Mannerisms of Foxes

HOMAGE TO HOMAGE TO HOMAGE TO CREELEY

2011-05-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

My first full-length collection Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley won the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize and is now available for purchase on the Furniture Press website; soon, it will also be available on SPD. Support the independent arts and literature: buy a copy. You can find excerpts from the collection online at diode and SpringGun, and in the forthcoming issues of Dear Navigator and [out of nothing].

Bloom

2010-11-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

Rob Schlegel's chapbook Bloom, published by Green Tower Press earlier this year, explores the ramifications of our "Medium-sized American" identity. More specifically, the collection investigates the manner in which our contemporary ennui, articulated in the "American sigh," is actually the "limit of [our American] privilege." In order to serve as a counterpoint to this "American...behavior" that predicates itself upon "American television" and all the trappings of today's consumer-culture, Bloom desires "the feeling of being engaged in the world" once more (or for the first time). Accordingly, the solution, it would seem, is a call for visceral poetry, wherein "Into language I am putting back my body." And what does the infusion of the body back into language accomplish? Perhaps it effects a particular ethics, wherein "I am the I undone, immersed in one perspective / to reach another," so as to commune with the ever-elusive Other. Or stated differently (click image for review in bigness):

Climate Reply

2010-11-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

New Michigan Press, in conjunction with DIAGRAM, just released Trey Moody's chapbook Climate Reply. Its filled with little poems, which themselves are filled with delicious nuggets such as: "You cannot remember what your body does // but you believe your body's not a tree, a tree not a body. / Shake with cold like you shake with cold." Reading this collection will make you moist, in a manner of speaking. After my first go-round, my moisture levels were so off-the-charts that I wrote the below review (click image for review in bigness):

Recent, Current, Imminent

2010-11-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

I'm taking an indefinite hiatus from all things poetry, but before I do, these are the various books I've collected over the past 12 months that I've read, currently reading, or must read before calling it quits:

Bonomo, Joe. Installations. NYC, NY: Penguin Books, 2008.
Florian, Sandy. On Wonderland & Waste. San Francisco, CA: Sidebrow Books, 2010.
Fortune, Merry. Ghosts By Albert Ayler, Ghosts By Albert Ayler. NYC, NY: Futurepoem, 2004.
Gaudry, Molly. We Take Me Apart. Mudlicious Press, 2009.
Gudding, Gabriel. Rhode Island Notebook. Champaign, IL: Dakley Archive press, 2007.
Kim, Myung Mi. Penury. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Press, 2009.
Mirov, Ben. Ghost Machine. Pittsburgh, PA: Caketrain, 2010.
Moody, Trey. Climate Reply. Tuscon, AZ: New Michigan Press, 2010.
Nakayasu, Sawako. Texture Notes. Chicago, IL: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.
Nichols, Travis. Iowa. Chicago, IL: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.
Roberson, Ed. City Eclogue. Berkeley, CA: Atelos Press, 2006.
Weiner, Hannah. Hannah Weiner's Open House. Chicago, IL: Kenning Editions, 2006.
Wilkinson, Joshua Marie. Selenography. San Francisco, CA: Sidebrow Books, 2010.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizopernia

2010-08-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative effort proposes a philosophy predicated upon multiplicity in order to develop concepts that act as models for a thought process not mired in dialectics. To wit, the philosophers state that the concept of multiplicity “was created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics” (32), and that there is “no question...of establishing a dualist opposition between...multiplicities....There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage, operating in the same assemblage” (34). If a multiplicity in its de jure state is not subsumed by the dialectical machine, then what, exactly, is it, or more precisely, how does it function? Readers find the answer to this question relatively early on in A Thousand Plateaus: “A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature” (8). Additionally, an assemblage that multiplicities form is an “increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (8). Moreover, while multiplicities occur on a particular “plane of consistency,” they are actually “defined by the outside” of that plane, in that there is a “line of flight or deterritorialization” that ruptures the plane's continuity, thus altering the dimensions of the plane (9). To this extent, a multiplicity is a transitive process defined by its operative function, or, in other words, its ability to do something. The most often evoked, and more often than not the most poorly understood, conceptual multiplicity from Deleuze and Guattrari's collection is that of the rhizome, which is a “radicle-system, or fascicular root” (5) that “assumes diverse forms” and exhibits a “surface extension in all directions” (7) via the “rupture” so as “never...to be overcoded” by the “tree” or “root” system (5-11). Of course, positing the rhizome in such a manner (i.e. tree versus rhizome) necessarily means that the concept becomes part of the dialectical/oppositional model. In order to function differently, Deleuze and Guattari advance several nuanced positions. One such position is that “to be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange uses” (15). Deleuze and Guattari infuse the trunk with strangeness in many ways, one of which is their re-conceptualization of certain terms. For example, in Plateau six, the word “organic,” usually associated with naturally or spontaneously occurring elements, becomes “the organization of the organs” and “the system of the judgment of God,” and thus “the enemy” (158): something other than the “organic” of common parlance. In contradistinction to the strangeness fostered through assigning different concepts to previously established words, Deleuze and Guattari also assign new words to old concepts; such a nominal maneuver, then, effects a retroactive alteration of the concept. An example of this technique is the renaming of the chapter-concept, instead referring to it as a “plateau.” Traditionally, the chapter-concept striates a particular section of a book so as to “necessarily delimit” and construct a “determined...frame” within “a closed space” (475), but, by renaming the chapter-concept a plateau, Deleuze and Guattari succeed in creating “piece[s] of immanence” that are “continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by an external termination” (158). To further explain, one can use the concept of the Body Without Organs (BwO); in plateau six (i.e. “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?”), readers confront the concept at its most intense, with the philosophers mapping it more thoroughly than anywhere else in the text as a whole. Yet, the plateau cannot contain the concept because it secretes into other plateaus, “How Do You Make…” merely harnesses BwO's intensity within a delimited plane of immanence, undertaking “an inevitable exercise or experimentation” (149) of operative-pragmatic-intensive assemblages. Other plateaus that reference BwO employ the concept’s intensity, but at a lower determination and magnitude and, perhaps, a higher rate of speed. Another nuanced position that the philosophers forward with regard to the rhizome and its relation to the tree that is often neglected is the importance, not so much of the rhizome itself, but the movement between the rhizome and the tree. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari's thought locates itself less within the rhizome and more within the process wherein opposing terms are “constantly being translated, transversed...[and] reversed” (474) in an effort to develop new “passages or combinations” (500) as yet unknown: a transitive becoming moving at variable speeds between opposing points so as to continually re-figure those points. To this extent, the “middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed...a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away” (25). Finally, to further complicate the rhizome-tree relation, the philosopher's mobilize the conjunction “and” to “establish a logic of the AND,” which will “overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, [and] nullify ending and beginnings” (25). “AND,” then, “places everything in variation” wherein “everything shifts” (98), not in the sense of dialectical synthesis, but in such a way that “AND” generates “an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other...or rather accumulation, of a set of vicinities” (485). Other concepts within A Thousand Plateaus that have received a fair amount of attention in academic and literary discourse are the machine, (de/re)-territorialization, minorization, order-words, becoming-animal, the nomad, and micropolitics. While each of these terms offer certain resonances in relation to one another (i.e. repetition), their localized affects do specific things that the others do not (i.e. difference); in this sense, Deleuze and Guattari's intra-conceptual relationships model the transversal movements describe above.

Deleuze and Langauge

2010-08-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York, NY: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2002.

On the most general level, Lecercle's monograph on the philosophy of Deleuze and its engagement with language as a discourse treats “language...not as a theme, but as a problem” (2). Of course, the author employs the term “problem” in the Deleuzian sense, which refers to a process of creating concepts that offers contingent solutions, wherein the problem remains always immanent to that particular solution and there is no definitive or final “answer” (38). As such, Lecercle does not claim his study is a mastery, nor a complete comprehension of Deleuze's use of language, but, instead, offers several philosophical variations on how one can conceptualize its use. For starters, the author maps Deleuze and Guattari's displeasure for linguistics, particularly the strain that begins with Saussaure and culminates in Chomsky's systematic overview of language. While their list of grievances is both expansive and nuanced, there are four, main postulates which they disagree with: the first is that “Language is informational and communicational”; the second is that “There is an abstract machine of language that does not appeal to any 'extrinisic' factor,” meaning that “languge is immune go worldly influences”; the third posits that “There are constants or universals that enable us to define [language] as a homogeneous system”; and, finally, that “Language can be scientifically studied only the conditions of a standard or major language” (86-7). Not surprisingly, then, Deleuze and Guattari counter Chomskian linguistics with a model that formulates language as 1) less a transmission of messages, and more as an utterance that “exerts force,” and as such, 2) is “a social act” that is “immersed,” or immanent “to the world” (88), 3) a “site of continuous variation, or heterogeneous currents,” and 4) due to such variations, one needs to study the “infinite variety of dialects, registers and jargons” (89) within a language, as opposed to a standardized model of that language. These four counter-claims form the base of what Lecercle calls a “new pragmatics” (“new,” in that it differs from the pragmatics of analytic philosophy championed by Wittengenstein and his followers) that celebrates “rule-breaking creativity of literary texts” as the center “of their philosophy of language” (156). Moreover, the literary utterances are never individualized within a specific author-subject, but “collective assemblages of enunciation” (156) predicated upon “a renewed concept of style” (157). Additionally, the new pragmatic model focuses on language as “a historical construct” (157) deeply enmeshed in material realities. After addressing a “new” pragmatics, the author mobilizes Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of machines, assemblages, and the minor and their relation to language. The first term, machine, is “dynamic and diachronic” as well as overtly “political” (181), and “characterised by a flow of energy and a series of cuts, or breaks, or ruptures that give the flow form by coding it” (183). Furthermore, there are two specific types of machines: the desiring machine and the social machine (183). Assemblages, on the other hand, are “ontologically mixed” and comprised of “the abstract materiality of utterances and institutions and the concrete materiality of objects” (185). Similar to machines, the assemblage “is always dual”: both a “machinic assemblage of desire, and a collective assemblage of enunciation” (186). It must be noted, though, that an “assemblage never refers to a subject” (188); the assemblage is always collective. This is not to say that Deleuze and Guattari negate the fact that there are such things as subjects, but they are only “end products of processes of subjectivation,” wherein “the most important aspect is the process, not the result” (189). Finally, while the use of the term “minor” is rather widespread within academic and literary communities, Lecercle stresses several important aspects of the concept: 1) “minor literature” is “an asignifying use of language”; 2) “directly and entirely political”; 3) collective; (195) 4) “is linked to becoming, a combination of active forces, or forces for change” (194); and, while perhaps surprising, 5) “keeps that major language alive” through the “multiplication of dialects and registers with the standard dialect” (197). The monograph closes with an examination of Deleuze's concepts of style and stuttering. Style, for Deleuze, is “the discord, the disequilibrium...that affects language at its most alive” (221) and manifests itself in “an original syntactic treatment of language” in order to take it “to its frontiers with silence” (222). Again, Deleuze highlights “the impersonality of style,” in that “that subject is not the origin, but the effect of style” (223). Stuttering, then, relates to style because it “introduces slippage or subversion within systematic langue” (232) through a “dynamic line worming its way through the plane of immanence of language” developing a syntax that produces a “tension toward silence, towards the ineffable, towards the limits of language” (233). The final chapter closes with eleven points that constitute “style-as-stuttering”; while Lecercle expounds upon each of these points, their nominal designations are: 1) disequilibrium, 2) variation, 3) vibration, 4) line, 5) minority, 6) inclusive disjunctions and reflexive connections, 7) repetition, 8) digression, 9) the intensive line of syntax, 10) rhythm, and 11) limit (243-4).

Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation

2010-08-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

O'Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. New York, NY: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006.

In his monograph on Deleuze and Guattari, O'Sullivan attends “to certain resonances between the field of philosophy (specifically Deleuzian) and the field of art and art history” (3). More precisely, the author states that his book will provide “another way of thinking art, beyond the 'horizon of the signifier,' beyond textuality, but not through a return to traditional aesthetic theory or indeed to previous artist-centered models” (4). To wit, the volume becomes neither art history nor philosophy, but “a smearing or blurring of certain conceptual resources into other specifically non-conceptual areas” (5). In other words, O'Sullivan believes his study to be “a bastard” of both discourses: of both, but not in either. Chapter one opens with “a working through of the concept of the rhizome” (6) and the manner in which the rhizome facilitates “a principle of connectivity” (17) in an effort to generate art-objects and art-encounters through the “blurring of discrete categories, producing new encounters and fostering monstrous couplings, new kinds of writing and new kinds of thought” (18). The chapter is rather expository, and most likely intended for those unfamiliar with Deleuze and Guattari, yet the author does forward several interesting claims. For starters, O'Sullivan posits art as an inherently, contextualized process: “We will call art that which produces an aesthetic effect, although this will be contingent and strategic...Art here is less a label for an object than a name for a specific kind of coupling” (23). Likewise, he understands that Deleuzian “art practice” will be “both rhizomatic and tree-like” (33), and thus demonstrates a more nuanced approach to Deleuze and Guattari than those critics, writers, etc. who champion the rhizome as the epitome of Deleuzian thought. In chapter two, O'Sullivan engages the concept of affect, or “the effect a given object or practice has on its beholder, and the beholder's 'becomings'” (39) in an asignifiying fashion, through the Deleuze-Spinoza dyad. These “rising and fallings” (41) of our bodies, especially when we encounter other bodies, entwine themselves intimately with the field of ethics, to the extent that “the organisation of one's world so as to produce joyful encounters, or affects...increase our capacity to act in the world” (41-2): an “ethics of sense,” or an “ethicoaesthetics” organizing “productive encounters 'through' art” (42). To emphasize the nature of affects, the author repeats throughout this section of the book that: “Affects then are not to do with signification or 'meaning'...they occur on a different asignifying register” (43). To O'Sullivan's mind, then, art is “a bundle of affects, or...a bloc of sensations,” and, as such, we should not so much concern ourselves with what an art-encounter means, so much as “what art does” (43). Chapter three covers Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the minor, as developed in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. The first third of this chapter merely outlines, rather extensively, what comprises a “minor” art, literature, or language. This glossing of the minor leads into the second section of chapter three, which relates the concept “to guerrilla political organisations” and “what lessons might be learnt from an artistic 'war-machine' from apparently non-artistic and politically engaged collectives” (70), focusing primarily on the Red Army Faction. The chapter closes with a discussion of the production of subjectivities as conceived (separately) by Guattari and Deleuze. Chapter four explores “other ways of thinking the ethical and 'political' effectivity of art...away from a horizon of transcendence” and toward “the plane of immanence” (98). As a case study, the author focuses on the environmental-art of Robert Smithson, specifically his Yucatan Mirror Displacements and Spiral Jetty. O'Sullivan, in the next chapter, follows a similar trajectory of thought, but, instead of immanence and Smithson, he produces “an encounter between...the monad and the fold, and...the paintings of the German contemporary artist Gerhard Richter” so as to create “a new kind of assemblage between the two” (121). The book's conclusion addresses art's capacity to show us “the contours for the future” in its attempt to “go beyond what appears to be reality” (146), to aid in “the invention of new stories for a people who do not recognise themselves in these stories” (147), and, due to the fact that “new media will necessarily involve new myths [and] new narratives” (153), charge Deleuzian art-encounters with rupturing technological practices working in “the service of the dominant myths” (153). Finally, O'Sullivan closes with a six-point “Manifesto for Future Art Practice.” While the author briefly expounds upon each point, they are titled as follows: 1) Activate immanence, 2) Harness affect, 3) Build probe-heads, 4) Actualize the virtual, 5) Always stuttering, always stammering, and 6) Always folding (155-7).

