminism, the lesbian/gay/bi/transgendered rights movement (LGBT), and the intersex rights movement. Some have argued that gender is an essential characteristic of existence; indeed it is intimately related to biological sex. Others have contested it is a social construct and as such should be dismissed. The complexity of this debate is by no means limited to these positions, but it is safe to say these are the key voices within it. The problem one faces when talking about gender is not a simple ontological or epistemological problem—it is also an ethical, in fact, highly political question. If gender is a construction and therefore is to be dismissed, how is it that we can construct a community of activists for transgender rights? If it is an essential part of human nature, then how do we account for anomalous phenomenon such as androgyny, drag, transsexuals (TS), transgendered (TG), and even “butch” lesbians and “flaming” gay males? What is at stake if we simply do away with the notion of gender? What further marginalization will result from the insistence that it is a static, constitutive and unchanging component of what it means to be human? How will all of this effect broader conceptions of identity? I’m not sure these questions have easy answers; and I am also unsure as to whether they should.

If we were to be so bold as to suggest a different interpretation of gender—as well as a different conception of its significance, representation, and deployment in the culture at large—we would be forced to deal with these myriad issues: politics, ethics, ontology, epistemology (more specifically medical epistemology and psychology), etc. It is important then to establish a foundation for interpreting gender that is open and dynamic (even if our conception of gender itself is not). We should represent gender openly if we are ever to determine whether it is, in fact a closed epistemological/onto-metaphysical concept or whether our current understanding of it is only one point in a polyvalent horizon. In order to accomplish this we must question the horizon of gender itself (which is not even conceived of as a horizon); in other words, we must question its logic, its representation—i.e., the binary—and do so through a hermeneutical methodology.

Reifying the Binary: Gender, Sex, and Love
Both gender and sex are conceived of as binary structures. Sex is seen as the more immutable of the two—there is male and there is female (and more progressive notions would include the intersexed or hermaphrodite, thus implying a somewhat more fluid ternary conception; however this ternary conception is not our prominent notion of sex). This conception of sex is based upon biology (the presence of a penis or vagina). Gender, then, can be said to be the performative adjunct of biological sex. The masculine and feminine genders refer to activities “commonly” associated with the biological male or female. By implication then, we mean stereotyping. For instance housework is a woman’s job, whereas landscaping is a man’s. If we accept this conception of gender, the androgynous or the transgendered lifestyle is highly problematic. Not only that, homosexuality presents a significant challenge, especially to the humanist model of gender or sexuality as an essential quality. Homosexual behavior would then represent a sort of sexual “inversion” or “psychic hermaphrodism.” Transsexual behavior, then, could be said to be an even more radical challenge to both gender and sex: it suggests not only the possible “misapplication” of gender but of sex as well, implying a shifting (though still polarized) conception of both gender and sex¹.

This polarization is the root of the problem since it permeates our very social structure. Male/female, complete/incomplete, queer/straight all represent the overwhelming binary structure of society. It is, however, I believe the task of hermeneutics as a philosophical, political, ethical, and most importantly, human endeavor, is to question and challenge the binary which is the logic of exclusion and assimilation. The binary conception of gender insists upon an identity with the corresponding characteristics of the male or the female, the masculine or the feminine. These are the paradigms through which we see ourselves and others. This is why the image of the homosexual or transvestite as the effeminate man is so popular in the literature of sexology in the 19th century (as well as the stereotypes of today). Where this stereotype evolves from is, namely, that view of sexuality which sees sexual behavior in terms of Darwinian survival and thus procreation (Herdt, 27-8). When a man has intercourse with another man, a process of “feminization” occurs on the part of the man who is on the receiving end of sodomy; in other words, he wants to be a woman. The binary notion, however, hermeneutics endeavors to show, is an inadequate model; in fact, there is some historical precedence for this claim in the notion of androgyny, drag, or transgender lifestyles—the in-between of gender which these various lifestyles represent in authentic dialogue suggests that one need not be categorized by the strict opposition between static structures such as male and female. If we begin with looking at cultural artifacts which are designed to challenge the binary conception of sex and gener, we might begin with Plato’s Symposium. In it, we are confronted with a challenge to the binary before Socrates even opens his mouth (he does not offer significant input to the dialogue for some time). It is upon the challenges presented in the historical and philosophical example of the Symposium I will build the rest of argument regarding a hermeneutics of gender.

In Aristophanes’ speech we are given a creation myth central to the Greek understanding of gender and sex (this myth is also discussed in Hesiod’s Theogony). In the beginning, we learn, there were three sexes: the children of the sun, moon, and earth. The male sex was spawned from the sun, the female from the earth, and the third sex (the hermaphrodite) from the moon since it had both the nature of sun and earth (Plato, 31). The male sex had the appearance of two men joined back to back, the female sex of two women joined back to back, and the hermaphrodite a male and female joined back to back. They were all seen as powerful beings and they attacked the gods. Thus, Zeus in his jealousy divided them in half and so human beings wander the earth longing for the other half from which they had been severed. As humans became lonely, they took their genitals and turn them from the insides of their bodies out, so they could attempt to “put themselves back together” when they embraced (Plato, 31-33)

What is interesting is that Aristophanes goes onto tell the company that men that desire after their former halves (another man) are the most respected since after they have been satisfied sexually they can pursue their daily lives while, women who desire men or men who desire women are lustful and sensual due to procreative lust (a refutation of the Darwinian justification for sexual dimorphism). Women who seek other women, lesbians, are hardly mentioned, and heterosexual relationships which result from male or female seeking their other half of the opposite sex are, as I’ve already shown, spoken of scornfully! (Plato, 32) How is it then that the binary can be said to be foundational? Indeed, the first metaphysicians were the Greeks, most prominently, is has been said, Plato himself. However, in Plato’s own sexual cosmology he challenges the logic of the binary in general and our current binary system of sexuality which privileges heterosexual behavior above that of homosexual behavior. Furthermore, men who engage in homosexual love are not seen as essentially effeminate. In fact, their homosexual sex lives are seen as the very reason they are able to remain a productive force in the society. If we view homosexuality as a historical phenomenon then, somewhere there was an inversion of values. Some might say Christianity, others the rise of modern psychiatry. Regardless, what is important is to make clear that the model of sexual dimorphism and binary gender is not a priori or essential at all; it is a construction and thus (thankfully, in my opinion) subject to revision.
Besides this obvious refutation of our current conception of gender identity and sexuality there is a more nuanced statement in the Symposium about these issues. This statement occurs in Socrates’ recounting of his discussion of Love with Diotima. In her explanation of Love Diotima informs Socrates that

The function of procreation is that of procreation in what is beautiful, and such procreation can either be physical or spiritual […] All men, Socrates, have a procreative impulse, both spiritual and physical, and when they come to maturity they feel a natural desire to beget children, but they can do so only in beauty and never in ugliness. There is something divine about the whole matter; in procreation and bringing to birth the mortal creature is endowed with a touch of immortality. But the process cannot take place in disharmony, and ugliness is out of harmony with everything divine, whereas beauty is in harmony with it. (Plato, 34)

With this we encounter a direct refutation of the current model of procreation as exclusionary (that is, the act of creation being an exclusively physical process resulting in the birth of a human child). Our idea of procreation does not include the spiritual or aesthetic; it has no taste for the divine, which is of course in Plato, experienced in beauty. The individual, singular expression of beauty then, as opposed to biology, is the foundation of love, of sex, and of gender. If we remove gender from its characteristic conception as the performative adjunct of sex and instead understand it as performance in-and-of-itself, for-itself then we come to understand that gender is merely an expression of what is beautiful or pleasing—what inspires happiness and is formed in harmony within the individual and then brought into the world through performance. Gender announces, performatively, who one sees her/himself to be. Gender, as a component of self-image and understanding, is part of that which we see when we confront the Other. When we desire someone we desire what is beautiful in them; and thus, what the Other sees as beautiful in her/himself. Desire then is not the longing for power or subjugation, it is instead a longing for realization or the arrival of an event; the event being the arrival of the Other’s disclosure of itself and thus of its beauty. Gender, as performance, as praxis, as activity is one way in which this beauty may be disclosed.

Hermeneutics is essential to this understanding because it informs the Platonic conception of procreation with a dialogical ontology. This ontology is rooted in the “true locus of hermeneutics” or what Gadamer calls “the in-between”(Gadamer, 295). The in-between can be characterized in this instance as the ontological space which exists between the binary opposition of male and female. In terms of biological sex we are confronted with a limitation: a ternary structure of male, female, and intersexed. However, biological sex need not be a definitive characteristic of sexual identity. The sex with which one identifies oneself is not a static structure. Biological sex may be a homogenous entity and due to scientific limitations and a lack of expertise I do not propose to challenge this notion. However, sexual identity is something all together different than biology. Identity is a structure which is conceived in reciprocity and in dialogue: a dialogue between one’s self-understanding and one’s objectification in the world. By objectification, I mean the experiences one encounters as a reality outside of psychic life: economics, culture, religion, and politics. Though not determinate, they are relational. The interconnectedness of our sense of self with the world we inhabit is an integral part of our humanity. Both our identities and the world change with the experiences and conditions we are faced with and the discoveries and revelations we have about ourselves. Identity then is far from a static structure: it is dynamic, fluid, and dialogical. Thus, when Plato speaks of desiring beauty permanently in the Symposium, he does not mean to say that beauty itself is permanent: but rather that we should perpetually seek what is beautiful in all of its many forms and manifestation (human and otherwise). Knowledge of ourselves and others, then, are not condition or determinate types of cognition but rather open networks of deliberation. “[T]he knower is not standing over against a situation he merely observes; he is directly confronted with what he sees. It is something he has to do.” (Gadamer, 314) Knowledge is an activity that yields to understanding which is characterized by phronesis and praxis: practical wisdom and activity. In this way, the activity of understanding what stands in alterity to the binary of male/female—i.e., the TS, TG, cross-dressing, or intersexed individual—is fluid and shifting. The dialogue which occurs in-between the binary is one which is in suspension. The “third sex” or “third gender” notion can be described best by Barbey’s characterization of the dandy (although it is applicable to all the lifestyles mentioned in this paper): ‘the “undecidable sex” (Garelick, 30). One must be able to disclose "beauty" freely in the space left by our suspension of prejudice. Only in this way does understanding occur: by not only questioning what is Other (TS, TG, queer, intersexed, etc) but our own preconceptions.

Knowledge always means, precisely, considering opposites. Its superiority over preconceived opinion consists in the fact that it is able to conceive of possibilities as possibilities. Knowledge is dialectical from the ground up. Only a person who questions can have knowledge, but questions include the antithesis of yes and no, of being like this and being like that (Gadamer, 365).

The undecideability of the dialectic presented in Gadamer’s text is precisely the dialectic conceived of as a dialogue. The person who questions is each and every one of us. We question gender and we question identity and the binary which represents the antithetical concepts of the dialectic. The key is that the question includes both rather than excluding one or the other. The resulting tension of undecidablity can only be relieved by loosening the knot where the binary intersects and becomes entangled and convoluted: the in-between. "Beauty" then, is not self-evident and subject to eternal standards but emergent, a process. It is a spectrum, much as sexuality itself is a spectrum. And the reflection of "beauty" in this sense, beauty as irreducible otherness and difference, as the unique marking of the individual is not a merely aesthetic category. Indeed, beauty may contain within it what is commonly perceived as decadence or depravity.

Dandyism, Homoeroticism, and Undecidability: or the Androgyny of Love
There are further examples of this in-between that I will now offer. Each a distinct historical or cultural phenomenon, but all of them open the possibility for the disclosure of beauty as opposed to categorization, as the paradigm through which we see the world and others.

