All Duncan, All the Time

It is strange have been drawn so deeply into the work of a poet whom I found all but illegible until recently, except for a very few poems whose rhythmic or pellucid qualities overcame for me all the occult mumbo-jumbo, those which seemed to embrace a more tangible (that is, social) reality as opposed to wispy intimations of a Theosophical/Gnostic/neo-Platonic nature. That is, I appreciated the anthology pieces--"A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar," "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "Poetry, a Natural Thing," and most especially, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," which moved Emily and I so much that we incorporated into our wedding ceremony. But most of the time, I found Duncan's embrace of the mythic and vatic embarrassing where it wasn't incomprehensible.

The mythic dimension in the other modern poets I've loved has always raised for me the question, Bug or feature? In a 1989 interview with John Tranter, Michael Davidson makes a very intelligent distinction between his generation of Language poets and the concern of Duncan and others with "the numinous"--that sense that true reality was something unavailable to common sense:

I guess the idea of the numinous was translated in my generation into the idea of the ideological. The ideological was also something that inhabits everything, and produces things. Ideology is something that emerges in the unconscious to create, in a sense, a kind of political unconscious. And so, while the gods may be dead, but the ideology is there, and that is an informing power in poetry. And you can play with that, and you can work with that. That’s the difference, I think, between Duncan’s generation and ours.

This transference, if you like, from the numinous to the ideological takes on special resonance when processed through Louis Althusser's definition of ideology as that which "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (that's from "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"; a less-often noted but just crucial corollary to this statement is, "Ideology has a material existence"). Instead of the innumerable deities (Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, and so on) that populate Duncan's poems, the Language generation has capital, history, language, and other such theoretical-institutional entities whose reality is determined by their access to the social, rather than to some transcendent realm (though Bruno Latour is useful here in pointing out how, in what he calls "the modern Constitution," the social is itself often constructed as transcendent body).

Whatever names we give to the gods, the strategy of Marxist poets is, according to Davidson, fundamentally isomorphic with that of Duncan: both kinds of poet are "trying to establish relationships to an economy that you can have no control over, yet negotiate with it. But negotiation is another metaphor for a kind of field process poetry, it is your ability to deal with a power that is larger than yourself." This is how I've managed to read poets like Pound and Yeats and Stevens in the past, translating their mythic figures (whether adapted from neo-Platonism, the Celtic Twilight, or invented by the poet--the Canon Aspirin, et al) into nodes in a larger field of force that mapped or inscribed that poet's sense of the social totality.

Duncan, however, won't play along with this strategy; or rather, to be Latourian again, the cost of translating his mythic gods into ideological entities is too high a price to pay--you lose the poem. At the same time, he's wilier than he's been taken for, I think, in terms of his own stance toward myth. Remember that he didn't come to the occult like most people do, because their given gods have failed them: he was born to it (adopted by Theosophical parents who chose him according to his astrological chart) and, I believe, had something of the same stance toward his parents' mythological worldview as Joyce came to have to Catholicism. That is, as a narrative, a force, whose power and significance operates almost independently of one's belief in it (if anything, from a rationalist perspective, it appears that the more outlandish a religion's tenets are, the more unshakable its adherents seem to be).

Joyce is not a bad point of comparison to Duncan, actually, who references him with some frequency: one can read Ulysses as an attempt to broaden and complexify the field of reality available to an Irishman, not by "Hellenizing" Ireland as Buck Mulligan purports to do, but by forcing Catholic dogma, the liberal (Jewish) enlightenment, and Homer to interact with and press upon each other, no one field of numinousness more authoritative than any other. (It's a little bit like Bakhtin's idea of the dialogic novel, except it's the contention of mythic systems rather than persons that matters--or you could turn that around and say it's the person-ization of myth that gives Joyce's novel its matter.)

The gods are real, then, for Duncan; no one of them, however, is THE God. As he writes in The H.D. Book:

I have written elsewhere that I am unbaptized, uninitated, ungraduated, unanalyzed. I had in mind that my worship belonged to no church, that my mysteries belonged to no cult, that my learning belonged to no institution, that my imaginatin of my self belonged to no philosophic system. My thought must be without sanction.*

But Duncan is no polytheist: his Nietzschean feel for the eternal return leads him to construct a notion of myth by which certain eternal forces recur throughout history under different names and with different valences: "Christendom," for Duncan, seems to be a repression of primordial forces in Greek myth (Eros chief among them), forces which reincarnate in the transgressive "spirit of romance" of the troubadours and in heretical notions of Christ as Eros. Romance gets born again contra the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, and the flame goes on for Duncan in the twentieth century, transferred in a "rite of participation" to his hands from the writing of H.D.**

I see now that it's this sense of the historical in Duncan, however eccentric or esoteric, that has opened the doorway to my being able to read him in truer sympathy than I've managed before. It's also a question, in my case, of maturity: I am less embarrassed now by Duncan's indulgence in "magick" because I am less embarrassed by my own taste for high rhetoric, not to mention the kitschy pleasures of Dungeons and Dragons (reading Duncan is like leafing through the old Deities & Demigods), prog rock, tarot cards, and the other emblems of an adolesence spent searching for alternatives to an oppressive reality that did not correspond to the truth of who and what I felt I was or could be.

So I am newly (re)attuned to Duncan; and exploring, for my article, the rich and unexpected possibilities for a poetic ecology that his writing, in its radical inclusiveness and shrewd troubling of the immanent/transcendent distinction, may have to offer us. Something richer, and darker (Duncan's Freudianism, his nigh-Lacanian sense of the Real as something obscured from any single position or vantage point, his sense of disequilibrium and parallax), close to what Timothy Morton calls "dark ecology," is offered by Duncan's poetics, a greater intensity than what more literal notions of nature writing seem capable of bringing to bear.

But this is also personally important to me, a Rubicon in my own sense of poetics. Back of my long infatuation with Language poetry and the Frankfurt School is this older sense of reality as something occulted, and the vocation and ultimate high of poetry-as-making: world-building, cosmology. For this poet, Duncan raises the stakes immeasurably. And I stand willing to declare myself, though no initiate, as under the spell of Romance.

* I am perhaps unjustifably amused by the resemblance of this list to the contemporaneous litany of No. 6 in The Prisoner: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own."

** "Rites of Participation" (as the most widely distributed chapter of The H.D. Book was called) are NOT rites of initiation: again, one must read closely to discover how Duncan is never in fact guilty of what Olson accuses him of in "Against Wisdom as Such," that is, of "buying in" to a myth or belief system; he's too much the anarchist for that, too much the universalist.

Printer's Row and Other News

In the very near future: Come hear me read from Severance Songs on Saturday, June 4 at high noon on the Arts & Poetry stage at the Printer's Row Lit Fest in downtown Chicago. I'll be followed by a poet named William Olsen, reading from a book called Sand Theory. Details here.

Speaking of Severance Songs, I'm very pleased to be able to point you to this review from Publishers Weekly that came out a little while back that calls the book, "Gorgeous, almost insistently allusive, and only infrequently overelaborate." I think I'm going to start marketing a new energy drink with that description.

In the not-quite-as-near future, people in or near Evanston can hear me take part in the RHINO Reads series at the Brothers K Coffeehouse, 500 Main St., on Friday, June 24 at 6 PM.

In the near past, there's this: a video of me reading as part of the Revolving Door series curated by Jennifer Steele and Jamie Kazay. The readings take place in a beautiful gallery on South Halsted not far from UIC, so this is a series you should check out. Thanks to Jamie and Jennifer for a great night!

I might need to rethink that shirt.

In other news, I have spent the whole of the month since Lake Forest College held its commencement ceremonies, setting me free from teaching responsibilities for a staggering eight months (for I have a fall sabbatical, let bells and clarions acknowledge), immersed in the very weird poetry and prose of Robert Duncan. For I am pursuing an intuition that Duncan, in his visionary anarchism, might offer a model for postmodern pastoral and ecopoetics that, in spite or because of his tendency toward abstraction and myth, has more power to bring about intimacy with otherness (what Timothy Morton calls "the ecological thought") than either empirically inclined poems (cognitive mapping of the eco-totality) or Heideggerian Romantic quietism.

You can see that spending so much time with Duncan has already had a deleterious effect on my prose style. But I am tied to the mast and must stay the course.

