Eastward Ho

Tomorrow the whole family packs into the car and drives east to spend a week in Maryland with the in-laws. A week after that we head up to Ithaca for the month, where I'll be researching an article I'm thinking about writing about A.R. Ammons. Ammons was the presiding spirit in the halls of the English Department at Cornell and perhaps as a result I always resisted reading him. But as someone with a continuing interest in pastoral poetry I think it's time to give him a second look; I'm interested in the possibility that the seemingly quietudinous Archie Ammons might be in some ways the flip side of the avant-pastoral more readily identifiable in the work of Charles Olson and company. As my former prof Roger Gilbert has remarked to me, he thinks Ammons may have evaded classification as a postmodern or avant-garde writer largely because of the company he kept—or didn't keep—in Ithaca, where by all accounts he enjoyed being the biggest fish in Cayuga Lake. But of course he was good friends with Ashbery and shared with him the increasingly dubious honor of having been canonized by Harold Bloom. If Ashbery is by no means completed by Bloom's insistence on reading him as a pure Romantic, perhaps Ammons isn't either.

I'll also keep hacking away at my fiction project and work on the final version of Severance Songs to give to Tupelo for publication. Of course we'll also be enjoying Ithaca and our friends (two of whom are expecting a baby almost any minute) and showing toddling Sadie the creeks and gorges. We'll miss Chicago—life here has become more dense with pleasures small and large in the past year—but Ithaca is divine in the summer. Anyway, I'd have a good time anywhere with these lovely ladies.

Occasional Notes on Fictional Prose

With verse, there's no problem: the line is the fundamental unit of meaning and of rhythm. With the prose poem, I focus on the sentence and the relation between sentences. Critical writing takes its rhythm from the argument, and at least in part from the work I'm writing about. But one of the difficulties of prose fiction is the freedom it offers: its fundamental unit can be the word, the phrase, the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, or even potentially the entire book (the map is the territory).

By "fiction" I am trying not to mean narrative or storytelling, but fiction as the most open category of prose: that which can include any kind of writing, because it is by definition not held to the standards of non-fiction. The prose is the fiction in its capaciousness, its generosity of relation. (I would say "novel" because that gets closer to the heteroglossic territory proper to what I'm attempting, but for now I shy away from the word and its grandiosity.)

"Narrative" seems at this point nearly synonymous with hypotaxis. I find for the most part that the units or chapters of my project are hypotactic on a sentence level (generally not my strategy with poetry) but the arrangement of the units themselves is paratactic: I hop from one scene to the next, one character to the next, without apparent causal links. But many if not most of the chapters have a conventionally realistic hypotactic coherence. Next time I'd like to try the opposite trick: paratactic sentences within chapters, but the chapters themselves following a linear, if not strictly causal, arrangement.

The chief stylistic tic of the fiction thus far is the sentence extended by numerous independent clauses set off by commas--a fugitive parataxis that interrupts the narrative, representing either the flight into a character's inwardness or an outward bound flight into the self-consciousness of the narrative itself.

Dialogue. In some chapters it takes conventional form, with quotation marks and little gestures and actions by the speaking characters that establish their spatial and emotional relations. In other chapters there are no marks, blurring the line between dialogue and indirect discourse. I don't know if ultimately one form must end up replacing the other. I was always a sucker for Joycean dialogue, in which dashes provide enough of a visual cue to the reader so that she knows who is speaking, but as the paragraph proceeds the line between dialogue and action becomes more wavery and indistinct. Conventional punctuation of dialogue produces a ventilating effect, a kind of breezy relief from the large blocks of prose I tend to produce--but I'm suspicious of this breeziness, the desire it seems to serve for writing qua writing to disappear and be replaced by a convincing illusion of speech.

The fiction I've loved most has been the fiction that conjures worlds: Middle Earth, Napoleon's Europe, Bloom's Dublin, Gatsby's Long Island, Sutpen's Hundred, Mrs. Dalloway's party. This requires a powerful imaginative effort utterly distinct from what I want to call imaginative verbal flow--one word, line, phrase, sentence following another, creating and compelling its own logic. I do not as yet have a strategy for managing these seemingly competing impulses, but the model that seems to offer the most hope and promise for what I want to do is Woolf. In To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and most of all The Waves she evolves a fictional method in which the logic of verbal flow miraculously and as it were interstitially conjures a living world of people and places in dynamic relation (though notoriously without "action," without anything much happening except, devastatingly, between the lines). Joyce, as brilliant as he is, can seem like a clever schoolboy by comparison.

The anecdote is something I resist in poetry. In prose fiction it interests me, less for its content (action) than for the situation of its speaker: who is telling this anecdote and to whom and with what motives. One valuable inspiration I take from Bolaño is his method of putting anecdotes into the mouths of minor characters which the major characters collect and arrange, or fail to arrange.

Write what you know. If a major public event is part of my fiction, how does this not simply become the more-or-less exciting backdrop for the private events that the realist novel tends to focus on? If I give in to this tendency I reproduce my own American middle-class experience as someone for whom the Events of his time--the fall of the Wall, 9/11, Iraq, Obama's election--were in fact mostly backdrop, experienced indirectly and less pressingly than the events of his private life. This is a damning fact of my life that I can't just run away from; it must therefore be my subject.

Length is a problem. Not the page count, which I still fetishize to a degree: it's all too easy to pile up pages if you show up every day, even if only for half-an-hour. But as the form of the thing emerges I'll have to decide how to bring that form out through significant cutting and rearranging. Right now I must simply go forward: if I write a bad chapter (and I've written many) I can only flag it and go back to it later, if there is a later. But what seems bad now may suit the form that I can't yet see, that I haven't yet determined or that has yet to determine me.

Take a lesson from my daughter, whose experience (walking, talking) is utterly new to her and utterly expected--the form she'll take is utterly determined (she will grow, she will speak in whole sentences, go to school, become ever more distant and independent) and utterly unpredictable. Utter in the sense of ultimate, utter in the sense of speech. I am amazed by the sheer beautiful ordinariness of her life. Let it be so with what I'm writing, too.

Fictional Poets

The most recent issue of Poetry, which for some reason arrived at my house a week later than usual, not only features excerpts from a long and novelistic poem by my benefactor Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, but an essay-review by Brian Phillips, "Fortune-tellers and Pharmacists," of some novels by poets, which begins with a quotation from the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (a character from A.S. Byatt's marvelous Possession): "The difference between poets and novelists is this, that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world." Phillips doesn't quite take this fictional poet's assertion at face value—he'd rather read the novelist's preoccupation with "the world" as fundamentally one of interest rather than activism—but he does seem to accept the fundamental dichotomy it offers. It seems to me that this dichotomy falls apart as soon as it is scrutinized: what are Shelley's unacknowledged legislating poets, in the Romantic view which I think still dominates our poetic discourse, if not imaginary betterers of the world? And it would be obtuse to assert that the likes of Joyce and Nabokov weren't writing "for the life of the language." Nevertheless, Ash's/Byatt's/Phillips' assertion makes for a useful jumping-off point, a view of writing, whether you call it poetry or fiction, as divided into writing about something versus simply writing.

This dichotomy tends to be dialectical in actual practice, but it seems to me to be something of an uneven one: even the most abstract of poets never fully escape subject matter, and most poets, even the "skittery" ones, scarcely wish to; but there are plenty of novels and stories out there which, while of course not escaping language, nevertheless express a powerful will to escape it: to be realized as John Gardner's "vivid continuous dream" or, more baldly, as a film. Even sophisticated novelists like Ian McEwan sometimes seem sometimes to be writing film treatments as opposed to producing a work with its life centered in language. (The fictional experiment I'm currently embarked on tries to confront this head-on by appropriating, for at least one of the narrative threads, the language of the film treatment and of the camera, refusing the narration of anyone's interiority but the imagined audience's.)

What fascinates me, though, is the possibility of the "about" being not the goal for which the writing is a mere means, a vehicle, but simply a way of organizing writing, of fulfilling possibilities for writing that verse seems largely incapable of because the line as unit of utterance calls so much attention to form, without necessarily doing anything interesting with it. (Here I've put Phillips' essay in dialogue with a useful interview in the most recent Denver Quarterly with the poet and now novelist John Olson, conducted by Noah Eli Gordon, in which he talks about why he's become drawn to prose.)