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

2010-08-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

In the author's introduction to his study on the paintings of Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze claims that what interests the Irish painter “is a violence that is involved only with color and line: violence of sensation (and not of representation)”; moreover, the “violence of sensation” entwines itself, rather intimately, with “materials and forces,” so as to “make these forces visible through their effects on the flesh” (xxix). To do so, then, Deleuze recognizes that Bacon must abjure the figurative in favor of the Figure (via the figural), to the extent that the latter, as opposed to the former, is “neither a model to represent nor a story to narrate” (6). While much of the first third of the study involves close, formal analysis of Bacon's paintings, Deleuze begins to more explicitly develop new concepts in the second third. For example, the author defines “sensation” as “the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliché” (31). Additionally, sensation “has one face turned toward the subject...and one face turned toward the object...Or rather, it has no face at all, it is both things indissolubly” (31). In this sense, sensation passes through both subject and object: it is a transformative and transitive force, such that “I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other” (31). In this respect, the subject of Bacon's paintings are not the Figures, contorted and screaming, but, instead, “Sensation is what is painted” (32). Furthermore, sensation “exists at diverse levels, in different orders, or in different domains. This means that there are not sensations of different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation” (33). Of course, it is important to note that sensation is not “sensational,” or that which “reconstitutes a scene of horror” because, “as soon as there is horror, a story is reintroduced” (34); likewise, sensation and “feeling” should not be conflated: “there are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing but affects, that is 'sensations' and 'instincts,' according to the formula of Naturalism”; and, finally, neither should sensation and movement be, necessarily, associated with one another: “Movement does not explain sensation; on the contrary, it is explained by the elasticity of the sensation” (36). Or, stating the final point differently, “it is not movement that explains the levels of sensation, it is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of movement” (36). According to Deleuze, then, the most appropriate manner in which to conceptualize the levels of sensation is to examine “the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This rhythm runs through a painting...the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself” (37). Toward the end of Deleuze's study, the philosopher states this concept alternately as “modulation,” which consists “of internal variations of intensity or saturation,” wherein “variations themselves change depending on relations of proximity to this or that zone of the field” (118). Conceiving of sensation's “rhythm” or “modulation,” as such, produces a concept that “is infinitely richer” because it affords a “passing through dynamic tensions, logical reversals, and organic exchanges and substitutions” (124). By situating sensation within a dynamic field of rhythm and modulation, Deleuze seeks to avoid binary and/or dialectical structures that result in a synthesis, or “middle way” (91); he is no more explicit about this when he states: “It would be wrong, however, to oppose...two tendencies” (105). Rather, sensation is a “specific way” (91) that “can enter into new and complex combinations and correlations” (106). Operating outside binary structures and their resultant synthetic couplings becomes of utmost importance during the philosopher's discussion of the diagram. The diagram “is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe” (83). On the one hand, the diagram allows for the “irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, [and] random” to enter a work in an effort to foster “a-signifying traits” (82) that function outside of representation; on the other hand, “one can also spoil the diagram, botch it, so overload it that it is rendered inoperative” (82). Without the concepts of “rhythm” and “modulation” passing through dynamic relations, the concept of the diagram itself, like all other concepts, would easily fall into a reductive binary. Moreover, Bacon's trajectory, which is that of the figural/the Figure, could be falsely conceived of as the synthesis of these two opposing perspectives. Instead, he creates a “specific way,” not a “middle way,” wherein he prevents the diagram “from proliferating” by “confining it to certain areas of the painting and certain moments of the act of painting” (89). Of course, this all begs the question: if the diagram is chaos, why incorporate it at all into the canvas? To answer, both Bacon and Deleuze champion a certain operative use of the diagram so as to combat cliché. To wit, clichés “are always-already on the canvas, and if the painter is content to transform the cliché...this reaction is still too intellectual [and] allows the cliché to rise again from its ashes” (72). Deleuze believes that Bacon escapes cliché through the operative use of the diagram in the form of “free marks” (76); these free, “nonrepresentative” marks “destroy nascent figuration” through “manipulated chance,” wherein they “express nothing” because Bacon randomly brushes, scrubs, or splatters them on the canvas before he begins painting, yet utilizes them within the Figure he creates (77): not a synthesis of two oppositional elements, but specific modulation of intensity flows within a complex field.

Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism

2010-08-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

Werbner, Pnina and Tariq Mohood, ed. Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London, United Kingdom: Zed Books, 1997.

In Werbner's introduction to Debating Cultural Hybridity, the co-editor of the collection outlines the major conceptual models that the essays therein cover. For starters, she parses out the difference between modern hybridity and postmodern hybridity. The former conceived of hybrid forms as a “transgressive power” that subverts “categorical oppositions,” thus creating “the conditions for cultural reflexivity and change” (1); the latter, on the hand, complicates notions of transgression, in that “cross-cultural” politics and “transversal alliances”engender “the very same sorts of difficulties that generate the contemporary dual forces of hybridity and essentialism in the first place” (3). Likewise, Werbner explicates the distinction between Bakhtin's “organic” and “intentional” hybrid. For Bakhtin, both types of “hybridisation [are] the mixture of two languages, an encounter between two different linguistic consciousnesses” (4). Yet, organic hybridity “is a feature of the historical evolution of all languages” and does “not disrupt the sense of order and continuity” (4-5) within language and culture because such transformation are, or at least are inherent to, language and culture. In contradistinction to the organic, intentional hybrids “create an ironic double consciousness,” in that they are “internally dialogical, fusing the unfusable” and foster “a heteroglossia 'that rages beyond...boundaries'” (5). Addiotnally, Werbner explores the importance of Haraway's cyborg politics, the difference between cosmopolitans and transnationals, and hybridity versus essentialism. The introduction concludes with a brief outline of the “problems with this celebration of hybridity,” one of which is the possibility that its “ephemeral and...contingent” aspects “mask long-term social and political continuities” (21), which tend to create and maintain hegemonic orders. True, “the centre..has its own official forms of...dissent,” but “we have to recognise the differential interests social groups have in sustaining boundaries” (22). To wit, the center's motives, aspirations, and interests in crossing and maintaining boundaries differ, if not in kind, then at least to degree vis-a-vis the periphery's. While most of the essays in the collection provide unique, critical perspectives on the issues presented by the editor, several pieces offer particularly compelling arguments. Johnathan Friedman's “Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarrelling,” for example, argues that “hybrids and hybridisation theorists are products of a group that self-identifies and/or identifies the world in such terms” (81). To attribute the term to those other than the self is a form of objectification, and thus essentializes the other. The most damning critique of the term “hybrid” within Debating Cultural Identity resides in John Hutnyk's essay “Adorno at Womad: South Asian Crossovers and the Limits of Hybridity-Talk.” Through a critical, Adornian analysis of the Peter Gabriel curated “world” music festival, the author demonstrates the manner in which “the multiplication of differences has become repetitive to the point where diversity and difference as commodities seem to offer only more and more of the same” (106). More specifically, “Womad seems to maintain a form of nationalist cultural essentialism that must remain blind to the inconsistencies of its own designations. At the same time crossover articulates as 'world music,' which in white hands often also loses its political edge,” thus promoting “white musical hegemony...through appropriation of non-European rhythms” (111). Moreover, Hutnyk's claims should reorient our understanding of academia and poetry's co-opting of the term “hybrid” in contemporary discourse (i.e. Swenson and St. John's American Hybrid), in that it is “now fashionable and even marketable” (118) to do so. To this extent, the hybrid becomes “conventional” and the “radical critiques” it once provided give way to a nullification of critical thinking (118), entering into “collusion with State policy-making” (119). Hutnyk believes that, to remain “radical,” once must go “beyond hybrid...politics towards a more 'stable' transnational anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and...anti-racist politics” (129). Such a stance is needed because, when “hybridity and diversity...are merely calls for access to the market”, artistic, politcal, and “academic works and the constructs [they] employ are part and parcel of a wider context that includes exploitation, oppression, racism, and cultural chauvinism” (131). The collection closes with “Tracing Hybridity in Theory.” This Nikos Papastergiadis penned essay traces the “incorporation of the concept of hybridity into the mainstream cultural discourse” and presents some of the “new problems” raised in doing so (257). At the forefront of Papastergiadis piece is Spivak's agrument “that the preoccupation with hybridity in academic discourse has tended to gloss persistent social divisions,” opting instead for “more cheerful populist claims” that attempt to erase “white supremacist ideologies” (258) so deeply inscribed within the word. In an effort to combat these historical and conceptual erasures, the author provides an in-depth narrative that describes the origins of the word “hybrid” and the racist/oppressive contexts under which it flourished.

The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English

2010-08-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

The impetus for Ramazani's study stems from his belief that, at the beginning of the new millennium, contemporary poetry appeared “strikingly provincial in the anglophone West” insofar as it “reassert[ed] boundaries” such as “postmodern or postconfessional, neoformalist or avant-garde” (1), etc. In an effort to re-map the discourse's landscape, the author turns his attentions to “a rich and vibrant poetry...issued from the hybridization of the English muse with the long-resident muses of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and other decolonizing territories of the British empire” (1). Before he launches into his examination proper, Ramazani presents the general framework and fundamental concepts of the hybrid muse within his introduction. First, he demonstrates how neither progressive nor traditional poetic models common to anglophile poetry (i.e. “lyric expression of personal feeling nor...postmodern negation of commodified language”) (3) are adequate paradigms through which to understand postcolonial writing. Moreover, the author defines “hybridity” as “the potentially productive tension between an imposed and an inherited culture” (6). Of course, he cautions that “the term can be misleading if it muffles the power differences between culture or oversimplifies multilayered deposits within any single culture” (6). To this extent, hybrid poets are members of a “small educated elite, anglophone poets of the Third World” with “intensive exposure to Western ideas and values” coupled with “an oblique relation to [their] native culture” (7). Such a blending of cultures produces poetry with “unintelligible,” or at least paradoxical, origins (8) that fosters “skepticism” (10), transitive affiliations, and dislocation (13). No doubt, both Western and non-Western readers tend to perceive hybrid poets as “occupying a [Western] language” and indigenous culture “which they have no rightful claim” (14) to; but, given their alienated status in relation to both the colonizer and the (de)colonized, they transform their “vexed” political, cultural, and ethnic identities into a unique and self-antagonizing poetry by way of language, syntax, form, and tropes in what becomes a “dazzling interplay between indigenous and Western” techniques (15-8). Finally, the introduction concludes with Ramazani explicating the broader implications of his study, specifically his belief that “the hybrid muse” can afford readers “some measure of understanding of the aesthetics, language, and experience of the contemporary world” (20). The first poet Ramazani examines is W.B. Yeats; by placing Yeats within the postcolonial canon, the author challenges the formal boundaries of the discourse usually occupied by “once-subjugated peoples of different colors and ethnicities” (22). To his mind, “sufficient conditions exist for redescribing Yeats as postcolonial” (22). These “conditions” derive from England's occupation of Ireland and the aforementioned poet's ambivalent stance toward that occupation. Moreover, hybrid poetry results as a “consequence of the violent intersection between the British empire and various cultures” and is “unintelligible without some sense of its historical origins” (8). In chapter three, Ramazani explores the poetry of Derek Walcott's Omeros and the contradiction of “how the postcolonial poet can both grieve the agonizing harm of British colonialism and celebrate the empire's literary bequest” (50). Walcott, it would appear, develops an “interethnic connection” through an “unpredictable...knitting together of different histories of affiliation” (50). The following chapter finds the author once again challenging the norms of his discourse. While, traditionally, metaphor was “associated with universalist philosophy and formalist poets, with Aristotle and the New Criticism” (72), Ramazani finds parallels between metaphor and the postcolonial poet in that both are “conceived of in terms of the movement, transference, or alienation of discourse from one place to another, a movement that involves not only a one-way shift but inevitably a bidirectional hybridization” (73). In demonstrating the “bidirectional” tension that arises “out of a historical matrix of violence, occupation, and resistance” (75), Ramazani provides close readings of poems by Indian writer A.K. Ramanujan. Similar to metaphor, scholars situate irony within a contested space in postcolonial studies; and, once again, Ramazani seeks to re-orient that space by outlining the “profound and fertile” (103) links between the two. To do so, he employs the poetry of Caribbean poet Louise Bennett, explaining her use of irony as a method of “twin perspectives...in a relation of antagonism” wherein “the power field...is often multiple and ambiguous” so that the writing “cuts more than one way” (105). The last poet Ramazani looks at is Okot p'Bitek and the manner in which his writing confronts the “vexed relation between postcolonial literatures and anthropology” (141). The “vexed relation” stems from the Western belief that postcolonial literature is “saturated with ethnographic information, conveying for a foreign readership the customs and beliefs of native cultures”; one the other hand, “Western critics have...been all too eager to attend to the ethnographic dimension of” postcolonial literature” (141). In fact, when “specifying their social milieu, postcolonial texts are no more ethnological” than Western literature (141). Moreover, “anthropology's complicity in the colonial enterprise” (141) creates an uneasy dynamic between these discourses. Of course, the inherent difficulty in attempting to refute the ethnographic elements of postcolonial wirters such as p'Bitek is that “typically in the diaspora, these writers return home in their imaginative works, but to a 'home' defamiliarized by anthropological modes of understanding,” thus crossing the boundaries of what constitutes “native” and “anthropological” (142); Ramazani claims that p'Bitek's Song of Lawino highlights these crossings. The collection as a whole concludes with the author addressing critiques of the hybridity model. The first critique, in which the model creates “the false impression of symmetry between unequal terms,” is kept “in check by continually referring back to the colonial and postcolonial matrices of violence, inequality, and oppression” (180). The second critique, that “hybridity replicates the binaries it is meant to supersede” (181), is not so much negated as it is qualified. Ramazani believes that the supposed “defect” of binary thought actually “acknowledges the Manichean structure of colonial divided, while also allowing for the sometimes frenzied traffic across it,” and thus promotes a continual “oscillation back and forth between...dichotomous” elements which produce “intersticial forms” (181). That “all cultures are hybrid and none can claim homogeneity” (181) is the final critique. While the author does not dispute this stance, he does, once again, qualify the charge by positing “a nuance understanding of degrees and modalities of hybridity” (182) along a continuum. In this sense, not all hybridities are equal.

Picture Theory

2010-08-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.