The Uncanny Relation: Modes for Ecological Art

Alastor (Moody)

Timothy Morton has been very usefully tracking two major possibilities for ecological art over at his blog Ecology without Nature: the relational or constructivist versus "object-oriented ecological art." He goes into more depth on this division in a new essay, "The Dark Ecology of Elegy," which you can download and read from a link available here. In a move I find fascinating for its literary-historical depth, he aligns the constructivist mode of eco-art, which is fundamentally an art of cognitive mapping, with Wordsworth; the other mode, which confronts and tarries with the uncanniness of objects in their absolute otherness from us, seems to be aligned with Keats and Shelley at their strangest and most hallucinatory (as demonstrated by his rather brilliant reading of Shelley's "Alastor" as an inverted Wordsworth poem). He presents the choice starkly: "Here's the deal: do you want a detailed advertorial, a network dense with relations? Or do you need a shocking encounter with an alien entity, opaque yet vivid, illusory yet real, already there?"

In American poetry, the Wordsworthian mode manifests in the field poetics that begins with Whitman; gets developed with wildly differing ideological orientations by Pound, Williams, and the Objectivists; is newly theorized for the postwar era by Charles Olson; and manifests today in the work of what we might broadly term the empirical postmodernists. Kristin Prevallet's 2003 manifesto, "Writing Is Never By Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Poetics," is a touchstone document for this branch of ecopoetics, dedicated explicitly to "the pursuit of rationality" in an increasingly irrational age.

The postmodern mode of Shelleyan excess or the Keatsian uncanny has not to my knowledge been fully theorized within an ecological context; but certainly the "necropastoral" for which Joyelle McSweeney has become a forceful advocate is one of its strongest contemporary manifestations. If asked to find a lineage for this writing in American poetry (yes, I realize how provincial I'm being, but that is my area of expertise), I would pick out Emily Dickinson (as so often the great foil and other for her contemporary Whitman), Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Alice Notley. (You will notice this second lineage is more heavily weighted toward femininity and queerness, which is probably not accidental; I would also emphasize the importance of Rimbaud and Baudelaire.) The revelatory encounter with uncanny objects, bodies, and drives dominates this poetry, which is much harder to reduce to a program or politics than the relational mode; this is no doubt the core of its strength and necessity, in Morton's view.

It's much easier therefore to understand how the poets in the first group might be understood as ecopoets: the first group is obsessed with the objective and universal, with seeing even the poetic subject as just one more point in the force field free of what Olson calls "the lyrical interference of the ego." The second group's strangeness and capacity for critique derives from what its return to the Cartesian divide between subject and object (what the Shelleyan conceptualists Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman might be referring to with their cute new term, "the sobject"), which renders both positions strange and (in a literal sense inverting what Heidegger means by "dwelling") unsettling to each other.

My wish, as when presented with any dichotomy, is to dialecticize these poles and to ask whether Morton isn't being hasty when he disparages the Wordsworthian collage-mode as "database art," "viewed from a height and posted to teach you something you already know." Partly this is because I don't believe that most of us "already know" how dire the ecological situation has become; I think most us, I would even include myself, are climate change deniers in the sense that we have not adjusted our comportment in any meaningful way to suggest that climate change has become an Event in the Badiouan sense, something marked as true by our fidelity to it, a fidelity which must be lived on an almost pre-cognitive level.

That's why I return to the mark of the uncanny in Prevallet's mini-essays. While most of these essays are on the subject of poetics, the first one takes the form of a paranoid rant against "the age of the engineered apocalypse," which in the face of the sheer irrationalism of Bush's American flirts explicitly with conspiracy theory, so that Prevallet all but comes out as a 9/11 "truther." Prevallet's rhetorical and passional excesses in the first mini-essay are not easily subdued by her declaration of fidelity to investigative relational poetics in the second: "Instead of buying gas masks and digging underground shelters (or moving to Canada), I turn my rage and confusion towards poetry, the unacknowledged legislation of worlds unacknowledged, to reveal both systems of knowing (content) and structures of ideology (form)."

Prevallet's swerve toward and then away from conspiracy theory marks her, as does the little "Defence of Poetry" allusion, as a secret Shelleyan (himself a secret Wordsworthian, as Morton hyposthesizes in his article). Conspiracy theory, after all, is a mode of cognition nearly identical to that of a Wordsworthian, relational poetics concerned primarily with connecting the dots and teaching its adherents what they already know (just as the release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate will only deepen the certainty of the most hardcore of the so-called "birthers"). It's only in its conclusions (conclusions which are never concluded but which always restart the obsessive retracing of the conspiracy's contours) that conspiracy theory differs: it offers not relation but revelation, with all of the religious and apocalyptic overtones that that word brings to bear.

Conspiracy theory, while formally identical to the practice of field poetics, is therefore more truly aligned with the Shelleyan uncanny than what I'd like to reterm the Wordsworthian rational sublime. The systems "revealed" by conspiracy theory are not purely relational but themselves become uncanny objects of fascination. An uncanny poetics of relation, therefore, does not somehow rise above conspiracy theory by its claims of greater rationality; instead it offers what Morton, writing about "Alastor," calls "a noir ecology, in which we admit to the contingency of our desire rather than chastening it into invisibility" ("Dark Ecology" 268).

In a film noir there is always an investigator or detective who is "wised up," who "knows the score," but who then discovers in the process of his investigation his own profound implication in the evil that he has uncovered, an evil whose hold on him goes far deeper than whatever rational choices he has made. There is no explaining away the evil and no justice is possible in the ordinary ethical sense; the detective's ethics stand with (or against) his ultimate prototype, Oedipus, in choosing to live with his new, unbearable knowledge.

So I am not so much disagreeing with Morton as wishing to refine his conclusions and to determine possibilities for a noir ecopoetics, which does not sacrifice or abandon the relational-rational, but uses collage poetics to bring the uncanny and excessive "evil" of nature/the body/the drives into consciousness and then beyond consciousness. Otherwise I fear that the shock of the uncanny is doomed to become just another aesthetic effect, a delicacy for the strong-of-stomach and the connoisseur. There has to a be a role for the rational, even a humbled and supplemented rationality, in a poetics that is nonetheless not instrumental but re-opens the foreclosed world.

The Anti-Anti-Accessible versus David Orr, or, Poetry as Perversion

To me talking/writing about poetry is not about getting it, the one kernel of meaning; it’s about expanding my ideas of it, of opening the poem up, bringing in new connections. The poem doesn’t need to “resist” full interpretation because there is not complete interpretation – interpretations expand my idea of the poem. Joyelle placing Plath in her necropastoral space is very insightful, but it doesn’t close down my reading of Plath, it makes her poetry even more interesting.

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

The kind of poem I want to read can seem mysterious and riddling when I’m twenty, and much less mysterious and riddling when I’m forty, but retains the capacity to astonish throughout. It is an adventurous poem that reflects the unknowable adventure that is life, and is full of the knowledge that only coalesces in hindsight, with experience. I, personally, don’t think of that as code. But if anything that interferes with literalism, that invites interpretation, or god forbid research, is figured as code, well then. I’m on the other side of that line.

The first quote comes from the latest in a series of posts by Johannes Göransson over at Montevidayo on the question of poetry and accessibility; the second from Ange Mlinko at Harriet. Both are part of a larger conversation sparked by the publication of David Orr's book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr, who reviews poetry for The New York Times Book Review, has produced a book seemingly designed to irritate actual poets and lovers of poetry (the unlovely but accurate phrase "poetry's stakeholders" comes to mind). Its efficacy in attracting more general readers to poetry remains to be seen. There are as of this morning 26 Amazon reviews of the book, mostly favorable, but as one reviewer I think rightly remarks, reading the book feels like stepping "into the middle of someone else's conversation." Another writes, "I would recommend this book highly for somebody who is 'sort of' interested in poetry." This "sort of" is at the heart of the book's difficulty, as it tries to stake out a middle ground between stakeholders (the denizens of what Orr calls "The Fishbowl") and the indifferent. Does this "sort of" really exist?

The question that the quotes above are concerned is one plaintively posed by another of Orr's Amazon reviewers: "Should poetry be such demanding, strenuous exercise?" Göransson's and Mlinko's answers to that clearly fall into the "Yes" category. Johannes has been unfolding an attack on the fundamental anti-intellectualism of Orr's approach in terms of the resistance he sets up to the idea that poems are there to be interpreted; they are instead there to be uncritically "loved," a sentimental approach curiously akin to the American discourse around children and childrearing, as if poetry cannot risk having its self-esteem bruised by critical reading. The problem with this of course is that we are never completely outside interpretation, just as we are never completely outside politics: the claim that poems need not be interpreted simply sets up the existing interpretive framework as the unmarked case, a "good" universal approach next to which all other approaches are particular, "academic," and "bad."

The general thrust of Johannes' critical enterprise is toward multiplicity: "interpretations expand my idea of the poem," for the idea of the "closed" singular interpretation of any given poem (what it "really means") is the mirror image of the notion that poetry is a beautiful mystery that we murder to dissect. Both ideological moves function to place poetry outside the bounds of what we commonly call "life": poetry becomes a standing reserve, a supplement to ordinary and multiple practices of living and reading, that is at once supremely important ("beautiful") and supremely irrelevant and unnecessary ("pointless").