The first example I would like to offer is that of the aforementioned dandy. Dandyism was a cultural phenomenon which still exerts influence over our notions of celebrity, personality, and aesthetics. In her book Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle, Rhonda Garelick charts the course of dandyism’s relationship with gender concepts, sexuality, and the feminine. The dandy sought a life of idleness which was consumed with how he presented himself. The stereotypical dandy is best characterized by his top-hat, black frock-coat with flowing tails, white gloves, high collar, frilled bows as a tie, often of exotic fabric, various ointments and perfumes and a social attitude focused on achieving recognition. The personality, as a whole, was a performance. The dandy, almost naturally, Garelick argues at several points in her book, is drawn to the feminine. Despite correlations between dandies and “camp” female performers, one of dandyism’s primary representatives—Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly—believed that assistance from women in perfecting the aesthetic sense of style and self-reproduction was unnecessary since the dandy, in certain respects, was himself a woman (Garelick, 25). Baudelaire’s notion of dandyism follows on this theme and anticipates drag, female impersonation, and transgenderism by recognizing dandies as “creatures of disguise and social manipulation” (Garelick, 34). The dandy sought to overcome his own gender, that of the male, not only by adapting feminine mannerisms and sense of aesthetic, but by literally subsuming himself in the character of what was seen as feminine in 19th century France; however, they distinctly identified themselves as male while insisting that the virtues of femininity reached perfection only in the aesthetic and fashion sensibility of the true dandy, a man (this despite great admiration for female performers of the day and iconoclastic, cross-dressing women such as Rachilde²).

The dandy, however, was not outside of the gender spectrum. The dandy occupied the space in between male and female. Dandyism was not a homogenous lifestyle. Former dandies, dating back to the ancient Greek Alcibiades, constituted themselves as singular individuals through self-creation and self-adaptation³ (as well as learning from the tradition of dandyism). It is in this way, especially, that dandyism represents early and subtle signs of a transgendered community. Each individual stands out as a distinct entity, yet merges to form an almost disciplic succession of men inhabiting this ambiguous gender category. The ambiguity and singularity of the dandy are essential to his existence; but so is his paradoxical insistence upon identifying himself with the tradition of dandyism. Thus, one might say the dandy not only represents a challenge to the binary but presents a microcosmic image of the dialogical conception of identity needed to overcome the binary in his own self-constitution. The effeminate dandy did not want to forsake his male identity or capitulate to the standard of feminine identity, but to cultivate a sense of the pleasurable, the beautiful, and the erotic in himself (and in some sense society), and in so doing fall both outside and within the male/female dichotomy without necessarily challenging the social and medical assumption of male superiority .

Dandies did represent an artistic community and their works are inflected with a distinct sense of sexuality. Many dandies were homosexuals or cross-dressers and notoriously effeminate. Their artistry did not separate them from moral condemnation either; indeed their artistry often went unrecognized in mainstream culture (in the case of Baudelaire, Lorrain, and other “decadents”). One need only look at the tragic case of Oscar Wilde and read his heartbreaking disavowal of his supposedly lurid, homosexual past in De Profoundis. Not only that, but several obscenity trials, public scandals, and incidence of base slander were suffered by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lorrain, and even Flaubert (not necessarily a dandy) for depictions of homosexuality, sodomy, cross-dressing, fetishism, or simply iconoclastic portraits of gender identity (as in the case of Madame Bovary).

The cognate sense of inspiration or elation and alienation run throughout dandyist texts and most significantly in the French Symbolist or Fin de Siecle period in both France and England. Notice this piece of verse by Wilde’s contemporary Marc Andre Raffalovich.

Because our world has music, and we dance;
Because our world has colour, and They gaze;
Because our speech is tuned, and schooled our glance,
And we have roseleaf nights and roseleaf days,
And we have leisure, work to do and rest;
Because They see us laughing when we meet,
And hear our words and voices, see us dressed
With skill, and pass us and our flowers smell sweet:
They think that we know friendship, passion, love!
Our peacock Pride! And Art our nightingale!
And Pleasure’s hand upon our dogskin gloves!
And if They see our faces burn or pale,
It is the sunlight, think They, or the gas,
--Our lives are wired like our gardenias.
(Raffalovich, “The World Well Lost IV”, 294)

At first we notice the capitalization of “They”: the majority which imposes its own vision of the dandy and the homosexual upon Raffalovich, Douglas (Wilde’s lover and compatriot) and Wilde. Their sense of exuberance is tempered by the knowledge that they are neither understood nor accepted. “They think that we know friendship, passion, love!” But this is not joy; it is an invective against their naïve perception of the dandy and the “molly” (or homosexual male). “They” are incapable of feeling or understanding those emotions as Raffalovich can and that is why “It is the sunlight, think They, or the gas”—the “They” remains unwilling to allow the “Other” to disclose its own beauty. While this piece of verse gets to the heart of the aesthetics, fashion, and ethos of dandyism and Victorian homosexual sub-culture, it is laden with a certain grief because it is a beauty which remains excluded: hence, though Raffalovich believes the world is “well lost”, it is “lost” nonetheless.

This tension between acceptance of oneself and the pain of exclusion is also marked in the transcripts of Wilde’s trial compared with his De Profoundis. In his trial Wilde rebelliously champions homosexuality: “the Love that dare not speak its name.”

‘

The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and misunderstood, so misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest for of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, where the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of live before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in pillory for it. (Wilde, 341)

However, after Wilde’s reputation and career were ruined at the hands of Douglas’ father the Marquis of Queensbury, his family life shattered; he eventually capitulated to the demands of the “They.” It is a clear example of the damage often done those who challenge the hierarchy of sexuality or gender.

What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. It is only to be done fully by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered. How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failures to realize those aspirations…(Wilde, from De Profoundis, 344)

The tragedy of Wilde’s self-doubt is precisely the effect that normalization seeks to breed in the LGBT community. Guilt is a powerful, powerful weapon and is utilized through the repression of “deviance” or otherness. Normalization, then, is negative and attempts to squash the dialogical space of the “in-between” by eradiating and homogenizing all space that lurks suspended between the monolithic concepts of binary gender: the masculine and the feminine. This early construction of an aesthetic community and lifestyle, however, survived, and paved the way for Goth, glam, glitter, and punk not only by its staunch courage and rebelliousness, but its passionate pursuit for singular recognition and respect.

Glam Rock & Punk Rock: The “Grotesque” Anatomy of an Artistic, Erotic, and Transgendered Sub-Culture
The risks and sufferings of the modern transgendered artistic community also provide us with a tragic and yet provocative example. In cultural and fashion history, the movement of glam rock was especially powerful in confronting a rigid structure of gender identity with radical cross-dressing, androgyny, and transsexualism. One notable example is David Bowie. Bowie’s notoriously androgynous stage characters Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and even the dandy-like Thin White Duke embodied a rebellious sexual energy and gender identity. Bowie in his performance and lyrics dwelled in the in-between, insisting upon being allowed to explore the full continuum of gender. Throughout his career he has appeared as himself in a typically masculine (though highly stylized) fashion and in full blown androgynous drag. The covers of his early albums depict him as a thin waif and a strikingly girlish figure⁴. On the covers of Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane his appearance is strictly androgynous and his personality is seemingly morphological: an effeminate/androgynous man playing raucous rock and roll with highly sexual and confrontational lyrics. In the song “Rebel, Rebel” off of the album Diamond Dogs, he sings of the glam rock scene of which he was a pioneer and the awkward and difficult lifestyle that accompanied it.

You've got your mother in a whirl/  She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl […] /Rebel Rebel, you've torn your dress/
Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess / Rebel Rebel, how could they know?/  Hot tramp, I love you so!
-Bowie, “Rebel, Rebel”

Just in these few lines we are confronted with the reactions of family and the confrontation between one’s peers in the glam community and one’s own self-identity (an apparent hold-over from the conflicts between mainstream standards, sub-culture standards, and the aesthetic/ethical standards carried over from dandyism of self-creation and fierce individualism). Later in the song, he mentions the drug use prevalent amongst this community of transgednered individuals, a problem still prevalent in the community today according to much of the psychological literature. These themes are tied-in directly to the aesthetic and musical culture of glam on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in the song “Lady Stardust” in which the main character, a ridiculed glam boy, is referred to using both the pronoun he and the title “Lady.”

People stared at the makeup on his face/  Laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace/  The boy in the bright blue jeans Jumped up on the stage/ And lady stardust sang his songs/ Of darkness and disgrace.
-Bowie, “Lady Stardust”

In a darker vein, forerunners of the glam movement, the Velvet Underground, and their songwriter Lou Reed, were notorious for their graphic lyrics about heroin use, sadomasochism, and deviancy. Part of this “deviancy” is actually a touching song (“Candy Says”) about Reed’s experiences with his close friend Candy Darling, an M to F (male to female) transsexual actress, prostitute, and performer in late 60’s/early 70’s Greenwich Village (and a member of Warhol’s factory). This song documents his impressions of Candy’s journey towards self-creation and the suffering she endured (“Candy says/I’ve learned to hate my body”); a journey cut short when Candy died due to cancer she developed through hormone use. Candy is a character in a later song by Reed “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” from his solo Transformer album as well⁵. The song tells the tale of the many “deviants” he met in Warhol’s factory: homosexuals, transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers.

One of the most radical and striking examples of the glam/punk movements challenge to homogenized gender identity is Wayne (Jayne County). With her band the Electric Chairs she wrote aggressive punk rock with titles like “Transgendered Outlaw” and “Man Enough to Be a Woman” (which would become the title of her autobiography). She began as a member of the Factory when she was pre-operative (and known as Wayne) and worked in the theater scene of Greenwich Village in the early 60’s. Inspired by glam bands like the New York Dolls and David Bowie and the aggressive music of Iggy Pop and the MC5, she started her own band and quickly became one of the top draws at the punk/glam scenes home bases: CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. After the punk movement petered out, she traveled and worked as a prostitute, eventually earning enough many to pay for sexual reassignment surgery (becoming Jayne). She still performs with the Electric Chairs, her band, and is a performance artist as well. She still confounds people today by presenting as a female and incorporating masculinity into her identity through her music (often Sticky Fingers era Stones' styled vamped up blues rock), posturing, dress, and attitude. Despite the masculine overtones of her art and personality, she still remains and insists on being recognized as, a female.

What the glam and punk movement demonstrates is an aggressive reaction to the repression of self-constituted gender identity. All of these people (Lou Reed, Bowie, Jayne County, the New York Dolls, etc) were attempting to carve out a niche in a world intent upon exclusion. Reed’s parents subjected him to electro-shock therapy and he was (like most glam/punk artists) a notorious drug user with a fetish for speed—his rebelliousness was only matched by his morbidity; Bowie was perpetually a topic of gossip columns regarding his sexuality and often portrayed as a freak or deviant and often lived up to the standard due to his cocaine induced paranoia; Jayne/Wayne County was simply to radical to ever be mentioned in the mainstream media—a former prostitute and drag queen who underwent a sex change is simply too extreme of a phenomenon to be represented and recognized. The glam rock and punk movement was seen as a freakish phenomenon. However, it is precisely this attitude the community was reacting against. Glam rock, popularized by artists like Bowie, T-Rex, and the New York Dolls and later exploited by groups like Kiss and Aerosmith, began as a movement to violently counteract the dispossession of transgendered individuals and other “freaks” and mount a call for recognition.