One expedient means of using narrative and prose to without completely losing sight of "the life of the language" is demonstrated by the curious trend of some poet-novelists to write about, well, poets. I've already talked about how liberating it's been to me to see Robert Bolaño produce great fiction in large part by writing about poets and their inevitably doomed attempts to take total refuge in the life of language, forsaking every "about" (By Night in Chile shows us the doom of a poet of the right that attempts this, while The Savage Detectives focuses, if that's the word, on the disappearance of two poets of the Left). Liberating because it offers the perennial permission every writer needs to write about what s/he knows best (without, I hope, falling into the imaginatively foreclosed trap of "Write what you know"). Now Phillips has me interested in reading Forrest Gander's first novel, As a Friend, though from one perspective it couldn't sound less promising: a short and elliptical narrative about the sort of Byronically charismatic poet that, in the abstract, sounds completely insufferable: the sort of fellow invariably described as "smoldering" (or in Phillips' wonderfully overripe phrase, a guy that "seems to exist in some kind of sweaty harmony with the axial lean of the Earth"), in a story suffused with Gothic atmospheres, sex, and suicide. To some people that no doubt sounds like a heady stew, but my first reaction is to say no thanks, I'd rather just read the original Faulkner.

Phillips nevertheless draws me in with his claim that the novel, and the fatally attractive character of the hero, is "explicitly about poetry." The compelling center of gravity that is the book's hero, Les (my guess is that he's based on Frank Stanford, who seems to have exerted as powerful a fascination on Gander as he has on Gander's wife, C.D. Wright), is a representation of the potential power of poetry to be, as Phillips puts it, "a form of supercharged awareness that cultivates the same ethical attention as human relationships." That awareness is extended democratically, one assumes, to people, things, and words; and in Gander's novel, it proves to be more openness than Les can sustain, to judge by his suicide.

Some might judge Gander's focus on the life of a poet to be a severe limitation upon his fiction; if Bolaño escapes similar censure, it probably has to do with the increasingly epic sweep of his works, plus their political content (this is the old problem/opportunity of writers who've lived under oppressive regimes: their writing will always mean differently than that of those of us who've never known anything but Western democracy and first-world comforts). But I see it as an opening, at least potentially (we'll see what I make of Gander's hothouse prose when I encounter it directly), a way to make writing its own "about," while at the same time inviting in enough narrative world (characters, setting, events) to allow the language its range, its fuller life. It suggests to me a possible path for my own writing, for accommodations beyond the lyric or even the prose poem. And if Gander has done it right, there will be enough "about" there to interest readers of traditional fiction as well. Because I'd be lying, as I imagine the poets Phillips talks about would be, if I didn't say part of my interest in fiction wasn't the wider readership it garners.

Really what interests me now is a testing of genre. I really like what Kundera says about the novel, how each must follow its own law, be its own model. This applies to the poem too, of course, and stands behind the long conflict between the adherents of traditional forms and those who stand and shout with Creeley and Chas. Olson that FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. I want something supple enough to include characters and events and essayistic digressions, shards and skeins of beautiful language, autobiography and the totally made-up, surrealism and satire and realism. The shape it all eventually assumes will be called a novel because "novel" seems to be the most capacious literary genre form available. But I will still be trying to maintain, as I try to do in my poems, some balance between my natural preoccupation with language and my life in what we call the world. And then I will say Goe, little booke, and see what others can make of it.

Sinking In

The full impact of winning the Dorset Prize is still making itself felt upon me. Thanks to everyone, by the way, who has written with their congratulations and best wishes. To receive such dramatic and sudden validation for a manuscript, Severance Songs, that I've been working on and believing in (and sometimes failing to believe in) for so long has really turned my head around, and the implications are still sinking in.

One question still to be resolved is, whither Burned-over District? I still like that title a lot, but I now think I came up with it because I needed to find some way to turn a corner, to achieve a fresh perspective on a book that I was in danger of losing in some essential way. Which is a strange way to think, because the book was always the book--it was fine, the poems were fine, maybe better than fine. But you need, or I need, to keep a project like that alive and vital in the mind while it's making the rounds, and it's hard to resist the urge to interpret, to find tea leaves, in the innumerable rejections the manuscript received before that shocking final yes.

I'm sure many poets, and artists in general, struggle with this. What do, what can all those noes mean? From a purely rational perspective, they may mean nothing other than that you simply never can tell what will appeal to a given editor or judge, and of course also that there are always many more high quality manuscripts out there than can be published in a given year. But it's hard not to assume that years of no--or years of coming close, which is almost worse--mean something, and that if you just made the right magical change then you'd somehow persuade the next reader to take a chance on your work. This is mostly unhealthy, and if I've persevered this long as a poet, it's largely because of the habit I've cultivated of sending stuff out, and then when it comes back, simply sending it out again.

But Severance Songs wasn't like that, because I've always had a special feeling for it: a belief that it expresses more consistently and compellingly whatever it is I've got in me to express, while at the same time working with and from and to a live language (a live wire). The right balance, in other words, of construction and expression. And so, as it was rejected year in and year out, I began to despair that it would ever find its readership, except in the piecemeal form it already has.

The Odyssey rewrite, which is the one that Tupelo received, was my latest attempt to open a manuscript that risks hermeticism if only in its quasi-sonnet form; I wanted to make it, yes, more accessible to readers. And perhaps I've succeeded in that and that version will stand. Or maybe the poems themselves were enough--have always been enough--and the lesson I should take from this is the simplest and hardest one to learn: have faith. I'd certainly encourage any younger poets reading this to try and absorb that lesson from my experience. (But also I'd advise them not to put all their publishing eggs in the contest basket. Poets under thirty, go start your own presses right now!)

Not to get mystical, but maybe this manuscript has been waiting for its time. It was written in the Bush years and bears those stains, and for a while I felt almost frantic at the thought that history was passing it by. But maybe only now, in a new and unformed era, can I and others hope to reckon with what it was to feel so fundamentally cut off from one's own decency and hopefulness, and at the same time to be so fully alive with desire.

Thanks again, readers, for the support you've shown me over the years.

Big News

The e-mail has gone out, so now it can be told: this afternoon, I received word from the editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press that Severance Songs—yes, Severance Songs, that's the title of the manuscript that I sent them and it's the title I'm going to stick with—has won this year's Dorset Prize! I am astounded and grateful and overwhelmed. (As if the last day of classes wasn't gift enough!)

I've lived with these poems for a long time, and I can't express how pleased I am that they will finally be taking solid book form, and through the offices of such a wonderful press.

Thanks to Ilya Kaminsky, this year's judge. I hope I'll be half as effective at bringing my poetry to life and to others as he has been.

And thanks to all my readers who've rooted for me and for this project.

As Stan Lee still probably says,

EXCELSIOR!

The Mighty Jungle

That's the song we sing to Sadie every night at bedtime: In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. Kind of a terrifying song, really: that's why it's good. From what I remember, all the best kid songs and stories have a kernel of terror in them.

My contribution, number ninety, to the hundred poems for Obama's first hundred days is now up at Starting Today. A riff on Whitman expressive of the sort of disappointment raised by huge hopes. But the "residual pride" I mention there is unerased. Obama means more to me than his imperfect and sometimes unjust policies—I'm not proud of this contradiction, but I feel it the same way I wake up every day with an optimism unshaken by all the evidence to the contrary my intellect's capable of gathering.

That may be my ultimate project, or at least my ultimate conundrum: reconciling what I know with what I feel. Sometimes I approach this with thoughts of Jameson's "cognitive mapping." Sometimes it's a more furtive and instinctive approach.

The work I'm doing now seems to demand the privacy of infrequent blogging; I don't want to talk about it too loudly for fear of inflating expectations. But of course I'm also just hella busy. The end of the semester is almost upon me, and then I might find myself posting here more often.

Reading a book about May '68 in Paris for my semi-secret project: Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman's When Poetry Ruled the Streets. Nice title, and as a first-hand account with documents it's invaluable, but I find myself in my bourgeois way wishing for something a little more objective. A typical sentence: "Formerly busy bureaucrats, housewives, shopkeepers, and grocery men interrupted the banal process of making a living to find out what life was all about" (29-30). It may very well be literally true, but as special pleading it sticks in my craw. And in spite of that "housewives," so far it's entirely a book about men. Where were the women in this movement? Was there a female equivalent to the book's hero, Daniel Cohn-Bendit? He's often the only named participant, as in this sentence describing a meeting between student representatives and the rector of the Sorbonne: "At midnight, finally, Roche received the representatives, among whom were Cohn-Bendit, three professors, and two members of UNEF [Union Nationale des Etudiants Francais]" (23). Well, there's lots more book left.