Ange Mlinko, meanwhile, asks what's so bad about seeing poems as encoded or as riddles to solve. I've been guilty of this move myself; just the other day, I tried to encourage a couple of creative writing students who are both talented writers but skittish when it comes to poetry by telling them not to worry about meaning. Which leaves them with what? they might reasonably have responded. Sound? Mood? That's not nothing, of course, but they're right to be dissatisfied, and it's unreasonable of poets to expect that readers aren't going to at least initially approach poems as they would any other instance of language: as bearers of information and significance. Mlinko stands up for what we might call the erotics of encoding: solving riddles is a basic human pleasure, as the legions of folks devoted to Sudoku and crossword puzzles will attest.

It's instructive to compare the general thrust of Orr's book to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay, "Against Interpretation," which ends with this demand: "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." The erotic is a mode of the aesthetic in that word's oldest sense: aiesthesis, perceiving through the senses. Sontag attacks the priority that hermeneutics gives to content, what a poem "says," in favor of a critical focus on form: "a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art." That word "loving" is crucial. As Johannes put it in his first post on this subject, the stance that Orr seems to represent holds that the poem is there to be loved: "It’s uncorrupted by interpretation." The trouble here may be less the insistence on purity than on the hollowing out and de-eroticizing of "love"; a false antimony is set up between love and criticism, if not love and interpretation. Sontag, as I read her, is not against interpretation so much as she is against the rush to interpretation; the form of an artwork is there to capture our senses, to tarry with and not be taken for granted (in this respect Sontag's "form" is indistinguishable from Shklovksy's ostranenie).

Orr's version of this argument is immeasurably weakened by an absence of a sense of the erotic. In his account the pleasure provided by poems, even in his most moving example (of his dying father's fondness for a line of Edward Lear's), is fundamentally infantile. More seriously, neither he nor Sontag seem to allow for the possibility of an erotics of interpretation itself. It's not Johannes' ripest language, but when he writes that "interpretations expand my idea of the poem" I imagine a certain tumescence; when Mlinko writes that "the kind of poem I want to read has a snaking logic of underground caves and aquifers," here too I see an embryo expression of the erotic pleasure to be found in interpretation. That is, the polymorphously perverse pleasure of more, of the multiple, of the ever-ramifying codes and contexts that interpretation gives birth to over time. Ange suggests that poems become less "riddling and mysterious" with age and experience, but the reverse can be as true.

Put, finally, another way, I think as I do so often of Keats' definition of negative capability: "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." I want to revise that slightly so that the "without" becomes a "before," and so that the "irritable" takes on a meaning closer to that of an itch that must be scratched, whose prolongation through Mysteries is itself a kind of pleasure, jouissance. And it's this erotic tension that the blandest theories of poetic engagement, like Orr's, sacrifice on the altar of accessibility.

"If they don't need poetry then bully for them. I like the movies too": so saith Frank O'Hara. Let's remember that for O'Hara "the movies" are not simply a Hollywood commodity (though they are, gloriously, that) but a sexual cruising ground (c.f. "Ave Maria"); by implication and association then poetry too is eroticized as something more than a matter of taste: it is a need, in the deep blues sense of, "I need you baby." It is a site productive of desire, perverse, leading nowhere but (pleasurably) astray. Whatever else it is, it certainly isn't "good for you." And it may only be in embracing its perverseness that poetry has any chance of obtaining the kind of purchase on its readership that I or David Orr might wish for it.

Radio Poetry

Friends, readers, countrymen: lend me your terrestrial rabbit ears! For I am going to be interviewed live sometime between 9:15 and 10 AM CDT tomorrow morning (that's Monday, April 18) about my new book Severance Songs by host Alison Cuddy on WBEZ's daily newsmagazine show, Eight Forty-Eight. More than a little excited; more than a little nervous. Tune in! Those of you not in the Chicago area will be able to listen to a recording via a link that I'll provide later.

Happy Pesach! What will I say?

UPDATE: Find out what I said by clicking here.

fallow writing writing

It's late in the semester and reserves are low. When I read for replenishment, instead I am stunned into what seems, by comparison with what I'm reading, the impoverishment of my own imagination. Lately it's Proust and Alice Notley.

Proust stuns me with his impossibly long and elegant sentences (in the C.K. Scott Moncrief translation), which unlike the recursive sentences of Henry James are laden to the brim with sensuous images. Proust's narrator is incapable of recalling any detail about his childhood in Combray without tumbling into unending digression about what, precisely, a given place or relationship felt like. There's a curious kind of paganism to this, visible in his long description of the church in Combray, which creates reverence in the narrator not because it offers any sort of channel to God, but because it grounds and orients, like Heidegger's Greek temple, the whole village and countryside, from which scarcely any vantage point can be found where the church steeple is not visible (and if you're too close to see it, you feel its presence). The procedure of the novel is of course located in the famous image of the madeleine, a humble sensuous object from which almost literally the whole seven-volume opus pours at the end of the first chapter or "Overture":

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

It's a search for lost time, to be regained or recaptured only after many hundreds of pages have been written; but it's also a novel about its own novelness, about the desire to write one and to become a writer. This is all familiar enough, I suppose, but up to this point I hadn't had the patience for Proust, hadn't seen what all the fuss was about; the prose seemed lugubrious and the book plotless; in narratological terms it's all catalyst, no kernel. (A kernel is an event which produces a turning point, in which an alternative to what has gone before arises; a catalyst amplifies or delays the action.) But now it seems the drama of writing, of sentences foraging for the precise texture of experience, is enough to hold my interest. The book has many other pleasures to offer in terms of realism: sharply drawn characters and character types, gentle to savage satire of French provincial mores and the fascinations of aristocracy, etcetera. But the pathos of going back, trying to give life to what's been lost (chiefly, I sense, the loss of the mother, whose life-giving goodnight kiss is the inaugurating event or non-event of the narrative), for this reader cannot be decoupled from the pathos of wanting to write. Proust, in short, is good if intimidating company for the would-be novelist; the very endlessness of In Search of Lost Time reassures me in the perpetual middle of my own manuscript that the search of and in language can be the point, can almost be enough.

So while I continue to pick at my novel there's no poetry to speak of, and in this silence poetry becomes more important and more impossible. I picked up Alice Notley's latest, Culture of One, and am almost nauseated by the sheer wild verve of the thing—"a novel in poems," it says on the back cover—it's almost too rich to digest. Notley's writing is unclassifiable, it's neither lyric nor narrative; the individual lines seem casual, even sloppy, and yet poem by poem I am overwhelmed by the sheer imaginative power she brings to bear on what seems at root a simple story about a lone woman, Marie, creating a "culture of one" (cleverly opposed to monoculture) somewhere in the desert Southwest, building and rebuilding a hut (Heidegger's temple again, or a parody of it) that some kid burns down as repeatedly, while a grocer and compulsive liar named Leroy, a dead woman named Ruby (wonderful noir name), and a pop star (Marie's daughter? Ruby's daughter), named Eve Love exist in some kind of triangle with her (I'm only a quarter way into the book so others might emerge). But what can you make of, what do you do with, writing like this?

The Book of Lies

Do you believe this stuff or is it a story?

I believe every fucking word, but it is a story.

Don't swear so much. Aren't we decorous? What

is a culture?

It's an enormous detailed lie lived in, wrought beliefs,

a loving fabrication. What's good about it? Nothing.

It keeps you going, but it institutionalizes inequality, killing,

and forced worship of questionable deities, it always presumes

an absolute: if no other an absolute of intelligence and insight.

The lore of certain people—men—what you're referred to.

This is Marie, thinking, though she wouldn't use this language;

this is also Eve Love thinking, though she's young enough

to bang her head against the wall thinking it: Marie would rather

reinvent the world for herself. This is Leroy thinking, who knows

more about lies than anyone. This isn't Mercy, or Ruby, or

the Satanist girl, or the girls, or their fathers thinking.

The Satanist girl almost thinks this; but she can't love

skepticism. It would make her cry. I, I don't think.

Except as a device. I think thought is a device. To get there.

