Moving

I'm packing up the house and feeling those Proustian emotions-- pleasure-edged sadness, and brief interruptive transmissions of hobbling anxiety, which the displacement of belongings always seems to liberate. I belong to them as much or more than they belong to me: as if the stable arrangement of baby-ravaged IKEA furniture, books and CDs, the sprawl of toys, the foodstuffs crammed in cabinets, all served to ballast and modulate and temper some kind of primary vertigo, anomie, that cast-away I was at zero seconds old. It's exciting in a way; terrifying as it is, there's an abundance in the spinning compass. I've always hoped that word was related to compassion.

So these things, these products, this greaty bounty, so much trash and ridiculous excess the divestment of which feels like any number of unnameable bodily functions, have been doing the job of narrating my life here in Ithaca for years now. Not ten years to return but seven to leave. They've done a good job, these things, told a good and compelling story, one of loss and delusion, love and more love, propinquity and friendship and meaningful work. But there could have been so many other stories. I see that now. I see that I'm basically a machine for moving, and there's a cruelty in that I'm not sure I can brook.

At the chess tables a few hours ago, Dennis says "Well, it looks like it's bad guys 3, good guys 1." From where I stand, it's a total fucking shutout. Unless in your book the good guys are the ones who make money whichever way the bodies or markets fall. But it's not a game, and there's no numerical system that can keep score.

If it's true what Chirac says that you can't trust people who eat poorly, neither can you trust those who eat well. We don't suffer immediate consequences from stupidity. I like French food, but I'll be the first to admit that their marvelous gastronomical culture is built around the principle of making putrefaction not only palatable but delicious. Cirrhotic goose liver? Calves' brains? Such skills in the kitchen probably arose from times of famine when there was nothing to be had but offal. Every great perfume has a note of something horrible in it: death or shit, musk or civet extract or unspecifiable rot. It makes the flowers last. Similarly, as Sontag points out, every great beauty has some inexcusable feature, something exaggerated or grotesque or plain ugly. Perfection's ugly. Witness Angelina Jolie.

But of course it shouldn't escape our attention that the culinary insults begin to fly just before the leaders of the fed world decide just how badly Africa will starve, just how sick we'll let Africa get, and whether global warming can be headed off without reducing consumption.

Bush's less-than-subtle wink to the footsoldiers of the end days, promising judicial candidates who "strictly and faithfully interpret the Constitution," makes me wonder if his kind of faith permits interpretation. Indeed, I wonder if the guy has ever interpreted anything. Every object of contemplation that he happens upon seems to mirror his preconceived convictions. He'd be the kid in my literature class who avoids analyzing a poem by way of platitude and loquacious pseudo-philosophical flatulence. And everything in a convoluted passive voice, everything acted upon by invisible outside forces.

__________

With uncanny timing, Noah Feldman's article in this Sunday's NYT magazine does suggest an actual honest-to-god (pun intended) political solution to the redstate/bluestate impasse: cut off govermental money for religion but permit the legislative exercise of religious convictions. Unfortunately, although it sounds good and all, I don't really buy the idea that you can put dollars in one room and ideology in the other. Wouldn't allowing a school board to vote in "intelligent design" mean, by way of federal monies, a de facto financing of ideology? And don't we have a right to protect those unfortunate kids in Denton who want the straight dope? It seems a recipe for a sort of ideological Yugoslavia, with belief-system refugees flooding to the places where it's still, mostly, safe to think some things sometimes.

_____

Dear Sir,

I am returning the enclosed gene marker, for which I can no longer find any legal, profitable, or even enjoyable use. I no longer believe it to be a lost poem of Sappho. Please dispose of it in accordance with section 27 of the statutory code.

1 tgccggggtg ttttttccac taaagctgtt ctcagagccc taaaaaagtt tgacagatac61 atattttatt ttttttgtgt gtgttttatt catcttgttg gcataaaaat agtgacattc121tcttcttatg gcaattatat ttgagttatc tatctatcta tctatctatc tatctatcta181tctatctatc tatctgtatt ttaaagagac agggtctttc actctgttgc ctaggctgga241gtgcagcatt gtgatcatag ctaactgcag ccttgaactc ctgagctcaa gggatcttcc301tgtctcagcc ttccaagtag gtaagactac aagtgtgtgg caccatacct ggctaattaa361 aac

Sincerely,

Proteus Minimus

A long overdue word about Daniel Subkoff's show:

As he had called me up a week prior to ask if I or anyone I knew owned a gun, I was, um, relieved that 1) there were no dead bodies and 2) I never even had the chance to ask myself if I liked it, so immediate were the pleasures, and so deep the spaces for contemplation it opened. I'm a sucker for anything that moves from the 2-d to the 3-d and back, pieces where the surface en- and -unfolds, and Daniel's bigger work, featuring primed canvas from which long strips are cut to form ladders that then attach to the floor and ceiling, suggested as much the invitingness of the blank canvas as its constrictions. I want to see a whole series of these. The other piece, an ink drawing, should remind anyone of their worst erotic relationships--two figures constituted by and enmeshed within the webs they've cast around each other. Yikes. But the ultimate vote of approval came from Noah, who appreciated the hook-and-ladder truck imagery of the first offering. Nothing else came close, not even the gold potatoes, and Anna and I were so glad to have made it down that weekend. For the first time in far too long, Anna didn't have to miss something fun due to those parental duties for which I can't, to my great chagrin, sub. Do other men get jealous that they can't breastfeed? I'm not sure I'd want the frontal appearance that goes with it but he's always so calm and sweet and happy when he's nursing. Or maybe this is all some banal Freudian displacement which you can surely figure out on your own.

Anyway, if you're in or near Chinatown anytime soon, you should check Daniel out. You'll be better off without the solid, unventilated mass of people and only the King of Beers to dull the effect of their less-than-rigorous bathing schedules, I promise. Stay tuned for news of future productions from Daniel.

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

Finally watched Bad Education last night, and despite everyone's claims that the absence of women--except as through-the-looking-glass images of the male characters' lives--had caused Almodovar to lose his edge, I was impressed with the first half of the movie, which placed me squarely between discomfort and descriptive rapture, in the style of Flaubert or Nabokov. Problem is, the films gets caught up in its obligations to plot elements, caught in the gears and cogs of Borgesian frame-breaking, and fails, I suppose, to push me all the way to the contemplation of infinity that good plots like this do. I get bored with the nesting structures of play-within-play, and not even the scene of a man pretending to be his tranvestite brother playing a film character based on his brother's life, who's in turn pretending, within the film, to be that character's sister, or whatever, could save it. Almodovar's best, I think, when he thinks in seeing, not doing, and with all of these loose-ends to tie up there's no time left for his brilliance with mise-en-scene, nor does his camp and kink really gel with all of the twists and turns. But it's definitely worth watching.

A couple of daydreams from the mordant Ange Mlinko. Version 1: "Freedom Tower" in the sense that a building is dedicated to its deceased benefactor. Version 2: a 1,776 ft. lightning rod so that the rest of us can go about with the business of our lives. All of this by way of Jane, by way of the the NYT: "impregnable" as in sterile, barren.

But on the other hand, I make the best BBQ flag this side of the Mississippi.

I'm Rubber, You're Glue

"The troops here . . . murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that . . . despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression, by toppling governments."

This is too easy, I know. How perfect that he delivers this feeble demagoguery from Fort Bragg, he with his swagger and confidence-man braggadocio? An empty joy, this.

Or magnificence is what best measures the distance between that garden and this one. Art's not a factory for pain, but pain's a factor in art.

Jane's comments of last week are a fitting and astute coda to the Foetry affair, and aside from this brief remark, hopefully the last we'll hear of it. I should note, though, that one of the upshots of the fallout from Foetry is a greater transparency on the part of contest administrators, if also a somewhat paranoid eagerness to assuage the wounded egos of the rejected, as if at any moment an Alan Cordle might go all librarian on their ass. Many of the contests to which I've submitted in the last year have provided not only detailed descriptions of their operations--how first readers are selected, how finalists are judged--but also narratives by the judges and editors and/or their own impression of the field. Earlier in the year, for instance, Michael Wiegers sent a five-page e-mail describing at great lengths the merits, as he saw them, of the finalists for the Hayden Carruth award, and quoting representative passages. If I wasn't surprised that his aesthetic and mine differ in more places than they overlap, I was also happy to know exactly where we stand. I also thought it was a charitable act to those unfortunates who came close, but not close enough. It's preferable, in many senses, to not even place for these contests. More recently, Sarabande's editors have sent a list and explanation of the five qualities--Transfomation, Ratio, Submission, Obsession, and Power to Silence--that they look for in a good manuscript. Although I can think of a couple books that I've enjoyed from Sarabande, particularly Deborah Tall's Summons, these seem exceptions to Sarabande's staid and unthreatening position, with its inistence on the principles of proportionality, moderation, and passivity on the part of both reader and writer. Most troubling, I suppose, is their praise of a poem's "power to silence," which I must admit certainly lends credence to some of Silliman's often annoying remarks about "quietude." It's worth quoting in full.