In the last weeks of my poetry class we're talking about "substructure," a term usefully descriptive of much of what postmodern poetry gets up to: poems that use the structure of narrative or argument or other modes of discourse without satisfying the usual ends of those structures. It sounds a bit banal when you put it that way, but structures ought to be less interesting than the poems they are capable of producing. When the structure is the most interesting part then you have conceptual poetry, which I'm not uninterested in but it doesn't grab me. There's that head/heart reconciliation project/problem again.

It's time for Sadie's nap, time to luxuriate in these half-disclosed privacies, time to stop writing and plot my return to it.

Writing with the Left Hand

Emily and Sadie are in Ithaca for a week. Solitude like this is luxurious and lonely in nearly equal measure. With my normal social identity in abeyance, and not thinking too much about teaching either, a writerly comportment overtakes me that I remember from my single days. It takes the form of looking for clues: haunting bookstores, reading snippets from several books at once, paging through old notebooks. Trying to find my own secret, like money I myself have stashed between pages.

Gradually I come to believe that poetry and fiction can coexist in me, as a reader and as a writer. A kind of ambidexterity might be possible, but I think poetry will always be for my right hand, an instinctive mode of making text. With fiction I have to trick myself into thinking it's poetry--or critical writing, which through long training has come to seem the second nature to poetry's first.

Looking primarily beyond the American scene for my clues to fiction: Beckett, Borges, and of course Bolaño. At Powells this morning I added Juan Goytisolo to that list; previously I've only read his remarkable and piercing State of Siege, but I was entranced by a few minutes with a copy that I found of The Garden of Secrets and bought it. But I also picked up Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A comedy and also Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance (though what I really want is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, just for the title). I also bought an old Mark Rudman book, By Contraries, and a pristine copy of the Sun & Moon edition of Clark Coolidge's Own Face. Four prose, two poetry: that accurately represents the proportion of my own thought just now, two to one.

But that one! The steady bassline.

This morning on Sound Opinions they were talking about literary rock songs and played one of my favorites while I was browsing at Powells: Blur's "Parklife." "I get up when I want except on Wednesdays, when I get rudely awakened by the dustman."

The dustman. Those Brits. What a way with the language.

Go dogs, go.

Also yesterday picked up for the first time ever a copy of Zoetrope: All-Story, the issue devoted to Latin American fiction. There's something about the Latin American literary imagination that hugely appeals to me right now. Maybe it's just that poets are still of cultural consequence in places like Mexico and Chile. Maybe it's the magic realism thing, the open door to what Kundera calls the oneiric, a necessary component of the novel of existential investigation. I'm also looking for short stories that will upset my expectations of that genre, because that's the form in which I've most often encountered fiction in recent years in places like Harpers and The New Yorker (but also in the occasional "mainstream" lit mag, something like The Kenyon Review), which is above all the fiction that I railed against in my earlier posts. Because short stories, if they're not first and last concerned with "story" in the bourgeois sense those stories tend to be (i.e., preoccupied by the destiny of some more-or-less middle class character dealing with largely private sorrows), can be remarkable, as my reacquaintance with Borges is teaching me.

I blame Joyce, actually, for this prejudice, because his fiction seems to represent a kind of Virgilian progress from apprentice work toward epic. And Dubliners, as perfect as those stories are, have become and remain the prototype of the realistic story, a genre Joyce abandoned. In so doing, he led me into a category error, confusing the limitations of the short story with the limitations of realism. I've let myself be pent in by imaginary boundaries.

Or take this example: one of my students in the senior creative writing class includes both short fiction and poems in her portfolio-in-progress. The prose pieces are remarkable for their compression (which I can't help but think of as a primarily poetic quality), their acuity of observation, and above all for the multiple voices they include, voices with the tang of living speech (she's very adept, this student, at indirect discourse, a mode that fascinates me). Her poems, by contrast, are workmanlike, a little obvious, and rather dull. The epiphany this led me to, in class, was that her stories seem alive because they are fundamentally heteroglossic, whereas in the poems she writes with a unitary voice; it's textbook Bakhtin. Of course poems don't have to be monoglossic, but I'm starting to think that Bakhtin was correct to say that such is their tendency.

My poems don't really resist that tendency: I'm not adept at changing voices and registers mid-line the way Ashbery can. But I will write sections or poems in series that make use of multiple voices, and of course I'm always fundamentally aware of the performative nature of voicing in poems: it's never a naive "me" that's speaking. Still, there's no question but that I'm feeling myself drawn back to fiction for its richer possibilities in the manufacture and mixing of what Kundera calls "experimental selves" but which I might as well call "experimental voices."

Celebrating my temporary bachelorhood tonight with a couple of friends and a screening of Conan the Barbarian. Why ask why.

It's a rich and confusing time.

Kundera's Way

So I'm installing some new bookcases and moving things around and finally beginning to establish some kind of flow to my library, which up to now has been scattered all over the house: fiction upstairs, poetry downstairs, theory books here and there, unclassifiable books all over the place. And one of the books on top of a pile I'm trudging with is Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, a book I read with perfect incomprehension back in my early twenties when I was under the malign combined influence of James Joyce and Raymond Carver (like tomato juice in breakfast cereal). So I opened it, and it turns out that Kundera said much of what I've been struggling to articulate recently much more clearly and eloquently. Take, for example, my complaint about the boring mechanics of fiction in that first post. In an interview that I think originated in The Paris Review, Kundera presents that point as "the will to divest," in an excursus about the Czech composer Leos Janacek:

You know, any musical composition involves a good deal of purely technical activity: exposition of a theme, development, variations, polyphonic work that is frequently quite mechanical, filling in the orchestration, transitions, and so on. These days music can be composed by computer, but there was always a kind of computer present in composers' heads: in a pinch, they could write a sonata without a single original idea, simply by following "cybernetically" the rules of composition. Janacek's imperative was: Destroy the "computer"! Harsh juxtapositions instead of transitions, repetition instead of variation, and always head straight for the heart of things: only the note that says something essential has the right to exist. Roughly the same idea applies to the novel: It too is weighed down by "technique," by the conventions that do the author's work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the characters' lives with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation. My own imperative is "Janacekian": to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic verbalism; to make it dense. (72 - 73)

And this is true for poetry too, of course: the automatism of technique is a risk run by any artist in any genre. What's great about discovering Kundera now is how he brings not just well-tuned grumbling but a positive theory of the novel that opposes that automatism. As I read on, I began to think that there must be somewhere in Roberto Bolaño's library a much-annotated and dog-eared copy of this book, because Kundera's theory of how the novel operates and what its aims are reminds me of nothing so intensely in my recent experience as 2666. Speaking of a novel by Hermann Broch called The Sleepwalkers, Kundera explains that it's in five sections, each of which is in a different genre, and that they are unified not by characters but only by theme. But this isn't quite enough to achieve the "polyphonic" novel that Kundera is aiming at (he's certainly read his Bakhtin), because Kundera demands that the individual "voices" that each section represent be equal—that there be no hierarchy among them, which in Broch he says there is. He calls this "counterpoint," as befits his musical background. Now this corresponds to another frustration I've often felt with modern fiction and film, which is the overweening tendency to center a narrative on a single character to the point where every other character in the story exists only to do something or teaching something to the main character. An egregious and over-the-top example would be a movie like Jerry Maguire, in which every character and scene is oriented toward producing some measure of enlightenment and self-knowledge in the titular character. As a result of my distaste for this egoism, I've long favored ensemble films and TV shows (like Big Love, the season finale of which is happening tonight, and the TiVo is ready to go). Novels don't fall into this trap quite as often, but short stories frequently do, and in most every creative writing textbook I've read the writer patiently explains how the main character has to be in some way changed by the experience of the story, but the other characters, major or minor, do not—they are catalysts for the hero's experience. I find the repetition and perpetuation of this model of storytelling to be wearisome and unattractive. More compelling—though it risks aridity, not to mention pretentiousness—is Kundera's belief that a novel ought to center on a "theme," which he defines quite succinctly as "an existential inquiry," as novels themselves are investigations of Being. That theme, that mode of Being—captured perhaps too schematically in the titles of Kundera's French novels (Immortality, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance) is the "hero" of a Kunderan novel (though he wouldn't use that term), as significant as the fundamental "unity of action" that Kundera also deems a novelistic requirement.