Ruminative, essayistic, unliterary, clumsy: then it swerves, then it swerves again. Because these are poems they permit perhaps more easily than prose a kind of prismatic relation between the speaker and the characters, who occupy and then get kicked out of the "I" position, so that all and none of them speak. It's the purest sort of poetic heteroglossia (a contradiction in terms, some would say) that I've encountered. The imaginative freedom on display here is breathtaking, and hard-earned. It's not imagination in the sense of invention, but in the sense of being willing and able, line by line and poem by poem, to seemingly do anything, go on your nerve, say "fuck it," break rules I'm usually scarcely conscious of when reading "innovative" poetry (you won't find here many of the postmodern tropes and devices catalogued to devastating effect in Elisa Gabbert's essay, "The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry," found in The Monkey and the Wrench; you can read about these "moves" here). It's highly rhetorical, it's more about the sentence than the line, as befits a novel. It accumulates moods; reading it is like watching the pattern of light and shade all day in the desert, on a mesa, as clouds move overhead, and then someone drops something from a height and it's messy: a watermelon, a human head. I can't feel this freedom for myself, the freedom of what Notley calls disobedience, but I need it. Even if I am a man.

So I Think I Have Nerves of Steel?

Sad you missed Charlie Sheen while he was in town? Well, have I got another trainwreck for ya:

The next installment of THE2NDHAND’s Chicago Nerves of Steel reading series, taking reading to new levels, skyrockets April 5 after 8 p.m. at Hungry Brain on Belmont.

Featuring:

**A Public service announcement by Bitches Gotta Eat blogger Samantha Irby
**Poet Joshua Corey
**Stand-up by Carter Edwards of the Upright Citizens Brigade
***& Novelist/Fiction Madman Davis Schneiderman

With music by Katie Knaub (expect more Harold Ray duets here) and Save The Clocktower, the latter a Chicago-based trio that merges electronics, live instrumentation, vocal harmonies, and catchy songwriting to create a pop/electronica blend. Check out their sophomore album Carousel or find them on Facebook.

Plonsker Residency Deadline

Hey! Are you a brilliant writer of innovative fiction or hybrid prose under 40 who has yet to publish a book? Why then haven't you sent a 30-page excerpt of your manuscript in progress to be considered for the fourth annual Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize?

The postmark deadline is April 1. Winners receive $10,000, a two-month residency in Glen Rowan House on the campus of Lake Forest College, and (subject to approval) publication of their book by the &NOW Books imprint of Lake Forest College Press. There are no formal teaching duties associated with the residency. And there is no reading fee charged.

Click the above link for more details, and apply!

Hybrid Pastoral

Reading Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and coming to certain provisional conclusions about his argument's implications for postmodern pastoral. The three spheres of critique or knowledge that Latour touches on are "naturalization, socialization and deconstruction" (5), which broadly correspond to the major divisions or disciplines of knowledge: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and literature/humanities (he also suggestively describes the realms proper to each sphere as "real, social and narrated" [7]). Each sphere of knowledge is carefully segregated from the others. And pastoral, it seems to me, can be an apt term for the utopian move away from the social: a retreat into the poetic to be sure, but Latour's configuration makes a pastoral of science visible as well.

At the same time, this attempt to segregate out the realm of social/political power, to enter into a zone of pure relation with language or with the nonhuman, inevitably has its social and political dimension. The renunciation of "politics as usual," is one of the strongest moves available to power—look at how Qadaffi is hanging on in part through his claim that he can't renounce power because he already has. After the coup that ended the Libyan monarchy, Qadaffi says, "I returned to my tent." (The infamous tent, incidentally, is a signifier of Qadaffi's Bedouin authenticity, and is also a zone in which he enjoys special sexual privileges—a perverse fulfillment of the pastoral escape from (sexual) mores tied to (re)production.) His unnamed sovereignty depends on its removal from the political and social sphere that he has done his best to eradicate, into the religio-pastoral narrative of "The Green Book."

Latour argues that the "work of purification" assigned to the division between humans and nonhumans, culture and nature, is made possible by the "work of translation" of hybrid networks—though to confront that connection between incommensurate ontologies is to undo the "Constitution" or "separation of powers" that is Latour's metaphor for the paradoxical configuration of purification and hybridity that produces modernity. I find this extremely useful in terms of explaining the potential of a postmodern pastoral, taking "postmodern" now in the literal sense Charles Olson gives it as what comes after the modern. Pastoral as traditionally conceived is a work of purification that is clandestinely also translation. Consider how the exiled Duke Senior in Shakespeare's As You Like It makes "sweet... the uses of adversity" by literally translating the nonhuman world into the terms of culture:

And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing. (2.1)

"'This is no flattery,'" the Duke says to himself about the elements, "'these are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.'" While many readers interpret this moment as Lear-lite—the Duke is persuaded by the elements that "what I am" is a mere mortal, no longer a king with two bodies but body alone—one could just as easily read the line, especially when juxtaposed with the "tongues in trees," as the restoration to the Duke of his royal identity by the nonhuman discourse of nature. The supposed purity of the non-verbal, non-social discourse of "feelingly" restores the Duke to his Dukeness. And certainly the course of the play suggests that the pastoral sojourn of the Duke and his court will return him to a sovereignty strengthened and refreshed by his experiences in the natural world.

Pastoral, then, is always a hybrid discourse. But its hybridity can be mystified or exposed, as a building's facade can conceal or reveal its structure. The postmodern pastoral that concerns me, a configuration of which will be presented by The Arcadia Project, exposes and plays with the dialectic of purification and translation, domination and emancipation. The latter refers to one of the central double-binds of modernity, by which domination of nature is supposed to lead to the emancipation of human beings-—yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer amply demonstrate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the domination of nature ends up reinscribed in social relations. This is the severed Gordian knot, in Latour's language, that we must "retie," imagining anew the collective that includes humans and nonhumans, with "society" describing "one part only of our collectives, the divide invented by the social sciences" (4).

Since poetry has as its very ground the imagination of subjectivity (on the individual/lyric level but as importantly the collective/epic level), poetry is uniquely well suited for rethinking questions of collectivity and representation. At the same time, poetry is the most "networked" form of literary discourse, given how a poem mobilizes its elements (lines, words, phonemes, morphemes) along multiple axes of sound, image, connotation, and allusion. Pastoral, that fusty old genre, becomes the deterritorialized territory most useful for thinking these simultaneously. Putting the complex into the simple, indeed.

Finally, it's surprising and pleasing to re-encounter the language of the "hybrid" in the context of poetry, no longer as the anemic hodgepodge of epiphanic lyric and Language poetry that is our period's most familiar style, but in this more rigorous and urgent sense. If "American Hybrid" represents precisely the sort of unmarked move that consolidates power beyond politics (or in the literary context, beyond criticism), the hybridity of postmodern pastoral represents something more volatile, because it absorbs the task of critique, or translation, into and against itself, producing in the most interesting cases poems that destabilize and subvert the subject-object positions that sustain domination.

Busy Week Ahead

Two upcoming events to alert you to:

The Dust of Suns by Raymond Roussel

When: Friday, March 5 and Saturday, March 6 at 8:00 PM; Sunday, March 7 at 3 PM
Where: The Charnel House, 3421 W. Fullerton St., Chicago, IL

French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) faced almost universal incomprehension and derision during his lifetime for works that neglected traditional character and plot development in favor of the construction of elaborate descriptions and anecdotes based on hidden wordplay. While the premieres of his self-financed plays caused near-riots, admirers included Surrealists Andre Breton and Robert Desnos. who called The Dust of Suns (1926) “another incursion into the unknown which you alone are exploring.” Roussel never enjoyed the posthumous fame of his hero Jules Verne, but he has exercised a powerful fascination upon later writers including the French Oulipo group, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault and Michael Palmer. New editions of his novels and poetry are forthcoming this year from Princeton and Dalkey Archive.

Like much of Roussel’s writing, The Dust of Suns has a colonial setting. Against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle French Guiana, a convoluted treasure hunt unfolds. The Frenchman Blache seeks his uncle’s inheritance, a cache of gems whose location lies at the end of a chain of clues that includes a sonnet engraved on a skull and the recollections of an albino shepherdess. Meanwhile, his daughter Solange is in love with Jacques—but all Jacques knows of his parentage is a mysterious tattoo on his shoulder…

This script-in-hand performance of Roussel’s play, directed by John Beer with design by Caroline Picard, features an array of Chicago writers and artists. Performers include: Larry Sawyer, Sara Gothard, Travis Nichols, Monica Fambrough, Jamie Kazay, James Tadd Alcox, Suzanne Scanlon, Joshua Corey, Jacob Knabb, Jennifer Karmin, Samantha Irby, Lisa Janssen, Brian Nemtusak, John Keene, Judith Goldman, Jennifer Steele, Francesco Levato, Nicole Wilson, Jacob Saenz, and Joel Craig.

773.871.9046

ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE.