"It's been remarked that the first reacction to powerful art is silene. Bad art on the other hand tends to evoke a flood of language. Easy and fun: to pan. Hard to praise. It's a bad sign when we're halfway through a poem and the voices in our heads have already begun to comment. What's missing most of the time is the intrigue of the unfamiliar. A good poem leads you to a place you didn't know existed. It is like disovering a hidden room in a house where you lived for many years. When the poet shows you the hidden room it may be dark and forbidding, or airy and awash with sun, furnished like a room in your dreams. You look for a long time at the objects there, which are familiar and strange at once. How can we not have known, all these years? It is the wonder at finding suh a room, where previously there was none, that takes away speech."

What we have an image of here is the sublime without the requisite threat, cruelty or indifference, a sublime which only confirms what had long been familiar but unarticulated. The silencing power of this art isn't that of the awe-inspiring, or the stupefyingly difficult. For that kind of work, although it might eventually silence, first must engage the reader, wear her out. This kind of silence sounds to me like boredom, or death, or at the very least an unvarying repetition of recollected emotions. I do want poetry to generate voices in my head, not commentary as much as a kind of parapoetry. I'm not sure how you can have an experience of the unfamiliar in the midst of general brain-death. It sounds like poetry as T.V., and I'd rather just watch T.V.

But, disagree as I might, I'm glad the editors have taken the time to set down these aesthetic musings. Differ though we may, this doesn't mean, necessarily, that I won't apply to the contest again. The winner of the prize this year, Matthew Lippman, has written some poems I recall enjoying, and I'm happy to have underwritten the expense of publishing his book, even if there were indubitably manuscripts from the pool of entries that I'd rather read.. This wouldn't be the first time that the right book was picked for the wrong reasons. Because I'm fortunate enough to be employed right now, twenty-five dollars is a small amount to contribute to all but the most egregiously wrong-headed of publishers.

_________________________________

Probably nothing will come of this but the hypocritical posturing of administration figures complemented by the cravenness of the press, but it's still encouraging. It's for the sake of cases like this that I sometimes fantasize about going to law school.

See you at the show? I'll be the one running interference for a garrulous toddler.

As I've been thinking, given a push by Deleuze, that Michael Jackson might be what we all really look like or are deep down, if there were a deep down, the diabolical result of the declaration of universal human rights which no-one really respects, neuter tupperware product of the we're-all-the-same machine which means we're all equally worthless, little neverlands occasionally allowed to rock out and moonwalk and crotch-grab in our own music video, in which case it might be a good time to express my demolisment at the hands of and admiration for Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, which reminds me that documentation of a life survived need not locomote along the tired rails of heroism and recuperation. It's a pure past, the past that was always past. I mean, I didn't feel manipulated, only burned and in that fire asked to consider the value and consequence of putting oneself in the third person, of bearing up under the dissociative disorder which washes events of all localizing emotion except a dim, diffused love in whose wake a brilliantly edited montage of super-8 footage, polaroids and post-disco effects dances on the pin of a head. Because, even if we let the 'eighties and 'nineties narrate for us, it's still important to have been allowed to be a person sometimes, on the beach perhaps. Like Frank O'Hara! Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm an imbecile of memory, that I remember little of my life before, say, twenty-eight and what I do remember seems horribly overprocessed, totally fucked by a Byzantine network of footnotes and false leads and a few scraps of grainy security-monitor footage. I read Proust with an pained nostalgia empty of all reference, wary of Orphic neck-injuries. Not gone? Just walled off by a moat and a rusty drawbridge? But "I do" "remember" days when the shifting points-of-view of internal dialogue were a monstrous thermometer: I and I, they and me, you and I, we and you. We was the worst.

An unfortunate title, I know, but I'll be here (on the Canadian border, right next to the Manhattan Bridge) on Friday night. I promise full refunds for those dissatisfied with Daniel Subkoff's "things."

An iPod for Father's day? I take back everything I ever said about a conspiracy by the Organization of Tie Manufacturers. I'll parent so much more effectively listening to The Butthole Surfers cover Variations on a Theme by Paganini (kidding).