Kundera's theory of the novel has other major touchstones that I find attractive: his (also seemingly Bakthinian) conviction that the novel can never simply reproduce the author's attitudes, political or otherwise, and that this is a limitation (or liberation) intrinsic to the form: "Outside the novel, we're in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge. Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and hypothesis" (78). And built into his notion of "radical divestment" is a rejection of verisimilitude for verisimulitude's sake, and an invitation into the novel of the discourses of dream (oneiric narrative) and essay (philosophy). As Kundera remarks more than once, there's no intrinsic reason for the European novel to have developed as it has; the possibilities inaugurated by a Tristram Shandy could have made it a more various creature, rather than simply going into hibernation until postmodernism came along.

Can, does, American fiction learn from Kundera's poetics? Stumbling on The Art of the Novel has seemingly confirmed an intuition I've been under the sway of for many weeks, which is that I need to look to Europe, to Latin America, perhaps to Asia for inspiration and ideas about fiction, but that the field of Anglo-American fiction for now is lying fallow and has little to offer me. At a time like this in my creative life I just a few touchstones to guide and reassure me as I stumble around in the dark; I need to disconnect from chatter and paranoia and market-chasing nonsense.* Kundera seems to offer one such touchstone, though I have little interest in imitating or taking cues from his actual fiction, and whose oracular tone (in his fiction and his nonfiction) sometimes rubs against the grain of my American ear.

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* Just poking around on the Web I found this article by Kris Saknussemm, who sagely advises would-be novelists to "not spend years experimenting with different forms of writing and various intellectual follies" and unabashedly urges writers to write with marketing first in mind: "In what section of a bookstore or retailer’s website will your book be found? Which authors can your work be likened to? In three sentences or less what’s your novel about?" Oy vey.

Trouble with Trouble with Fiction

My last post seems to have harshed the mellow of a few folks eager to rise to fiction's defense (which I can't take seriously, as it continues in spite of everything to be the dominant literary mode) and others who feel they've caught me being reductive and simplistic (guilty as charged). Of course there's more to fiction than winding up the monkeys, though I'm intrigued by one commenter's remark that my parodic accounting of how fiction works is actually a damn interesting way to produce poems. If the piece came off as snobbery, it can only be so in a bizarre, reverse-psychology kind of way, because in spite of identifying as a poet and finding the world of poetry more engaging and more free-spirited than the market-driven world of American MFA-style fiction, I am in fact something of a frustrated novelist, who never got over having his world rocked by the titanic prose slabs of Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Pynchon, Melville, Sterne, etc., etc. Somewhere in the final section of 2666, Archimboldi succinctly claims that fiction can do everything poetry can, plus a lot more, and I kind of agree with that. At its best, the novel isn't an empty vessel for the kabuki of a writer's career, but a monster (taut or baggy) stitched together out of wildly diverse components, over months and years of obsession and possession.

I resist fiction as I encounter it in the New York Times Book Review and even the New York Review of Books, on the tables of Barnes & Noble and even BookCellar (a very fine independent store in Lincoln Square) and Myopic Books (Wicker Park). It's digestible, it's currency. The bar seems set too low: take, for example, an acclaimed recent novel, Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It's funny and tragic and the writing is inspired at times, and I can see why it got all sorts of attention and won prizes, and yet I judge it a failure, in large part because the title character is a gutless wonder completely unworthy of the attention the novel lavishes upon him—a failure all the more disappointing to this comic-book geek given its attempt to tell the story of a comic-book geek's encounter with the sad, savage history of the Dominican Republic, within the framework of a last-chance-to-get-laid picaresque adventure. Sounds pretty good, but the elements don't gel; instead we get a set of brilliant set-pieces that founder in their attempt to depict the struggle between reality and imagination that Latin American political upheaval in the context of an indvidual's own struggle between his (pathetic, inadequate, fat and loveless) reality and his (four-color, heroic, good triumphing over evil) imagination. But Oscar Wao himself is too flimsy, inept, and undermotivated, barely even adequate as a holy fool, since he himself does none of the investigating of the past that makes for its most gripping segments. He's a small man and the book around him is small too as a consequence. A worthy experiment at least, and oddly or not so oddly similar to Bolaño's overall project of depicting the flight into literature perpetrated by all of his characters as a journey into damnation, a flight from evil that ends, invariably, in evil's very heart.

It's not, ultimately, that I want to privilege language—that that for me is where all the action is, and therefore fiction will usually disappoint me because the libidinal energies of a novel or short story will be sucked up by plot and character, leaving little or no energy or interest left over for the life of words. I'm not necessarily interested in the "poet's novel," of the sort I think Brian Phillips talks about or will talk about in an upcoming issue of Poetry: that is, a novel in which the poetic function of language (to be Jakobsonian) takes precedence over plot and character. It's rather that I'm interested in a "democratized" novel, one in which the beauty and accuracy of the sentences is at least as important as the characters, incidents, and ideas that those sentences build—neither a poetic garnish for the meat of the story, nor itself the main course.

Part of the reason I'm drawn to this is because of my own experience as a writer, which has taught me that the things I write without preconception are going to be stronger and stranger than those I try to control. I want to cultivate maximum extraversion, in Jung's sense—other-directedness—like Jack Spicer, I need a good radio to tune in the Martians with. For me that happens best word by word, phrase by phrase, whereas with plots and characters one starts thinking about probabilities until every sentence feels overdetermined and I'm overcome by acedia and disgust. But of course not every writer is extraverted in that way; there must be many fiction writers whose muses, whose internalized Others, manifest through the constructs of plot and character (consider all the stories writers tell about characters who behave in ways than their creators never intended). But that's what I'm ultimately looking for from a book: not something chiseled and finite and controlled, but a loose baggy monster, a scene of struggle, something that contains more of an author and her universe than her intentions could ever have fathomed when she set out, and quite likely not afterward, either.

It just takes longer, usually, to figure out whether or not a work of fiction is extraverted in this fashion. A poem can give me an immediate hit of the alienated majesty I go to writing for. But when a novel, such as 2666, does accomplish this, and lures me all the way through to its impossible ending, it has the potential to undo and remake me in a way that individual poems can't hope to do.

Do I contradict myself...?

Trouble with Fiction

Here's my trouble with fiction: the labor, or rather the mechanics, required to interest most readers bores me silly. It's boring to read and twice as boring to write. Here is a character, here is a situation and setting for that character, here is that character's desire, here is another character who can gratify that desire but has contrary desires of her own. Wind up the monkeys and watch them dance. Beautiful or accurate prose is an accessory, a garnish; if the author's done his job correctly we'll hurry by all that stuff so we can get to What Happens Next.

I'm never bored when I write a poem: my interest is continually pricked onward by the endless possibilities of syntax and juxtaposition, of wordplay on the levels of sound, image, and connotation. I am often bored when I read poems, but when that doesn't happen I follow the turns of the language with delight, rarely hurrying on in search of the general gestalt—I don't have to, it accumulates slyly, rapidly, by indirection, so that the best poems gradually colonize my consciousness with something we might call worldness, or atmosphere, or mood (the German Stimmüng best approximates what I mean). It will do rapidly and effortlessly what fiction typically labors for many pages to achieve: that sensation of transport that is for me the degree zero of aesthetic experience.

I'm always trying to return to Middle Earth: not Tolkien's much-imitated and abused fantasy world (though that is the archetype) but that sensation of a world suspended between ours and that of pure imagination: a contested space, dialogic, allegorical but with no master key, in narrative but not necessarily of narrative. If I write my way into this space, I must not be bored. But I risk boring the reader in a hurry, and most readers are in a hurry. If I want to achieve what I think it's just possible to achieve, I will do so by inserting fragments of reality into the work, fragments with the energy, the gravity or the magnetism, to pull readers through the text, though not promising to deposit them in reality (or Truth) as conventional narratives do. To repeat the old saying: the journey is the destination. The trick is in making this as true for the reader as it is for the writer.

A Word about Watchmen

It didn't suck, though I wonder what the larger audience, the one not composed of GenX geeks for whom the comic served as a kind of serial Bible as it came out one mind-blowing, paranoia-steeping issue at a time back in the Eighties, could possibly have made of it. As spectacle, it exceeds The Dark Knight, and it's not without a certain visual poetry, particularly in the scenes focusing on Dr. Manhattan, who is gifted with a surprisingly light, properly bemused voice by Billy Crudup. The acting is a mixed bag: Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes gleefully sadistic hay in his turn as the Comedian, while Patrick Wilson is an appropriately melancholy Nite Owl (his hair is perfect). Malin Akerman, best known to me before now for being topless in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, looks the part but her line readings are wince-inducingly bad. As the trailer voiceover man would say, Jackie Earle Haley IS Rohrshach, compelling in his "squidgy" mask and even more compelling out of it. Most disappointing is Matthew Goode as Ozymandias: he gets the character's closeted self-superiority but has nothing of the necessary gravitas. He's a lightweight in more senses than one: it's hard to believe that the Comedian, even in his sixties, wouldn't have been able to throw this Ozymandias out the window instead of vice-versa.