Glam rock can be said to dwell in the in-between because it did not resort to simply inverting sex roles or aestheticizing their project (as the dandies did). Surely, there was an aesthetic component (Bowie’s stage performances in the 1970’s were notoriously theatrical and lavish), but gender was chosen as the medium of performance. In the face of repression, many of these iconoclastic artists highlighted for the first time (certainly in mainstream culture) the constructedness of gender as well as the repression which the binary structure accorded to it. The in-between of glam rock was non-existent and did not have a distinctly counter-culture voice. The glam rock movement attempted to make space for such a discourse to take place. It provided an area for the arrival of the event of dialogue. More than iconoclastic, glam rock and punk rock invented a new iconography: the trans iconography; one of the first systems of art and representation to give a voice to explicitly trans individuals and issues in popular culture—consequently, glam rock and punk rock were far from popular and often repressed or homogenized at best in the mainstream media. However, this does not take away from the significance of glam’s cultural protest. If anything, glam's significance as a "gender fucking" or subversive LGBT movement is highlighted by even more aggressive tendencies exhibited in punk. Patti Smith's sacramental portrait of male on male rape and of adolescent sexual confusion in "Land" highlights a fundamentally Rimbaudian strain in punk poetics: the beatification of what is ugly and depraved.

The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea
From the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating
Another boy was sliding up the hallway
He merged perfectly with the hallway,
He merged perfectly, the mirror in the hallway

The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,
but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames,
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses.
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney
Do you know how to twist, well it goes like this, it goes like this
Baby mash potato, do the alligator, do the alligator
And you twist the twister like your baby sister
I want your baby sister, give me your baby sister, dig your baby sister
Rise up on her knees, do the sweet pea, do the sweet pee pee,
Roll down on her back, got to lose control, got to lose control,
Got to lose control and then you take control,
Then you're rolled down on your back and you like it like that,
Like it like that, like it like that, like it like that,
Then you do the watusi, yeah do the watusi
Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy,
Can't you show me nothing but surrender ?”
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket,
Taped to his chest there's the answer,
You got pen knives and jack knives and
Switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred
Then he cries, then he screams, saying
Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain
And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud,
Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud,
And go Johnny go, and do the watusi, oh do the watusi
-Patti Smith, "Land"

Smith's ecstatic sexual imagery (her leering, rhythmic paean to a young girl "humping on a parking meter" in her re-interpretation of the Them's "Gloria") is rife with violence and conflict because it seeks to not only interrogate and explore sexual difference, but to destroy the very concept of sexual normalcy. The symmetry between the anonymous boy "driving it deep in Johnny" and Johnny's revelation of an array of blades beneath his jacket makes this rape or at the very least rough, violent sexual encounter mirror the logic of conquest. But the conquest sought for here is not purely sexual or based on some dimension of social power, but rather, a conquest of self. Johnny's reaction, his lashing out, his fierce self-assertion, his manic energy is a celebration of his confusion and ambiguity (notice, NOT ambivalence). His supplication to his anonymous "lover", is not a sign of weakness; it's not a sign of anything. It is a liminal, undetermined moment. We're not even sure what to call it. All that we know is that when prompted ("can't you show me nothing but surrender"), Johnny is anything but submissive. Johnny, the "pretty boy" is a weapon. His sexual virility is a weapon, an unleashing of great power and energy. It is telling that Smith, a woman who on the cover of the album Horses is dressed in nearly totally androgynous drag, glorifies the sexual potency of this male adolescent through a homosexual encounter. It turns the myth of rock n' roll on it's head (the invocation of the watusi and other popular dances. Smith confounds the expectations of rock history by not playing up her girlishness a la 60's girl groups (who ironically enough, provided ample fodder for the New York Dolls brand of Stones' inspired "cock rock"), by diving head first into avant-garde performance poetry, tough three chord rock and roll, and a decidedly twisted take on the rock n' roll archetype (inherited from the blues) of male sexual conquest. More than a shocking lyrical turn, it is a statement of feminine rebellion and a celebration of the spectrum of male sexuality. It challenges not only the mainstream cultural understanding of women in rock n' roll, but it undermines the notion that homosexuals = sissies. It is Johnny, the passive agent in this homosexual encounter, decked out in a leather jacket, wielding switchblades (a la the "leader of the pack"). "Land", as an artwork is an attack on sexual mores and a fittingly Rimbaudian gesture, eschewing mainstream stereotypes of women and homosexuals and dismantling the iconography and standards of the effeminate, flaming gay male in one fell swoop. One might even say Patti Smith pointed the way toward a new, tougher dandyism.

NOTES

1. It is instructive at this point to refer the reader to Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing. This book of case studies in the field of psychopathology specifically regarding sexual behavior, documented the common phenomenon of what was regularly referred to in sexological literature “inversion” or “psychic hermaphrodism.” In his text, Krafft-Ebbing encompasses transvestitism, homosexuality, androgyny, and transexualism to two realms of disorder: fetishism and antipathic sexuality or “the total lack of feeling toward the opposite sex.” (p.21) While Krafft-Ebing certainly does not hide his moral horror in these case studies, they are still enlightening. For a more detailed account and characterization of these phenomenon I would recommend case studies 91 (fetishism/acquired homosexuality), 105 (Fetishism, specifically for women’s clothing and cross dressing), 128 (homosexuality; a biography which epitomizes what was seen as the stereotypical gay man, the effeminate male), 129 (a lengthy and illuminating autobiography of a transsexual), 131 (psychosexual metamorphosis), 152 (androgyny), 166 (gynandry—though Krafft-Ebing refers to her as a “man-woman”, from the details it is quite clear that the patient was a cross-dressing lesbian who enjoyed presenting herself as a man). All of these case studies make use of both the language and metaphor of inversion and hermaphrodism and are highly interesting examples of how LGBT individuals were seen by a majority of the psychiatric, medical, and lay community.

2. Rachilde was born a genetic girl in 1860; however her father, disappointed he didn’t have a son, raised her as a boy. This ambiguous and shifting gender identity traveled with Rachilde the rest of her life. She obtained permission to appear in public as a cross-dresser by Parisian authorities when she arrived there from the country-side (it was illegal in 19th century Paris) and her business cards read “Rachilde: Man of Letters.” Her first novel Monsieur Venus explores the relationship between two transgendered levels, one a sadist (a gendered girl presenting as a man) who dominates his lover (a gendered boy presenting as a girl). The inversion of gender labels is common throughout the book (a man is referred to as Aunt and a woman Uncle). She was dubbed “Mademoiselle Baudelaire” by a famous French critic after the appearance of this book. However at 29 she married Alfred Vallete and a year later gave birth to a child, Gabrielle, whom she remained distant from throughout her life. She would go on to found the French cultural journal Mercure de France and align herself with conservative French nationalist despite her former anarchist sympathies. She was a self-professed misogynist and was notorious for “preferring the company of her pet rats to human beings.” (Hustvedt, 1084, The Deacadent Reader)

3. The writings of both Rachilde (see note above for explanation) and Jean Lorrain prove helpful in illustrating these points. It should be noted that Lorrain was said to be openly homosexual, which is true, but more accurately Lorrain (like Rachilde) was transgendered. He wore heavy makeup-up, large rings, painted his nails and when once asked if he ever wished to be a woman he responded: “Yes! For the vice of it!” (Hustvedt, 1079) He was a disciple of Barbey (who coined the dandy as the “undecidable sex”) and was referred as “Monsieur, the slut” by him. Lorrain took pleasure in vice and was fascinated by criminality. Even his presenting as a transgendered artist spoke of his fascination with the feminine: for Lorrain the woman not only embodied sensuality and violent beauty, but the ideal pathology; in the Dictionnaire encyclopedique des science medicales (1864-89) “women” are among the list of medical ailments (Hustvedt, 18). It is likely Lorrain was aware of this since his stories were notorious for their medical, sexological, and pathological detail due to his avid research and interest in criminology and deviance (Hustvedt, 18-19).

4. This is most noticeable on the cover of his 1970 The Man Who Sold the World album where he is sprawled out on a couch in a dress with naturally long, and well styled girlish hair.

5. The entire album is obsessed with morphological identity. Reed has a few songs on it relating to cross-dressing and gender-bending, and even the title Transformer implies this pre-occupation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beizer, Janet. “Venus in Drag, or Redressing the Discourse of Hysteria: Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

--------------. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zinn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Brookner, Anita. “Baudelaire: The Black Frock Coat.” Romanticism and Its Discontents. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.

d’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey. “Les Diaboliques.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York, Zone Books, 1998.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1998.

Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Herdt, Gilbert. “Introduction: Third Sexes and Third Genders.” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, 1993.

Hustvedt, Asti. “The Art of Death: French Fiction at the Fin-de-Siecle.” The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.

Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories. Trans. Dr. Domino Falls. London: Velvet Publications, 1997.

Lorrain, Jean. “Selections."The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-
de-Siecle France. Ed. Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books, 1998.

Plato. “From Symposium.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Raffalovich, Marc Andres. “World Well Lost IV.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Reed, Lou. Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. New York: Hyperion, 1991.

Wilde, Oscar. “De Profoundis.” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

-------------. “A Defense of Uranian Love: From The Transcripts of the Second Trial (April
20-26, 1895).” The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Ed. Byrne S. Fone. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

It Is Miraculous to Sink With the Outgoing Tide: Writing Through the Possibilities for Poetry Post-Bush

2009-02-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

1 (Preface)

To consider poetry in an age such as ours seems to be a damned near foolish proposition. Poetry, at least as it is prejudicially portrayed, conveys beauty, truth, and opens “the doors of perception” to transcendental vistas located beyond the realm of everyday cognition and sensation (or so the textbooks and anthologies tell us when they discuss the Romantics or the Metaphysical poets, who, since I was an adolescent, I seem to have an affinity for. This is an attempt to both navigate that influence and separate myself from it. Somewhat. I hope.) I begin by noting that this undertaking is neither narrative nor linear in nature. It is fractured, scattered, and ill at ease. As it should be.

After the election of Barack Obama, we must address the potential erosion of the political movements that developed in response to the Bush presidency. This concern is also part of what poetry faces as it moves forward in, what some hope, is a better, more open, less monological “discourse”. This isn’t to say they will inevitably erode. It’s not as if on noon of inauguration day a movement for peace in the Middle East evaporated, that the movement for economic human rights was eviscerated by the winds of “Change” (big “C”, always). It also means that poetic subversions such as Flarf, or conceptual poetry, poetries that are meant to undermine hierarchies and challenge cultural legibility and legitimacy are now simply a bit too behind the times to be relevant. The precarious economic situation we are faced with today is a stark reminder that beneath the mask of market progress there hides the twisted grimace of economic reality, of the pain and disenfranchisement perpetuated by an economic system built on exploitation and a cultural environment which, for so long, has been inhaling the anesthetizing ether of profit, excess, exploding credit lines and political impropriety. Now, more than ever, poetries built on critique and negation, on subversion and counter-cultural tendencies are needed. We cannot let this indisputably historic moment (and potential opportunity) undercut one of the fundamental tasks of poetry: to re-shape not only the way we conceive of the world, but how we move within it, as linguistic agents, as cultural taste-testers, as political creatures wandering through an increasingly fucked up (for lack of a better term) political landscape. That landscape can be delimited, it’s horizons broadened or narrowed, it’s topography uprooted, and the narratives of it’s myths can be radically altered by these and other “difficult” poetries: whether it be the disparate label of “Language” poetry or flarf or conceptual poetry or radical performative poetries, visual poetries, or reflective visits to the archives of visionary political tapestries such as Ginsberg’s “Witchita Vortex Sutra”, Oppen’s serial explorations of our everyday lives, and Zukofsky’s socialist modernist experiments. What follows here is an attempt at writing through a few of these past, present, and future possibilities and to offer a few suggestions of what these possibilities might have to say to us about capitalism, the canon, and the increasing commodification of our lives and our language at this moment. There are still chains to be cast in the fire.