Noah's guitar-obsession is beginning to outpace the fire-engine thing and, in other music news, I've learned through blogolandia that J. Clover beat me to the punch by using The Mountain Goats' title "The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton." Figures. Could you find a more obvious title for a poem than that?

Looks like my furrowed brow's holding up my pants again.

Following up on yesterday's post . . . .Yau does a wonderful job of contending with the meta-reviewer's claims that Ashbery isn't really all that exciting as a prose writer. I must admit to having felt the same myself, even as much as reading Ashb.'s poems can make it difficult for me think of him as belonging to the same species as me. A few of the pieces in Selected Prose do have a workmanly quality or exude the odor of loveless labor. But there are other pieces--on Stein, on Roussel, on Mapplethorpe--that are as good reviews come. When Ashbery's on, he shies away almost completely from evaluation or comparison, and instead pursues his difficult, personal and ambivalent perceptions onto a far promontory (premonitory?) from which I can consider, say, Mapplethorpe, and by extension, art and writing in general. Perhaps because he shies away from intense, singular affect I might initially get the impression of the ho-hum. But if I read on, I'll find myself somewhere strangely familiar and yet also strangely unmapped. He's a great model, for me, of what a review can and should do. Also: the bidirectional interview between Ashbery and Koch is one of funniest, most vertiginous moveable feasts I've ever encountered. What a perfect portrait of two minds germane enough to weather confict, irony and multiple levels of play and teasing! It reminds me, as I'm sure it reminds others, of those best conversations with good friends, those late nights of talk and wit the residue of which is just plain old poetry.

The blogs are abuzz with thoughts on the status of poetry reviewing, kicked off by a longer-than-usual-post by our friend P0-bot: (here, here, here, here). John Yau's article on Ashbery as reviewer, in the May/June APR, and on reviewing culture in the artworld, might provide a useful perspective, and some sort of explanation for the place where we are. If Ashbery's influence is as massive as we all suspect it to be, and his definition of great art is that which makes exposition or explanation of it unnecessary--and troubles even the articulation of appreciation-- where does that leave all of us with advanced degrees and precise vocabularies and sagging bookshelves? We're then in a situation where, yes, we want to be told what we might enjoy but also want to be entertained during the process. The thesis-driven review--which notes a tendency among several different books--is a good thing, and often makes for an edifying read, but I suspect that a great deal of the most interesting poetry will fail to conform to this model. Books like this often ask for another kind of writing largely confined to academic journals, even if these distinctions aren't hard and fast. All of this is why--per Tim Yu's comments--I read blogs. I don't agree with Tim, though, that a large reviewing concern need be committed to one particular side of the poetry-wars or another--as is the case with Boston Review and Poetry. The virtue of the Constant Critic site, and other journals or sites that feature regular reviewers, is that you come to get a sense for a particular reviewer's tastes/agenda--Jordan or Joyelle McSweeney or Stephen Burt or Calvin Bedient--as much as you do a particular magazine's. I don't see any reason why we couldn't have a clearing house for these individuals and, then, wildcards like myself thrown in for good measure. Would it be a solution to segregate the zing-zing from the bling-bling and thesis-y? I would call it The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

And I should add, re Fourier Series, and as a result of my swithchbacking through the pages of Kierkegaard, that bravery isn't the same as fearlessness. You have to be afraid to be brave.

Since Josh and Jordan are making nice, I thought now as good a time as any to quickly remark on what a compelling, and yes smart, but more importantly, brave book Fourier Series is. It's a poem that's afraid of neither its ambitions for poetry and theory and human thoughtwork, nor its Whitmanic utopian hopefulness for the promises inherent in the American west. Even LA, even Vegas! And this is precisely why the book is good. Now I don't want to make it seem like Josh has wandered into a Haight-Ashbury wormhole--there's as much critical energy here as there is posited utopian vision, as much Hunter S. Thompson as there is Ronald Johnson or Hart Crane. But there's a certain fearlessness here about American history--read: slavery, genocide, war, etc.--that I suspect will strike some as a violation of poetic table etiquette. He's just not melancholy enough:

you shouldn't doubt
my sincerity

I speak for the mukluked tribe
who found this iceplanet's
rich invitations

engraved on the skin
of white whales

Is he allowed to say that? Isn't he from the suburbs of Jersey, like Jewish or something? And to call himself "sincere" at the same time, instead of distancing himself with a joke or something, as if the humorous word "mukluk" were some kind of apology? The nerve! Yes, the nerve, the one that, perhaps more poets should strike, whether we like it or not. It's good to see a poet as unafraid of identity politics as he is, and it's good also to see someone as unafraid of Modernism with all its fascist minefields, someone who offers not only critique but also something to come after the critique, even if it's a tentative, provisional, and ultimately indeterminate vision (phew!). I guess what I mean is--he's not afraid of the future. And he does all this in the context of language-play, and an insistence on the immanent, erotic pleasures both within and without the poem. Occasionally, these moments of play, of punning, of silliness that are the seriousness of the poem, do fall flat, but that's all of a piece with the poem's overall bravery.