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

On Saturday, March 12 at 7 PM, please come to The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square for a launch party for my new book Severance Songs. A celebration of the sonnet, my reading from the new book will be interwoven by readings of new and classic sonnets by a cavalcade of Chicago poets: Chris Green, Simone Muench, Tony Trigilio, Jennifer Karmin, Ray Bianchi, Kristy Odelius, Robert Archambeau, Larry Sawyer, Davis Schneiderman, and Joel Craig.

As its name suggests, the Book Cellar is both a terrific independent bookstore and a vendor of fine beers and wines, so it's sure to be a rocking time. The address is 4736-38 Lincoln Avenue and the phone number is 773.293.2665. Hope to see you there!

Theses on Visionary Materialism

1

That poetry is a mode by which words are made present as things without ceasing to refer.

1.1

The rivalry between signifier and signified, the reader's being brought to that boundary, is a poem's happening.

2

That poetry is a subset of imaginative literature, in which the operations of the reader's imagination are brought to bear on the rivalry between mimesis and rhetoric, thingness and speech.

3

That there is reading and there is beholding or apprehending, and prior to both is judgment or a question. What kind of writing is it?

3.1

What kind is writing?

3.11

Men judge of things according to their mental disposition, and rather imagine than understand. (Spinoza.)

3.2

Reading or apprehending, what belongs to the reader has the name of an action: wreading.

4

That the boundary between word and thing, signifier and signified, rhetoric and mimesis is not a boundary in the sense that it indicates the presence of a dialectic.

4.1

For these seeming binaries are two halves of the word, or the sign, or the poem, that is itself multiple, more than halves/halved.

4.2

The boundary that makes a binary is itself an unbounded territory, a Möbius strip along which the wreader travels.

4.21

A reader of text cuts the strip, like the Gordian knot, an Alexandrian-interpretive expression of her will to power.

4.22

A beholder of the textual object cuts himself, an abject if not resentful abdication of interpretation to the mute power of things.

4.3

The boundary as Möbius territory is the monism of reading. Spirit and letter are not in dialectical tension but simultaneous positions on the strip. Line by line, word by word, the preponderance of spirit or of letter in the wreader's experience is purely local and momentary.

4.4

Poetry's monism does not predicate a holistic or organic relation between signifier and signified, poet and poem, word and Word, man and nature. It is possible to be visionary without being Romantic.

4.41

There are men lunatic enough to believe that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony. (Spinoza.)

5

That poetry is vision.

5.1

The vision is not the whole. (Adorno: The whole is the untrue.)

5.2

Vision bears the possibility of contact with the real.

5.21

Not in the sense that vision pierces the cloud of unknowingness, the cloud of ideology.

5.22

Not in the sense that vision splits the world into real and unreal, or the phenomenal and noumenal, or the real and the imaginary, or earth and heaven, or earth and world.

5.3

Vision is in history and is partly conditioned by it. A condition of its truth.

5.31

Vision does not mystify.

5.32

Vision does not unify.

5.321

The eyes of Robert Duncan did not focus on a single object.

5.33

Vision is local and material and historical. And:

5.34

Vision is a traveler.

5.4

Vision is natural insofar as nature is historical (evolution).

5.5

Vision binds the two halves of the Möbius strip. But in this case, two halves do not make a whole.

5.51

The two halves are like a whole in the sense that they offer the completest possible range of poetic action. Wreading.

5.512

But see 5.1, above.

5.6

The two halves make up a "whole" that is multiple. More and less.

5.61

Less is also more.

5.7

Truth is in the eye that measures this excess.

5.71

The eye that follows the line.

6

That vision is cognition, peculiar to poetry, or to any mode that presents an only apparent singularity.

6.1

A singularity of which we ask, What kind is writing?

6.2

Or which asks of us, What do you want from me?

6.21

Poetry is supposed to know. (Lacan.)

6.3

Wreading interrogates its own demand. That the poem be a whole.

6.31

It tarries, not just with the negative, but with the "more" a poem is or indicates.

6.4

Vision splits the poem, or is split by it. But is whole on the other side.

6.5

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such / many as a mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of. (Olson.)

6.6

But the impasse is this: poetry is only partly rhetoric, only partly mimetic. It wants to be part of the world yet exceeds it, quite literally, by halves.

7

That vision exceeds, by its nature, vision is excessive. The more than whole is the true.

7.1

The truest poetry is the most visionary, the most excessive.

7.11

This includes the excessively impoverished.

7.2

The baroque and multiple / the abject less-than-one: these are the modes of vision (of excess) of our age.

7.21

Poetry exceeds (succeeds) silence. (In Beckett, in Celan.)

7.22

Poetry exceeds (succeeds) its speaker. (In Rimbaud, in Pessoa, on Black Mountain, in Yasusada.)

7.3

A climate of vision includes poem, poet, wreader, and world. All instances of the local and historical in a relation that exceeds, without transcending, the local and historical.

7.4

A climate of vision is impure, may blur and mislead, must not depend on the esoteric.

7.41

The esoteric often mistaken for excess; the former at best a mode of the latter. It should not be the only mode.

7.41

That sense of the real, heightened, comes in meeting the Möbius strip. Negotiating excess without managing or recuperating it. Poetry is not an economy of anything but energy, potential, methodology.

7.411

The work of the morning is methodology; how to use oneself, and on what. (Olson.)

7.5

Eco (oikos, home) is prior to nomy (management, method, rule), as it is prior to logos.

7.51

What's prior divides the apparent whole of the poem into the multiple.

7.52

Home is an excess, like Being, and vision is a possible relation. It takes (more than) one to know (more than) one.

8

That poetry makes no thing happen.

9

That no plus the thing makes the world.

Goe, little booke

So excited was I over the creative and intellectual implications of what I saw at the AWP that I forgot to mention the more elemental thrill of seeing and holding my book for the first time. It has not yet been officially published - that will happen on March 15. But I am planning a book launch event at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, Chicago, on Saturday March 12 at 7 PM. It's going to be a celebration of the book and of the sonnet, that persistent deformed and deforming little form, which my book plays with.

Persons interested in a review copy or events or suchlike can please backchannel me (corey[at]lakeforest.edu) or click here to contact Tupelo directly.

Excitable Retrospect: AWP 2011

Back this afternoon from a condensed experience of DC, since I wasn't able to get there until Thursday night, like many many others affected by the snow. I've been going to this thing for the better part of a decade, now, but I'm still often surprised by how energized I feel afterward (and exhausted). Part of that is social: connecting with old dear friends whom I see infrequently enough that to encounter them is to reflect intensely on what you've been doing and who you've become since you saw them last. In my case that meant the usual suspects, Brian Teare and Richard Greenfield, who are beginning to enjoy a smidgen of the success they deserve (you owe it to yourself to click away right now and purchase a copy of Brian's rendingly beautiful new book Pleasure). But I also connected with older friends, from Montana days and even quite a bit earlier (weirdly, Marie Gauthier, the director of publicity for Tupleo Press, remembers meeting me when we were both in high school). And on my first night there I had a long chat with Evan Lavender-Smith that was the beginning of the weekend's personal theme: reconnecting and reintegrating old interests, selves, and projects. It's all of a piece: the poems, the criticism, the anxiety, the curiosity, the fiction. Which is another way of saying that I'm beginning to accept that I'm not getting any younger and the ride, though one-way, is radically cumulative. Nothing is lost, only discarded, and not even then.

Looking now at a bigger stack of books acquired at the book fair than I'd planned on acquiring; it's all the fault of Coffee House Press, which had a Crazy Eddie moment on Saturday and offered up everything at the table for $5/copy. Wishing it were as cheap and easy to buy time to read them all in. Another highlight include the "Leaping Prose" panel put on by Peter Grandbois, Carol Moldaw, Kazim Ali, and the grande dame of paratactic fiction, Carole Maso. The conceit of the panel was taken from Robert Bly's 1975 book Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (a book I remember taking from my mother's bookshelf, very much part of my inheritance from her). It's not always easy for me to take Bly seriously; I've never thought there was much bottom to the "Deep Image" movement, and even the subtitle is cloying, shirking the real work of building a theoretical argument (and this is leaving out the whole unfortunate Iron John business). But Grandbois and the others did a good job of adapting Bly's "idea" about associative leaps in poetry as a technique fully adaptable to the task of narrative. There were moments when I thought I detected a tone of--well, not sanctimony exactly, but a little bit of eat-your-vegetables from Grandbois' part of the presentation. When avant-gardistes attack the "flow" of the "fictive dream" of conventional fiction as requiring the reader to take a passive, consumerist stance toward what they read, wanting to "escape" and be "swept away" (and I'll admit I've used this rhetoric myself in the past), there's often a degree of implicit Puritanism. As I grumpily Tweeted at one moment, "I don't want to read paratactic writing because it's good for me. It must offer pleasures as acute, if less voluptuous, than hypotaxis." Certainly it's clear to any reader of this blog that I take pleasure in writing hypotactic prose, and that I love an elaborate sentence, sometimes to the point of straining punctuation and syntax. At any rate, I seem to be at a point conducive to the questioning of pieties and bonnes pensées. The convert's fervor that I felt ten years ago when I was discovering the New Americans and Language poetry and cultural materialism for the first time is beginning to fade.