These are quibbles. More disturbing, or perhaps just a sign of the times, is the negation or subtraction of the fundamental humanism of the comic. It's been misinterpreted as the book that cleared the path for "dark" superheroes, alongside the Moore-penned Batman: The Killing Joke and everything Frank Miller's ever done. But what Moore is really about in Watchmen is discovering the human faces behind the masks: as the first Nite Owl writes, ""Yes, we were crazy, we were kinky, we were Nazis, all those things that people say. We were also doing something because we believed in it. We were attempting, through our personal efforts, to make our country a safer and better place to live in. Individually, working on our separate patches of turf, we did too much good in our respective communities to be written off as a mere aberration, whether social or sexual or psychological." Moore takes the heroic impulse as seriously as the pathology, and none of his characters, even the very worst of them, lacks a fundamental humanity. That includes the minor characters, the non-masks: Bernard the newspaper vendor and Bernie the comic-reading freeloader; the compromised psychiatrist Malcolm Long and his wife; and the Nixon of the comic is more than the mad bomber of the movie but shows flickers of introspection and regret.

The subordination of these characters to the masked heroes is an obvious, probably necessary gesture given the task of compressing twelve issues into three hours, but it's a serious loss, made more serious by the director's moronic sadism, his need to upstage the already grim violence of the comic (but it's real, that violence—the people involved suffer, there's nothing cathartic about it). What on earth was he thinking by turning Dan and Laurie's battle with the street gang into a battle to the death? He takes a scene with a wryly humorous undertone—as shown in the final panel of the battle in which the sweat-drenched heroes are shown as it were post-coitally—and turns it into a pointless bloodbath that permanently damages our sense of the fundamental decency of those characters. There are many other moments in which the violence gratuitously goes beyond the comic, giving us a cheap little thrill that empties out the queasiness the original book induced by showing us superheroes attempting murder and rape. The cynicism of this is expressed most succinctly in the transformation of a scene in which Rohrshach outwits one of the thugs who've come to kill him in his prison cell. In the original comic, Rohrshach taunts poor Lawrence into reaching through the bars of his prison cell, Lawrence shouting, "We've got a hundred guys out here that want to kill you. What have you got?" Deftly breaking the guy's thumbs while tying his hands together, Rohrshach replies, "Your hands. My perspective." It's a dryly funny moment that emphasizes what's so terrifying about Rohrshach: not his physicality (he's a little guy) but his black-and-white view of the world. In the film, though, Rohrshach's line is "Your hands. My pleasure." That gives the whole game away. Snyder has traded the comic's negativity for nihilism, and it's too bad.

My dream for a filmed Watchmen always revolved around a mini-series or even a full-fledged series, something that could take the time to find a cinematic means of replicating the multiple perspectives for which comics are ideal. The comic packs almost every panel with multiple storylines, switching between background and foreground, each issue interpolated with texts: an essay on birding by Dan Dreiberg, a corporate report on Ozymandias' toy line, a Playboy-style interview with Veidt in Antarctica. It's a very writerly book, which makes it ever more obvious why Moore has taken his name off the filmed adaptations of his work. I liked V for Vendetta, and I liked this, if only for the set pieces and images that it brought to larger-than-life: Dr. Manhattan's glass palace on Mars, the Comedian leaping down into a rioting mob from the Owlship, Rohrshach's pitch-perfect battle with police. It's a great comic-book movie, but it's a lousy comic.

Teaching Poetry, Tossing the Coin

Heads

Most of my poetry students come to my classes with the goal of self-expression. They come to poetry with their ideas of themselves already formed, complete and entire. They seek to render, boldly or shyly, entirely “as is,” their ideal selves with sentences broken into lines. I do my level best to cut against this late-Romantic expressivist grain with a little old-fashioned constructivsm. I give them exercises and constraints, some Oulipo-inspired (S+7, abecedarian poems, lipograms, etc.) and some homegrown. One of my favorite tricks, usually at the beginning of the semester, is to ask them to write the worst poem they possibly can. The results are hilarious and raise student consciousness about the dangers posed by cliched images, overfamiliar or archaic diction, and clunky end-rhymes. To a greater or lesser degree this opens their ears and their eyes, and they start to think about poetry differently. All along, I’m working cheerfully to undermine the assumptions that they brought to the class, to fight a covert war against poetry as self-expression. It’s not that I’m against it per se, or that I’m on a moral crusade against the small-bore narcissism of Facebook and YouTube—I’m all for narcissism if it leads to interesting work. But I believe that poets, especially young poets, whether they realize it or not, write not to express the self but to discover it: to open the Russian doll of themselves, to give birth to multiplicities, to contain multitudes. Derrida wrote that there was nothing outside the text, infuriating just about everybody; but for me it’s an article of faith, at least as a poetry teacher, that the self is text, part of the larger weave of language, and a poet must find the seamy side of his or her particular embroidered corner and work it.

Tails

All semester, she’d endured the incomprehension of her classmates, while I gently and sometimes less gently tried to nudge her obvious talent toward something I could grasp, something I could recognize. She sank into stony silence while continuing to write baffling little poems, often with the grammar or syntax mangled to a degree that maddens because you can’t be sure if it’s deliberate or a mistake. The images spoke of something subterranean and grand, something having to do with sex, death, alcoholism, and a mother half helpless, half horrifying. They weren’t good poems but they were strong poems. I pointed out her mistakes, tried to encourage her, eventually just tried to avoid discouraging her. At semester’s end, in the artist’s statement I have each student append to his or her portfolio, she complained about the class. She’d felt humiliated by the experience of having her classmates read her poems, time and again, without ever getting them. They kept asking her, as I asked her, for clarity, though we meant different things by this. They wanted to know what the poem was about; I wanted the poem’s components, its lines and word choices, to ring more resonantly. She wrote a cry from the heart: “I don’t want to write from a place of clarity. I want to write from a more private, unseen place.” And reading this, after the class is over, no longer really her teacher, I want to applaud it even as I lament my inability to have seen that private place—not that I would intrude upon it, but that I could have felt its presence more palpably and encouraged its growth and slow revelation. She’s building a self, maybe several selves, maybe her mother’s self in new relation with her own. She’s doing it in language and she believes in the self. She’s a romantic, she’s a visionary, she’s clumsy as all hell. And I can’t, don’t, teach that. I gave her some tools, I got out of her way, but I didn’t get clear, and she didn’t. I hope she will. I hope she won’t.

Say It Don't Spray It: Another Note on Bolaño

Nearing the end finally of 2666, which is bound to leave a lasting and deep impression upon me. One insight I've gleaned about the challenge the novel poses I've obtained from Adam Kirsch's review in Slate of the book: his first sentence ("According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly") goes some distance toward expressing what I and others have tried to say about Bolaño's seemingly un- or antiliterary qualities. But a more profoundly practical insight comes from an Amazon review by one Stephen Balbach—here's the key paragraph:

Bolano successfully breaks one of the basic rules of fiction writing - rather than showing what happens, he tells what happens, like a journalist. Thus he is able to say as much in one paragraph that others take in a chapter. Bolano says as much in 900 pages that might normally take 2500. He does not use line breaks and quotes for dialog (except in book 5), so there are often long blocks of text with no white space - it's a 900 page novel of high word count, but smooth reading. Ironically I never felt I was wasting my time, as if every detail mattered, even though I guess none of it did, all of it did.

This explains to me better than anything else I've read what I find so fascinating and attractive about Bolaño's style. As a teacher of creative writing, I'm constantly admonishing students to show-don't-tell—that most axiomatic article-of-faith in the field of creative writing, heir to Ezra Pound's "Go in fear of abstractions" and as such an exception to the rule of our generally anti-modernist literature: it's the one little fragment of modernism universally adopted and passed on, like a virus. And to be sure, it's damn good advice, easier to offer than to accept, and students prove time and again that telling about or describing characters, thoughts, and themes rather than showing through action is the quickest path to dead-eyed and amateurish prose.