In the introduction to Picture Theory, Mitchell states that his book “investigates the interactions of visual and verbal representation in a variety of media, principally literature and the visual arts”; but more than merely describing these “interactions,” the author wishes “to trace their linkages to issues of power, value, and human interest” (5). Of course, he immediately complicates this notion of a verbal-visual binary with the claim that “all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no 'purely' visual or verbal arts” (5). To a certain extent, this is both the rhetorical and formal structure of the book writ large: a continual series of dialectical negations, “not in the Hegelian sense of achieving a stable synthesis, but in...Adorno's sense of working through contradiction interminably” (418). Mitchell divides Picture Theory into five sections, with each section subdivided further into chapters. Section I, titled “Picture Theory,” begins by laying out the historical and critical foundations of what the author calls the “Pictorial Turn.” This turn, like the linguistic and ethical turns preceding it, stems “from a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry” (13); but far from replicating traditional lines of inquiry, such as mimetic and correspondence theory promoted within art history/theory, the pictorial turn is “a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (16). Likewise, the problematics inherent to “spectatorship," as well as the expansive historical and cultural networks enveloping a particular representation, must also be considered (16). Mitchell's next point of departure is metapictures and their ability to “provide their own metalanguage,” wherein these images “might be capable of reflection on themselves, capable of providing second-order discourse” (38). In the final subsection of “Picture Theory,” the author engages the term “imagetext” and discusses the “infinite” and “unstable dialectic that constantly shifts its location in representational practices” (83) when dealing with image and text composites. To wit, Mitchell presents readers with the theoretical underpinnings of his argument that are not predicated upon simple binaries, but upon a “whole ensemble of relations between media, [wherein] relations can be many other things besides similarity, resemblance, and analogy” (89). Furthermore, these “relations” are “open” so as to preserve the “radical incommensurability” (90) between “media” elements. While few firm conclusions are established, the author makes clear that he intends to “decenter...the purist's image of media” (97). The second major section of Picture Theory, “Texutal Pictures,” offers close readings of literary texts that incorporate, in one manner or another, images. The opening subsection explores Blake's illuminated texts, followed by an examination of ekphrastic poetry (which he further parses out into “indifference,” “hope,” and “fear”) (152-4), and, finally, the manner in which narratives (specifically slave narratives) are disrupted by moments of description (i.e. imagism). Section III, “Pictorial Texts,” intends to be the chiasmic reversal of the previous section, in that Mitchell presents three subsections that demonstrate how language enters the visual zone; to do so, he first analyzes abstract art and how its desire to extricate language (i.e. narrative) from works actually generated an extensive scaffolding of theoretical language to support it, then the minimalist-period of Robert Morris' career, and concludes with and extended look at the subgenre of photographic essays that, more often than not, fosters “a resistance...in the text-photo relation” (287). “Pictures and Power,” which is the title of section IV, returns to a more theoretical plane, working through the dialectics of illusion(ism) and (ir)realism. To this extent, Mitchell expands the dialectical model of illusion-realism into (illusion-illusionism)-(realism-irrealism), and thus creates a multivalent approach that introduces an ever widening discourse fraught with complexities. Moreover, the author invokes Foucault's conception of power and the imagetext's complicity with those power relations (324). Picture Theory's final section, “Pictures and the Public Sphere,” further extends the notion of imagetexts and power, but contrasts Foucault's concept with that of Habermas' concept of the public sphere as an “ideological template” that promotes “uncoerced reason and free discussion” (363). While much of this section focuses on Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Oliver Stone's JFK, Mitchell provides a thorough and incisive study of “public art” and the manner in which it not only collapses “the distinction between symbolic and actual violence,” but necessarily induces violence (374-5). The book closes with a brief conclusion in which Mitchell glosses the questions: What lies outside of representation? Why are we so anxious with regard to representation? and What is our responsibility with/to/for representation?

The Language of Images

2010-08-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. The Language of Images. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

The Mitchell edited anthology The Language of Images collects a series of essays that examine the “symbiotic relationship between verbal and pictorial modes in modern art and literature” (1), wherein the “language of images,” in the most general sense, refers to “language about images,...images regarded as a language,...[and] verbal language as a system informed by images” (3). Moreover, the essays that Mitchell gathers together in this volume intentionally problematize our notions of the verbal-pictorial binary by “discriminating the various ways in which the barriers are erected and transgressed and determining whether these activities have a history” (3). The anthology's opening piece, “On Poetry and Painting, With a Thought of Music,” explores the “affinities between poetry and painting,” to the extent that practitioners working within both genres “want to reach the silence behind [their respective] languages, the silence within the languages” (9), to say nothing of the fact that “both painter and poet are makers of images” (11). Elizabeth Abel's essay “Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire's Response to the Art of Delacroix” provides a thorough review of both the historical relationship between poetry and painting, as well as Baudelaire's essays on the paintings of Delacroix; but more importantly, Abel demonstrates the manner in which the former co-opted pictorial concepts of the latter and incorporated them into his poems. As the author clearly states, the artists shared neither similar contents nor stylistic elements (42-3); instead, their works function as “interconnected systems” (43) that “balance form and movement in an interrelated whole” (52). Delacroix achieved this “harmony” by “breaking up masses of color into separate brush strokes of different tones which fuse in the spectator's eye, creating a more luminous impression than that of uniform color blocks” (48); Baudelaire, meanwhile, achieved a similar effect when he “repeats certain sounds to sustain a particular tone,” with an “adherence to regular and intricate rhyme schemes” (52), and suggesting movement through the use of deliberate syntax that modulates a reader's pacing (57). Ernest B. Gilman's essay “Word and Image in Quarles' Emblemes,” on the other hand, focuses on a literary work that employs both image and text in the form of the emblem. More specifically, Gilman’s argument is that the “energy of [Quarles'] book flow less from the plates or the poems taken separately, or from the harmony of their cooperation, than from the discord of the confrontation between them” (61). By generating a zone of contention between image and text, Quarles conceived differently the relationship between the two, in that “traditional descriptions of emblematic art assume the image and the word...join together to create a total effect richer than that of either component alone, that the two parts are commensurate and reinforcing” (61). By undermining pre-established correspondences, Quarles' book can be read less as a faulty or aberrant, and more as an important moment in the history of emblematic discourse. In his short polemic, “A Plea for Visual Thinking,” Rudolf Arnheim goes to great lengths to debunk the claim that “perception offers nothing better than the fairly mechanical recording of the stimuli arriving at the sensory receptors” (172), whereas “thinking...process[es] that information” and thus “emerges...as the 'higher,' more respectable function” (171). To wit, Arnheim posits that “thinking is impossible without recourse to perceptual images” (176) and, in fact, “the intimate interaction between intuitive and intellectual functioning” (179), or perception and thought, account for the manner in which humans solve high-level problems and interact with the world. The final essay of the collection, titled “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory,” was penned by Mitchell himself. At its broadest, Mitchell's contribution “concentrates on the problem of spatial in literature and the languages of criticism with the aim of clarifying its role in reading and literary analysis and with the hope of relating the notion of literary verbal space to the general problem of epistemological structures” (273). The foundation of the author's argument resides in Leibniz's conception of space as “an order of coexistent data” that allows for a “relational and kinematic” understandings (275), which leads into a discussion of how humans spatialize time so as to make it less abstract. As reading and literature tend to be considered temporally based, this is of utmost importance. While Mitchell creates a rather nuanced argument, it can be, essentially, divided into four layers. First, literature is spatial in a material sense: as a physical object that contains a “style of type, size of page, locations of glosses, presence of absence of illustrations, even texture of paper” (282). Second, literature as a mode of representation is spatial in that a “realm...has to be constructed mentally during or after the temporal experience of reading a text” so as to visualize an image (283). The third level of spatial orientation occurs “in the problematics of 'structure' and 'form'” (283). Mitchell's fourth and final layer occurs at the level of “meaning” and the manner in which readers metaphorically stratify types of “meaning” as surface-level understanding or deep-meaning. While Mitchell bases some of his argumentation upon structuralist precepts (particularly those of Northrop Frye), there are some marked differences. First, he does not conceptualize “temporal form” as “the antithesis of spatial form” (284); instead, he conceptualizes the two modes as an interrelated pair that work in conjunction with one another. Additionally, Mitchell does not contend that spatial form has “any fixed map,” nor will it “account for all the details of the text” (284). In the end, Mitchell spatial turn in language serves “to put the form back into fiction and see the way it moves and submerges in the texture of the work” (298), as well as to see literature “as an ecosystem, an organism, a human form” (299).

Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics

2010-07-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

Beach, Christopher, ed. Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1998.

As he states in the preface to his critical anthology, Christopher Beach conceptualizes Artifice and Indeterminacy as a “bringing together [of] the most significant previously uncollected essays by avant-gardist poets and critics” that adhere to four main principles: 1) each piece was written after 1980, 2) “contains no material collected in [previous] anthologies,” 3) represents “the strongest...examples of postmodern avant-garde poetics,” and 4) places a premium on essays that eschew “conventional format” (ix). Beach further delimits the anthology by subdividing the material into four separate categories. The centerpiece of the incipient section, titled “Form/Syntax/Speech,” is Charles Berstein's “Artifice of Absorption,” which he composed in lineated verse; of particular importance to his argument is the claim that the “meaning” of a poem is located in a “complex” residing “be- / yond an accumulation of devices & subject matters” and that poetry is a “writing specifically designed to absorb, or inflate / ...styles of/ reading” (3). Likewise, he promotes “artifice” over “realism” because the former actively calls attention to its “artificiality,” which both have, but only one acknowledges (4). Bob Perelman's essay “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice” is also important in that it defines, explains, and critiques “the new sentence,” which was integral to texts associated with the Language movement. The new sentence employs paratactic elisions within a sentence, but also “gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance” (26). In addition to attempting “to redefine genres” (26), such techniques foster a discontinuity that resembles the dissociative nature of contemporary “ADD” culture (28), while simultaneously promoting a “quite different political and aesthetic aim” (29) intended to subvert, or at least work outside of, mainstream/capitalistic paradigms. In the second section, title “Pattern/Experience/Song,” David Antin's “what it means to be avant-garde” employs a spatially fragmented, unpunctuated, and colloquial writing style that investigates staid notions of the avant-garde as a discourse and historical tradition; in contradistinction to such formulations, he promotes an alternative conceptualization that does not “look backwards or forward,” but instead “occup[ies] the present” (121) wherein “nothing...could have prepared [one] for [this] moment” (129). Another key moment within this section is Lyn Hejinian's commentary on metonymy, in which the trope “moves attention from thing to thing” and focuses on “combination rather than selection” (147). To this extent, “Metonymic thinking moves more rapidly and less predictably than metaphor permits” because it develops “an associative network” as opposed “elaborated” relationships. Section three, titled “Institutions and Ideology,” concentrates on both the political freight and implications of poetry as a discourse. James Sherry's “The Boundaries of Poetry” explores the possibility of an expanded notion of the poem through an “appropriation [of] art and the use of modes of discourse not native to the writer in poetry” (185) in order to generate “complex systems” that render “dynamic properties” (187) and reside in “an objective zone of fluctuation” (188). Ron Silliman's essay “The Political Economy of Poetry” offers a marco-level view of poetry wherein poems are zones of contention: they “both are and are not commodities” and, as such, poets struggle in coming to terms with this fact (190). Furthermore, Silliman goes on to state: “The social composition of its audience is the primary context of any writing” (194), thus highlighting the contextualization of poems as communal objects, as opposed to hermetic, primarily aestheticized artifacts championed by New Critical approaches during the first-half of the twentieth-century. The final section of Beach's anthology, “Poetics and Gender,” contains some of the most progressive writing in the entire collection. Rae Armantrout's “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity” examines the “question of how best to represent women's social position,” while refuting Charles Berstein's claim that women don't compose in “language-oriented writing” (287). Instead, she proposes that “women had [not] shown a marked preference for poetry of an easily readable...conventional kind” (287). Actualizing this stance are Rachel Blau DuPlessis' “The Pink Guitar” and Susan Howe's “Flames and Generosities of the Heart.” The former employs a fracture, aphoristic, and experimental form that channels “A desire to change the authority relations to the text and possibly to language” in an effort “to stop a normal, normative, coherent, flowing, and consumable” text. To her mind, the “struggle on the page is not decorative” (314): the aesthetic innovations of her essay are politically charged statements that attempt to undermine hegemonic conventions. Likewise, Howe's essay incorporates images of Dickinson's manuscripts and extensive block quotes from a variety of sources to create both a collaged and hybrid text that “[re]Define[s] the bounds of naked Expression” through “indecipherable variation” (336).

Collapsible Poetics Theater

2010-07-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

Toscano, Rodrigo. Collapsible Poetics Theater. Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2008.

In the back matter for Toscano's collection of theatrical poems, readers are informed that his “Poetics Theater is a test of poetry” that “brings an entirely new set of possibilities” to the poem, but, concomitantly, “fits into the poetry scene as a baby does in itchy burlap” (155), in that the rigidity of poetic discourse confines, irritates, and suffocates. To wit, conceptualizing Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater as simply a book of genre-bending poems proves reductive. In fact, both the artifact and the text within the artifact are merely potential poems; the poems, in all reality, are the actualized performances of the pieces. The dialogue, stage directions, and diagrams therein merely “Circumscrib[e] a zone of action” (3) in order foster a “more textured...proclamation,” or, in a very literal manner, “architectural thought” (5). For Collapsible Poetics Theater is “poetry for the movement” (31), and the movement from the page to the stage activates the movement from the head to the entire body, wherein the “ears,” as well as the head's other component parts (i.e. eyes/mouth/mind), “detach and take flight in different directions” (130). Furthermore, with this detachment, the poems “conjure up a volatile space...where signs shake off their 'natural selves'” (138) within the signifying system and re-adjust their modus operandi: “words and phrases” achieve “variating intensities and affects” (121) in service of, for, and from the body that the two-dimensional space of the page and well-worn theories of signification cannot achieve. Indeed, Toscano creates an embodied poetics, or in his words, “Body-body-centric” (2) poems of performance, action, and movement. But the connotations of the word “movement” are not limited to the aforementioned spaces; “movement” also refers to social and cultural movements, whether they be the “Movimiento Al Socialismo” (19), “Movimiento a la poesia translinguistica” (20), or “Movimiento a la construccion de bombas poeticas efectivas para explotar la direccion general de Bechtel” (22). Two of the more overt manners in which the poet enacts a culturally engaged poetic is through 1) direct treatment of economic and social issues, particularly in relation to border-politics and immigration, and 2) by writing multi-lingual texts. In the case of the former, speakers in “Truax Inimical” make polemic statements, such as “We once were intimidated by the words 'vagrant' 'fugitive' 'illegal'” (22), “Your weapon of choice...U.S. Dollar” (7), and “At the core of the Empire is an authentic voice that sounds like a controlling sleazy son of a—” (5) that clearly support a progressive, “counter-capitalistic” (4) stance and declare “complete independence from...Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.” (22). In the case of the latter, speakers in “Pig Angels of the Americlypse” code-switch from English to Spanish, more often than not employing colloquial phrases and regional dialects. To wit, stage directions inform us that “Players should take special care in emphasizing where the accent falls on each” version of the word “Dario” (43). But perhaps more importantly than all other concerns, Toscano does not want the Collapsible Poetics Theater to collapse into a “perennially open-ended poetics and/or border crossing aesthetics sans actual bodies moving freely” (24); his collection allows bodies to move “freely” on stage, but bodies must be able to move “freely” across border as well. While the speakers in the closing performance concede “it's only poetic theater's faux duress,” there is hope that “It's a vantage point nonetheless” (153), and from that “vantage point” and “through simple love,” all will have an opportunity to “roll over—to the other side” (70) freely.

The PoPedology of an Ambient Language

2010-07-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Torres, Edwin. The PoPedology of an Ambient Language. Berkeley, CA: Atelos Press, 2007.