Grandbois did make some casually provocative assertions: he said that modernist fiction was preoccupied with epistemology--how we know our own lives--whereas the leaping prose he wanted to sponsor is ontologically oriented. Shit happens, and the reader is left to orient herself in relation to the narrated events or elements; literature becomes a mode then of object-oriented ontology. That's all familiar enough for me to question it, less from the point of view of logic than from my own attractions and compulsions. I've been reading more and more Robert Duncan, and am becoming fascinated with his arguments on behalf of rhetoric--the ways in which he complicates a legacy of modernist poetry that, it seems to me, is precisely opposed to Grandbois' claims about modernist fiction. Pound, the Objectivists, et al. Their preoccupation with clear hard images, aversion to "dim lands of peace," and so on, assert an ontological desire, a notion that a poem like The Cantos can somehow accumulate enough significantly arranged details to spontaneously combust into a new metaphysics. Duncan's ontological yearnings are grounded in something no less wacky, but harder for we postmoderns to swallow: myth and the esoteric. Rhetoric, though: I'm interested in it, I'm less persuaded than I've been in the past about modernist insistences on poems as objects and things and machines made of words. I had gone so far in the other direction that for years I've been reading poems without any concern for their meaning or message at all; pure intoxication of sound and association was what did it for me. There may have been, probably was/is a secret kernel of meaning, but intuiting its presence was enough; I felt no desire to crack the code or plant the seed. That's changing. The poetry I desire now has a relation to rhetoric and argument, albeit a fractured or tortured one. That's why Jennifer Moxley and Alice Notley are rising stars in my personal firmament. And there's some other connection between rhetoric and myth that my re-immersion in Duncan and Olson is teaching me. Olson's word muthologos--"what is said about what is said"--captures this not-quite-concept perfectly.

Back to the panel. My qualms about the possible Puritanism of parataxis were largely assuaged as the panel's real subject and motive became clear: bringing poetic strategies and stances to fiction writing--a subject near to my heart. (Carole Maso has an essay whose title says it all: "Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose" and which includes what is for me an aspirational phrase for my own fiction: "a necklace of luminous moments strung together.") Carol Moldaw talked about her book The Widening, which dislocates temporality and pronoun reference so as to meditate on the adventure of a teenage girl's sexual awakening. The frighteningly prolific Kazim Ali spoke of approaches to prose that dislocate the framework of expectation that we bring to it, citing as examples Gertrude Stein (yes of course) and Willa Cather (more surprising) and John Steinbeck (!) as writers who have only just begun to be read, because we are only just beginning to break out of the "read" we have on them. (That quick labeling and pseudo-interpretation that's really a dismissal, a put-down: oh we know all about that, no need to actually read it.)

Maso's talk was the most lyrical, as you might expect: she spoke of her desire (this is a close paraphrase) to honor what's illegible, what passes through us without a code. (Aside: isn't that pure Platonism? Romantic idealism? Experience, consciousness, being, whatever you want to call the "subject" of writing: doesn't a statement like Maso's turn that subject into something inaccessibly a priori, noumenal, an at-best absent presence? Why has it taken so long for me to figure these things out? Olson: "I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties.") Another nice line of hers: "In novels, anything can happen. Even things that have already happened." A pledge of the novel as a space for maximal freedom, with the aspiration "to traverse the abyss of time, to undo damage." (That notion of damage, trauma, again, seems weirdly Platonist: a trauma is an experience that has happened without happening, trapped in the past, an underwater rock diverting and contorting what flows around it; and the only way to undo trauma is to (re)live it, through fiction or dreamwork [Traumwerk].)

Another peak AWP experience was hearing the Chilean dissident poet Raúl Zurita, with his translator Daniel Borzutzky (and publisher Joyelle McSweeney, and respondent Monica de la Torre) read from his searing book Song for His Disappeared Love. As organizer Johannes Göransson inimitably put it, “This is like getting Neruda to the fucking AWP. This guy spent 6 weeks in a shed being tortured following the Pinochet coup.” The poem takes the reader to that shed, in wrenching rhythmical verses that seem flung up against a witnessing landscape of sand and sea and mountains. Zurita's body is shrunken and twisted by illness, which only seemed to enhance the prophetic power of his voice, like smoke with lightning forking through it. A reminder, if reminder were needed, that poetry for much of the world is a precious and depletable imaginative resource and not just an ornament for overeducated hipsters. Zurita, though known as an experimentalist, is very much a Romantic: twice he referred to his belief that there are experiences of pain and suffering that cannot be put into words, and that this is the Inferno of literature; that there are experiences of happiness and ecstasy that similarly resist language, and these are its Paradiso; and writing itself is a Purgatorio, betwixt and between these inexpressible zones of experience. It's a beautiful and again weirdly Platonic thought.

These thoughts are barely formed, but there are even more cloudy and ineffable ones coming--having to do with narrative, and the visionary, and the "beyond" of poetry. I think Oren Izenberg's new book is going to be important, and also Cary Wolfe's What Is Posthumanism? Will report as things move, and change.

Arcadia Ego, or: We Have Always Been Pastoral

Joyelle McSweeney continues to elaborate her theory of necropastoral in her latest post, a summation of the necrotic yet vital qualities she identifies with that "defunct, anachronistic, dead, imperial and imperialistic literary form." I think that's a fair characterization of how pastoral has been used—there is most definitely a pastoral ideology "contrived to represent separation, quarantine, timelessness, stasis, protection from upset and death." At the same time, it's an inherently unstable genre, which has demonstrated self-consciousness about its own project from the beginning. Consider the first of Virgil's Eclogues, in which two shepherds talk about current events. One has become a refugee, his land seized by the state to be given to demobilized soldiers; the other has, through his poetry, won at least provisional reposession of his land through the direct intervention of the sovereign, whom he has caught in a nostalgic mood:

In Rome I found the young man in whose honor
We sacrifice at our altars every month.
He said, "Go feed your flocks as in the old days;
Herdsmen, raise your cattle as you used to."

(David Ferry, trans.)

The uncanny quality in this eclogue is the absence of jealousy or political friction between the dispossessed Meliboeus and that fortunate senex Tityrus; "It's not that I'm envious, but full of wonder." The dialogue becomes Meliboeus' elegy for the life with flocks and fields that he will know no more, and ends with Tityrus' invitation to linger for at least one more night as his guest, for, "Already there's smoke you can see from the neighbor's chimneys / And the shadows of the hills are lengthening as they fall. " Et in Arcadia ego: not just physical death, but social and economic death, are part and parcel of the pastoral experience, and Tityrus has no guarantee that "the young man" in Rome won't change his mind tomorrow about his status.

This possibility is elaborated in the ninth eclogue, which essentially retells the story of the first from the dispossessed shepherd's point of view. "A stranger came / To take possession of our farm, and said: / 'I own this place; you have to leave this place.'" To which his interlocutor, the naive Lycidas (whose name Milton will take for his great pastoral elegy of that title) responds:

But I was told Menalcas with his songs
Had saved the land, from where those hills arise
To where they slope down gently to the water,
Near those old beech trees, with their broken tops.

"Yes, that was the story," Moeris replies, "but what can music do / Against the weapons of soldiers?" And once again elegy, that nearest neighbor to pastoral (and isn't "pastoral elegy" very nearly a synonym for "necropastoral"?) takes hold as the two shepherds sing sorrowfully of a land that seems always already lost: "Time takes all we have away from us." The master poet, Menalcas, who was powerless against political violence, remains offstage in this eclogue, like Godot; "The time for singing will be when Menalcas comes" is the poem's last line.

It's impossible to read these poems and feel assured of pastoral as the perfect fantasy of the locus ameonus or virga intacta that it presents itself as in its most ideological forms (the Marlboro Man, for instance, though of course even his iconography has become infected by death). Consider, too, Leo Marx's characterization of American pastoral in particular as the conjuration of a "middle landscape," ideally situated between a hostile wilderness and the corruptions of capitalism. But his book The Machine in the Garden is a close examination of how the boundary between the two is actually a wavery and porous line. Its iconic scene is an excerpt from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebook, in which a forest revery is interrupted, then reconstituted, by the sound of a locomotive thundering not so very far away.