I don't regret repeating show-don't-tell to students that need to hear it, but I am beginning to regret my own internalization of that rule, and to recognize that much of what I find most valuable in writing is in fact in violation of the rule. This is part of a larger or longer pattern of education and Bildung that I've perceived in myself as a writer, which in the past I've expressed as a kind of pyramidal view of Pound's trio, melopoeia (sound), phanopoeia (image), and logopoeia ("the dance of the intellect among words"). That is, it's a pyramid I've climbed as I've become more confident and experienced as a poet. When I was very young, I was fascinated above all by the sound of words, by the way they shift and deform in your mouth through repetition. Then in the first poems I wrote to find readers I was preoccupied primarily with the creation of striking images, and this impulse carried me some ways into graduate school. Finally—it took discovering the Language poets for me to conceptualize this—I became most interested in logopoeia, in the complex and subtle interactions between the connotative and denotative levels of language, a level of linguistic action maybe best described by Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. That's territory at a considerable remove from show-don't-tell, which it required a certain amount of conceptual machinery and experience for me to distance myself from in my poems.

At the same time, I've wanted to try narrative, and that's where show-don't-tell has stymied me, because fiction that tells is lifeless, or so I believed, while fiction that shows bores the pants off of me. What's the distinction between lifelessness and boredom? Well, the former is a corpse, interesting only for its history as something alive: the experience that you try to transform and render in prose like a coroner's report of an autopsy. There's at least a certain honesty to that, but I find most "good" fiction to be bankrupted by its slavish adherence to show-don't-tell: I can't read mainstream short stories or novels without being acutely conscious of the machinery of manipulation that gets vividly realized character X across the pages to ambiguously revealed goal Z—Y being the more-or-less beautiful, more-or-less serviceable and vehicular sentences and paragraphs that even most literary writers hope to disappear (disappear is here a transitive verb, as it is in South America) in favor of what John Gardner, archdeacon of realist fiction, called the "vivid continuous dream."

Bolaño breaks the stalemate. He tells, and yet his prose—no, that's not quite accurate, his narrative—is full of life and interest and urgency, forcing attention to details (which is what I go to poetry for, that slippery savoring recoil from individual words, clauses, lines) through intense compression (thus Balbach's intimation that the novel is "really" 2500 pages long). How does he achieve this? I think quite simply from his adaptation of the hoariest of narrative engines, going all the way back to Oedipus Rex: the mystery. Because each of his fictions ultimately has the obsessive drive of the detective seeking to unravel a crime—a crime that, in the best hard-boiled tradition, is always also an existential or even ontological crime, and not just a murder, though it's murder too, murder most foul and unbearable in its endless iterations, as the deliberate flatness of the prose describing the murders of women in "The Part about the Crimes" makes plain. The novel takes us deeper and deeper into multiple mysteries mysteriously aligned—the parallel hauntings of the literary critics, the mad Mexican professor, the black reporter whose nom de plume is Oscar Fate, the savage naif novelist Benno von Arcimboldi whose story I'm currently unraveling, sure to leave a morass of threads in my hands at the end without anything resembling a resolution, and yet bound to satisfy through its truth content, the respect Bolaño holds for mystery, a mystery that he throws everything he's got at (and he's got a lot) and which still resists him, and us, and that's its truth, though it takes us close into its heart, and wraps us and holds us there, and will not be forgotten.

If I write narrative prose, then, I must write it like poetry, so that the details matter. But neither can I tie those details together—compress them—in a way that falsifies them. The third, most difficult thing is to coalesce them with an urgency that gets fully transmitted to the reader—otherwise I'm doomed, as so many are doomed, to produce writing that only a handful of other logophiles will be willing to parse. Not the worst fate if that's the price of integrity; but Bolaño shows—I hope he shows—another path.

Pastiche of Greatness

I don't hear a lot of live music—I'm lucky to make it to the movies once a month or so with a 13-month-old—but on Friday night Emily and I were in the kitchen and heard Tony Sarabia on the radio talking about Juana Molina in such glowing terms that, in a thoroughly uncharacteristic moment of mutual spontaneity, we got online and ordered some tickets for her show on Sunday night at the Morse Theater and then lo and behold were able at the last minute to get friends to babysit so we could actually see the show.

Molina is astonishing. A former sit-com star from Argentina, she's been making intricately layered music as a solo artist for many years—Sarabia says for the first time she's touring with a band, though it consists of just two other people. She reminds me a bit of Theresa Andersson, whom you can see in this video doing a one-woman band routine a bit like Molina's, making use of digital looping to layer one sound atop another. Molina, though, makes much heavier usage of synthesizers, as well as natural and ambient sounds (her album Son, integrates birdsong and a fireworks show into the music); she used to be quite folky, but the music now has a harder and to me more interesting edge. Her new album, Un Dia, creates a vivid soundscape in which the lyricism of her voice struggles to harmonize with sounds I associate with the hyperintensity of the global urban mediascape. I hear elements that remind me of Laurie Anderson circa Big Science, Björk's more experimental pieces, and riffs from the darker side of Radiohead's moon.

Semi-legible photo of Juana Molina and her band at the Morse Theater on Sunday, February 22, 2009.

Hearing her live was a sublime experience like I've rarely had a music show: the reason I rarely go to concerts is that I'm more of an earbuds kind of guy, and part of me has never understood the value of paying a lot of money to watch a bunch of people do not terribly visually interesting things on a stage while playing a rougher version of what they did in the studio. But Molina, ably backed by a slyly charismatic bass player and a drummer with a sunny vibe, was mesmerizing as she constructed the intricate loops of her songs. Again and again, she created a sound that was the whole foreground— the melody—only to succeed it with a new melody that harmonized with the old sound, now in the background, so that as each song went further and deeper it was like wandering in Baudelaire's forest of correspondences. It was an absolute triumph of pastiche, the form that excites me the most in music. And it makes me think about pastiche's role in poetry, as well.

Pastiche is practically a self-criticizing concept in the wake of Jameson's attack on it: a "blank parody" that produces sensation out of juxtaposing unlike discourses while detaching that act of collage from the political and historical energies that would give it meaning. This is the nutshell critique of post-Language poetry: that poets in their wake have adopted the disjunctive techniques of their predecessors while walking away from the ethical commitments that drove the LangPos to develop those techniques in the first place. The pop music equivalent is sampling, and if I were more knowledgeable about it I could probably draw distinctions between those artists who intend some kind of witty commentary by their appropriation of a riff originally belonging to Motown or acid rock or what have you and those who simply want a quick meaningless hit of the familiar to make their song more marketable. The big musical equivalent to the poetry example is probably the long history of the appropriation of African-American musical tropes by white artists; sampling just speeds up a process that began long before Elvis opened his first can of Brylcreem.

Molina seems a bit different. That may partly depend on my ignorance: I don't know anything about Latin American pop, and she may very well be appropriating and riffing on musical discourses that I just don't know about. But I don't think so: I believe instead that her juxtaposition of patently synthetic sounds with the music of the lyric subject (the voice, the acoustic guitar), and of course her crossbreeding of these (harmonizing with herself, rendering her own voice mechanical) turns a constructivist collage technique toward expressive ends that include the personal without being confined to it. That is, as with much postmodern poetry and music, I get the news of our/my condition from her music: I am transported to where I'm already standing, the half-virtual half-real circumstance of a citizen of the digital age, clapping his hands in the overloud dark.

How weird to come out of this ecstasy into the debased discourse that can produce something like David Orr's piece on poetic greatness in the most recent Sunday New York Times. Parts of it are valuable, like his indictment of "greatness" as a tone, "grand, sober, sweeping — unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical," a willed nationalistic somberness that reminds me of nothing so much as Yorick's suspicion of "gravity" ("a mysterious carriage of the body invented to cover the defects of the mind") in Tristram Shandy. But even as he attacks this notion of greatness he still longs for greatness as such, weirdly oblivious, among other things, to the masculinist presumptions behind such canon-making gestures (his discussion of Elizabeth Bishop is egregiously untheorized in this respect). It has something to do with his desire for more rigorous criticism: if we keep our eye on the greatness ball there will be less mediocrity, less log-rolling. But I'm not sure we can so easily separate "greatness" as a category from the pompous discourse that Orr tries to criticize but ends up entirely wrapped in, like a second-rate Superman's cape.