Torres' collection is a multi-valent text that encourages readers to interrogate the nature of language, inscription (whether text or image), identity, and the book as artifact. At the level of language, the poet shapes an “Ambient Language,” which is a “surrounding revolution of sound” used to create a “blurry feedback tongue” (104). Stated differently, Torres creates an ethereal and suggestive language that is both aesthetically and politically progressive by making it “blurry” and self-referential, instead of clear and communicative. To do so, he employs a plethora of techniques. One of the most evident blurrings is the poet's use of neologisms; “unwords” (27), such as “understandment” (14), “clutterdust” (24), “whyness” (26), and “socikal” (28) can be found in nearly every poem of PoPedology. Likewise, word fragmentation, wherein “The body gives / me body when / it breaks” (22), so that “body” becomes “the bod now” (22), and language becomes “lang -a ” in order to convey “incomplete thots” (167), proliferate throughout the text. Agrammatical constructions abound as well. By incorporating greater than and less than signs, hyperbolic use of semicolons, and, in some cases, the absence of any punctuation, “cycles of syntax” and “unheard disjunct[s]” (91) develop so as to pose the question: “what little version of yourself repeats in semicolon” (105), mathematical symbols, or no symbol at all? Moreover, “what little version of” the poet or reader appear when Torres writes bi-lingual poems in both English and Spanish? This is of utmost importance, because, in the poet's estimation “the birth of danger is ingles,” in that, when employed traditionally, it fosters “comfort word[s]” lacking revolutionary aspects. Another feature of Torres' collection is the use of inscription, particularly, the manner in which text and image interact. On the one hand, the written word is a “trying to understa/ breathing in this/ alphabet of pageness,” and on the other hand, “images appear..as apparitions in/ guise of meaning” (167). To this extent, the former attempts a truncated “understa”ing of the relation between body and book, while the latter is a visual ghost of “meaning”: something there but not there. By placing text and images (e.g. concrete poems, random/unpronounceable characters as visual fields, photographs, and abstract shapes) side-by-side, Torres asks us to “stare against the unpronounceable” images and “speak through the cracks” of language in an effort to generate “a third space where the eye is an ear” (90) and the ear is an eye. Not surprisingly, then, the author claims to be “a visualist in command of the lingual” (92). As far as identity is concerned, PoPedology challenges readers in many ways. Within the register of genre distinction, several conflations occur:“In Cocktease” confuses theater with poetry, “Catlan Bonanza Translation” television script with poetry “Bottle O' Chutney” popular music with poetry, and “The Interferist Knows Mad Flow” academic discourse/treatise with poetry. What results, then, is a “hybrid species” that, while “Untactical,” is nonetheless the “very prognosis/ inherent of ambient age” (176). Torres' poems, especially during the latter-half of the collection, investigate ethnic identity as well. The poet states that he is a “Latino, un-Latinized by non-Latino speak” (176), but in an effort to assert a less “non-Latino” identity, he engages in a process wherein “language will blur/ by language// crossing limit,” which manifests a “transforming” or “limitless/...shape-shifting” that actively undermines “empirical tyranny” (169). By placing a premium on language, “race be language/ before nation” so that “each tongue/ be/ sacred nature” (169). In other words, Torres implements a radical artifice within language in order to effect a constant becoming that, in and of itself, produces a unique identity predicated upon language and not upon a particular nation-state. In such a manner, “Breath [becomes] king-queen-country” through “Ambient Breath” and ambient language (174), both saving and newly forming a Latino identity. Finally, PoPedology investigates the material realities of the book as artifact. In the middle-section of Torres' collection, titled “Wallism,” readers will immediately notice a marked difference: the paper stock alters from non-glossy to glossy, thus highlighting the “book as tactile memo” and a “contactualize[d]...space” (168). The alteration engages readers on a sensory plane typically neglected in poetry. Moreover, “Wallism” contains several images of pages, so that the page in the book contains images of pages: “a copier copies...pages/ with a code of symbols across the top” (18). Cracking that “code,” it would appear, enables readers to recognize and set in motion “static structures” (88) that normally delimit a text; when a reader cracks the “code,” the poems literally escape the artifact. For example, in the book's concluding section, Torres dedicates an entire page to the phrase “environmental/ white noise” (113); shortly thereafter, there are several blank pages. If one meditates upon the phrase while starring at the blank pages, something interesting occurs: the poem leaves the page/book and becomes the ambient noise heard in the surrounding environment: a unique experience for every reader: the sound of breakers crashing on the beach, the rattle of a subway car, a conversation between strangers, or the clicking of a radiator. Not surprisingly, Torres later invokes the name “john cage” (169), whose 4'33'' activated silence and ambient noise in a similar fashion.

21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics

2010-07-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2002.

Perloff's study of Modernism and its relation to contemporary poetry is, to her mind, a “manifesto” that focuses on “four early modernists whose specific inventions have changed the course of poetry as we know it: Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov” (5). More precisely, Perloff attempts to map a lineage between these select, few poet-artists and today's “powerful avant-garde” (4-5) who produce, think through, and write in a “materialist poetic” (3). Such a poetic's “key concept...is...constructivism,” in that language is not so much a “conduit for thoughts and feelings,” but instead a “site of meaning-make” (9); in other words, constructivist poetry employs language for epistemological ends, as opposed to expressive or communicative ends. The first essay in the collection examines early-Eliot, particularly “Prufrock” and the manner in which the poem's “sound structure, far from being some sort of container for the matter to be conveyed, actually produces that matter” (19), the poet's implementation of Flaubert's mot juste, or “the one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid a multitude of words [and] terms, that might just do” (22), syntax that blurs connections and inhibits the formation of “clear, neat, [and] larger units” (25), as well as an “urbanism” that exhibits “an awareness of proletarian life” (26). In the second section, titled “Gertrude Stein's Differential Syntax,” Perloff explores the concept that a writer “begins, not with an idea to represent in words, words that are then arranged in sentences, but with...sentences themselves” (55). To this extent, the written word, fundamentally, is not representative, but instead a system of inscriptions and corresponding sounds (that are arbitrarily assigned) wherein the relationships between primary, secondary, tertiary elements, etc. are of the most import and what those elements signify or represent are aftereffects. Furthermore, Stein “foregrounds the constructedness of the poetic text” (62) through excessive repetition in which a word or sentence is “repeated with slight variation, each instance making us revise our sense of the one preceding it so that gradually meaning accrues” (57), likewise with her “use of sound play and pun...ellipsis and asyntacticality” (74). Following her investigation of Stein, Perloff studies Duchmap his altering of how one engages art-objects. More precisely, how “art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was said” (83). In other words, artists and consumers of art shifted their attention from technique to the concepts underlying art-objects, or moving from the “retinal” to the “mind” (84). Additionally, many of Duchmap's creations contain a “verbal dimension” so as to produce “proto-language poems” (90), wherein images, via the ideogram, are meant to be read; conversely, words “do not prompt oral recitation,” but instead become inscriptions which are to be viewed (97). Additionally, Duchamp regularly wrote texts predicated upon “rule[s] and grammatical relationship[s]” (93), foretelling the constraint poetry of later artists such as John Cage and Jackson Mac Low. The last modernist that Perloff examines is the Russian poet, Velimir Khlebnikov. The poet's work focuses on “how phonemic and morphemic play can produce a poetic language beyond mind or reason” (123) through an “elaborate” etymological play (125) that necessarily fosters“distinct consonantal sounds...[that] constitute a metonymic network of intricately related signifiers” (126). Other techniques Khlebnikov employs that will, eventually, be co-opted by the contemporary avant-garde are an “emphasis on the graphic...characteristics of language” (127), the development of “algorithmical equations” (130) to manipulate language, as well as “neologism, paranomasia, and glossolalia” (126). 21st-Century Modernism's final essay situates Language poetry as the inheritor of constructivist poetics formed through a nexus of early-Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov. While not an all-inclusive study of the movement, Perloff chooses four prominent representatives (i.e. Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Steve McCaffery) as examples of how the modernist poetics manifest themselves nearly one-hundred years later, outlining both the similarities and differences within this new temporal and cultural context.

A New Quaratine Will Take My Place

2010-07-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Göransson, Johannes. A New Quarantine Will Take My Place. Apostrophe Books, 2007.

Göransson's Quarantine contains sections composed of both prose and verse in an effort to produce “a story of the death of narrative” (5) wherein the speaker attempts to “be more obscure” (10) by filling his poems “with all this excess” (11). And what is “all this excess”? For starters, excess “involve[s] gibberish anatomies” (13), or continual reconstructions of the body that function as “stylistic impulses of...decorative patterns” (24), providing readers with a physiology that mutates from sentence to sentence, page to page, and poem to poem. The speaker begins by informing us that: “I need to paint my torso to look more like a torso” (17), thus positing a “need” to aestheticize his “torso” in a representational manner (i.e. “more like a torso”). But the desire for a torso to resemble a torso soon dissipates, as one encounters a “barked torso” (23), a “flocked torso” (24), a torso on which a “poem [is] engraved” (26), another which contains “an entire October of birds” and a “travesty of stiches” (27). While the torso undergoes ceaseless alterations, the poem reminds us of the “futility of reconstruction” (26), and the inability of these metamorphoses to produce a stable subjectivity, presence, or “totalizing narrative” (41). Of course, to the speaker's mind, this is not necessarily a negative consequence; in fact, there appears to be certain amount of disdain for such concepts when he states: “If I had my choice, I wouldn't even be here” (31): complete absence of the self: becoming-imperceptible. The pay-off, then, is vocalized in the process of transformation itself, a new evolution of the physical and conceptual self sung throughout the poems. In other words, the speaker celebrates his ability “to fit so many/ disparate parts in my mouth at once” (35). It should come as no surprise, then, that he tells us several times: “I wish I were...Darwin” (17). Another technique Göransson employs throughout his collection is the incorporation of “PERFORATION[S]” and “MORE PERFORATION[S]” (79) within many of the poems that rupture their trajectory, both linguistically and materially. For instance, one-third of the way through the poem “Retina, Ignite,” the poet uses an entire page for the phrase “REVULSION AS/ AN ANTIDOTE TO/ EXPERIMENTAL/ POETRY” (25), interrupting the syntactical unit (i.e. sentence) on the previous page so that “The birds are trying to escape” (24 and 26) is separated within the artifact, as well as linguistically, and spliced by the “REVULSION” phrase. Such “PERFORATION[S],” no doubt, aid in the dissolution of “totalizing narratives” by displacing the audience and forcing them outside of the poem's narrative. Finally, the poem “Postcards” is a series of letters, or postcards, written to a variety of characters and inanimate objects; they tend to be short, blithe, and rather light-hearted in tone, relative to the rest of the collection.

Dictee

2010-07-09T10:18:00.000-07:00

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.

Dictee begins with two paragraphs, one written in French and one in English, that signal a code-switching found throughout the remainder of the text. Alternating between these aforementioned, Western languages, as well as Chinese, Cha's book makes literal the Japanese suppression of Korea's native tongue, which forced Koreans to “speak in the tongue the mandatory language” that “is not [their] own,” requiring them to be “Bi-ligual” and “Tri-lingual,” and erasing “The tongue that is forbidden...[their] mother tongue” (45). But the process of language acquisition, of becoming bi- and trilingual, is a stammering and difficult one; both the form and content of Cha's prose indicate this. Readers discover that, when writing, the author “mimicks the speaking. That might resemble speech...Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words...she resorts to mimicking gestures with the mouth” (3). The “noise” and “groan[s],” as one would expect, do not adhere to “proper” grammatical requirements; more often than not, the author composes her written words in a staccato and fragmented manner. For example: “She takes. She takes the pause. Slowly. From the thick. The thickness. From weighted motion upwards. Slowed” (5). The hyperbolic use of periods mimics the “Broken speech [and] Pigeon tongue” (161) Cha spoke in once exiled from Korea. Moreover, upon moving to Paris, and then to the United States, “someone” took her “identity and replaced it with their” own (56) by culturally mandating her to speak in French and English. In addition to focusing on the relationship between identity and language, idiosyncratic grammar encourages readers to conceptualize the embodiment of language: the voice as an intensive and affective tool. For instance, Cha writes: “Stop. Start. Starts./ Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise./ Broken speech. One to one. At a time./ Cracked tongue. Broken tongue” (75). On the page facing this poem about the “Starts” and “Stop[s]” of “Broken speech” formed by a “Cracked” and “Broken” tongue, there are several anatomical diagrams of the human larynx. Through the juxtaposition of images and text, the author highlights or intensifies the concept of voice, and language which voice produces, as a physical apparatus, not merely an abstract system indicated by a series of recurring inscriptions. To this extent, when one switches from language to language, the body (i.e. the tongue and larynx) must move, literally, in markedly different patterns. Acquiring these patterns of movement sometimes necessitates that a speaker enter a linguistic “void” (73) wherein nothing is voiced, at other times utter “Remnants” that are “Missing” (69) integral aspects of this new language, and, occasionally, vocalize nothing more than a guttural “Noise” (75). The incorporation of images into Dictee, though, most often elicits pathos from the viewer. In order to do so, Cha uses close-up head-shots of Korean women, engendering a humanistic empathy so as to personalize the “atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, [and] destruction” she and other Koreans suffered. While these images are most prolific throughout the collection, there are several pages of reproduced, handwritten notes and letters as well. Inserting these reproductions into the fabric of the text produces, once again, an intensifying effect that reinforces the “authenticity” of Cha's life-story: this is no work of fiction, but a harrowing autobiography that documents oppression, displacement, and cultural erasure created by a hand, a body, a woman attempting “to write [so] she could continue to live...without ceasing” (141). A final aesthetic point that merits attention is the narrative arc of Dictee. While, indeed, the book does tell a story, its “Narrative shifts, discovers variation” (145), by avoiding chronological progression, abruptly oscillating between characters and point-of-view, as well as altering its mode of conveyance (e.g. verse, standard prose, poetic prose, letters, images, quotation, historical accounts, etc.). To wit, Dictee “follows no progression in particular of the narrative but submits only to the timelessness created in [Cha's] body” (149). In other words, Cha's book does not succumb to traditional (i.e. imperialistic) narrative form and its adherence to comprehensible, temporal spaces, but, instead, is “created in her body,” embodied, and thus an extension of her tangible self.

Body Clock

2010-07-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Sikelianos, Eleni. Body Clock. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008.