Good Totalities, Good Subjectivities

This from Josh: "Yet I'm coming to feel that sheer indeterminacy, the infinite play of the signifier, and the postmodern sublime have also exhausted themselves. I am searching and searching right now, through all this philosophy and in my own writing, for what might follow the negative—for the recovery of subjectivity—for the ends of elegy."


Yes, yes indeed, and I'd add that, along with the recovery of subjectivity comes the recovery of totality, too, and the beginning of the end, perhaps, of the sometimes merely reflexive disjunction that characterizes so much postmodern poetry, a point that Christopher Nealon makes in his essay "Camp Messianism . . ." (American Literature, available from Project Muse). We might be able to distinguish between good and bad totality, as Adorno does, or distinguish between liberated subjectivity and a merely fragmented subjectivity. Fragmentation is a part of the violence of our age, too. And it ain't always good, as the layout of the more and more New Jersified Town of Ithaca reminds me.

But enough intellectualism for today. I'm going to go read James--"a mind so fine. . . no mere idea can penetrate it." (Eliot).

Front-Boredom

Does anyone else have the experience of enjoying the latter half of a book more than the first? This seems to happen to me all the time, and I must confess I'm a bit mystified as to the cause. Often, I'll feel lukewarm about the first ten pages of a book--and then, gradually, through persevering, come to realize that I'm in the middle of a genuine-like poetic experience. This happened to me most recently with Susan Wheeler's Ledger. In the first section, I was thinking, OK, intriguingly involuted descriptive language, a pretty palette, but so? and why so much weight on the money metaphor? But by the end of the book, after the first few longer, and more disjunctive or experimental, pieces, I was in awe, I was ready to sell things for a bit of whatever currency the book was printed on or with. I was ready to write my name in red ink on its back page as I watched the money metaphor metastasize (and alliterate), colonizing every last bit of interpersonal space. The book's slamming.

Now, I might chalk up this experience--let's call it front-boredom--to the need to learn a particular poet's language, except that on rereading the initial poems, it's often the case that I still don't really care for them. This mystifies me because, when showing my manuscripts to others, I'm often told to front-load the book as much as possible, put the best poems first, since I can rearrange the manuscript later if it gets taken. Now, certainly with an established poet there isn't as much need to grab a first reader, and so avoid the gong, but this happens with first books, too. Are these poets forsaking the practice of front-loading? Are they committed to a genetic or developmental narrative, wherein the final poems demonstrate a fuller command of or flexibility within their material? Are people doing what is often the case with 19th-century novels, where the writer throws all her resources into the task of boring you to death in the first 100 pages, so as to scare away the unworthy and make the consequent rewards all the more pleasurable. Is this about me? Do I just have bad taste respective to the taste of the poets I like?

It's because of this experience that I sometimes must force myself to read collections cover to cover, rather than skipping around after the first few poems and searching for something I like. If I do that, I might bounce around in a book for years without surveying its pleasures. Should I start reading the last five pages, then the first five, first?

Speaking of beginnings, I watched the premiere of the new season of Six Feet Under last night, and found it a bit of a mess, a bit tired, and despite all the fine writing, less successful at warding off the melodrama that the fantastic acting always flirts with and yet usually escapes. It's probably a good thing that the show's been cancelled; I want to see these actors get the challenging movie roles they deserve. Especially Lauren Ambrose; the girl's brilliant, and getting sexier and sexier.

New Issue of MiPo

The latest product of Didi Menendez's ever-expanding internet poetry emporium, the Gabe Gudding issue of MiPoesias, is now available. Please do check out the stupefying cabinet of wonders that Gabe and Didi have assembled here--from the post-punk abjection of Lara Glenum to the crystalline intensities of Rae Armantrout, from the informatic bricolage of Kasey Mohammed to the post-industrial rough sleep of Christian Bok, from my genius friend Karl Parker to my genius friend Josh Corey. Until my copy of The Hat arrives, this will do for reading.