I recognize a little of myself in Orr's point about our veneration of non-American writers, whose greater political risks confer automatic laurels—isn't part of my fascination with Robert Bolaño based on his apparent greatness, even though the whole drive of his work deliberately dead-ends in the lethal cul-de-sac of literary greatness? But that's another post. Mostly I find Orr's focus on poets as vessels of "greatness" bizarre and unuseful. The music of Juana Molina remind me that what matters to me in art is an individual's multi-voicedness: heteroglossia without all the plot and other encumbrances of the novel being dragged along behind it. And this gets to another thing I love about Molina: she's a comedian, and there's humor, wit, and goofiness behind and beside the sublimity, which I probably would not have apprehended without seeing her live. She doesn't melodramatize herself and her music, but the music isn't "small"—it contains multitudes. That's what I'd like my poetry to be like: something supple and with real reach, and power without taking itself too seriously—without playing the game of self-canonization.

The Stentor Speaks

Worth reading: an article in the Lake Forest College student paper about Christian Bök's performance last week:

Noise, sound, or poetry? LFC reacts - Arts and Leisure

Report from the Festival, Part 2

Happy birthday, Charles. Happy birthday, Abe.

Jessica Savitz reading.

Tuesday evening

Jessica Savitz's reading at 8 PM in Meyer Auditorium is not only her Lake Forest College debut, but her debut period—she's never read her work in public before. It's a remarkably assured debut, in which the poems from her manuscript Hunting Is Painting ebb and flow together in a kind of continuous dream language, while images—family photos, the photos of a family friend who served in Vietnam, the work of a photographer named Roxane Hopper, and paintings by Allison Hawkins—flash by on the screen behind her:



What I love about Jessica's poetry is how purely beautiful it is, while at the same time there are hints and peeps of the grotesque and violent shimmering between the lines, especially in the poems that deal directly with animals and the animalistic. I also like what the images do in the text, particularly the photographs, which are never simply illustrative but instead reframe the sometimes elliptical poems on the tense axis of personal history. I confess that when the manuscript arrived last year, I was put off by the largely amateur quality of the photos, but I've since been won over—I like the roughness, the collage-quality, they bring to the poems. A cautionary tale against letting some corrupt idea of "professionalism" prejudge my experience of poetry.

Wednesday

A morning of administrative tasks followed by an afternoon and evening of increasing poetic intensity. Three of the four Gnoets arrive on campus about an hour before showtime—they are Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, and John Tipton (absent was Jon Trowbridge, the Google engineer who actually wrote the Gnoetry software). Really lovely guys I'd recommend to any campus looking to shake some cages in the nicest possible way. After some technical difficulties they are able to demonstrate the Gnoetry machine in action. What is Gnoetry? Well, you can read about it at some length here, but the quick and dirty version is that the software uses an algorithim to analyze one or more texts (generally public domain stuff readily available on the web, ranging from the novels of Charles Dickens and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe to scripture and Eliza Poor Donner Houghton's firsthand account of the fate of the Donnner Party). It can then transform elements from those texts (and you can select what percentage of your poem that you want to draw from each source text) and create a formal poem: haiku, renga, blank verse, and other forms in which syllable-counting is involved.

The results can be eerily high in aesthetic quality: a poem extracted from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" is appropriately haunted and blood-splashed as it worked through phrases like "The scarlet horror" and the oddly terrifying ending phrase, "But the bolts." The audience of mostly students is mostly scandalized by the apparent vandalism to human ingenuity offered by machine-assisted poetry, but they show signs of being intrigued as well—one of my poetry students writes afterwards that while she felt that in some way Gnoetry was destructive to poetry, she also appreciated its democratic dimension—offering a potential path for non-poets to create poems. I wish the Gnoetry software was online, but there are apparently considerable technical difficulties; I imagine they'll manage it someday.

Three of the guys of Gnoetry—Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, and John Tipton—demonstrating the end of poetry as we know it.

A slightly less blurry shot of Gnoetry in action.

After the Gnoets do their thing and a bite to eat at the dining hall, it's time for the main event: Christian Bök and the Lake Forest College Student Sound Cabaret. The Cabaret consists of eight Lake Forest students (Zachary Engel, Alexandra Fisher, Roland Davin, Max Glassburg, Will Stafford, Carl LaMark, Emily Capettini, and Nicole Nodi) who've been working with Christian for the last several days on a performance of Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate," but they precede this with an "uncreative writing" demonstration: each has chosen a non-literary text to perform for one minute's duration. The results are pretty hilarious as the students perform a hysterical prologue to what I assume is an anti-abortion video; a caption from an art history textbook; the text from the back of somebody's State Farm insurance card; instructions on how to create methamphetamine "for informational purposes only"; and other bits of anti-literature.


The LFC Student Sound Cabaret's "uncreative writing" findings. Stay tuned for what I call Max Glassburg's "State Trooper State Farm" routine at the very end (around 5:36).

I'm even more impressed by the performance of "Ursonate": after fewer than three days of rehearsal they've produced a tightly woven and integrated performance of complete nonsense that manages to be lyrical, funny, and dramatic by turns:


The LFC Student Sound Cabaret performing an excerpt from Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate."

After the Cabaret sits down, Christian steps up to the microphone and does his thing. Photos and video can't capture the electric effect his performance has on an audience: this is the only poetry reading I can remember in which each poem is followed by spontaneous applause. He reads some of the dirtiest bits of Eunoia, sings an alien hymn that he wrote for Earth: Final Conflict, and performs anagrams and dadaist ditties. But what will stay with me the longest is the aria he performed from a Canadian avant-garde opera, The Princess of the Stars, written by R. Murray Schafer.


Christian Bök performs the Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy from R. Murray Schafer's opera The Princess of the Stars.

The opera is apparently staged on the shores of a Canadian lake at 4 in the morning. The audience sits on shore, while the performers are in large canoes on the water. Christian played the villain, the Three-Horned Enemy, a dragon-like monster that abducts the eponymous princess, which apparently takes the form of a gigantic (10-foot) puppet that Christian has to manipulate from his canoe while "singing." The Enemy's aria consists of a series of earsplitting shrieks, growls, and moans that rip through the audience like lightning-tipped spears; one young woman next to me flinches at every new torrent of sound. Sublime.

Part of the score for the Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy.
After the performance there's a reception with more guacamole than anyone can eat, and a remnant band of students plus myself, Christian, and creative writing instructor and playwright Lucas Krueger retire to Boomer's in the student center for a beer. Christian goes into more detail about his experience performing in the opera and fields the students' questions—pitched midway between incredulity and awe—with aplomb. A family man, I leave them to their 10:30 PM confab and drive home.

Report from the Festival

Man in motion: Christian Bök leads Lake Forest students into the thickets of Schwitters' "Ursonate."

Sunday evening

I pick up Christian from the airport and take him to the college. We discuss Canadian politics, the rise of Michael Ignatieff, and the general absence of charismatic personages in both the political and poetry worlds in Canada at the moment. We pick up Stephanie Strickland at Glen Rowan House on the campus and go for dinner to Casa de Isaac in Highwood—a great little Mexican place owned by Orthodox Jews, so the place is closed on Shabbat. I am chagrined to realize the place has no liquor license, but we still enjoy our food. Stop off for a drink at the rather stuffy Southgate Cafe in Lake Forest, where Christian dazzles us with the complexity of his drink order, though it seems to amount to a dry martini with a slice of cucumber instead of an olive or twist of lemon.

Tucked into a corner of the bar I mostly bear witness to an animated debate between Stephanie and Christian about the role that myth might play in reconfiguring our culture's ability to understand reality (with a special emphasis on ecology) in terms that aren't stranded by the personal, the experiential, our very grammar's tendency to reduce our understanding of the world to the action of individual agents upon individual objects. Christian rejects myth as something dangerous that's already been tried; Stephanie is more pragmatic and thinks we need to hook into existing structures of feeling (my phrase, or rather Raymond Williams' phrase, not hers). Their disagreement seems to center on whether myth can be non-religious or not: Stephanie seems to say it can, Christian seems to say it can't. I lean in Stephanie's direction, but am unhappy with her example of Buddhism as a philosophical framework that gets us away from subject-object (or I-It, I suppose to adapt Martin Buber) thinking. If we really want to be pragmatic about getting people to imagine the mess we're in, and the sheer complexity of the systems that obtain, we're going to have to work with material more or less indigenous to North American culture. But maybe I'm being too narrow.

One drink's all I have time for, as a family man, but we nevertheless manage to close the place down at 9 PM. Lake Forest nightlife ain't much. I drop them off at the guest house and drive home.