In addition to mapping a space created between the body and time, where “in the many directions in which a body grows, it grows or shrinks in time” (32) to the extent that “a human [is] so shaped like an hour” (34), Sikelianos' Body Clock explores the transitional zone between speech and sound, language and body, and image and text. For instance, the poem “Experiments with Minutes” asks “If we could shine a flashlight/ through the edge of a minute” and “see the membrane's red/ corpuscle,” could we then “Move the flashlight out on eternity” (35)? In other words, does the temporal dimension, in this case “a minute,” have a physical dimension enclosed by a visible “membrane”? And, if it does, what about the the time containing all of time (i.e. “eternity”); can it too be enclosed in physical space? But more than rhetorical questions, Sikelianos investigates the possibilities of an embodied temporal space through a series of text-image hybrids. More specifically, the poet, within the time-frame of one minute, draws a circle with “small freckles of scattered” dots inside of it so as to visually delimit the “conception [of] a minute...though not perfectly” (36). Of course, through the “not perfectly,” she further problematizes the visual concept of a minute when she informs the reader that “This..minute...only took 34 seconds to draw” (36), and the following image “took 31 seconds to draw, but accidentally depicts 61 random seconds” (37). Moreover, when she succeeds in drawing “a// minute that takes exactly a minute,” it “required” her “to sometimes speed up, sometimes slow down” (39) the velocity of her visual minute. Certainly, the poet posits no definitive answer as to the relationship between body, image, text and time, but the multi-dimensional poem does complicate our understanding of each. Later, in the section of the book titled “The Abstracted Heart of Hours & Days (Body Clock),” Sikelianos extrapolates her previous investigation of the minute to the length of an hour. But not only has the temporal space expanded, so has the visual space. Instead of drawing a simple circle enclosing “freckles,” the poet creates elaborate floral patterns surround by time-stamped text so as to imagine how a flower might “rhyme with hour in sound and shape” (99). In this manner, Sikelianos goes “Chasing a minute inside an hour's burrow” (103), while “seconds are peeling off the hour” like “petals floating into a vast distance” (100). In the “Note on Minutes and Hours” that concludes the collection, readers discover the creative and intellectual scaffolding for these pieces; the author explains: “I tried sketching portraits of minutes, attempting to contain them within that temporal allocation. Later, I graduated to hours...Soon, I realized...that these were poem-drawings” (149). These “poem-drawings,” composed of both floral patterns and handwritten words are followed by “typed language...which appears as footnotes [and] is the language residue of the experiment” (149). To this extent, the handwritten words and the typed words sometimes mirror one another, such as “the hour's seeds scatter” and “the hour's seeds scatter” (112), but at other times contain unique moments; for example, Sikelianos draws a wavy blossom next to the inscription “a minute expands into/ an hour,” but the typed-text below reads “she calls I// answer swer a swerve a/ brush of air” (108). In this way, the “residue” of the “experiment” bears no direct linguistic relation to its predecessor, but, no doubt, contains an oblique, almost invisible, conceptual link to it wherein “each word opened upon/ the limb” (78) so that we can “see language the trees” (76) and plant-life. It is, of course, a matter of looking in a particular fashion, one in which the “body exposed...to word, erodes” (88) into the new by traveling through a contested zone of transition where “The poem can be as risky as the body” (107) by challenging readers to conceptualize body-poem-text-image-time-space differently.

The Cave

2010-06-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

Coolidge, Clark and Bernadette Mayer. The Cave. Princeton, NJ: Adventures in Poetry, 2009.

Coolidge and Mayer's collaboration stems from a trip the two poets took with several of their friends and family members to Eldon's Cave in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts on September 10, 1972; the writers composed the resulting material from this excursion over the course of the following six years. Details surrounding the book's inception and production are important for two specific reasons. First, the collection functions as a cave, particularly Eldon's Cave, metonymically; secondly, the collection explores the confluence of memory and language, or how “cave words leave a hollow in our past” (69). To this extent, the book opens with fairly direct prose that recounts the particulars of the poets' outing, from the round-about manner in which they found the location of the cave, to their exploration of it's tunnels, passages, and crevices. In a very literal manner, then, the prose poems that comprise the majority of The Cave are “Passages,” wherein Coolidge and Mayer inform us that “I can find my way in without directions for putting words together,” and our “way in” is an exploration of how one recalls an external event via an internal consciousness over the course of time. When constructing these memories in the written form, not adhering to linguistic rules is important because “The directions for a multiplication of words may not work in [a] place” (16), such as a cave, as it does in another “places”; instead, in this “absence of alphabet for putting words together,” readers need a system based upon context that evolves organically: language born of/in the “environment,” or “Words carved in marble [that] define what is sculptural but not transportable” (16). Therefore, as writers and readers, the “game [is] to figure out what words were the cave” (17). But the “sculptural” words that “work in [this] place” are not meant, necessarily, to communicate or signify in a traditional manner, nor is their purpose determinate or singular. In fact, the words are “energy words” that “speak an unrehearsed...echoes” and produce “a spring, a spewing, a spitting” (10) within the audience; in other words, The Cave contains intensive and affective language focusing on “the repetition of cadences” (56) in an effort to evoke “the grand qualities of...music...in its rare forms” (57), via its “long & complex sentence” (54) structures, neologisms “not in my dictionary” (53), and “twist[s] of syntax” (64). In addition to the aesthetic and philosophical explorations of language, Mayer and Coolidge also investigate what it means to write a collaborative work and how co-written texts “obfuscate...identities shown” (9). The collection concludes with a series of dialogues between real and imagined characters; in once such dialogue, Mayer asks Coolidge: “How come Clark we keep putting words whatever they are/ into each other's mouths?” While the question, initially, may lead readers to the conclusion that the purpose of a collaborative text is lost upon the poets, the pieces that precede the dialogue tell us something different. In fact, “putting words...into each other's mouths” is a experiment in “always getting lost off the main passage” (65), or “narrating the trail” in such a manner that “I have become both they” (43) so as to discover “a new way of speaking” (34) that “eats away at the pronoun I” and creates a “sense invisible” (19).

The Transformation

2010-06-28T08:02:00.000-07:00

Spahr, Juliana. The Transformation. Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2007.

The Transformation “tells a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001” (217), when the author lived in Hawai'i, Brooklyn, and her travels between the two locations. Written in a dense, lyric, and repetitive style, the book works “under the sign of contradiction” (213), displaying characteristics that one finds in both prose and poetry, thus challenging readers to question the manner in which we assign genre distinctions. For example, the book, which Spahr composes in sentences and paragraphs, contains a protagonist, a somewhat linear plot, and culminates in a specific, transformative change within the protagonist's consciousness that often marks a work of prose; but, of course, there are several aesthetic elements that confound that designation, infusing the text with poetic qualities. One such technique is the hyperbolic repetition of complex kennings. For instance, instead of referring to Hawai'i as “Hawai'i,” Spahr refers to it as the “island in the middle of the Pacific” (14); likewise, inhabitants of the island that are from an indigenous blood-line are called “those who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived” (84). Phrases such as these are used repeatedly throughout the book, frequently multiple times in a single paragraph, and overload the text with identical, rhythmic, and lengthy patterns that produce “awkward repetitions or...weird turns of phrases that [can be] heard in [the] writing as musical” (62). Spahr's “musical” writing enacts, to a certain extent, “avant-garde” practices that use “fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on to make them like a foreigner in their own language” (99). The Deleuzian concept of the stutter, or that which makes one “a foreigner in [one's] own language” is of utmost importance to the text because issues of imperialism, colonialism, and the author's complicity with those concepts are at the forefront of her writing. Specifically, English, or “expansionist language,” acts as “a cultural bomb” that “absorb[s] in order to kill out...local languages” (94); while doing so, it fails to “carry all the local knowledge” of a colonized culture (98), thus eradicating indigenous languages/cultures while simultaneously promoting “legacies of imperialism” (95). If a writer who is complicit with “expansionist language” desires to work against these tendencies, “they would have to say sideways” (99) and not in a straightforward, appropriate, or traditional manner. Another important aesthetic technique Spahr employs is “troubled and pressured pronouns” (205). To generate “pressure” on pronouns, the author uses the third-person plural (in the form of “them” or “they”) exclusively throughout the text. In the one instance wherein she invokes the first-person, readers find out why she implements this choice; she writes: “when a certain singer sang out I am, I said...it was a statement of male assertion and privilege” (185). Identity, more specifically gender identity and the manner in which language transmits and enforces it, is yet another theme within The Transformation. As Spahr states, her book “is a story of coming to an identity, coming to realize that they not only had a gender that was decided for them without their consent and by historical events that they had not even been alive to witness” (22). By choosing to write in the third-person plural, she attempts to find “an ease in discomfort” (22), undermining “male privilege” and the identity assigned to her which she had no part in deciding. At the conclusion of the book, there is an “admission that they didn't have any real answers” with regard to imperialism, gender, etc., but we are left with “the hope that if they kept writing others might point them to answers” (214). The pointing, then, will take place on a map (i.e. The Transformation) that offers “a new sort of conceptualization that allowed for more going astray than any map they had ever seen” (211) and lead to “a love of the varieties” (212) and differences that we as humans encounter each moment of our lives.

There Are Birds

2010-06-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

Taggart, John. There Are Birds. Chicago, IL: Flood Editions, 2008.

Taggart investigates both sound and repetition in There Are Birds through use of the serial poem. The centerpiece of the collection is a sixty-page poem, sectioned into eighty-nine units and titled “Unveiling/Marianne Moore,” which displays most of the characteristics at work within the book as a whole. The extended form of the serial poem offers Taggart and his audience an ideal platform to explore these principles because it is a “deliberative sequence a line of thought/ which is not a straight line which is a branching/serpentine” and “which stops and starts/restarts which has life/ a form of its own cut up or broken/ nonetheless a life form rhythm/ of its own” (23). By deliberating through and within a “branching” and “serpentine” thought pattern, that at times is “cut up or broken,” the poem forces the reader into neither a particular instance positing itself as a false totality, nor a rational line of thought predicated upon logic; instead, readers encounter an accumulation of sounds and words, or “stops and starts/restarts” that produce “a life form rhythm” beyond the grasp of classification and representation. Stated differently, by exploring similar words, sounds, and themes over the course of the poem, a “reduction and the composition of reduction” results “in intensity”: an affective rhythm that consists of “birdsong/ mourning and unmourning at sunrise” (1), “delicate textures (6), and “color and pattern” (19). Of course, this is not to say that the intellect has no role in these poems; in fact, Taggart believes that one needs a certain amount of concentration and control to direct intensities in a positive manner. He writes: “As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy...upon written words” (25). In order to aid in the process of intensity control, the poet incorporates a great deal of white space into his writing. The Notes section at the end of There Are Birds further expounds upon the purpose of spacing when it informs us that we “will occasionally come upon internal space gaps of varying proportions (varying durations of silence)...They provide time for rest, for an image to assume depth and definition, for reflection. They are not so much 'holes' as cadenced parts of the whole” (90). To wit, the pauses created by the “gaps” attempt to provide a “cadence” for readers wherein “the space between white space and spaces in the head” fuses so that “things,” or images, words, sounds, and ideas, “that belong together...are made to hold together” (23) in concentration. But, just as soon as we produce these image-thoughts, they dissipate, shifting from “operative” to “operatic”: an “evolution...from speech to cry,” from linguistic and intellectual to emotive, intensive, and “ultimate unintelligibility” (38). In addition to the aforementioned traits of Taggart's poems, they also lack regular punctuation, more often than not relying on line breaks and the reader's internal rhythm to determine the cadence of the poem. As such, one must foster a “rapport with the body [and] the note,” or inscription, so as to move “straight/ into sounds colors”; only then can one make “room/space for...a new sign” formed from “the/ shadow of// ...what was given to him” (82).

The Vermont Notebook

2010-06-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

Ashbery, John and Joe Brainard. The Vermont Notebook. Calais, VT: Granary Books, Inc., 2001.

The Vermont Notebook is a collaborative effort containing the prose poetry of John Ashbery and charcoal sketches by visual artist Joe Brainard. With regard to Ashbery's poems, lists comprise the first third of the book, which range from names of other poets, corporations, board games, and urban minutia, just to name a few. Following the aforementioned lists, the poet employs a variety of different forms, such as diary entries and personal letters so as conduct a “reinvestigation and reapprasial of the whole situation” (43) that is prose poetry. While these experiments, no doubt, offer readers an interesting lens through which to view poetry, Ashbery also invokes the prose poem tradition of Gertrude Stein, at times, when exploring the use of wordplay and repetition; for example, he writes: “They say we are treason to understand what goes on not to understand what goes on. They say gals understand more. They say guys understand more. They say guys and gals glued to surprise partition understand more. They say all understand more. They say no one understand more” (31). At the close of the book, the penultimate piece, “The Fairie's Song,” is the lone poem written in lineated, verse form and speaks to the fact “that whatever we arrange,” in this case prose poems, “Will sooner of later get all fucked up” (93) with a more traditional, lyric sensibility. With regard to content, Ashbery explores late-twentieth century conceptions of Americana, whether that be with a Whitmanian catalog of southern cities, such as “Charlottesville, Washington, Baltimore, Macon, Manassas, Asheville” (19), etc., or unapologetic polemics wherein the poet notes: “What with all our pious expostulations and public declarations of concern for the poor and the elderly, this is a lot of bunk and our own president plays it right into the lap of big business and uses every opportunity he can to fuck the consumer and the little guy. We might as well face up to the fact that this is...part of our so-called American way of life” (59). Another theme explored by the author is the confluence of culture and nature, specifically, when he writes about the “Marco Applied Marine Ecology Station” in the “southern Gulf coast of Florida” (77) and the company's subsequent efforts of “finding ways to protect and enhance the environment” (79) through man-made contraptions and consumer refuse. In one instance, scientists created artificial reefs from “57,000 old automobile tires...wired together” (81), in another, bald eagle nests were re-located and “strapped to a concrete piling in a mangrove thicket” (77). While Marco's plans do provide animal life with certain amount of “environmental protection,” they also have an ulterior motive: capital; with regard to to the previously mentioned reefs, the impetus of the project had more to do with raising a fisherman's catch-rate from one fish every two hours, to “sometimes...up to 15 fish per hour” (83). The relationship between Ashbery's text and Brainard's sketches is also worth mentioning because, throughout the course of the book, it alters frequently. The first page of the book contains the silhouette of a solitary figure standing on the horizon, instilling within the reader a sense of isolation; on the next page, there is a short list: “October, November, December” (7). By pairing the list with the drawing, the isolate figure imbues the months with a particular emptiness or solitary existence. Several pages later, readers encounter the following list: “Industrial parks, vacant lots...arenas...tarmac, blacktop, service roads, parking lots...” (11), but the image on the opposing page is that of a country road, a farm, and various livestock. While the juxtaposition of rural landscape with a list of urban spaces, no doubt, initially jars the audience, further examination encourages them to gauge the differences, as well as material-economic relationships between them. Of course, there is no mandatory manner in which to conceptualize the images, nor their relationship to the text. Sometimes they may cause an audience member anxiety or confusion: to “teeter...on the hem of sleep, disrobing this way or that, clenching his teeth [at] all those distraught objects...seeming not seeing but just seeing” (35). Yet, if one thinks through the text and image relationship thoroughly, the zone of transition between the two develop into “signposts toward an infinity of wavering susceptible variables, if one but [knows] how to read them aright” (61).

Debbie: An Epic

2010-06-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

Robertson, Lisa. Debbie: An Epic. Vancouver, Canada: New Star Books, 1997.