2 (Text)

Perhaps the sad state of poetry in the “mainstream” of culture is less of a comment on poetry and more of a comment on our culture. If we are dissatisfied with the readability, comprehensibility, and “appeal” of the majority of modern, especially experimental poetic expression, it is not due to any failure of our poetry, but rather due to a failure of our civilization and culture at large. If it is true that “real poetry...brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history” (and I believe it is), this still does not mean that we must wait until history is so far gone as to be doomed to obscurity in order to settle our accounts. Why, after Adorno famously asked, “Can there be poetry after Auschwitz” (or rather proclaimed it was impossible), has no one dared to venture that poetry is impossible after Mi Lai, or Abu Ghraib, or Darfur, or Srebenicia, or Cambodia, or the Congo, or Amadou Diallo, or Katrina, or the war in Iraq, or the AIDS pandemic, or the massacre at Jenin? Ultimately, Adorno’s question was both premature and too late. If we were to ask ourselves if it is possible to write poetry, indeed, to employ art as a valid means of representation after a traumatic or horrific event, then we would find that all art, all poetry, was an attempt to justify its existence in the midst of an atrocity exhibition. It appears as though “that which has happened” is always already happening. In some form, again and yet again. And we would like to think that there is something more to art and poetry than the stuff of distraction, of placidity, of pure reactionary tendencies. The vitality of poetry is directly related to the degree to which it capably and faithfully represents the pieces contained within the atrocity exhibition. All poetry, in that sense, is ekphratic. In this sense, poetry is neither particular or universal, neither private or public, neither political or confessional. Poetry is a searching, an experience of wonder. Poetry is always in between these distinctions. Even the most political, socially minded poem is a confession, and the most confessional poem is a keyhole for political insight. Poetry is always this AND not that. It would appear poetry, at heart then, poetry is and should be fundamentally, a negation. It’s negativity, however, is its freedom, its potentiality.

***

Ginsberg’s evocation of the “holy” in his “Footnote to Howl” is appropriate only in that it is labeled as a footnote or afterthought. That’s all the “holy”, the transcendental gesture can ever be. It is not present or even imminent. It is a nice dream, it is a comforting conjuring trick. Ultimately, the holy, the hollowed, that which is miraculous and beautiful is an odd proposition. One thing we can learn from Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl” is that the miraculous, the beautiful is not the hidden core of depravity, perversity, wanton lustfulness, and subversion--these things can be themselves, without qualification, beautiful and miraculous. They call the very terms into question, and this ambiguity and this potential erasure, are the only things which give the terms meaning. This tradition of standing beauty on it’s head dates back to Baudelaire and even further to Catullus. And despite this new era of optimism and hope, we should never forget that our ambiguity is our strongest weapon, as we buttress ourselves against complacency and our “passionate taste for the difficult.” We should always demand that we be given the opportunity to reach into a puddle of gore or a jar of tears or trash heap and find the open hand of the miraculous.

***

The seat of the miraculous is a vomit green couch, rain-beaten and musty on the side of a curb. It is what we uncover in basements. The miraculous is forgotten. The miraculous is not even silent, it is screaming, and ignored. The miraculous is timid when cast over by a flashlight. The keen, sharp, exacting light of analysis cannot shine through the murky pool of the miraculous. We feel its mud ooze between our toes and laugh as the tide spirits away the sand beneath our feet. It is miraculous to sink with the outgoing tide.

Gallery

“What has quite rapidly happened is that Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international capitalism. Its attempt at a universal market, transfrontier and transclass, turned out to be spurious. Its forms lent themselves to cultural competition and the commercial interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of schools, styles, and fashion so essential to the market. The painfully acquired techniques of significant disconnection are relocated, with the help of the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as the merely technical modes of advertising and the commercial cinema. The isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, have become the easy iconography of the commercials, and the lonely, bitter, sardonic, and sceptical hero takes his ready-made place as the star of the thriller. “ -Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism

“The word, dissociated from the husk of habitual cliches, and from the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed from responsibility in relation to all possible context; it appears in one brief act, which, being devoid of reflections, declares its solitude, and therefore its innocence. This art has the very structure of suicide: in it, silence is a homogenous poetic time which traps the word between two layers and sets it off less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as a light, a void, a murder, a freedom.” -Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, on Mallarme’s “typographical agraphia”

“But what about being the bad speaker myself? There’s an experience that could be described as linguistic occasion, of being poised somewhere between “language speaks me” and “I speak language.” It is the flashing across the mind of words which fly into the head as if they somehow must be said. A clump of phrases shape their own occasion, which swells toward articulation.” -Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect

“Because I’m a writer, not a speaker”-Alice Sebold,novelist/memoirist, in an interview with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (WHYY), October 15th, 2007.

3 (Text)

What they find in poetry is an assemblage of games, cliches, half-truths, suppositions, lists, misgivings, and wishes; they find the very stuff of experience, and that which happens in between experience: the anxieties, ambiguities, fears, and curiosities. The poem is like a photographic negative. Perhaps it is readable, but as a negative is still liminal, still in process. And even if one were to develop this negative, perhaps the aperture was off, the film faulty or overexposed. Perhaps the photograph will be burned, given away, lost or torn. But it is this unknowing that is fundamental to the power of poetry. The poem should always strive to remain a negative. To remain in between nothingness and presence, to be an imperfect signification, a liminal representation, fraught with anxiety and ecstatic possibility. The poem should be an expression “wonder”, of awe-struck, irreducible unknowing. When the “message in a bottle” washes up on shore, we should always consider the possibility that we will be confronted with a blank piece of paper inside.

***

Consider this a voicemail deleted by accident. There is a record of existence. But nothing to speak to it. Where did it come from?

Gallery

“Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything. So every one must stay with the language their language that has come to be spoken and written and which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation.” -Getrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar” from Lectures in America

“Let us have theories there and return to here’s hear.” -James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

“[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task, which is to push itself to the origin of language (a task that is by definition impossible); when it strains to “dig” right to language’s possibility; it encounters, a the edge of the inaccessible and forever-concealed gaping, the naked possibility of address.”-Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience

“TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. ...

I have not meant to express my thought but to
help you clarify what you yourself think. ...

You are not any more different from me than
your right leg is from your left, but what joins us
is THE SLEEP OF REASON-WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.” -Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

4 (Text)

Whenever one accounts for desire, manifest or sublimated, one accounts for negation, for lack. Whether it is a desire for freedom or control, for excess or simplicity, desire stakes a claim for “this and not that”; it affirms and negates in a simultaneous action and this simultaneity is its trace. The ability to simultaneously create and negate, to build up and lay waste is miraculous. And it is language which gives us this capacity. As word-bearers, we are uniquely equipped with the tools necessary to inhabit, change, make sense of, and break apart the world. Ultimately, poetry does not strive to satiate desire, or to purely negate, or to purely affirm, but rather to spoil the very notion of purity and satiation. Poetry celebrates incompleteness and slippage. It is by nature a cipher, even in its most explicit moments, the reasons behind a choice of word, and the debatability of a words utility and effectiveness in communicating a given idea, give rise to the potential for negation and slippage. And this potential is our greatest freedom, our greatest hope. Because it’s ever-present possibility should unmoor us from our firm entrenchment in a desire for permanence, for Truth rather than truths, for campaigns rather than moments, for complicity rather than delinquency. These slippages and uncertainties, conflicting interpretations and opaque significations are causes for celebration. The blank piece of paper which greets us inside the bottle (should that be what we find), is not a simple negation, a simple nothing, it is an invitation to scrawl our own message and chuck it back into the riptide, or to simply reinsert the paper into the bottle and pass it along to another intrepid beachcomber. And we do not pass along silence or apathy, but rather a horizon to be delimited and and filled, we pass along our ambiguity, our recognition of absence.Who knows, perhaps while wandering along at low tide, we will find this selfsame bottle, we will recognize it and open it; we will recognize the paper inside as the blank piece of paper we passed on all that time ago, and we will find a message awaiting us. And should we recognize the bottle and the paper within, and find it still blank, we may defer, yet again...or perhaps we will take it upon ourselves to be sure that this unsettled debt can finally be accounted for. After all, we need but a word...

***

We are hybrids you and I. We are Other and Same. We smother one another. It is the same tears we cry. We have dreamed ourselves as aberrations. We celebrate our horrid corporeality. No theory explains us. No scientist will dissect us. Even if one should endeavor, he would find nothing but neurons strung together by ampersands and tightly wound fibers of teeth. And we do not blink.

Gallery

“More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of spirits--this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture-- becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so on ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like it or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: you too have weapons.” -Franz Kafka, Diaries (12 June, 1923)

5 (Text)

The canon is an attempt to write a grocery list which will only rarely need to be amended. We will walk into the store and find all of the foodstuffs and household cleaning products we will ever need. And the options and choices will be evident and our decision will simply be a matter of which predetermined product from the limited array of commodities we will choose from. The aisles will be filled with Forms, Ideas, serenity, unity, process, nothingness, Will, the State, anarchy, polit bureaus, freedom, liberty, democracy, caste, god, nation, race, Dasein, essence, existence, facticity, games, capital, labor theories of value, evolution, intelligent designs, apperception, hermeneutics, empire, rebellion, dissent, history, narrative, trauma, witness, differance, the image, the word, the eye (all three), the commodity fetish, the Oedipal complex, anxiety, archetype, artifice, appropriation, translation, mechanical reproductions, biopower, rhizomes, nomads, monads, dereve, Messianic time, fire, rivers, habitus, mirrors, epistemes, gold standards, social credit, theological crematoriums, afterthoughts, insights, dreamworlds, phonemes, primitive utopias, leviathans, genocides, sexes, genders, disposition, afrocentrics, oceanic, feminist, latent bisexualities, semiotics, flags, prophecy, voice, constellations, terror, cruelty, theater, epics, arcades, negations (of negations) [of negations], after-Auschwitzes, death, dying, teleological suspensions of the ethical, eternal returns (both happy and unhappy), genealogies, archaeologies, new urbanisms, old cities, security walls, clashes of civilizations, Lexuses, flatitude, as performance, a dark wood, great refusals, projects, groups-in-fusion, days of rage, summers of love, sons of sams, detournement, deconstructions, aleatoric, cubist Dadas, concrete visual sound poems, realisms, class conscious crapshoots, problems with god, god problems, virgin births, virgin undertakers, virgin afterlife greeters, onto-theological irreconcilable differences, imagined communities, ambiguous genitalia, third ways, fateful triangles even, olive branches. FEMAs, pre-emptive wars, solid intelligences, ideologies, crises, stimmung, metamorphoses, messages in bottles, tuberculoses, turnings, addictions, bad ideas, plowshares, swords, no’s, yeses, raptures, reckonings, towns, countries, peasantries (sans culottes), dialectics, Dianetics, mimetic, close reading, subaltern, post colonial, new historical unpaid tabs.