In Deleuzeian terms, a pastoral poem deterritorializes or rhizomes (if that can be a verb) the landscape it reflects, but the most interesting such poems don't close the loop through an authoritative reterritorialization. Instead the represented landscape remains open, infected if you like, by the visible passage of the reader's desire to flee complexity/multiplicity/the city/death. McSweeney's necropastoral, in my view, is valuable insofar as it's an updating of the pastoral to be responsive to the most current environmental conditions (taking late capitalism in this sense as the environment or "climate" of contemporary poetry). I'm especially interested in her notion of necropastoral as a means of processing (or maybe "confronting" is a better word) "contamination," both in its ideological senses (the racist pastoral fantasy of the anti-immigration America First crowd) and its biochemical one. As Joyelle puts it, "the necropastoral is the toxic double of our eviscerating, flammable contemporary world, where avian flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, toxic contamination via industrial waste, hormones in milk, poisons leaching out of formaldehyde FEMA trailers, have destroyed the idea of the bordered or bounded body and marked the porousness of the human body as its most characteristic quality."

I wonder if Joyelle has read any Bruno Latour, who has introduced the concept of the "quasi-object" to ecological thought: a social "object" which is also kinda-sorta a subject, of which toxic entities like hormones in milk are pardigmatic examples. This would be the darkest example yet of necropastoral, in that it parodically achieves the reconciliation between subject and object, self and other, human and nature, that is at the root of the pastoral fantasy. The (contaminated) body becomes indistinguishable from its (contaminated) environment. It's difficult to be sanguine about this from the perspective of normative environmentalism, but it's exciting allegorically, as a means of imaginatively contesting fundamentally undemocratic fantasies of purity (something ecology at its most misanthropic is fully capable of manifesting).

Fourier Series - The Movie

I am nigh-ecstatic to be able to direct you to this "kinetic translation" of my book Fourier Series, designed and programmed by its publisher—nay, its wizard—William Gillespie of Spineless Books:

Fourier Électronique

Yee-haw!

Also, this is a good time to announce to all who might care that I will be at AWP in DC next week. There are a couple of Tupelo/Severance Songs related events of interest:

Tupelo Press Off-Site Reception

Petits Plats Restaurant
2653 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington DC 20008
(202) 518-0018
www.petitsplats.com

Join us at Petits Plats (close to the conference hotel) for drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and short readings by a few of our 2010/2011 authors. Join us in a toast to Tupelo's authors and staff for eleven years of dynamic publishing!

Friday, February 4
6:15 - 8:30 pm


With short readings by (in order of appearance):

Ilya Kaminsky

Nancy Naomi Carlson

Daniel Khalastchi

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Ellen Doré Watson

Kristin Bock

Michael Chitwood

Kazim Ali

Rebecca Dunham

Stacey Waite

Dan Beachy-Quick

Joshua Corey

Megan Snyder-Camp


Please RSVP for this event:
Send an email with the number in your party to mgauthier@tupelopress.org.
Please put "AWP Reception" in your subject line,
and feel free to bring a guest.

I'll be signing advance copies of the book at the Tupelo Books table on Saturday at 11:30 AM, alongside Megan Snyder-Camp whose new book is called The Forest of Sure Things.

Joyelle McSweeney's Necropastoral

As you might suppose, I'm completely fascinated by Joyelle McSweeney's recent posts on "necropastoral" up at Montevidayo. It's a little unclear to me as to whether she's talking about pastoral as an always-already uncanny undead genre, outside and yet adjacent to the polis ("the temporal and geographical sureties of the court, the urbs, the imperium itself"), or if she isn't suggesting a sub- or paragenre called necropastoral, with its own distinct aesthetic characteristics. The former seems to be the case in her original post, while the fascinating post on Sylvia Plath suggests the latter, and might lead in a direct line therefore to the necropastoral aspects of gurlesque.

It makes perfect sense to read Plath's Ariel as a kind of parody or burlesque of the pastoral, when the latter is constructed as the reservoir of "natural" values. I'm especially struck by the image of the infant's mother dissolving into the ambient environment in "Morning Song"; Joyelle calls it "a total mediumicity in which Art moves from the infant to the speaker, from the infant into the material surround, creating the body of the poem." This "mediumicity" seems very similar to Timothy Morton's notion of ambience as the tendency of environmental writing in general to "re-mark" the boundary between subject and object, transgressing that boundary even, without ever erasing it. For Morton the Freudian "oceanic feeling" or the Emersonian transparent eye-ball with its ecstatic "I am nothing, I see all" seems to be fundamentally ideological, not an erasing of the barrier but a manifestation of the subject's desire to swallow the object whole. For Plath, I imagine, the poem read as pastoral highlights how that genre has been gendered as a playground for the inviolable masculine subject but strips the feminine object-subject bare; the mother-speaker of the poem is dissolved by the infantile demand that she become the feminized object-atmosphere of "nature." The subject here is swallowed by her own object-hood, "cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown." And the poem, and the book as a whole, is a luridly violent rebellion against the demands pastoral makes for women to become more-and-less than human, more-and-less than sexual, more-and-less than alive.

I'm reminded of Lisa Robertson's "How Pastoral: A Manifesto" and her claim there that "I needed a genre for when I go phantom"--phantom in this context bringing us very close to Joyelle's necropastoral (though it's a notably less embodied sort of word, and there's a definite aesthetic distance between the cerebral, even Apollonian necropastoral of a book like The Weather or The Men versus the Dionysian variety embraced by Plath and the poets I associate with the gurlesque. But I need to think more about the larger, rather seductive claims Joyelle seems to be making about pastoral in general. Necropastoral seems rather more specific than "postmodern pastoral" or even "avant-pastoral," the terms I've grown accustomed to playing with; it would seem to go beyond a pastoral that merely foregrounds its own artifice, the better to play with the tradition of turning nature into a standing reserve for sovereign authority and cultural norms. Is it a zombie pastoral, the pleasure of the walking dead in devouring brains, the hypersublime viral pleasure of mindless multiplication, unlife, earth without world?

You Villain Touch; or, the Body of Genre

In my first meeting with this semester's starry-eyed Introduction to Creative Writing students, I played a little game where each student shares a word that they like and another word that they despise. It's a functional icebreaker and, as far as the favorite words go, also serves as a simple diagnostic tool, dividing the class roughly into the aspirational (words like "hope" and "individual") and the ear-driven ("indubitably" is the one I recall). The negative words are more interesting. After three different students independently came up with "moist" (a word that occurred last semester as well), I began writing down the disliked words on the board:

moist
crusty
secreted
slice

Another disfavored word that I didn't write down sums the rest up, both sonically and in terms of meaning: grotesque. Each word is heavy on sibilants and, except for slice, hard C and T sounds. And each describes an object failing to maintain its boundaries, spilling liquid (moist, secreted), crumbling (crusty), or dissevering (slice). Words that conjure disintegrating bodies. Words that make your flesh creep—a phrase that in itself conjures that crucial aspect of the grotesque, the uncanny aliveness and strangeness of your own body, which is coterminous yet refuses to play along with the social and psychological boundaries of the self.

Thinking a lot today about the grotesque as a genre, or anti-genre, in light of various books on my radar. In the senior seminar I'm co-teaching this spring with Davis Schneiderman, our chosen texts are William Gillespie's new novel (but perhaps I should borrow Geraldine Kim's coinage, Povel), Keyhole Factory; and the much-noted anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics. I'm also reading the brand new collection edited by Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (in which my esteemed colleague Bob Archambeau has a useful essay on the Victorian pretensions on the can-poetry-matter crowd). Last but not least, a book that does not yet exist but which G.C. Waldrep and I are slowly laboring into being: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. All these things form a constellation in my mind on the question of boundaries in American poetry, and in poems themselves.

Touch me not: one of the early warnings, or irresistible come-ons, in the English literary tradition, when it comes to touching:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

This famous sonnet of Sir Thomas Wyatt's, an imitation or riff on Petrarch's "Rime 190" is widely understood to be an allegory about the poet's desire for Anne Boleyn. It's a poem about impossible pursuit, partly because pursuit is barred by the power of the sovereign (Caesar, aka King Henry VIII) and the Ovidian transformations of Boleyn, who takes the form of an animal (a deer, "an hind") but also, in the poem's most famous line, something even more uncatchable: "Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind"). The poet yearns to touch, catch, and "hold" the elusive beloved but she is "wild for to hold, though [she] seem tame." To hunt this hind means to risk "running wild" in the sense of total dissolution of the self; for the revenge of the sovereign must be total in nature. Wyatt's social death, his death at court, would precede his inevitable physical death should he be caught in the act of sexual treason. The power of eros becomes the eros of power, with this difference: unable to assume the power of Caesar (itself a power greater than any single body can contain), the power of touch threatens annihilation; and yet such touch, clearly, is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

In the American tradition there's overt celebration of touch, mingling, pressing the flesh, but this celebration masks a profound ambivalence. Walt Whitman is surely the poet laureate of touch and its Dionysisan tendency to blur and bend the principium individuationis:

Mine is no callous shell;
I have instant conductors all over me, whether I pass or stop;
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy;
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

From that "harmlessly through me" (implying a fundamental stability of self: "Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am") we pass quickly to touch as peak experience, the jouissance of "about as much as I can stand." And the section that follows is even darker:

s this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself;
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
Depriving me of my best, as for a purpose,
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
They bribed to swap off with touch, and go and graze at the edges of me;
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger;
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

The sentries desert every other part of me;
They have left me helpless to a red marauder;
They all come to the headland, to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors;
I talk wildly—I have lost my wits—I and nobody else am the greatest traitor;
I went myself first to the headland—my own hands carried me there.