Monday

Christian is met for breakfast by four student volunteers, one of whom wrote me afterward to report that Bök blew his mind. Well, that's why he's here. Then he goes off to visit music professor Don Meyer's senior seminar with apparently similar results. I spend the morning dealing with administrative details, then meet up with Stephanie for lunch at our surprisingly good dining hall (I think "surprisingly good" ought to be part of its name. I had stir fry). Afterward we do an a/v check in the auditorium where Stephanie and and our Plonsker writer-in-residence Jessica Savitz will each do their things on Tuesday: Jessica's incorporating some striking photos and images into her reading, while Stephanie of course is a full-fledged multimedia poet (evidence here).

More administration, then I walk over to Glen Rowan to pick up Christian to take him to the first meeting of the Sound Cabaret Workshop he's leading as Artist-in-Residence. I stick around to see how it goes; the workshop turns out to be a lively rehearsal of an excerpt from Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate," to be performed chorus-style by the students in the workshop. They take surprisingly and immediately well to shouting things like Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu and rakete bee bee? rakete bee zee. (I think here of Khlebnikov's definition of Zaum as "words in no known language that nonetheless have something to say.") If language is a virus, nonsense may be one of its most infective forms. They'll perform their piece before a hopefully large audience on Wednesday evening.

After the workshop we meet Stephanie and Jessica for dinner in the dining hall (pesto chicken pizza with bacon on top, just because) along with English/Theater prof Richard Pettengill, who's having the indefagitable Christian to visit his evening class afterward. Jessica and I opt to attend the Lake Forest College Writing Club's reading, which is alas poorly attended, but the readers get off some good things. I'm pleased to see that the univocalic constraint I gave my poetry students has infected some club members who are not in the class, and marvel as always at how restricting yourself to one vowel invariably produces lively, surprising, pleasure-inducing poems.

Home in time to see the latest Bachelor deny one of four identical females a rose.

Tuesday

Meet up with Stephanie and Christian to take them to my morning poetry writing class, in which they each give short presentations and take questions. Christian has ten simple rules for writing better poems, which I'll print here:

1. Use only concrete, physical nouns.
2. Choose the most specific possible nouns: "convertible" or "Mercedes," not "car."
3. Verbs must be active. Avoid "to be" like it was Ebola.
4. Make the subject of the verb do something that subject doesn't normally do. Not "the chainsaw cuts" or even "the chainsaw shreds" (a student-suggested improvement) but "the chainsaw stencils the silence" (Al Purdy).
5. No adjectives!
6. But if you must use an adjective, it should not normally apply to the noun it modifies.
7. No adverbs!
8. But if you must use an adverb, it should modify its verb in a surprising or incongruous way.
9. Never compare anything to anything else (i.e., death to similes—no "like" or "as"). Juxtapose directly.
10. The things you juxtapose should be wildly unlike each other. Not "The moon, a face" but cummings' "the moon rattles like a piece of angry candy." Yes, that breaks the simile rule.

These are very fine rules, I think, though there must always be exceptions. It will be interesting to hear from those students who resist this constructivist approach to poetry. Stephanie followed up with her own list, this time the eleven rules or principles of electronic literature, or elit. They're part of an essay of hers on the subject that's about to appear over at the Poetry Foundation, so just keep checking there for it. I can remember a couple of them: the first is elegant in its simplicity: "If you can print it out, it's not elit." She got everyone thinking, I believe, about how writing is and must change in a digital age. In a sense, the books we read are digital imitations of books: electronically typeset rather than letter-pressed, a reproduction of the product of older technology. The illusion of the "page" produced by a word processor such as Word similarly demonstrates how chained we continue to be to a past era of information. Stephanie's point about this is not that books should or will disappear, but rather that we have yet to develop an electronic literature that fits its medium; her point of comparison is the early days of TV, in which all the programs resembled filmed plays. It took decades for television to evolve forms of storytelling that make maximum use of its particular resources while minimizing or eliminating remnants of the theatrical (though it seems, with the advent of wide-screen television, to have moved much closer to cinema in recent years).

Stephanie Strickland takes questions after her presentation of hypermedia poems on Tuesday afternoon.
After the class and a quick lunch, in which we are joined by by my colleague Davis Schneiderman, it's time for Stephanie's noon performance/demonstration. Attendance is solid and my feeling is that the audience was impressed and interested in the digital poems she shared with us: Vniverse, The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, slippingglimpse, and Errand upon Which We Came (all viewable at her website, though some of the pieces, like Vniverse, can only be viewed on a PC). Most fascinating to me was her explanation of how slippingglimpse uses the movements of water—images captured from the Maine coast—to synchronize the movements of words and phrases from the poem. As she puts it, the water "reads" the poems in this way, creating a dialogue between human and nonhuman languages; there's also a dialogue or dialectic in the ways in which the stylized configuration of the phrases and their overlappings and movement can lead one to read the image and watch the text. Stephanie and Christian are both skeptical, I think, of my notion of postmodern pastoral (which I talked to them a bit about), and of "nature poetry" in general; but I think I could make some interesting hay with slippingglimpse's staging of what Strickland calls "coreading."

After that Stephanie, Christian, and I meet with my advanced writing seminar—a small group of seniors, most of whom are more interested in prose than poetry. That doesn't stop us from having a fascinating conversation about changes in publishing, the tension between commerce and art, and the different levels of "alienation" (a student's word) that different sorts of texts conjure (the implicit continuum begins with J.K. Rowling and ends, I suppose, with Schwitters). And then Stephanie goes off to write and Christian, whose energy continues to humble, goes off to his workshop and I am here in my office writing this.

Tonight Jessica's reading; tomorrow, Gnoetry, the Sound Cabaret, and Christian himself. The Festival is, I think, well-launched.

The Lake Forest College Poetrypalooza

Image of Hotchkiss Hall on the Lake Forest College campus, where most of the events listed below will take place.

Poetrypalooza! That's my secret alternative name for the Fifth Annual Lake Forest Literary Festival, scheduled next week as an extremely rich appetizer for the AWP conference taking place in downtown Chicago that weekend. We have a heckuva line-up of great poetry scheduled, with an special emphasis on performance, hypermedia, and poetry off the page. Click the link or read on for an annotated schedule of events.

Monday, February 9

7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Reading by the members of the Lake Forest College Writing Club.
Come hear what our students have been up to, creative writing-wise.

Tuesday, February 10

Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Reading/performance by computer artist and poet Stephanie Strickland.
This should represent an extraordinary collision of hypermedia and the numinous (her latest book, The Red Virgin, is about the French feminist poet and philosopher Simone Weil).

8:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Reading by Jessica Savitz, our first Madeleine P. Plonsker Writer in Residence
Jessica's manuscript of poems, Hunting Is Painting, won the first prize ever to be awarded, and it's an auspicious debute: a strange and marvelous exploration of the boundaries between animality and art. It will be published by Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books.

Wednesday, February 11

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Gnoetry, a Chicago-based collective that explores collaborations between poets and computer programmers, demonstrates their work.
Should be very entertaining as the Gnoets take cues from the audience to create a computer-assisted poem right then and there.

7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
The Lake Forest College Student Sound Cabaret performs, followed by a reading by Artist-in-Residence Christian Bök in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel.
The keynote event of the festival and a must-see (or rather, must-hear).

Thursday, February 12

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Panel discussion by Festival participants.

7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Three younger poets—Brian Teare, Karen Leona Anderson, and Richard Greenfield—will read from their work in Meyer Auditorium.
These three poets are all under 40 and have all written extraordinary first books:

- Brian Teare’s The Room Where I Was Born won the Triangle Award for Gay Poetry and his new book, Sight Map is due out this month from University of California Press.
- Karen Leona Anderson’s forthcoming first book, Punish Honey, mixes lyricism with scientific investigation.
- Richard Greenfield’s A Carnage in the Love-trees was named a Top Ten University Press Book by BookSense in 2003. His highly anticipated second book, Tracer, is forthcoming from Omnidawn.

All festival events are free and open to the public and take place on the Middle Campus of Lake Forest College in Meyer Auditorium, Hotchkiss Hall. (The exception is the Wednesday night performance by the Sound Cabaret and Christian Bök, which will take place in the Chapel.) The festival has been made possible by the support of the Lake Forest College Department of English, the Dean of the Faculty, the Artist-in-Residence Committee, the Center for Chicago Programs, and the American Studies Program.

Hoping to see you there! And if not, perhaps I'll see you at or around AWP the following weekend.