Lyre Lag

“I speak language.” It is the flashing
than consolation is: you too
have that as long as every word, is twisted in impossible)
; when it strains to what about being
the said.
A clump of phrases fragment on your left,
but what joins reflections, declares its solitude, quite rapidly happened is that Modernism of the inaccessible
and forever-concealed gaping, the occasion,
of being poised infinitum. The only
express my thought
[W]hen poetry accomplishes its task,
which it, origin of language (a task that happened is t
hat it is going to go. The word, dissociated
from the definition impossible); when it strains a speaker.
Most especially a remark rapidly happened is
that Modernism quickly lost--
become the easy iconography of schools,
styles, and into the new international
the trained and assured Its attempt at a but to
help your left, but their own occasion,
which swells toward articulation. layers and
sets it off (the head) as if they somehow must have
not a word between two layers and sets declare its solitude, the new
international capitalism.
Its attempt is then freed from responsibility
in relation “I speak language.” It is a light, a void, a murder, its
innocence. This art has the
merely technical modes, recreation
and there is no possible doubt: thing is not colors or emotions
it isolated, estranged images of
It is the flashing across the infinitesimally little help.
More than consolation going to go on
any more different from me to here’s hear.
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“dig” right to language’s possibility; stay with the language (happens whether you like it or no.) and fashion, so essential
to the reflections, declares its solitude, and
therefore its as if they somehow must. So every one which is to...
phrases shape their own but what joins us-- a cryptogram more than poetry
accomplishes its task, of significant discconnection
(very structure of suicide): in it, silence
“it strains”
is their characteristic; takes his ready-made place
And so on
as a real thing is not imitation of a cryptogram.
Every word, twisted in no. And what you like is to the origin in one brief act,
as which,is to push itself
to MONSTERS.

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as if cultural competition and the isolated
, estranged images of alienation and being
devoid of reflections, declares its significant disconnection
are relocated, with the help, ad infinitum.

The only easy iconography of the commercials, and
WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE and “I speak: humanity
is anything!
So? and “I speak language.”
It is leg, it is from your left, its anti-bourgeois stance,
the market. The painfully thriller.
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The word, dissociated from the freedom. But
poetic time which traps writes. It is a clump of ready-
made stars and is no possible doubt about it and
that Modernism quickly lost special images of humanity.

to be spurious.
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cliches, and from the technical (described as
linguistic occasion), which cliches, clarify what you yourself think.
the speaker. as writer,
is then freed from theories there or as long as humanity is infinitesimally...

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of reflections, which are isolated, estranged images as transfrontier
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a murder, fashion!

your right
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is cultural competition & techniques of
significant discconnection & are commercials, and the lonely, bitter,
being devoid of reflections, is you, too turned out to be
THE SLEEP OF innocence.
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estranged images of alienation
poetry c
ryptogram
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that speaks me
and
“I speak think. ...

the lonely address.
context; it appears to push itself
like is of infinitesimally LIFE
trained and so on
ad theories there and return to
You, to one is anything.
So I achieved comfortable integration into the commercial
interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of
consolation: you too have weapons. being devoid of reflections,
declare its solitude, and therefore an intellectual of merely technical modes
to go on being as technicists,
as the merely technical modes clarify

TO WHOM
forever-concealed, gaping, the naked
possibility of address. ready-made as
an imitation either of sounds or as the very
structure of suicide:
in it, silence, mind of words which fly as long
as humanity is anything.
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which swells
toward articulation.
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not a speaker.
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real thing
freedom.

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help
its
solitude,
and therefore its innocence.

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the help of the special between two layers
of
words
its intellectual recreation.
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theories there in it all
the history of commercials,
and structure
and suicide: in it, silence is a homogenous poetics.

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techniques of significant disconnection
and are relocated, with the help being devoid of reflections,
& its solitude, and therefore are relocated, with the
help of the special
speaker:

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responsibility (
by definition impossible
); when
it strains being the bad speaker ,myself

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their advertising and the commercial to “dig”

right, like this,with the language of suicide:
a remark like this: “And so on...”
than as a light, a void, a murder, speak language!
It is the flashing across the mind of the possibility of address.
TO WHOM LIFE IS,
silence, yourself-- the lonely, bitter, sardonic, and POSSIBLE. ...
alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as POSSIBLE. ...
its intellectual recreation.

“Let us have theories there a
nd styles, and/or emotions
offered less as a fragment of a cryptogram than as
the isolated, estranged and
quickly must be said.
A clump of merely technical modes of
advertising with the language, their language

that has come to a speaker. Language as that
which swells toward articulation
the technical reflexes of the writer, is then freed.
Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois commercials,
and turned against the speaker.
Most especially language.”

The estranged images-- the commercial cinema-- alienation
shapes their own attempt at a universal market,
transfrontier and transclass, the thriller that is
The word,
dissociated from the husk.

My Derrida/Celan Essay

2009-01-31T10:25:00.001-08:00

Pierre Joris, the excellent Celan translator, poet, and anthologist was kind enough to engage in an extended discussion on my essay below. I feel that it's important to note and encourage you to read it since it makes some very important and justifiable criticisms of the essay. Namely, my choice of translators, and my reliance on that sole source. The translation by McHugh and Popov includes the line "cough-caw's double", a line which they added that does not occur in the original Celan poem in order to make the link to Kafka far more explicit then Celan himself would...

As Joris points out,

"Celan and his parents did not live in Germany, but in Czernowitz, then part of Rumania, today part of the Ukraine. They were not sent to Auschwitz, but to work camps along the Bug river, on the Romanian/Ukrainian border...Landis gets his information via the Popov/McHugh’s introduction where they center on that glottal stop (also the title of their book) by connecting it to the manner in which Celan’s mother is supposed to have died: “from a wound in the throat.” It makes for a nice & tidy connection, but in 40 years of reading Celan and the vast Sekundärliteratur on his work, I have never come across this bit of information. From all we actually know (check, among many others, Israel Chalfen’s biography of the young Celan, or the appendix to the Celan/Celan-Lestrange correspondance, or Walter Emmerich’s book), she died by the traditional Nazi execution technique: the “Genickschuss” — or shot in the nape of the neck or back of the head, i.e. a bullet from behind (even the Nazis didn’t much care to look their victims in the face), and not from the front, as “a wound in the throat” (and thus possibly in the “Kehlkopf”) wants us to believe. An unnecessary little bit of stretching the known facts to prove the theory and justify the importance of the title seems to be going on in that intro.d have. It also included erroneous biographical information in their introduction."

Joris also makes the contention that an overly-psychologized reading of Celan is problematic. It's a thoughtful point and something I've thought of. To read more about Joris' point on the matter and a more detailed discussion of some his other points about my essay in detail you should visit his blog where his article "Celan, Kafka, & the Glottal Stop" discusses these issues.

We Who Are Left Behind: Poetry as Testimony in Derrida and Celan

2009-01-25T20:36:00.000-08:00

by Matthew Landis

Please read this before continuing with the essay. It's a bit of a disclaimer along with some observations on some of the problems and good points with the essay by Pierre Joris.

To write is to arrange language under fascination and, through language, in language, remain in contact with the absolute milieu, where the thing becomes an image again, where the image, which had been allusion to a figure, becomes an illusion to what is without figure, and having been a form sketched on absence, becomes the unformed presence of that absence, the opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.
~Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude”

Poetry has a few distinct features that make it fertile ground for interrogating writing and the layers of hidden meaning, collective wishes, and unspoken associations which saturate it . Rather than a concern for grammar and syntax, it provides it’s own unique ideas about form. The sonnet, the ode, the villanelle, aleatoric writing, oulipian constraint, conceptual poetry, Projective verse --the language of any poem is replete with supplemantarity, departures, presuppositions and cognitive and aesthetic fissures and fissions. The devices associated with these formal paradigms, when deployed in a poem, can refer to several layers of meaning and association, the literal image or supra-textual ideogram, a narrative line or a paratactic break. And despite the variations on form and the diversity of content, any of these devices do not lessen a poems discursive or communicative qualities (no matter how they might be re-worked, masked, or undermined). Even an attempt to obfuscate meaning and to challenge notions of legibility communicate something about our understanding of language and signification. Even a blank sheet of paper folded into a bottle carries a message.

Celan refers to the poem as if it is a solitary organism in search of an ecology. “The poem”, writes Celan, “wants to reach the Other, it needs this Other, it needs a vis a vis. It searches it out and addresses it.”¹ The poem pays great attention to and in fact lusts after this Other. Celan’s description of the poem’s “sense of detail, of outline, of structure”² is reminiscent of the great care taken by a lover examining her partner’s body. The curves, textures, and totality of the body are subject to the gaze of the one who desires after it. It is a desire which is intensified in it’s repetition. But this repetition is not differential; for Celan the images in the poem are “perceived and to be perceived one time, one time over and over again, and only now and only here.”³

Each poem is the one path that seeks to send the voice to a receptive “thou”, it is a “sending oneself ahead of oneself [...] A kind of homecoming”⁴ which is always already a striking out for one’s home at the moment of arrival. It is a homecoming deferred; the poem emerges as that which is not yet found, but is to be found. The poem seeks itself, seeks its own homecoming even as it embarks upon the journey which is the coming-home. This openness is sought by the poem so that its “tropes and metaphors” can be developed “ad absurdum.”⁵ The logic of the “ad absurdum” is the impossibility of the arrival of the poem because its images, its hidden thoughts are rehearsed for an audience only once, one time, in the here and now⁶. Celan acknowledges that such poems—the “absolute poem”⁷—do not exist, but also recognizes that this perfection, this utopia, is the demand of the poem the questioning or indetermination of this demand haunts it. The poem demands presence, that is, self-presence, it demands here and now and recognizes its own lack in its desire, and asks why it has been separated from its own voice—it seeks to know why it only speaks in silence and is only addressed in its absence.

Celan’s “Frankfurt, September” struggles with these questions and makes this same demand. The poem addresses us ideogrammically; through association and through metonymy. The voice within the poem can only find its thou through proxy. It is silent and absent at once, and the strange metonymic code that is the poem itself, is its trace. The first section of this poem is especially interesting in this context. It provides an iconography and ideogrammic topography replete with disparate meanings. The poem announces itself not with a greeting, but rather with a splintering. The fragment is an is an interruption as beginning. The poem begins as an interruption in progress and the images of the first stanza project it into the breach.

Blind wall-space,
bearded by brilliances.
A dream of a cockchafer
sheds light on it.⁸

An empty wall, without sight, and with a halo. The possibility, the emptiness, the absence is made visible and turned into a sort of presence in itself. The trace of “brilliances”, of lights, frame it the way that hair frames the bearded face. The cockchafer, its hairy legs and loud buzzing in the heat of early summer, is conjured if only in a dream. The sound of its clumsy flight announces “here” and orients us. The poem announces itself through another interruption, widening the gap of this breach.

Behind that, raster of lamentations,
Freud’s forehead opens up:

the tear
compacted of silence
breaks out in a proposition:
“Psycho-
logy for the last
time.”

The pseudo-jackdaw
(cough-caw’s double)
is breakfasting.⁹

It is here that the poem, again, uses the breach to give voice to itself. The opening of Freud’s forehead releases a tear that is dense with silence which “breaks out” into a proposition into which the poem interjects—the interjection is a silence, a breath, between psyche and logos, the word or discourse of the soul¹⁰. The interruption or breach is prevalent in this first section of the poem. The pseudo-jackdaw, the not-quite-a-crow, is interrupted with a parenthetical observation, as it “breaks fast”, and eats for the first time. One can imagine our crow (if that is what he is) looking to see who is speaking to him as he silently devours his breakfast (perhaps one of our beetles from the first stanza?).

And then, in a final and significant breach, the poem gives us space to pause and proclaims:

The glottal stop is breaking
into song.¹¹

The glottal stop is the breaking off of sound by the pressing of the laryngeal folds (the glottis) together. In addition to this breach in voice, we have a breach in space. The break after “breaking” again leaves a space into which the song emerges. One might think of the song of the jackdaw (or Eurasian crow), who’s birdsong “Kyack!”¹² when pronounced by the human voice, begins with a glottal stop, a vocalization interrupted by the folds of the voice pressing against one another.