One of the more prominent characteristics of Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic is the manner in which typography and layout call attention to the material production and design of the artifact itself. For instance, on the inside cover (before the text proper begins), a short lyric appears that functions as an introductory missive, and to a certain extent, a brief guide on how to engage the poem: “imagine that an explorer arrives is aroused by an unreadable question acts in undreamed-of bilingual event. clear away the rubbish. the visible remains. Good luck!” More important than the author positing the reader as an “explorer” confronted with the mystery of “an unreadable question” and an “undreamed-of bilingual event,” is the fact that Robertson transgresses boundaries within the material artifact by presenting the literary text upon pages traditionally reserved for publication information, errata, and marginalia. Likewise, employing multiple fonts, colors, and weights to the typography on the title page foreshadows radical use of typography readers encounter throughout the collection. At its most conservative, the text's typographical experiments simply enlarge, alter, or strengthen/weaken the font, thus calling attention to certain words. In the opening poem, the poet typographically highlights words such as “Mirage,” “Harmony,” and “Disproportion,” encouraging readers to linger over them a bit longer and consider their heightened relevance; when Robertson writes “Harmony/ ...an Effect of Disproportion,” the material alterations in the text attune the reader's concentration to the philosophical paradox of an antithesis' containment within the thesis rather than outside of it. Of course, a more radical use of typography occurs at the beginning of “Episode: Majorettes,” in which a single poem stretches across the expanse of two facing pages, overlayed upon a gray diamond shape. By using techniques such as this, the inscriptions, as well as the abstract designs that accompany them, function not just as text, but as visual art-objects themselves. Or, as the author writes, the inscriptions become “ornaments of my clever flesh: Borrowed/ from rivals,” or other mediums. By focusing on “ornaments,” Robertson privileges the artist and the act of creation as “All that is beautiful, from which I choose/ even artifice, which I hold above nature,” to mention nothing of the claim that “Artifice complicates,” and thus expands our world-views. Another convention the poet calls into question with her collection is classifications of poetry. Specifically, by invoking the term “Epic” within the title, repeatedly referencing Virgil, as well as herself as “Virgil's bastard daughter,” one expects the text to structure itself around a grand narrative in an effort to historicize or mythologize a particular community. But, of course, this is not what readers encounter. In fact, readers find that the protagonist, Debbie, is a “Moot person in moot place,” emptying her of particulars; moreover, Robertson devalues histories when she writes: “I'd like to think/ of narrative as a/ folly.” This is not to say that narrative does not serve a purpose. Indeed, narrative is “classically/styled” and “might decorate and/ articulate the idea of the/ present,” but it is founded upon “ambivalence” and the “rhetoric of our identity” (which is problematic, in that identity is “moot”): not upon truth, but upon “repeating the/ word political.” Another aesthetic feature of Debbie is how the poet “refracts the [poem's] cursive grammar” by “ticking against the/ dark adjacency of prose.../ of gods and punctuation.” Take, for instance, the following excerpt: “amazon an amazon with a mounted/ amazon from behind by an ama/ zon over a fallen amazon an/ amazon overcoming striking down/ an amazon an amazon striking.” Within these lines, several poetic idiosyncrasies that occur throughout the collection manifest themselves: 1) complete absence of punctuation, 2) repetition of the word, in this case “amazon,” and 3) breaking lines mid-word or on soft words. Finally, Robertson conflates extravagant and colloquial idioms, juxtaposing phrases such as “I've veiled/ such fulsome money, o tongue phosphoric, bleating” with “I've fucked things up, but I'm awake.”

Complex Sleep

2010-06-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Tost, Tony. Complex Sleep. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007.

Complex Sleep, in a strict sense, is an investigation of form wherein particular and, to a certain extent, arbitrary constraints create texts with a “Structural sensibility” (43) that “summon[s]/ precision” (55), but also produces an ethereal language that is “perpetually speculative” (45) as to meaning because form dictates content, often times at the expense of transparent comprehension. For example, the footnote to the title poem informs readers that the main text “is an index of alphabetically arranged sentences...that made up a prose poem” also named “Complex Sleep” (64). Such a re-ordering of language presents the audience with a radically different text, thus fostering a radically different reception; or as Tost writes: “A change of words is more or less/ a change of minds” (64). More specifically, since the “footnote alerts” (65) readers of the new arrangement vis-a-vis the old arrangement, one continually speculates as to the relationship between the way in which the sentences were originally ordered and the final version's order: What was lost? What was gained? The poet acknowledges this space between versions when he writes of the “weird displacement” (96) that occurs in “the spaces between words” (95) and our reception of them. In addition the the fragmentary nature of the sentences' content and the curiosity the footnote imbues within the reader regarding the meta-commentary, another characteristic the alphabetical reconstruction offers is a repetitive, often times anaphoric auditory experience. For instance, over the course of the first six and a half pages, the incipient word of each sentence begins with the letter “A”; moreover, the first word of each sentence on the opening three and a half pages is the indefinite article “A.” The anaphora and alliterative sounds foster an accumulative musicality that “set[s] up a few/ fetishistic patterns.../ in order to create a sense of...obsession or/ suppression” (78): obsessive in that the form is compulsive, suppressive in that the form delimits. The serial poem “Ink Drop,” like “Complex Sleep,” employs a specific, albeit arbitrary, form; all nine poems contain ten lines, and each line contains five words. While, no doubt, the phrase “Stranglehold offers form” (37) speaks to the manner in which line-and-word counted form constrains both the poet and the poem, it also offers “Vibrating stabilities. Improvisations” (35). Neologisms are the most evident of these “vibrations” and “improvisations” found within the poems: in order to fit the proper number of words into a line, Tost combines words to create new ones, such as “Twittersong” (39), Dreamdead” (43), and “Flowchant” (45). Another technique employed to maintain the word count of lines, and thus the poems' “vibrations,” is a liberal elision, more than not generated through inventive use of punctuation. Take for instance, the following excerpt: “Repeater: identity's specificities/ capabilities atmospheric; perceptive, bitter” (44). The sentence elides relational language, instead opting for radical parataxis predicated upon relational punctuation (i.e. colons, semicolons, and commas). Finally, in the poem “A Northern Eros,” the phrases “the genius of your legs” and “another rose” (33) repeat throughout the poem, but each repetition mutates slightly based upon the context in which it is found; or, as the poem states, the poem as a whole becomes a “Tape-loop” of “another rose doubling” (33), as well as the “genius of your legs” doubling that is “Mostly bound (to sound)” so as to enact a “Verbal pressure” (34) and a “Gray magic of blood repeating” (35). With such a premium placed upon the sonic capabilities of these poems, it is no coincidence that in the “Notes” section that concludes the collection, Tost references a slew of musicians and bands that “patterned” and provided “scaffolding for” his writing, such as Bob Dylan, Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices, the Beatles, Curtis Mayfield, and Captain Beefheart, just to name a few.

On Spec

2010-06-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

Williams, Tyrone. On Spec. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2008.

Tyrone Williams' On Spec explores the confluence of post-Language poetry and African-American poetic tradition; the entwining of diverse aesthetic and ideological lineages is no more apparent than midway through the collection in “Four Dialogues, Five Fish, One Bowl (Interrogation Procedures).” Within this serial piece, the author juxtaposes critical examination of prominent twentieth-century black artists with a rigorous study of Derrida's The Gift of Death. For instance, in “Preface 1,” Williams informs readers that the “unnamed narrator” from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man “functions as an example of the absent indefinite article; he is just another black man poised at the edge of history, peering into the oblivion” (63). The poet couches his critique within language (i.e. the lack of an article in the book's title), but focuses on black identity in “American history: the individual as simultaneously a part of, and apart from, a community” (63). Immediately following the paragraph on Invisible Man, a second paragraph analyzes Derrida's theory of deconstruction and explains how the French philosopher argued that “foundational oppositions,” in fact, were not so much oppositions, but, when given “x and not-x, not-x is not only the polar opposite of x but, in fact, is contained within x” (63). To this extent, both paragraphs, while written in different idioms and whose contents are often thought to be at odds with one another (see Joyce-Gates-Baker debate), seek to understand and come to terms with a fundamental, philosophical paradox: in one case framed as a subject both “ a part of, and apart from” a collective, and in the other case “x and not-x” both outside of and “contained within x.” No doubt, Williams' investigation of the aforementioned subject-matter stems from his understanding as an experimental, African-American poet that “The signature public/ the only avant-garde/ behind invention” (17) has often times dismissed the “Smoke to motion...rhythm of evading/ Low-down mast, new-hold plank, whip-/ Taut” music found in blues, jazz, and oral traditions (riffing, improvisation, and punning), as something other than the “advanced guard.” But, by shrewdly combining the two, such as when he writes “Auto-didact/-dialectics/ stage in rent-to-rent/ 'crowded houses,' asea to har-har-/ poon Terrible Tom's tom-tom/ stutter” (21), both poetic strains are “contained within” each other, via word-play. It is not so much that the poet resolves the tension between traditions, but that he allows them to exist concurrently within his aesthetic. Another aspect of On Spec that bears mention is the book's conflation of genres. With regard to the previously discussed “Four Dialogues..,” the poet encourages readers to question the relationship between theory and poetry: What are their similarities? What are their differences? And how are we, as readers and writers, affected by our placement within the transitional and often nebulous zone between them? Similar questions can be asked when approaching “Brer R(g).” The piece is a five-part play, initially performed for the Bay Area Poets Group in 2004. The text, whether dialogue or stage directions, contains language that is simultaneously spare and associative, fostering a distinctly Beckettian aura that necessitates the audience connect the elliptical moments, passages, movements, and vocalizations with their own words and experiences. Other boundary-defying techniques Williams employs are the use of check-boxes, errata and footnotes delimited both spatially and visually in non-traditional manners, mathematical equations, cross-outs, quotation, and liberal use of white space. An additional poetic technique the author uses rather frequently is the hard enjambment, regularly breaking on syllables mid-word; for example: “green-/ print/ for/ a/ shot-/ gun/ a-/ part-/ ment” (141). By slowing down the readers' cognition through accumulation of fragmented phonemes, both spatially and temporally, we find that “Enjambment disables” intellect in favor of “affective minimals” (114). Or stated differently, by radical use of “Enjambment” and the creation of phonetic “minimals,” the poems “disable” our immediate understanding of them, instead offering us confusion, play, mystery, anxiety and these psychological states' commiserate “affective” responses.

Seismosis

2010-06-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

Keene, John and Christopher Stackhouse. Seismosis. San Diego, CA: 1913 Press, 2006.

The collaborations comprising Keene and Stackhouse's Seismosis contain two elements: abstract pen and pencil, line drawings and language-based poetry that more often than not employs innovative forms. The aforementioned poems range from prose poetry to lists to graphs to found text to erasures to more traditionally lineated verse, just to name a few techniques. The language within Keene's pieces, like Stackhouse's drawings, tends to be abstract; for example, in the poem “After C (4): Event Location” readers encounter passages such as : “stretching himself to a level of being gone/ at the moment of gut and presentation./ As in an incipient space, the search for an approach/ to deconstruct his erasure” (16). The question, then, becomes: what is the best manner for audience members to engage a "stretching" of language that necessarily works to avoid the concrete in favor of a more ethereal and fluid idiom that approaches "a level of being gone"? To a certain extent, Keene's provides the answer to this question in the poem “Analysis II”; he writes that the purpose of “abstract art” lies “in stressing the strength of energy released by cognition and observation” (56). What is of special interest with regard to this excerpt is the author's belief that affect, or “energy,” is necessarily stimulated by what many consider to be its antithesis: “cognition,” or intellect. In this manner, the poet attempts not so much to reconcile a binary, so much as develop an idea of how these two concepts work in conjunction with one another. Stated differently, the relationship between intellect and affect fostered within this collection produces “a formal provocation” through “a radical juxtaposition” (107) of disparate modes of engagement. In Seismosis' afterword, Geoffrey Jacques claims that one finds this provocation in “a refusal to disavow voice while paying close attention to the materiality of language” (107). In either case, the raison d'erte of the work appears to be an exploration of contradictory terms and how we as readers can exist, functionally, within both simultaneously. Of course, Keene realizes that abstract art and writing causes many people difficulty, in that it does not offer “immediate pleasure” as do art-objects traditionally conceived of as “”mimetic” (56), but his hope is that those who feel put off by such work will attempt to claw “through the layers of cell and axion” and “le[a]d [them]/ to an emotion” and “intensity” (56). Another question that arises when reading Keene and Stachkhouse's book is: what is the relationship between between text and image? The authors do not necessarily answer the question, so much as restate the question in their own words and images: “He kept drawing, wondering what it meant to attempt/ to convey correspondences, to explore percepts, feelings, impressions, rendering/ topographies of inner quests, geometries of inquiry, testimony of an interior vision” (49). This is not to say that readers are not provided with any clues as to how one best navigates the “correspondence” between text and image; in fact, the collection offers hints, even though oblique, throughout. For instance: “When drawn, however, the unnatured, “ or abstract, works as “a SCREEN made up/ of its component patterns” (46). As such, if one wants to draw back the “SCREEN” so as to find the correspondence between text and image, it would be beneficial to examine “component patterns,” or the repetitions found within and between word and image. In some cases, no doubt, the speaker wants “to map this cluster feeling...drawing it, its negative and subordinate qualities” (64), and thus abstraction, to a certain extent, becomes mimetic; in other cases, the speaker writes “independent of the drawing net, its wake or trace” (87) so that, if a connection is teased out, it is strictly a product of reader's consciousness and bears no relation to authorial intent. Either way, upon “entering” into Seismosis, and by extension the transitional zone between word and image, we as readers are “extending/ sensation into line tone time and rhythm/ mark architecture/ attentive to physical conversation” (21). In other words, Keene and Stackhouse's collaborative effort aesthetically manipulates the abstract “line,” both poetic and hand-drawn, via “tone time and rhythm” so as to produce “sensation,” or “physical conversation” (i.e. affect) through the abstract and the cognitive.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

2010-06-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

Rankine, Claudia. Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Saint Paul: MN, Graywolf Press, 2004.

The back-cover of Don't Let Me Be Lonely categorizes the book as a collection of lyric essays. To this extent, the pieces are short, open-ended prose blocks that contain a musical rhythm and auditory repetitions that provide a certain amount of lyricism wherein the author “tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness” (129). As the title of the book suggests, the central theme is loneliness, particularly the manner in which it manifests itself within the contemporary, American cultural landscape (e.g. politics, prescripted medication, television, etc.); a language that embodies “usefulness,” then, seeks to combat loneliness in that, according to Rankine, “loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness” (129). Outside of the trans-genre aesthetic the text evinces, another important aspect of Rankine's book is the incorporation of images into the fabric of the essays. To begin with, individual sections are separated by a photograph of a television with static on its screen. Just as viewers at one time needed to pass through interstitial, static spaces when changing from one channel to another, readers encounter the aforementioned image that signifies a passing from one essay to another: a symbolic or metaphoric photograph that indicates an alteration of subject matter. But more than symbolic, the images within the essays also produce an affective response within the reader/viewer. For example, in the first half of the collection, a cropped image of “a slate message board” bearing the inscription “this is the most miserable” (17) is embedded several times within a paragraph. When we find out that, instead of chalk, the composer of the message has “scratched in the words...with some sort of sharp edge” (18) a literal wave or chill radiates throughout one's body when looking at the third instance of the board. Another result of incorporating images into the collection is a heighten sense of pathos within the reader/viewer. When reading the end-notes we find that on June 7, 1998 three white men chained James Byrd Jr. to the bumper of their car and dragged him for two miles, leaving nothing but a “shredded torso” and “a trail of blood, body parts, and personal effects” along the road (135); knowing these facts, it is nearly impossible not to be disgusted. But looking at the images of blood-stain concrete, the crime-scene investigator's markings for where Byrd's head was found, and a portrait picture of Byrd sometime before the incident occurred, there is an added sense of revulsion that text alone cannot produce. In addition to pictorial reproductions, Lonely also contains hand-drawn and computer-generated drawings. In on such instance, four sets of lips at varying stages of openness disrupt the flow of a particular paragraph. After the lips, we find that these images correspond to the speaker as she “watch[es] my mother's mouth move” (40). A final aspect of Rankine's book that bears mentioning is the study of the first-person pronoun “I” that the author undertakes. Given the fact that, in this day and age, many “no longer...see confession as intimate and full of silences” (53), how does the use of the first-person pronoun function within our cultural consciousness? To Rankine's mind, she believes that “there exists an 'I' who was institutionalized” (53) by, on can presume, the media and other cultural outlets, and thus does not function in the same liberatory manner as the “I” found within confessional poetry during the mid-twentieth-century. Instead, lost in modern loneliness, Rankine can only pose questions as to the “I's” purpose: “what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words [of 'I']? Is 'I' even me or am 'I' a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we” (54)? While she arrives at no definitive answer, recognition of the other, perhaps, is of more importance than recognition of the “I.” This is understood no more clearly than in Rankine's extend quotation of Levinas: “This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other” (120). This is not to say that subject positions are outmoded or hold no import, but it does mean that, to combat loneliness, a necessary “conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of the same presence [to the other] perhaps has everything to do with being alive” (130).

Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

2010-06-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Kelsey, Karla. Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary. Boise, ID: Ahsahta Press, 2006.

A portion of Plato's Theaetetus acts as an extended epigraph to Kelsey's collection, in which Socrates likens the human mind to “an aviary of all sorts of birds” wherein “the birds are kinds of knowledge” and one can “hold any of them after he has taken them, and again to let them go.” Using this introduction as a guide to engaging the text, one can read the book's words, and the corresponding thoughts and images they produce within the reader, as “birds” in an aviary that can be captured and released, each moment offering “modes of transformation” (35) “out-limning new objects” (43) in an “elliptical escaping” (44). Stated differently, the poems create “new objects” within the reader's consciousness, but due to slight alterations, or “transformation[s]” between poems, an absolute or transcendental meaning will not be attained, thus lighting the reader upon an “elliptical escape” into “an alternate scraping of trust/ and through a crack in the sky,” so that “the mind/ draws a relation between patterns” (43-4). “Patterns,” not knowledge, then, is what Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary seeks to develop; and through these “patterns,” some sense of “new objects,” as well as a subjectivity that is both tautological (i.e. “I am I” (78)) and paradoxical (i.e. “Or I have left// myself abroad, and vast, in/ many acres” (78)) cannot so much be attained, but be entered into momentarily. Content-wise, Kelsey focuses on the natural world, exploring landscapes with “mountains hedging up” (53), a “Pocket of valley full of clouds” (59), and an “Overload of palm” (57) where, all the while, “birds flutter/ and fling” (67) themselves upon a “wind beating...to a new sound” (66). Formally, the author structures her collection around three, discrete sections, titled “Flood/Fold,” “Containment and Fracture,” and “Impression, Flux, Continguity.” While each section contains a distinctive style, “Flood/Fold,” divided into four, “Aperture” subsections, is the most innovative of the group. Specifically, Kelsey writes fragmented lyrics “Marked/ by the spaces/ between” (4) them; moreover, these spaces contain a series of centered asterisks varying in length that act as “crosses” which “tell us to be.../ cross-hatched in hope--/ as in a pattern” (8) while they foster an “inner rhythm” (9). In other words, while the spaces do not contain tangible, semantic meaning, the do generate a “rhythm” or temporal “pattern” between stanzas; the “rhythm,” in many ways, can be understood as an affective, auditory cycle that offers “hope” through affirmation by undermining normative epistemological formations: “The movement of perfection between scent and sight/ attained and then lost, thought not as an escalation of vision” (28), but as “sensations” and the “taut wires between them outlining...space” (34). In addition to the asterisks' production of “inner rhythm” and “sensations,” they also offer the reader a visual landscape upon the page that forms “nether relations” which are “mutilated in the mind” (48), to the extent that conflate sight and sound. The second section, “Containment and Fracture,” contains, exclusively, prose poems with a highly-charged lyricism; for example: “our going into, called inter-atmospheric arms gesturing out and out as in flickering action as the ugly world haloing your head” (57). In addition to extensive use of alliteration, the excerpt contains repeated words (i.e. “out and out”) and an aversion to linear narratives. The author subdivides the final portion of the collection into “Sound and Image Accordances.” While formally less dynamic than the previous two sections, “Impression, Flux, Contiguity” does provide readers with “Instruction/ embedded in our spheres” (79) in that we learn “the story [is] not to be told,” per se, “because it has come out folded, melody lost, left/ to face another direction” (84). And what is this “other direction”? It is “a refusal/ to arrest into meaning,” it is “words” that “float/ tilt through air” (89), it is “word and eye...no longer part of...muscles” (90); in other words, Kelsey refutes language as a conduit for epistemology, instead conceiving of language as disassociated from our consciousness and our bodies, floating through the “air” as objects of their own accord.

The Midnight

2010-05-30T16:31:00.000-07:00

Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2003.

Howe's collection contains five, main sections divided into three sections of short, lyric poems and two sections of extended, prose pieces. Within the prose sections, Howe embeds a series of photographs, maps, and mimeographs of rare books. To wit, one of The Midnight's central concerns is the relationship between image and text; in the book's introduction, Howe writes: “word and picture are essentially rivals. The transitional space between image and scripture is often a zone of contention” (iii). The “zone of contention” she mentions is “a chiastic universe” in which “only relations exist,” but “nothing” in this universe, including these relations, “exists absolutely” (127); as such, the relationships “always [tend] toward the middle,” “hovering between identities” in order to create a “ghostly skeptic[ism]” (115). Yet more than conceptual, the “zone of contention” is also a material space wherein these two “rivals” can be found “rubbing together” (iii) in “three dimensions, visual, textual, and auditory” (75). For readers of Howe's collection, then, the question becomes: how do the images and text within the book function in both material and conceptual registers? As one would expect, the relationships are variable, by turns descriptive, analytic, tangential, or oblique, thus producing a “nebulous” (78) understanding of their correspondence. Far from eliciting anxiety within the reader, the author believes that the indeterminate nature of these spaces are “suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind” (Emerson qtd in Howe 46), encouraging individual readers to create meaning, albeit protean, on their own. With regard to specific content, the prose sections examine books as physical artifacts, the mutating use and pronunciation of the English language, the biographies of canonical authors, such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as the autobiographical information about the author herself. As far as the lyric portions of the collection, the poet writes “Surviving fragment[s] of/ New England” (15) that, aesthetically, are a “Cobbled approach sometime/ clipped rhythm” (159). Stated differently, Howe composes lyrics dealing with the “1775 landscape [of] America” (101), not in a coherent and logical manner, but rather in “strapwork trellis sentence[s]” that are constructed in such a way that “Each phoneme has an indeterminate nanosecond kink” that unhinges the poem's semantic value, instead giving prominence to an “evocative vocalic value” (145) that privileges sound over meaning. Or perhaps, more precisely, the poems develop a “zone of contention” between sound and meaning, leaving the reader, once again, to determine the relationship between the two “rivals” at a particular moment in time with the knowledge, of course, that this relationship can be altered according to temporal contingencies and specific readership.

Silence: Lectures and Writing

2010-05-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

With regard to the intermingling of genres and multiple modes of conveyance within a particular artwork, John Cage's collection offers readers several possibilities and models in both form and content. For example, in his article “Forerunners of Modern Music,” the author writes: “technologists and artists...meet by intersection, becoming aware of the otherwise unknowable...imagining brightly a common goal” (65). To this extent, scientific discourse and the humanities, often times thought to be at odds with one another, not only “intersect,” but share a “common goal”; likewise, while addressing contemporary music in his essay “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage insists that musical composition during the mid-twentieth-century exhibited “principles familiar to modern painting and architecture: collage and space” (69-70). Echoing his claims that music employs ideas and techniques from other art forms, the author also believes that “[w]hatever method is used in composing the materials of the dance can be extended to the organization of the musical materials”; but more than an instance of co-opting, the “form of the music-dance composition should be a necessary working together of all materials used. The music will then be more than an accompaniment; it will be an integral part of the dance” (88). At his most radical, Cage comes “to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom” (274), in that “it should be determined which sounds further the growth of mushrooms” and whether or not they “make sounds of their own” (275), etc. Not surprisingly, then, many the articles and lectures within Silence are “unusual in form” so as to “permit the listener [or reader] to experience what [Cage] had to say rather than just hear about it” (ix). As such, “form” becomes, or at least aides in, the “experience” of writing, art, and music itself. Take, for example, “Erik Satie,” which Cage describes as “an imaginary conversation between Satie and myself” wherein “neither of us hears what the other says” (76). For starters, the type-setting for each composer's words are stylistically and spatial different: Satie's words are italicized and flush-left, while Cage's words are standard-font and off to the right-side of the page; moreover, the text is staggered so the composers' words move down along a vertical axis. Toward the end of the conversation, Cage incorporates an increasingly complex series of diagrams into the fabric of the text, thus adding an imagistic component. Throughout Silence, Cage also attempts to mimic the manner in which “musical action of existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve or what have you in total sound-space” (9). More specifically, the use of magnetic tape and its spatialization of sound (i.e. the way, instead of working with time in the form of meter, one could manipulate a length of tape in centimeters of inches) was copied by separating texts into pre-formatted columns or rows. When one reads the text within a particular column or row, it must be vocalized within a standardize time-frame, regardless of the number of characters present. Therefore, longer passages need to be read faster, while shorter passages need to be read slower. Another technique readers confront during the collection is poly-vocal arrangements. The lecture “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” actually contains four “independent lectures to be used in whole or in part—horizontally and vertically” (194). While the lecture can only be delivered by, at most, a single “live” lecturer, that “live” reading “may be superimposed on...recorded readings. Or the whole may be recorded and delivered mechanically” (194). The lectures themselves are divided into pre-determined time-units, that cover fifty-seven minutes, though not all lectures last for that amount of time. Lectures that don't last the full time-period contain white space, signifying “silence.” Of course, given that Cage conceptualized “silence” not as the absence of sound, but as “ambient sounds” that are “unpredictable and changing” (22), this necessarily means that non-annotated “noise” will enter into the delivery of the lectures and produce indeterminate effects and affects.

Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing

2010-05-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey St. Press, 2003.

In the preface to Guest's collection, the editors inform readers that Forces of Imagination compiles “talks, published and unpublished essays, poems and short pieces” (7) from the author's career, to mention nothing of the reproductions of paintings by artist and Guest-collaborator Laurie Reid. Through an intermingling of genres over the course of the book, strict classification succumbs to “cross[ing] the border [and] exulting in a new freedom” wherein “forms of poetry...are restlessly releasing themselves” and occupying a “less inhibited...territory” (11). The poet also claims that there is an “invisible architecture” supporting her work that “reaches/ into the poem/ in search of/ an identity” (18); if the poems in this collection defy standard genre-definitions, then one can reasonably assume that their identity, as such, will necessarily be that of a protean subjectivity, at once “both obscure and clear” (100). These fluid genre constraints and identifications are most evident in selections such as “The Voice of the Poem,” “Green Shoots,” and “The Beautiful Voyage,” in which the pieces are interspersed with both poetry and prose, all the while maintaining a discursive, essay-like tone. With regard to subject matter, Guest examines the differences between opposing poetic traditions in “Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry,” the history of poetic tradition in “H.D. and the Conflict of Imagism,”voice in “Shifting Persona,” and the concept of genre in “Poetry the True Fiction.” While, no doubt, her subject matter is wide-ranging, the recurring focus of the collection is that of the imagination and its function with regard to the poet and the poem. The author believes that “only imagination can return the text to life” (16) and, likewise, “is the spirit inside the poem, a nostalgia for the Infinite” (85); thus, she elevates the concept to messianic levels. Another important aspect of Forces of Imagination is the text's relationship to the aforementioned, Laurie Reid images. Found throughout the book, Reid's paintings are reminiscent of Abstract painters, such as Mondrian, and Abstract-Expressionist, such as Pollock, but to their purpose, one can turn to Guest's essay “The Shadow of Surrealism” for enlightenment. She states: “I grew up under the shadow of Surrealism. In that creative atmosphere of magical rites there was no recognized separation between the arts”; moreover, she goes on to claim that one “could never again look at poetry as a locked kingdom. Poetry extended vertically, as well as horizontally” (51). To this extent, just as Gertrude Stein and Picasso's work “engaged in a similar struggle” with regard to conceptual concerns, so too does Guest and Reid's work. The former attempts, through incorporation of the latter's visual essays, “to find out how the painter worked so that [s]he might apply [her] discoveries to [her] own work” (53). Guest, it could be argued, goes one step further by claiming that the image-essays “are ghosts not words; they are the ephemera that surround and decorate the mind of the poet, a halo rescued from life” (85).

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

2010-05-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd edition. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2007.

Joan Pinkvoss, in her introduction to the third edition of Borderlands, states that “the spirit” of Anzaldúa’s book is “hybrid, inclusive, many-voiced” (i), to the extent that the author gave a “voice to what it meant to be a hybrid…caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits” (iii). More explicitly, to be hybrid is “to act—as we theorize” (xiii), to conflate the “iconographic-mythic-linguistic” (xv), and to participate in a “shaman aesthetic” wherein the storyteller transforms “into something or someone else” (xviii); or, in the Anzaldúa’s words, to enter into “a place of contradictions” (19) located “at the juncture of cultures [and] languages” that requires a “switching of ‘codes’” (20) for one to navigate it most effectively. In chapter one, readers confront this hybrid aesthetic immediately: Anzaldúa a) writes the text in both English and Spanish, b) in addition to her own, original writing, incorporates poems and block quotes from other writers, c) employs “a new genre she calls autohistoria” (2) that melds the genres of historical narrative, memoir, fiction, and poetry, as well as d) addressing content that focuses on the “U.S.-Mexican border,” which in her view “es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third—a border culture” (25). While each chapter within the first half of the book contains theoretical and aesthetic innovations, chapters five, six, and seven are of particular importance because they discuss language, aesthetics, and philosophy respectively. With regard to the first of these issues, Anzaldúa promotes a “a secret language” that connects to and communicates with the identity of “a complex, heterogeneous people” that comprises a fluid network of no less than eight, individual languages that range from Standard English to North Mexican Spanish dialect, to Pachuco (77), just to name a few. Validation of this heterogeneous, or “Wild” tongue is of the utmost importance to Chicanas because the dominant, white culture has deemed it “illegitimate, a bastard language” and thus speakers “have internalized the belief that [they] speak poor[ly]” (80). In “Tlilli, Tlapalli,” or the chapter on aesthetics, Anzaldúa suggests an intertwining of “religious, social, and aesthetic purposes of art” so that, contrary to Western cultures, the artistic would not be split from the functional (88). Furthermore, the author actively seeks to produce a book formed around “a mosaic pattern…a weaving pattern…with [a] deep structure” that is multi-textured and generates “a hybridization of metaphor…full of variations and seeming contradictions” (88). Finally, her aesthetic concerns are to be “enacted” and “forever invoked, always performance” (89), embodying, and thus connecting to the physical realm, her art. In the final chapter of the first section, Anzaldúa offers a framework for a new mestiza consciousness. While it does, to her mind, provide a third way or element, this consciousness is not a synthesis, which is a product of dialectical thinking. Whereas the latter produces a third element-thought-way through synthesis, and thus reconciliation between opposing elements-thoughts-ways, Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness produces an “ambivalence from the clash of voices” and “results in mental and emotional states of perplexity” (100). Sometimes, this will necessitate that one working within this mode of thought take a “counterstance” with regard to the oppressor, at other times she must “split the two mortal combatants” so that she is “on both shores at once”, and at other times must “disengage from the dominant culture…and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory” (101). As such, the modes of engagement and possibilities are numerous and fluid; the new meztiza needs to remain flexible, “shift out of habitual formations,” and develop a “divergent thinking, characterized by movement” toward inclusivity, or stated differently, “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (101). The second half of Borderlands contains poems, written sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, and more often than not, both. Aesthetically, the poems tend to be narratives dealing with border life, but usually present the reader with a speaker that undertakes a physical transformation or metamorphosis into another being or creature. For example: “If the wind would give her feathers for fingers/ she would string words and images together” (140), or “You must plunge your fingers/ into your navel, with your two hands/ split open,/ spill out the lizards and horned toads/ the orchards and the sunflowers” (186).