You villian touch! what are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat;
Unclench your floodgates! you are too much for me.

Many commentators see this moment in the poem as a moment of masturbation and not the nigh-unbearable contact with another's flesh. But this is nearly irrelevant to the larger question of the power of "villain touch" to destabilize the self and threaten it with foundering. Je est un autre, as Rimbaud says, and one's own body (Whitman's queer body) may be as "autre" as another's.

Or as Jeff Goldblum's mad scientist puts it in The Fly, "The flesh makes you crazy."

Flash forward a hundred years to the Confessional poets. And when I think about what's most compelling about their work, what makes them sexy--there's no better word--it's not the dubious glamour of insanity ("My mind's not right") but the ways in which Berryman and Lowell and Plath admit the treacherous terrain of tremulous bodies in contact with other bodies into their poems. Consider for example Berryman's own "touch me not" poem, "Dream Song 4":

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact that her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. -- Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls. --

Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.

The seemingly indifferent and self-possessed object that is the desired woman's "compact & delicious body" has the effect of shaking Henry's always precarious subjectivity all to pieces; "fainting with interest" (the first word suggests a Keatsian "swoon"; the latter word suggesting that we are very far from any Kantian idealized aestheticiation of the body-object; Henry's interest in her is decidedly culinary), he is torn between the violently opposed actions of "springing on her" (closing the absolute distance between subject and object) or "falling at her little feet" (abjectifying the self while placing the beloved on a properly Petrarchan pedestal, an action which notably sustains rather than terminates her inaccessibility). Villain touch in this poem is all mental, all fantasy, but it's still powerful enough to shake this speaker apart, calling his minstrel-doppelgänger Mr. Bones into existence in the final strophe, a mark of Henry's habitually split self. "There ought to be a law against Henry / ...there is." It's Henry's identity as transgressor, as transgressed, as divided by painful (erotic or deathly, or both; see "Dream Song 382") contact with others, that makes him and The Dream Songs so memorable.

The question of genre and the comparative fleshliness or bony spiritualization of American poetry connects, I think, directly to this question of contact between subject and object; or in broader national terms, the divide between democratic melting pot and xenophobic nationalism. Of course it was Lowell who gave us the metaphor of "the raw and the cooked"' in poetry, that is so weirdly apt to this question of the role of the flesh, the grotesque and carnivalesque. Lowell meant, broadly, the "raw" poetry of Ginsberg and the New Americans versus the "cooked," more traditionally formal poetry nurtured by the New Criticism. He was referring primarily to poetic form, but as with any strong metaphor, the vehicle of raw and cooked can overpower the tenor of form and bring poetry, abruptly, into more or less sublimated contact with the flesh.

I am tempted to be contrarian here and to argue that, just as Berryman and Lowell are more preoccupied with the raw terrors of embodiment than you might expect, so too is a poet like Ginsberg surprisingly concerned with bodily integrity and the construction of an impermeable subjectivity: the egotistical sublime. The phrase of course evokes John Keats and his notorious characterization of "the camelion poet" as boundariless, permeable body: "A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body." And Ginsberg, who demonstrates Whitmanian sympathy with others in "Howl," does not go so far as Whitman does as to risk dissolution; his "I" exists in ambiguously distanced relation to "the best minds of my generation" who engage in Dionysian ecstasies of gay sex and drugs, and which only comes back into the poem as self-in-touch-and-at-risk with the appearance or reappearance of Carl Solomon: "Ah Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe and now you're really in the total animal soup of time." That's a terrifically ambiguous phrase as far as Lowell's metaphor goes--total animal soup, isn't that somehow raw and cooked? When we are "in the soup" we are in chaotic contact with the heterogenous, and in danger of being eaten besides! But it's Carl who's in the soup, not Ginsberg, who steps back in the second section for his jeremiad against "Moloch" and who only fully inhabits the poem as an I that is "with you in Rockland / where you're madder than I am"; but that repeated phrase, "I'm with you in Rockland" only serves to reiterate the speaker's separation from the "madder" Solomon, who only threatens actual contact "in my dreams" at the poem's conclusion: " in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across / America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night." To my cottage: a strikingly pastoral image evocative of Yeats and Pound in Ireland or, perhaps more pertinently, the person from Porlock who's arrived just in time to prevent Coleridge from dissolving into the total animal soup of "Kublai Khan."

I see that I've yielded to temptation; I see also that pastoral has come up, as I knew it would. Because pastoral is that fantasy of subject-object, culture-nature reconciliation, though in actual pastorals the supposed reconciliation is firmly on the subject's terms (as in Romantic and Transcendentalist pastoral) or more rarely the object's (as in the Objectivist pastoral of an Oppen or a Francis Ponge, "taking the side of things" [Les partis pris des choses]). One might say that an anthology like American Hybrid takes a pastoral position by constructing a wishful "middle landscape" between raw and cooked poetries (editor Cole Swensen, curiously the only of the two editors engaged by the critics in The Monkey and the Wrench, calls it "a thriving center of alterity"). We can imagine a hybrid itself as "raw" or "cooked," with the "cooked" end of the continuum implying synthesis and blending, while "the raw" preserves the individual identities of its components in what I envision as a lightly dressed salad. In general the anthology's critics see it as a cooked anthology that's pretending to be raw--that it represents a re-inscription of white mythology, constructing an imaginary exterior (and superior) to the fraught and intrinsically political zone of contention that is po-biz, from which so many poets and critics regardless of aesthetic position seem to want to escape.

What has this got to do with that villain touch? Everything, if the yearning for touch ("Contact! Contact!" Thoreau cries) weren't always in the Western tradition countered by fear of touch, by our dim or acute suspicion that our boundaries, our bodies, are porous and penetrable. ("Secure our borders!" the Tea Party cries, which like all such movements seeks not political power but the end of politics as such, not just "politics as usual.") To identify with the porous and penetrable is to take a step toward the grotesque (consider the drag queen), inverting powerfully gendered and hierarchical assumptions about who gets to be a speaking (lyric) subject. When young women speak from the uncanny position of the object, as in the gurlesque; or when flarfists make deliberately bad-tasting animal soup out of kitsch; or when the writers associated with New Narrative (I have in mind a loose confederation of largely Bay Area authors, the sons and daughters of Kathy Acker, many of whom are represented in Biting the Error) tell baroque stories of desiring machines and bodies-without-organs; or when almost anyone takes the trouble to translate poems written almost anywhere else in the world (the most intimate and intimidating form of poetic touch, it seems, for American readers)--then we are exploring and exploding, without dreaming of erasing, that terrifying and seductive boundary, permeable and mortal as human skin.

Olson again crystallizes things for me, return us to "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 (withheld)." "No Greek will be able / to discriminate my body"--Olson rejecting the philosophical tradition of humanism running at least from Socrates to Descartes, reducing his body to res extensa. "I have this sense / that I am one / with my skin." A sense refined, I think, by Olson's experience among the Maya, whom as he told Creeley seemed to hold their bodies differently from Americans: "it's so very gentle, so granted, the feel, of touch -- none of that pull, away, which, in the States caused me, for so many years, the deepest sort of questions about my own structure." The return to the body--or not the body, but a body, what a body, Olson's gigantic body, Maximus, mountainous locus of difference. It's easy to read the last lines of this poem as the return of the egotistical sublime, but:

Plus this—plus this:

that forever the geography

which leans in

on me I compell

backwards I compell Gloucester

to yield, to

change

Polis

is this

The landscape (the landscape!) exerts its pressure on Maximus, "leans in" on him, transmits through him a compulsion on Gloucester, not because he is artifex, Mussolini-manque, but because he has a citizen-body, and to be such a transmitter, in contact, on that boundary between self and other, subject and object, well. "Polis / is this."