You can read an interview with me here, and a couple of poems here.

This just in: I highly recommend the new White Stripes album, Get Behind Me Satan. I've found their earlier albums to bore after repeated listening but this one promises future rewards. Marimba via Detroit and Led Zeppelin! May this be an auspicious omen for the Pistons game tonight!

Deep Throat is Felt.

Report to the Academy

I wish that I could explain my absence from blogging by way of an exciting narrative with multiple, shifting points-of-view, street-cred-building references and animals whose quaint way of speaking bears the heavy hand of The Censor, but alas I've spent most of the last week supine, reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembing, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, and Wings of the Dove, or lamenting the beating that my favorites the Phoenix Suns are taking at the hands of San Antonio Spurs. Yet another reason to hate Texas: what state can have three playoff-quality basketball teams? One with lots of oil money. . . Kierkegaard says that I should both accept that they will lose tonight and hold on to the hope that they won't, marry Beckett's "I can't go on" to his "I'll go on."

There's that paradox again, the one that makes relaxation, or the absence of responsibilities, one of the most time-consuming endeavors one can pursue. As the temperature rises, more and more air percolates in between my thoughts; by mid-July I'm averaging a mere one or two perplexed, mostly empty looks a day. Until then, I'll be perusing the Library at Nothingness, a trove of writings on and by the members of the Situationist International. I haven't looked at any of this stuff since my undergraduate days in Lester Mazur's Decentralism class, and I'm thinking that it will help Toward a Pornography of the Sublime, which is at the very least getting longer. LA D->rive anyone?

Something ought to be said, and then retracted just as quickly, without as much as exposing one chink in the mosaic of armored silences which it is our custom to dutifully polish, about litotes in James, not only the rhetorical kind, at which he's certainly no hack, but the larger thematic or characterological variety, where, to take a cue from Josh, any positive emotion, thought or motive you can attribute to the characters is the result of a negated negative--the bad thing the person does not do or does not say, as Milly "was to wonder in subsequent reflection what in the world they had actually said, since they made such a success of what they didn't say. . . ." It's a dizzying and alien place to spend an hour or two, but what's amazing is how well James quickly sends me to finishing school, how quickly he teaches me to read the proper cues, or lack thereof. And his syntax is, as everyone says, a visceral thrill, as if the comma had become its own kind of word. A fun to place to visit, but I don't think I could live there--those impressionistic, beaten-gold interiors would give me a permanent case of vertigo.

“It Looks Like War, But It’s Really Peacekeeping”


Despite or perhaps because of their reputation as fierce and skillful warriors, capable of repulsing on several occasions the Roman legions which fought them in the dark, spirit-thronged forests, the early Germanic tribes had no word for war. Was it this that gave them such courage, such bloodlust, this lack action edged out with brutal feints and parries? This quiver of related but not quite adequate poeticisms? Did the Romans so frequently lose because of their tendency to conflate war (bellum) with beauty (bello), fascinated by the aesthetics, the pageantry and dark iconography of bloodshed, which meant whether they liked it or not an ethics as well? In English, so many centuries later, we’ve resolved these problems situated at the twin headwaters of our language. We have many words for war, as many words as we have wars: on terror, on poverty, on immorality, drugs, of hearts and minds. Some of its synonyms are “biology,” “lungs” and “name.” Some of its practitioners are human beings, as if that absence, bouqueted by so much language, still in them militated toward that wall of molten limbs and skulls called law, begging to be charged against with armor-plated Leviathan bulldozers. Oh endless levy, oh my Levites. “And who in time knows whiter we may vent/ the treasure of our tongue.” As from the knitted brow of my uncle, persecution mania, and name a name for name drilled back all the way to Sanskrit, which it tears you apart to think. Bios in its divide and conquer, its primal discomfort fizzing away in the mitochondria. As if war were the name for the name we don’t have for war. It’s like trying to pronounce “heav’n” as one syllable. Lungs, the light organs; light which rips into the dark, repeating the big bang; a heaviness we leave our Privates stranded in.

Phew! I was sure the quiz would cast me as a Wordsworth!


You are William Blake! Wow. I'm impressed. Not
only are you a self-made artist and poet, but
you've suddenly become a very trendy guy to
like. It's not that we doubt that you have all
your marbles, it's just that we're not quite
sure what you did with them to come up with
those terrifying theological visions. The
people of your time were nowhere near as
forgiving as that, and all your neighbors
thought you were a grade-A nut job. But we
love you, so rest happy.

Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?
brought to you by

Still basically pissed off at Christopher Bitchin' for his niggling, wrong-headed review of the Johns Hopkins' Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism , a resource (networked, thankfully) I've found enormously useful as I've stumbled around in the dark, half-deserted places of lit. crit. and philosophy. I guess my beef should really be with the NYT Book Review, a publication that never ceases to bore me half-to-death and consistently fail to review books of interest. I've wasted a good deal of money on books that got good marks there. A glutton for punishment, I be, I suppose. Getting the marxophobic, Republocrat Christopher Hitchens to review this volume is like getting me to review The Encyclopedia of Paleontology. I'm not its real audience, only listening in, and to waste half a page quarreling with the usage of assert/argue is a waste of newsprint. Perhaps I'm missing an appropriate sense of humor. Were I in a different mood, perhaps his shocked tone that objectivity is "disputed; even denied" would strike me as funny. But there's really nothing funny about a writer invoking George Orwell to ultimately call for the censorship and policing of literary criticism--more of the "why can't they be accessible?" rhetoric we hear in the po. world. This isn't to say that I don't find some theorists unnecessarily obscurantist, but to singlehandedly wave away an entire discipline, as if everything worth saying could be written in NYT language, is absolutely infuriating. He seems to miss the fact that these thinkers aren't writing for, or responding to, a general audience, any more than people working on superstring theory are using the high-school algebra I still remember. With all apologies for the analogy syndrome.

On other fronts, I'm thinking of developing and marketing Good Book Toilet Paper (TM)--"Soft on your bottom, hard on your soul." It might really sell.

Report to the Academy

Just read some of the nice things that Josh is saying about me over in his part of the Blogger servers, and felt compelled to mention what a fantastic poem he has in "Kiosk/Stylus." It's a Manhattan poem that extends and builds upon the hard-won optimism and exuberance and joie de vivre of Crane's The Bridge, saluting Whitman as he disappears into a D.U.M.B.O basement, but that never forgets where and who and how we are, lately, and tomorrow too in all likelihood. By allowing himself some sprawl and fall, Josh has given us the clearest and most compelling and thrilling articulation of the concerns that we've watched him think through in blogland over the past couple of years, his quest for some sort of non-victimizing relationship between individuals, and I think that the urban pastoral spaces of Manhattan give him, and in turn us, some stunning glimpses of what that might feel and look like, even as "cadavers by chance and choice" remind him of what a long measurement he must make. The poem has all of the gymnastic, prepositional energy of Kevin Davies but also the wonderful collision of dictional registers that Josh is such a wonderful resource for--his language is always reaching back to the Romantics, the Metaphysicals, reaching across to Celan and Rilke. It's a vital poem, and I hope it gets the intelligent, open-hearted attention it deserves. And yes, sadly, in this line up, I think I play Eliot to his Crane. Of The Waste Land, Crane says, "good, of course, but so damn dead!"

So it was , indeed, a really great meeting we had yesterday, and an interesting pairing--my Los Angeles to his New York, even as his New York looks west to a Disneyland tucked into the N.J. Meadowlands and my Los Angeles keeps telling itself night-night stories about the rest of the country.

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I've been absent from blogland for a little while, first because of an end-of-the-semester grading quarantine, and then because I am putzing around with this essay I want to write about Beckett, "semantic satiation," Twombly and some other folks but that is stalled right now as I wait for books to come in. I'm reading James' Wings of the Dove, the syntax of which keeps waltzing my mind around his litotic observations about human nature, or better said anti-nature, and his vertiginously described interior spaces. More, perhaps, on all of these things a bit later. Blonde Redhead and Nick Cave, too, and my friend Brook is in town, back from Berlin and on his way west.

Report to the Academy

A lovely reading at SOON the other night, if I do say so myself. Huge thanks to Josh, Karen, Theo and especially Aaron Tieger (formerly of Fishblog and editor of Carve), who produced an incredible broadside of Karl's and my poems, the front of which features various flarfish anagrammatizations of our names--reparable spank, preplan, rearbran planks, sparkler lark, sabre barrels. But all so violent? Thankfully, Aaron was kind enough to pull "rape" and "raper." You've got to take the whole onomastic name-as-destiny thing with a grain of salt, even some lithium carbonate, but I'm always thankful that, after the pot wore off, my parents decided against naming me Cosmos.