So what is the significance of Celan’s obsession with the breach, the interruption, the breaking? In “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (since the contents behind his forehead are available anyway), Derrida notes that, “Breaching, the tracing of a trail, opens up a conducting path. Which presupposes a certain violence and a certain resistance to effraction. The path is broken, cracked, fracta, breached.”¹³ If we consider Derrida’s characterization of the metaphor of the breach as that which opens up a “conducting path” or that which “traces a trail”¹⁴, we see affinities with Celan’s lecture discussed earlier. The voice, broken off and silenced, sends itself ahead of itself in the poem. In between enunciation and the reception of the word, the glottal stop intervenes or provides a breach. Even in the self-presence of speech, we find an interruption: the glottal stop now “breaking into song”. The poem them becomes a symptom which marks Western metaphysics. The repression of writing, it's breaking off, it's sudden cessation is elaborated upon by Derrida in his studies of grammatology and the pharmakon and in the “onto-theological exclusion of the trace”.

The exclusion of the trace is, in itself, a form of interruption, that is, erasure. The erasure of the trace is the attempt to erase the threat of absence. But this moment of erasure is a curious one, for how does one erase that which is absent? More than an interruption, erasure functions as repression, that is the pre-emptive erasure of absence embodied in the threat of writing.

Writing is unthinkable without repression. The condition for writing is that there be neither a permanent contact nor an absolute break between strata: the vigilance and failure of censorship […] If there were only perception, pure permeability to breaching, there would be no breaches. We would be written, but nothing would be recorded; no writing would be produced, retained, repeated as legibility. But pure perception does not exist: we are written only as we write, by the agency within us which always already keeps watch over perception, be it internal or external.¹⁵

This exclusion of the trace then, this censorship, or breaching between the strata of presence and absence is not a monolithic “pure” or absolute censorship. It is a breach because it is the play and indetermination between pure presence or pure absence (which pre-suppose one another) that is at the heart of deconstruction. The erasure or repression of writing is not responded to in kind through the erasure or repression of speech. Rather, the relationship between presence and absence is indeterminate, in play—in other words it is differance which breaks into the breach.

The implications of this deconstruction of the binary between presence and absence or speech and writing extend beyond the esoteric realm of literary criticism however. There is more at stake in “Frankfurt, September” and Derrida’s early corpus than the challenging of onto-theology. The question of presence and absence, of erasure and the breach, brings to mind the ideas expressed in much of Derrida’s later work. Derrida’s concern with singularity (Shibboleth), alterity (Entre Nous), friendship (The Politics of Friendship), and forgiveness (Of Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness) are questions which extend from his early research. They are interruptions, but they are not pure interruptions. These interruptions opened up “conducting paths” for new discussions and new discourse.

If we discuss Celan’s poem based on these early Derridean texts we see that the breach or interruption figures heavily. But what happens if the breach is permanent? What about the “pure” erasure of death? (This question figures heavily into the first section of Celan’s poem). The singularity of one’s death, that death is one’s “ownmost possibility” as Heidegger repeatedly claims in Being and Time is marked by the wound which erased the voice of Celan’s mother. The glottal stop, the breach, is not followed by a phonetic conclusion. In this instance it is pure, it is silenced. Celan cannot speak for his departed mother. His voice cannot take the place of her own because the presence of his voice cannot undo the erasure of his mother’s. Her absence is marked by the impossibility of a return. There is no homecoming. The interruption does not open a “conducting path”. The erasure of the trace leaves nothing in its wake but silence in this instance. The only way that Celan can “speak” for his dead mother is to bear witness. To give testimony to this wound. The poem then, the voice of the poem, of Celan’s mother, of the dead, of the silenced, of the pure victim is silent. It is expressed only through images, through substitution, through a supplement. The supplement attempts to make up for the absence of the victim, of their voice. Writing is all that remains in its stead. Rather than the threat of presence, writing substitutes itself for the presence of the departed and provides a testimony.

Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which would  choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject's relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life's organisation, that is to say, of the economy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the  original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent¹⁷.

Derrida makes an equivocation in this passage between spacing, that is distance or the result of the breech and writing itself. Writing, in itself, is a breach or interruption which constitutes itself as a process of becoming (recall Celan’s reference to the path of the poem). What writing posits is a testament of absence. In the absence of the subject, writing becomes the subject; it constitutes itself as a testament in place of the subject. Celan not only testifies to his mother’s own departure or his own grief, but he also gives testament in a more collective fashion. Celan makes reference to Kafka on a variety of levels in the fourth stanza of the poem. Kafka’s name, in his native Czech, actually means jackdaw. Also, notice our parenthetical observation. The phonetic pronunciation of “cough caw” is quite clearly an allusion to Kafka as well as a morbid sort of pun. The cough refers to Kafka’s tubercular condition and the “caw” is reminiscent of the stereotypical rendering of the bird call of the crow¹⁸. Mark M. Anderson in his review of Popov & Mc Hugh’s translation of Glottal Stop: 101 Poems notes an even subtler nod to Kafka. In referring to the lines ''The pseudo-jackdaw / (cough-caw's double) / is breakfasting. / The glottal stop is breaking / into song'', he notes:

The hesitation after ''breaking'' becomes particularly poignant when one considers that Kafka (whose Jewish name, Amschel, is close to Celan's original family name [see footnote]) was working on his story of a singing mouse when he lost his voice shortly before his death¹⁹.

Celan is interested in remembering, of offering a testament not only of his own experience of loss and erasure, but seeks to offer a supplementary testimony. He makes note of his acknowledgment of another Jewish artist (Kafka) and of another morbidly ironic interruption (the interruption of a work about song amidst the loss of Kafka's own voice). The wound of his mother’s death (the wound of her wound) is placed in conjunction with the wound of an early or “untimely” loss. The interruption of violence or disease speaks to the threat of absence lingering behind all presence. The poetry Celan leaves in its wake addresses the complicated position of we who are left behind, that is, the position of we who remember, who give testimony, whose paths are still open. The attempt to exclude the trace by onto-theology is not just a question of linguistic, but of that “testamentary essence” which I quoted Derrida on earlier. The attempt to exclude the trace in onto-theology is an attempt to refashion the pure breach or interruption that is death; in other words, to exclude the trace is to exclude the testamentary essence of writing for we who are left behind, we who are present within the breach, within the absence of the departed.

The subordination of the trace to the full presence summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an onto-theology determining the archaeological and eschatological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without difference: another name for death, historical metonymy where God's name holds death in check²⁰.

Parousia, self-presence, being here. The insistence is a kind of violence in and of itself. But it is not just the esoteric violence of semiotics and grammatology. The insistence upon self-presence stains truth and creates a false equivocation: presence, that is self-presence, as the foundation of truth. As Heidegger himself, the last metaphysician of presence, notes throughout Being and Time, truth (alethea) is not a sort of static self-presence, but it is emergent: it is an uncovering²¹. In the face of unspeakable horror, of murder, of genocide, how are we to hear the testimony of the departed? How does the patient speak through his illness when he is no longer present, when he is without a voice? How do we uncover the singularity of the other, their singular voice and give testimony to it? The testimonial function of writing alluded to by Derrida above seeks to disrupt the metonym of the name of God, pure presence, and to instead create a breach where death ceases to be a silencing and instead becomes “a conducting path” for we who are left behind.

In his memorial lecture on the occasion of the death of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Derrida spends a great deal of time contemplating the interruption. He writes, “From the first encounter, interruption anticipates death, precedes death. Interruption casts over each the pall of an implacable future anterior.”²² This sending of the self ahead of oneself, this anticipation not only precedes death, but the testimony of the survivor. In his extended contemplation of the final line of Celan’s “Vast, Glowing Vault” from Atemwende, Derrida teases out the position of the survivor in the poems final pronunciation: “The world is not here, I must carry you.”²³ Derrida precedes his analysis of the poem with his own pronunciation about the survivor and what it means to be one who is left behind, one who gives testimony.

The survivor, then, remains alone. Beyond the world of the other, he is also in some fashion beyond or before the world itself. In the world outside the world and deprived of the world. At the least, he feels solely responsible, assigned to carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared, responsible without world (weltos), without ground of any world, thenceforth, in a world without world, as if without earth beyond the end of the world.²⁴

The singular position of the survivor: he who is left behind to carry the other as a wholly departed and singular other, a wholly departed and singular world. The survivor not only dwells within the breach, but carries the weight of the breach, “the tear/ compacted of silence.” In that moment, this tear, this glottal stop (the cleaving, in both senses, of the glottal folds) the survivor carries on with the other, with the other’s world, a conducting path gives testimony in its absence and writing “breaks into song”, the specter of a singular, departed voice etched onto the tableau through the pen, its medium.

The testimonial (in this case a poem by Celan) is a counter-signatory to the erasure of the trace. It is a substitute, just as the ram is substituted by Abraham in place of Isaac. The sacrifice, the burden of “I must” is fulfilled in the substitution: the sacrificial lamb carries the burden of the other and his world. We who are left behind to testify and to hear testimony are given “the gift of the poem to all readers and counter-signatories, who, always under the law of the trace at work, and of the trace as work, would lead to or get along a wholly other reading or counter-reading.”²⁵ This reading or reception of the work of the trace, of this arche-writing, of this remembrance is then the world of the other, the wholly other that we must carry. It is the counter to erasure, it is the inscription. The inscription of reading is the “I must carry you”, you the other, your world, your wounds, your sickness. We carry the singularity of the other with us and we become their testimony and that becoming is the constitution of the testimonial not only for us, but in us; it is the constitution of testimony for itself.

In his final entry in his diary, June 12th, 1923 roughly a year before he would die, Kafka (one of the signatories of Celan’s testimony in “Frankfurt, September) wrote of the fear felt with each utterance, with each word written. His tubercular condition worsened throughout 1922, he could anticipate his dying and the loss of his voice preceded and foreshadowed the final gasp, the glottal stop that would forever silence him. But he found a strange “consolation” in his writing and in his fear, and oddly enough it proved to be that act of testifying, of speaking through the writing of the trace--a writing of memory, of the diary and its remembrances, that opened up a “conducting path” in the breach, in the coming undone of his world. Kafka uses his writing and his testimony in this, his final diary entry, to fight back against the threat of the “spear”, of erasure.

More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of spirits—the twist of the hand is the characteristic gesture—becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially like this. And so ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is this: You too have weapons²⁶.

NOTES

1 Paul Celan, “Meridian”, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan by Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 181.

2 Ibid., p. 182.

3 Ibid., p. 183

4 Ibid., p. 184

5 Ibid., p. 183.

6 Ibid., p. 182

7 Ibid.

8 Paul Celan, “Frankfurt, September” in Glottal Stop: 101 Poems (trans. by Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh). Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000, p. 37.

9 Ibid.

10 Later in the poem, Celan refers to the “human song of tooth and soul, the two/ hard things.” The soul of course, being the essence of the human being, and the tooth which functions in both a gastric (mastication before swallowing) and phonetic function (the teeth are often used in conjunction with the tongue when producing harsh consonants). Here we have the association of voice with soul, or essence, i.e., presence and self-presence.

11 Ibid.

12 See “Jackdaw Characteristics”. The phonetic sound of the glottal stop can best be explained, in English, by the final sound in the uh of “uh oh”. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop for more information and examples.

13 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Writing and Difference (trans. by Allan Bass). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 200 (emphasis added).