Karl read beautifully, with a Berrymanian application of precise and accurate pressures to individual words. Tempo, volume, a circumpsection before silence, all of these came together so that you could hear each and every pun, or in some cases hear yourself not quite getting it, which is the feeling I get and enjoy getting and not getting, incidentally, when I read Matthea Harvey's zany, delicious Sad Little Breathing Machine.

The humor in Karl's poems--by turns delicate, Kaufmanesque and then body-blow hilarious--primed the audience to pick up on the less frequent and less overt humor in my poetry. A truly great night, one to enshrine in increasingly fictionalized self-presentations for sure. I think I may have learned, finally, to accept and even enjoy compliments. Insults are next. And I found four people to look at mss.!

Here's the intro that I wrote for Karl:



One of the most annoying things that you can ask me about is audience—that is, to and for whom I write. Partly because I’m not sure I believe in audience and partly because like most good American-style humans with a persecution complex, I want everyone to admire me. But when I’m doing the work, when I’m writing the poem, if there’s anyone listening in on the process, anyone in my study, it’s probably Karl Parker.

When I first came to Cornell to do an M.F.A. in poetry writing seven years ago, I was keenly aware of how very little literature I had read, having subsisted on a Spartan diet of a few dozen creased and stained books. With Karl, I found an intensive-learning-program in literature and a sensibility and a mind that I could put faith in. I read Wittgenstein. I read Joyce. I read Beckett’s Trilogy. I could trust his sensibility, because I knew that for him this wasn’t a day-job, that literature was where he lived, that it was as necessary as air. Perhaps our connection has to do with the fact our given names both have similar derivations—a Karl is a person of common or low-birth, a churl if you will, and a Jasper is a rustic simpleton or hick. Our names can both take an indefinite article. For example, Wordsworth has the following lines: “He was a carl as wide and rude /As ever hue-and-cry pursued.” Or this one from 1898—“there were a lot of ‘Jaspers’ sitting around the stove, chewing tobacco and telling lies.” So, I could trust my inner hillbilly to his inner Scotch peasant. [Insert essay on the philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers here] Neither of us, I think, felt at home in the barrenly empirical world, and we recognized in each other this shared transience

I would rather read Karl’s poetry than just about anyone else’s, One of the virtues of these poems, one of their many immediately appealing qualities, is their humility—a humility that risks humiliation, and homelessness, and which realizes that only by admitting to such can it allow for the home-making, transformative powers of poetic thought. The speaker of these poems—a Karl or, if you will, a Jasper, whose inner autobiography belongs to any of us willing to suffer its little children and animals—resembles, in his humility, the Shakespearean fool or self-parodying stand-up comic or Beckettian protagonist whose errancies and misprisions give the lie to our prefabricated illusions. Their persistence in the face of folly is wisdom, and a home in homelessness. His poems achieve this by stressing utterance over reference and performance over recollection. Like Wittgenstein’s investigations, they start with the smallest and most basic of materials, and by troubling them reveal profound problems and profounder possibilities. They “make little airholes in doubt.” To read his poems is to read a primer on how to Houdini one’s way out of the tightest of spots, “through the holes, more than happy.”

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For those of you in Ithaca and environs, come and see me read this Saturday with Rennaissance man, flaneur and poet of everything that might still always matter, by way of everything that hopefully won't: Karl Parker.


Presenting innovative and small-press poetry in downtown Ithaca.(usually) Second Saturday of (nearly) every month.State of the Art Gallery, 120 W. State St.


Jasper Bernes and Karl Parker
Saturday, May 7 7 pm.
Jasper Bernes was born in Southern California in 1974. He studied at Hampshire College and Cornell University and currently teaches English and creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His poems appear in such journals as Barrow Street, Canwehaveourballback?, NoTell Motel, MiPoesias and Seneca Review. A selection of his poems can be found in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. He lives in Ithaca, NY with his girlfriend, Anna Shapiro, and their son, Noah. In the fall, he will enter the Poet Protection Program at UC Berkeley. He also maintains a blog, Little Red’s Recovery Room (jasperbernes.blogspot.com)

Karl Parker teaches freshmen at Cornell and inmates at Auburn State Correctional Facility, having recently received an MFA from the New School. He was awarded the 2004 National Arts Club Literary Committee Scholarship for Poetry and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2005). Parker’s poems have appeared in Spoon River, Fence, Seneca Review, Downtown Brooklyn, notellmotel, mipoesias, gedanken-strich, canwehaveourballback, and elevenbulls.