14 Ibid., p. 197.

15 Ibid., p. 226.

16 Sentence removed due to its erroneous biographical information.

17 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1998, p. 69

18 Mark M. Anderson, “A Poet At War With His Language” from The New York Times 31 Dec. 2005. located at http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/reviews/001231.31anderst.html

19 Ibid. Celan’s given name was Paul Antschel but after World War II he would change his last name to Aurel and Ancel before finally settling on Celan (see http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/celan.htm)

20 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 71

21 While this seems to undermine or call into question the belief that Heidegger was a metaphysician of presence, it should be noted that his dominant metonymic device of the call pre-supposes a voice which is capable of calling and being received. The voice always traverses the breach; it is not deferred or waylaid. While Heidegger moves away from the prominent metonymic device of sight or vision as truth, the aural sense of truth, of hearing, still does not account for the pure breach, for death, and for the testimonial.

22 Jacques Derrida, “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinites, The Poem” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (ed. By Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen). New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 140.

23 In his essay, the English translation Derrida renders is the Pierre Joris, translation "The world is gone". I, however, utilize my own translation of this poem "The world is not here", since I believe the word gone implies a connotation of permanence or certainty which is not faithful to my reading of the poem. I imagine seeking the world and finding that it is "not here" and being confused or unsure where it has gone, how it has been erased, and for how long. This sense of knowing or sensing the absence of the world, but being unable to say or know anything more about it is an important distinction between Joris' translation and my own.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., p. 157.

26 Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923 (ed. By Max Brod). New York: Shocken Books, 1976, p. 423.

Beginning of a work in progress...

2008-12-31T12:31:00.000-08:00

I

Welcome to our
cultural opium dens
palaces of rotting flowers
perfumes, ankle deep,
detritus brushing past my
calves, along with
Guy Debord’s pompous cadaver
all the while (
his dead eyes peering
thru the muck)
gagging on the latest
litany of exiles
and traitors.

He was right though, you know. Mr Debord I mean. “In the decor of the spectacle the eye meets only things and their prices.” Makes me wonder if I’ve ever wanted a woman or a man, or if I only considered how much they might cost. No one knows anyone that well. Hidden costs, after all. See you have to buy the supplement too, that’s where they get you. The price of secrecy after all is an assault on privacy. With every new line added on your family plan an additional NSA file is opened. The agency finds itself bemusedly aroused. Rain forecasted in the northwest and increased chatter. Idle chatter. The NSA reads Heidegger now, you know. Mr. Debord would not be pleased.

II

I’ve already
used it
in a
piece. It’s
mine. In
the marketplace
of ideas
words are
copyright. Right?

We own
the thoughts
we’ve lost
and they
own us.
Still, uh
we are
losing the
things we
have let
go of:
however, we
are surprised
that they
are no
longer our
own.

Dear Madam (or Sir):

I demand the return of the syllables which have been stolen (you say “liberated”). They are not property and therefore cannot be party to a theft. It’s not that I object to your having lifted them so casually out from underneath our front porch, it’s that they’re not mine. Or yours. Or anyone’s. They’re just a name. But it’s okay. I didn’t want it. The burden of a name is it’s signature. All the same, I demand their return.

All the best,
moment of sadness, opinion stormings

something i scribbled the other day

2008-11-18T16:39:00.000-08:00

do you want to listen? just listen, listen to the teeth of the new moon biting into the night. forecast this evening, a low of 29 and dark. everything is dying, i said. click on the link. it takes you to a blood-red low hanging moon over baltimore. chance of rain in the city, 20% with possible snow flurries in the suburbs. everything is already dead, you replied. engine blocks humming in the pattern of palindromes. pistons pumping phrases flanging phases canceling credit cards. these devices our sensitive, the forecast sound. are we dying or are we already dead, i wondered?

this is our destiny. to be good stewards of the collapse. to be faithful witnesses to the fall.

i hope that you die.

i hope that we both die.

drowning in huge pools, unthinkably deep reservoirs of capital reserves, unprocessed trauma, and second guesses and addition by subtraction (or so we tell ourselves). do you want to listen? click on the link. but nothing is connected, i thought. we are all dying. we are already dead. we are the answers to these questions. we are scattered. tangential and gentile. a cup of sweet wine. a blessing. christ was born today, ushered in by choirs of angels rolling off glitchy electronic arpeggios on basement casio keyboards. functional approximations of swells and decrescendos, compressed and thistled, snared in briars, hung up in pitchy three part harmony. there is no harmony. there is always onomatopoeiac resemblences and over-lapses. there is no new sentence. there is always new silence. there is always new. there is always. there is. there.

The Identity Complex of the Poet

2008-09-07T23:14:00.000-07:00

I've only been published in one journal. My poems have been rejected by Poetry and by the Omnidawn Press poetry competition. This shouldn't make me feel like less of a poet, but it does. I've read the Language poets, studied with Charles Bernstein, I know all about "official verse culture" and it's trappings, and yet I can't help feeling like a failure at times. Because I'm not published. Because I was not a precocious visionary like RImbaud. Because I have not measured up to the standards of success dictated by the culture of academia and publishing. Because I am a young poet, and to quote Bob Perelman (loosely), "all young poets write the same." Am I even a poet? Who cares about my production and my work? I've read and re-read, edited and re-edited and I still don't feel as if I'm good enough, original enough, groundbreaking enough. Am I a failure? Am I a poet at all?

Why should it matter. I write poems, I have my own, albeit potentially uninspired ideas about poetry and poetics. I've attempted, in my own way, to practice those views to contribute something meaningful to the discourse of contemporary poetry. Yes, there is a problem of access. How can I enter a debate, or really engage in a discourse with poets and theoreticians when my opinions will often never reach their ears and if they do, all too often be dismissed for my lack of credentials. Or originality, Or interest. Or something. Or perhaps I'm too sensitive and this slighting, this erasure is imaginary, a figment of my own low self-opinion. Either way, why should I stop writing. Or trying to publish. Or self-publish. Or engage other poets. Perhaps I should send my manuscript to Ron Silliman, busy as he is, or try and do some things with the Philly Sound Poets, much as I dislike some of their work. Or try and actually publicize this blog, scared as I am of ridicule, or worse, ambivalence. I wonder if this is a problem all young poets have. Do some us know we are destined for greatness? To be published in Poetry as teenagers, to revolutionize the way people think about language, its possibilities, and contingencies, to change the way someone thinks about their own writing? Should we know? Do we need to know in order to be poets? Or, is it that all we need is a voice we are courageous and/or stupid enough to use, and to advertise? Is it that we all need is immunity to the all too understandable fear of rejection and marginalization? Is it that we all need is to get over ourselves? Or perhaps, to simply write, and think, and change and grow, and contribute, and fight and claw, no matter how ardently we ignored or how frightened we become? Or to stop asking questions and for once just...

About my Spam Haiku

2008-06-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

Something I read in Kenny Goldsmith's piece on conceptual poetics at the Poetry Foundation's blog was really intriguing to me. He wrote:

"In their self-reflexive use of appropriated language, conceptual writers embrace the inherent and inherited politics of the borrowed words: far be it from conceptual writers to morally or politically dictate words that aren't theirs. The choice or machine that makes the poem sets the political agenda in motion, which is often times morally or politically reprehensible to the author. With the rise of appropriation-based literary practices, the familiar or quotidian is made unfamiliar or strange when left semantically intact. No need to blast apart syntax."

What I found interesting about this was the way in which the presentation of content morally reprehensible to the author could contribute to the advancement of the author's own political values. In my Spam Haiku there are some, what I find, rather unsavory lines, gestures, or descriptions. Some writing which I myself find suspect or just plain bad. But that is precisely the point of my recent obsession with spam. We live in a spam culture. Invasive, viral advertising, intractable reifications of social hierarchies and prejudices, appeals to the most base, vitriolic aspects of human expression and activity. Exploitation. Manipulation. Co-optation. Advertising as virus. This approach to language, to expression, to poetry fascinated me endlessly, because by appropriating or stealing from "spam", by co-opting and presenting it as art it, I hope, begs the question of how this invasive culture, this marketing of consciousness-oriented colonialism contributes to how we engage the world, how we work through the world using language. The disjunctive and often isolated nature of spam, it's exploded syntax, it's gibberish, it's utter lack of aim or focus is a reflection of the state of our culture at large. It was a really interesting exercise to formalize that narrative, that strand of culture, and explore it. It's meant to say alot more about how I see our culture than to express my own personal likes and interests. But that risk is part of what Mr. Goldsmith was talking about I suppose.

Spam Haiku

2008-06-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

The other day I was searching to see if anyone had tapped into email or message board spam as source text for poetry. I'm sure it's been done, but I was interested in writing along more constraints. So I looked up spam haiku...there's an entire website of haiku or nearku written about SPAM...the product.

Behold...

Anyway, I composed some haiku or near-haiku using actual text from email spam I received or by inventing what I imagined to be some phrases in spam based motifs. The 4th and final section isn't exactly spam. It's short poems using phrases from LOLcats

Spam Haiku

I
50mg x 60 US Pills $199.99
extend your possibilities in your
private life
as cute amateur girls bedmove
lesbian cumshots appraised your
professional life

unbelievable quality!
Indulge yourself with luxury time piece
join the world of
successful people!
tcfer qoyny
and find out incredible hulk’s secret!

Nude classy blonde babes trusion
Get you left hand ready. Send your wife away.
boosty tennin hardcore bed
Have they ever told you this,
"God! Your p qze en xay is is so sm fjt all!"?
Didn’t you feel sad?

II
I’ll still love you more
Just you and me
http://213.129.37.167

Not the same without you
I give my heart to you
http:// 79.119.139.55

I’ll Never Find Someone Like You
I Want You, I Need You, I Love You
http://87.1.3.110/

III
Old granny fucked hard
Cumshot girls writ(h)e in hot bed
Incest fuck boy girl

PILLS available right now
You last al nigt long
She lovefucks for you

Best deal on teh web
Oxycontin,ViagRa
In your private home

IV
I can haz cheesburger?
Invisible piano
Ceiling cat iz
watchin you masturbate

I haz a flavur
Do not want
It’s a trap!

Gollum cat wants his precious
Scout cat sees enemy approaching
It’s a tarp!

Some ruminations on poetic schools and scenes...

2008-06-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

Speaking as a young, relatively unpublished poet (outside of something I had published in the most recent issue of Critiphoria, I haven't noticed this parochialism per se. But maybe that's because I'm not as involved in any particular poetic school or scene.

I live in southern New Jersey a little less than an hour from Philly, but no matter how I look, I can't seem to find groups of poets I feel like I could be comfortable with. This might be a personal shortfall on my part, as I'm a bit shy, but mostly it's precisely because of this, what I see as, insecure need to stake out a particular ground. I've always been more interested in synthesis as opposed to particulars, and I feel like niche carving very often ends up being exclusivity. I'd love to engage myself in a group of poets capable of seeing the value in both flarf and conceptual poetries that sill sees value in Blake or Heine and reads langpo with enthusiasm...a really inclusive group of young poets that aren't just steadfastly trying to create their own "scene" or live up to the bygone era of some other "scene". I understand that establishment of different schools is an important way of fostering debate, which I'm all for, but debate which is primarily dismissive or divisive does a lot more harm then good.

I understand that there's a need to stake out claims against or create movements to subvert mainstream or certain culturally favored trends (which very often lead to uncomplicated, unchallenging poetries that may or may not reflect the rest of mainstream culture's sexist or racist or homophobic traits). But doesn't it feel like sometimes the piranhas in this pool are all attacking one another in their fervor to devour their prey?

Three Poems I Published in the Feb. 2008 Issue of Critiphoria

2008-06-19T01:47:00.000-07:00

"three letters"

Links to the other poets' work included in Issue 1

On Lying (potential implications for poetry I suppose)

2008-06-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

I think the problem most people have is that its difficult for them to "embellish" without bullshitting. There's a certain acumen you have to develop for lying. It's not enough to lie, you have to lie in such a way that people can reasonably suspect the story yr telling is both a lie and a truth. If you couch it in a way that makes it seem like you might be telling a lie in order to conceal the truth and pull this off effectively, the lie will not be believable, but the severity of the situation will be and the intrigue will be compounded: in other words, lie as if the truth is even more incredible than the story your weaving and the person you're lying to will an invent a lie more spectacular than anything you could ever dream of. People would much rather invent their own stories than listen to someone else's. The secret to a good lie is to trick the other person into telling themselves the lie for you.

The other problem alot of people have is that they're not interesting enough to be worthy of their own mythologies, and even their embellishments consist of inconsequential and insignificant gestures. Rather than tell a bunch of stories meant to enhance the truth, do just ONE thing with absolute certainty and magnify the intensity of that action.

Thoughts on Teaching Poetry

2008-05-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

Teaching poetry (both how to read it and how to write it) requires a far broader knowledge-base than the formal rules of prosody and an encyclopedic background in the poetic canon. I believe it is important to engage students by forcing them to consider possibilities, rather than confining their education to the prescriptions of poetic practice. Contemporary poetry consists of so much more than rhymed couplets, free verse “slam” poetry, confessional, or topical poetry. Yet if one were to look at the poetry often fastidiously marketed in mainstream culture (when it is at all), one would think it was the only sort of writing making contributions to the aesthetic realm of poetry. The prejudice against “difficult poetry”, that is poetry which challenges conventional notions of readability and transparency, is a prejudice against possibility. It is indicative of the close-minded intolerance in our culture at large which values sound bites over substance and attacks tolerance, complexity and experimentation as evidence of weakness, arrogance or relativism. Confronting this prejudice in both writing and our everyday lives, wrestling with it, and attempting to work against it is at the core of my teaching philosophy.

When approaching the “creative writing” classroom environment there is traditionally a process of work-shopping, where the students bring in selections of writing and read them aloud or pass them out to the class. Each student gets a turn to read and each student is expected to offer some sort of constructive criticism. Perhaps the assignment will be to write a sonnet, or ABAB couplets, or an alexandrine, or to experiment with any number of metrical devices. In other cases, the assignment will be to write a topical poem, or a descriptive poem, or a personal poem. The problem with this format is that the students end up spending so much time focusing on clarity of content or adherence to form that both the content and form suffer. When teaching poetry seminars, I would take an approach similar to Charles Bernstein’s in my Experimental Writing course in graduate school. Each week, the students in my class would be required to read selections not exclusively from classical, canonical sources (though some would certainly be included), but a whole cast of poets notable not so much for their status within academia, but rather for their inventiveness in grappling with the linguistic possibility of poetry. For instance, in reading work by a poet like Jackson Mac Low, I can expose the students to chance-based operations in poetry and explain the methods poets like Mac Low used in composing their work. This would then lead to a discussion of the advantages of such techniques and the implications they have presented for the practice and function of poetry. Furthermore, it opens up a potential line of deeper investigation for each individual student by allowing them to engage with the reading through poetic practice. By presenting these compositional methods in a deep analytical context, I believe the assignments to write work using one of these methods or expanding on one of these methods are more enriching then an assignment which is simply geared towards getting a student to replicate a particular prosodic formula. It is not enough to ask the students to mimic form or improve the clarity of their content-- we as teachers must challenge them to interrogate the very concepts of form and content not only as readers, but as writers. I believe it is this interrogation that makes my approach distinct. By providing this sort of foundation in the classroom, it is easier for students to work on a more intense level with the concepts and techniques presented and thus move beyond them into their own experiments and compositional methods. Part of erasing the prejudice against the “difficult poem” is to provide this analytical framework so that students can learn how to ask deeper and more nuanced questions about a poem or a method of writing. In doing so, they can uncover the possibilities, limitations, and slippages of contemporary poetry for themselves, thereby elucidating the advantages and contributions of such “difficult” poetry. So much of what students learn about poetry before they get to college is colored by the requirements of Advance Placement exams and textbook questionnaires. Granted, these might be useful in some scenarios, but to limit the experience of poetry to only that which is baptized in the font of academic canonicity or mainstream acceptability is to deny students a vital opportunity to experience the full breadth, ingenuity, and yes, difficulty of contemporary poetry. This is why the texts I use tend not to be texts such as Norton anthologies, but rather anthologies such as Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Jorris’ 2 volume Poems for the Millenium (Berkeley: University of California Press, vol. 1 1995/ vol. 2 1998) which include a more diverse collection of international and experimental poets as well as non-traditional or marginal poetries (such as indigenous poetries, concrete/visual poetry, as well as a good sampling of theoretical work and poetics).

Since the early 1900’s and the work of radical modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, poets has been problematizing the structures of language and meaning. Rather than treating language as a tool for personal expression and the perfection of form, language has become the subject of poetic exploration, and its syntactical, aural, and grammatical features have been undermined and recombined in order to expand aesthetic possibilities. This is why not just poetry, but poetics and theory are increasingly contributing to hybrid ways of art-making and criticism. This blurring of the boundaries between poetry and poetics, and the call to challenge the accepted characterizations of genres, aesthetic categories and mediums is at the heart of my teaching. I would encourage students in my creative writing classes to explore these various alternative poetic mediums. Requiring students to create blogs, for instance, is a great way to encourage them to get in the habit of writing regularly and it also encourages dialogue and collaboration within the class (especially since I would require students to comment on all other students blogs weekly). This may also include writing and presenting performance based poetry or experimenting with visual poetry through the use of collage, cut up, and video. I also attempt to facilitate this not just through exposing them to diverse, atypical poets and mediums, but through providing them with some of these alternative mediums. I often keep a Korg digital recorder and microphone on hand. That way students who wish to do a recording of a poem for more than one voice, or to record a sound poem or performance, can sign up for time to learn how to use the machine and record with it. Some of these assignments may be optional and others (such as the maintenance of a blog) are often mandatory.

Beyond using these various experimental examples and compositional techniques in my writing seminars,interdisciplinary or "general studies" classes also offer a tremendous opportunity to present students with entire classes that deal in the sort of interdisciplinary, inclusionary explorations often included within the individual assignments I’ve alluded to above. For example, I’ve been working on developing a course which I’ve been tentatively calling “The Manifesto” where students are required to read political, artistic and philosophical manifestoes and are asked to examine what makes an effective manifesto, contextualize them within their attendant political or artistic movements, and deal with questions such as: how faithfully the movement adhered to the tenants of the manifesto, how important was the manifesto when it came to practically shaping the ideology and action of the movement, and to examine the broader question of the importance and function of manifestoes in contemporary culture. Readings would include selections from Surrealism, Futurism, Communism, Anarchism, Nazism/Fascism, Situationism, Imagism, Dadaism, and the Fluxus group. A reading packet could be compiled and Xeroxed and I’ve also been examining Mary Ann Caws anthology Manifesto: A Century of Isms (University of Nebraska Press, 2000) as a possible course text.

While I admittedly don’t have much teaching experience, I have a wealth of experiencing collaborating with poets and reading and writing poetry. It is because of this experience that I want to teach poetry so badly. I want to provide the sort of encouragement, openness, and challenges my professors offered me to other aspiring writers. I also have developed a love for teaching and a knack for dealing with diverse personalities through my work teaching my piano and voice students at Woodland Country Day School and Music Central. I’ve taught people from the age of 7 to the age of 50, of all different economic backgrounds, from private school student to immigrant child to middle aged men and women. I approach each one of them or small group of them with the same desire to instill a sense of wonder, ambition, and individuality into their educational experience. Ultimately, while my aim as a teacher who addresses poetry and aesthetics is to give students a diverse, complex, and thorough understanding of the wide range of poetic possibility, it is my hope that they can take a larger lesson from this specific aim. I believe that writing has a far greater impact than cultural or artistic contributions When I challenge students to deal with a difficult poem, to read it closely, and really embrace its difficulty or “strangeness” I’m hoping this will lead to larger discussions and questions about the nature of language and art and their social and political consequences. I’m hoping not only to train these students to be thoughtful and provocative writers, but also thoughtful and provocative citizens. The larger message within my attempt to engage students in deep, complex conversations about multivalent, difficult writing is for them to not shy away from the things that seem foreign or opaque, but to embrace them and attempt to understand them. Hopefully, my insistence upon focusing on possibility rather than pre/proscription can help, at least in some small way, to produce a more contemplative and tolerant human being at the end of their time in my classroom.

A Few Interesting Asides...

2008-05-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

-Aram Saroyan

“Poetry is political to the degree that it refuses the language of Massed Culture and the Official Religions and Corporate State, while at the same time actively engaging political discourses. In this way, poetry might potentially interrogate the ideological presumptions of the dominant language. It becomes, by default, a place to reflect on the meaning of basic terms, including democracy, freedom, terrorism, God, truth, evil, and so on. The meaning of these terms cannot be assumed. So when you begin to interrogate these nouns, you open up into a no-noun space of poetry, where people say “I don't understand it” because they don't have the practice of listening to that which they don’t already know. Yet, without that kind of listening, politics is doomed. Poetry is not a form of macro politics, it’s not a form of direct political action, poetry doesn't change governments, poetry doesn't stop wars. It's a pre-requisite for political thinking but it's not sufficient form of action. Poetry is not the end of politics. It's the beginning of politics.” (from an interview with Charles Bernstein in Plebella No.6, December 2005)

“The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseparable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Nor do they make love, as Breton thought, except in dreams. Words work — on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information, words are not in themselves “informationist”; they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in a relation analogous to that which proletarians (in the modern as well as the classic sense of the term) have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.”

“News is the poetry of power, the counterpoetry of law and order, the mediated falsification of what exists. Conversely, poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language recovering its richness, language breaking its rigid significations and simultaneously embracing words and music, cries and gestures, painting and mathematics, facts and acts. Poetry thus depends on the richest possibilities for living and changing life at a given stage of socioeconomic structure. Needless to say, this relationship of poetry to its material base is not a subordination of one to the other, but an interaction."

”Thus the life of language — which is bound up with every advance of theoretical understanding (“Ideas improve; the meaning of words participates in the improvement”) — is expelled from the mechanical field of official information. But this also means that free thought can organize itself with a secrecy that is beyond the reach of informationist police techniques. A similar point could be made about the quest for unambiguous signals and instantaneous binary classification, which is clearly linked with the existing power structure. Even in their most delirious formulations, the informationist theorists are no more than clumsy precursors of the future they have chosen, which is the same brave new world that the dominant forces of the present society are working toward — the reinforcement of the cybernetic state. They are the vassals of the lords of the technocratic feudalism that is now constituting itself. There is no innocence in their buffoonery; they are the king’s jesters.”

”Real poetry, which has “world enough and time,” seeks to reorient the entire world and the entire future to its own ends. As long as it lasts, its demands admit of no compromise. It brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history...Poetry is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer society, since it is not consumable (in terms of the modern criteria for a consumable object: an object that is of equivalent value for each of a mass of isolated passive consumers). Poetry is nothing when it is quoted; it needs to be detourned, brought back into play. Otherwise the study of the poetry of the past is nothing but an academic exercise. The history of poetry is only a way of running away from the poetry of history, if we understand by that phrase not the spectacular history of the rulers but the history of everyday life and its possible liberation; the history of each individual life and its realization." (from "All the King's Men", Situationist Internationale #8, 1963)

130. Our clear and simple language-games are not prepatory studies for a future regularization of language-- as it were first approximation, ignoring friction and air-resistance. The language-games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities.”

131. For we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison-- as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall easily in doing philosophy.) [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (3d. ed. trans. G.E.M Anscombe), 1958]