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

2010-05-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998.

The primary storyline in Caron’s novel involves the development of Greyon, a red half-man monster with wings, from child to young man. The early sections of the story focus on the protagonist’s relationship with his mother and his older, sexually abusive brother; additionally, this is also when Greyon begins constructing his “autobiography,” wherein he intends to “set down all the inside things/ particularly his own heroism…coolly omit[ing]/ all outside things” (29). During his adolescence, he meets an older boy named Herakles and falls in love. After a brief romance and seduction, Herakles rebuffs Greyon for another lover, casting the latter into a lovesick depression akin to “the cries of the roses/ being burned alive in the noonday sun” (84). In an effort to escape his emotional torment, Greyon travels to Beunos Aires, but ends up accidentally running into Herakles and his new lover, Ancash, who are on a world-wide expedition making recordings of volcanoes. The three men soon enter into a love-triangle that oscillates between love and sadness, anger and lust; such a tumultuous relationship makes them, in a manner of speaking, “neighbors of fire” (146) separated by “a dangerous cloud” (132) that will leave them forever apart. But just as the fact that Greyon’s half-monster and sexual identities transgress normative conventions, so too does the book itself. Subtitled “A Novel in Verse,” Carson’s book complicates our notions of the genre designations “verse” and “novel”; as readers, we are told as much when Herakles grandmother says: “Question is how they use [a genre]—given the limits of the form” (67). The opening sections of the book attempt to undermine normative genre conventions as well. For instance, in the section titled “Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” Carson introduces readers, in a pseudo-academic, historian-style to the Greek writer Stesichoros, creator of the Greyon myth. According to Carson, as a poet, the Greek writer made “Words bounce” by letting them “do what they want to do and what they have to do” (3); likewise, by “undo[ing] the latches” (5) of language through peculiar adjective usage (4), he was able to create strange and compelling stories theretofore unheard of. Is this Stesichoros a historically accurate figure? Did Carson fabricate this figure entirely? While, no doubt, a bit of research would clear this matter up, Carson herself offers no clues one way or the other. Following the introductory section, the author provides the only surviving extent fragments of the original Greyon story written by Stesichoros, and presumably, translated by Carson herself. This section, in turn, is followed by several sections, in the form of a Platonic dialectic, concerning the blinding of Stesichoros by Helen for “a bit of blasphemy” (15) he wrote with regard to her sexual behavior. At the conclusion of the book, there is an “interview” with Stesichoros in which he speaks about his “aesthetic of blindness,” or the way “people act when they know that important information is being withheld” (147) from them. Also important within in the interview is Stesichoros’ claim that there is “No difference” (149) between form and content. Another aspect of Carson’s book that merits mention is the ekphrastic chapters that conclude the primary narrative. What makes these section interesting is the fact that these sections of the novel in verse are based upon photographs that exist only within the narrative itself, and thus one must question whether or not they can be consider ekphrastic works proper. Again, it appears that these are questions Carson poses with regard to forms, leaving the reader without the necessary information and continually fostering the aforementioned aesthetic of blindness.

Notes on Conceptualisms

2010-05-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Place, Vanessa and Robert Fritterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Press, 2009.

Place and Fritterman’s book, as the title suggests, examines the possibilities and consequences of conceptual writing in the form of a series of notes, numbered one through twelve, most of which contain an additional series of sub-points. The book concludes with an essay by Place called “Ventouses” and an appendix containing a list of contemporary titles that explore conceptual writing as a means of producing texts. As the authors themselves claim, the book serves as “a primer” composed of “notes, aphorisms, quotes, and inquiries on conceptual writing” (9) that outline the “expectations of the readership or thinkership” (10). The first note, and the one that offers the most generalized account of what conceptual writing can be, states: “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing” (13). The authors consider conceptual writing allegorical to the extent that an allegory begins with a “pre-text” that exists within “cultural conditions” upon which the written text parallels (13). In a similar fashion, then, much of Notes develops connections between these two types of writing. Additionally, Place and Fritterman are indebted to German thinkers such as Adorno and Bürger. With regard to the former, the authors echo Dialectic of Enlightenment when they write: “Note that in post-conceptual work, there is no distinction between…contemplation and consumption” (18), and thus reiterating Adorno’s concept of fetishism; concerning the latter, the authors believe that “Institutional Critique, as an arm of Conceptual Art, cannot destroy these institutions, but aims to unveil and underscore them through demystification” (48), more than less co-opting Bürger’s critique of the historical avant-garde in his book The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Of particular interest within these notes is the manner in which the authors employ the term “hybrid.” Place and Fritterman write: “In hybrid or ‘impure’ conceptual…writing, the points in between [the pre-text and post-text spectrum] can accommodate a rebellion against, or critique of, the more stringent end-points” (22); their use of the word “impure” carries with it pejorative connotations, but the invocation of “rebellion” connotes a libratory impetus or upheaval. As such, the book fosters a linguistic ambivalence toward this concept. Too much cannot be made of the ambivalence because of the tensions produced between the term “impure” and genocide, especially due to the fact that in note twelve Place and Fritterman address the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, as well as the Holocaust. Likewise, note seven (letter a, point one) states that, when contemplating conceptual writing, “Race is also [a] consideration” (35). Given that the term “hybrid” derives from post-colonial theory and has been co-opted by many white, Western writers, Place and Fritterman's language seems problematic when examined rigorously. Of course, this should not come as too large of a surprise, as they write: “Failure is the goal of conceptual writing” (22), and “I have failed miserably—over and over again” (23). Finally, in the essay “Ventouses,” Place attempts to outline the contemporary “relationship between writing and image” (59), demonstrating the manner in which traditional conceptions of painting as “horizontal” (i.e. spatial) and poetry as “vertical” (i.e. temporal) have begun to erode because “visual images are being systematically drained of image, leaving behind image referent—language” (64). Likewise, the author highlights the fact that “words are images and images are words—linked, and different, one and two-in-the-same” (68), and thus further complicates a correspondence that could otherwise be reduced to a simple binary.

The Scented Fox

2010-05-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

Brown, Laynie. The Scented Fox. Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2007.

Laynie Brown’s The Scented Fox explores the tale form as a series of “strange returns and recognitions” (Howe qtd in Brown 9) wherein “Each word itself is an arrangement/ The story must exist in each word or it cannot go on” (Zukofsky qtd in Brown 9). In an effort to promote the “strange returns and recognitions,” Brown writes within several reoccurring forms throughout the collection. For example, she employs the epistolary form, often addressing these letters to the natural world (e.g. “To a vine leaf” (38) and “To larks” (32)). But more than just letters, the poet cycles through surreal prose narratives; short lyric pieces, which sometimes appear as lullabies or monologues; or three-word stories that function as seed words wherein the reader constructs their own extended narrative from and around them; as well as an imagined dictionary. In its most dynamic moments, the book conflates these forms, such as in the poem “Ceremony for a Man Possessed by the Spirit of a Lion”; within this poem, there is a prose narrative, a letter, and a lyric poem. In this way, the collection, the poet, and the reader “set out to disarrange” themselves by writing and reading in a “whichways aslant” that attempts to capture “all forms which had passed beneath [our] eyes” (16). The “strange returns and recognitions” are perpetuated, likewise, by the manner in which Brown scatters the letters and “The Travelling Crystal” poems throughout the book, instead of grouping them within their own sections. But more than the alterations and oscillations of global form, the poems, as the Zukofsky epigraph makes clear, focus on the microforms inherent to each word. The most evident example of attention to word “arrangement” is the “antiquate words” (16) Brown uses; take, for instance, the following passage: “yet no contryl of the features of this landscappe she did seek to carve out in words before her” (16). In addition to the outdated spelling of “contryl” and “landscappe,” the poet writes in an “antiquated” syntax, inverting the sentence structure so the active agent (i.e. “she”) and her corresponding action (i.e. “did seek to carve”) occur, grammatically, at the end of the sentence. Readers find meta-poetic statements concerning the aberrant spelling and syntax throughout the text, whether it is “The letter was that which recommended sleep when once/ foreshadowed” (23) which “says nothing of the inscriptions” it bears (46), or how “the sentence must contrive to complete itself” (71) to the extent that it produces odd “dimensions we are travelling through” (36) that “may be dangerous” (19) because it seeks “to rewrite perplexity” (29). It seems as though the collection “is communicating with you in its own language and cannot be exactly translated” (70), but this does not mean that no attempt at translation is made; in fact, the third section, titled “Festoon Dictionary,” offers readers an oblique guide to what the collection’s words mean. In other words, it “attempts to speak aptly” (105) about the “promenade vocabulary” (102) that confronts the reader, but, of course, provides not more than “a series of slight rustling sounds” (104) that may, in the end, obfuscate more than elucidate.

Deed

2010-05-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

Smith, Rod. Deed. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007.

The center-piece of Rod Smith’s book is the extended poem-sequence “The Good House,” wherein the author explores the word “house,” its allegorical possibilities, and a particular aesthetics of accumulation which offer the reader “something vague, something almost not there, a something garish contracted from contact with fragments” leaving us “in the dark alone” when considering individual moments of the poem, but when reflected upon holistically, “there is some light [and] Maybe we can see it” (72). The opening section of the poem provides an instance of these characteristics, in that “The good houses the parts” and in “the house…/…/ opulence isn’t allowed, so to/ form is to erase what’s not/ gradual & new” (7). The “house” appears to be poetry composed of “parts” that discourages the known, or the “opulence” of all which is not “new.” Furthermore, we find “What matters most is sincerity” (12), but a “sincerity” predicated upon “the/ sounds made, in the sounds created, in the sounds &/ in their laughing” (18), not upon sentimentality or an outward expression of some internal “truth.” Of course, as an allegory, the speaker hopes that the “house” is more than just poetry because “If the house is just poetry/ we’re in trouble” (22); to this extent, we find an alteration of what the “house” can be, in that “This house was that house/ to many” and it “alternated, sometimes house, sometime home” (9). As such, it is this very alternation of the allegory’s signification that “gave the house hope” (9). In addition to the aforementioned accumulation of fragments and focus on sound, Smith often breaks lines on articles and prepositions, encouraging readers to reconfigure both the privilege accorded to the end of a line and the relative lack of privilege normally accorded to certain grammatical structures. Finally, the poem avoids proper capitalization and punctuation usage. The following poem-sequence, titled “The Spider Poems,” explores similar territory, but through the implementation of the word “spider” instead of “house.” “The Given,” which is the collection’s third section, is the most wide-ranging in the book. Some of the poems, such as “Barnes & Chernobyl” which riffs off of a Bob Dylan tune, are short, playful, and campy, while other poems, such as “Page One,” are a bit longer and denser. With regard to the latter of these poems, the poet employs a diction not necessarily considered poetic, using phrases like “gastric internecine cosmology” or “counterfeit proletarian justification” (71); in this manner, Smith takes “the sounds that were, so to speak,/ thrown away/ through the process of making other pieces” (73) and fashions them into a poetic idiom. The collection closing section is “Homage to Homage to Creeley” and re-imagines Spicer’s “Homage to Creeley.”

Starsdown

2010-04-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

Bernes, Jasper. Starsdown. Berkeley, CA: ingirumimusnocteetconsumimiurigni, 2007.

In Starsdown, Bernes constructs an apocalyptic Los Angeles in miniature, or as the speaker of the opening poem states: “The following are urban samples uncovered during crisis drills” (11). Readers find, rather quickly, the root of these crises, which are “the great wastes underground” (12), “digital pastorals,” and “keyword clouds” (13) that, no doubt, are products of a culture “gone all gooey and bourgeois in the middle of/ a now” (15). Likewise, strewn across the collection are Whitmanian lists, such as “pesticide…polyester,/ Chewing gum, detergent, mustard gas precursor, Heart valves, condoms, [and] contact lenses,” all which signify a “synthetic thought” that creates goods for buyers to consume and dispose of at will. Aesthetically, Bernes creates a highly-stylized world that mirrors the artifice of Los Angeles; he does so through alliteration and neologisms, such as “orchidized/ with chemical, chimerical crystals” (71), non-normative use of syntax, as in the poem “Nine Pools,” homophones, for example, when “Justice” becomes “Just this, just this” (30), and meta-linguistic wordplay, where “In the mirror, mom is mom, irreversible./ In the wrong end of the camera, wow” (78). The center-piece of the collection, though, is the thirty-page “Promissory Notes.” The poem begins with an introduction concerning the variable relationships between society, culture, art, and money, the purposes of which tend to be blurred when we discover “that money is a kind of primitive poetry because money is a piece of itself” (36) and, of the “sagging market,” one can “poem it, write value into the blank” (36), which, ultimately, becomes “the failure of metaphor” (77) with regard to poetry’s inability to aid in the creation of a utopian society. Important to the first half of the introduction is Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard, and the manner in which the decision allows us to no longer “trace long loops and ellipses with [money’s] origin in the gleaming, hurt tonnage of Fort Knox” (37). In other words, such as post-structural thought demonstrated the how one could, to some extent, separate signifier and signified and thus conceive of theretofore abstract languages (e.g. Language poetry), by separating the dollar from gold, Nixon succeeded in abstracting the monetary system to a greater degree than ever before. Toward the second half of the introduction, artists who composed pieces that were of or dealt with money, such as Ralph Blakelock, Andy Warhol, and the fictitious protagonist of the poem, Henry, are examined so as to show how “the link between labor and economic value has been if not severed, then obscured beyond all attempt at clarification” (38). The poem’s main section contains an alternating series of Xeroxed checks that have been typed on and prose poems about the aforementioned Henry. In some instances, the text clarifies the relationship between check-image and itself. For example, in the first pairing, readers find that “The recipient of the checks above and below—nos. 23 and 12 in the collection—remembers his encounter with Henry as follows…” (41), and thus incorporates the image into a narrative. In other instances, the connection is oblique, if not completely obfuscated. To a certain extent, the dissociation between text and image speaks to the introduction’s reference to the dissociation between the dollar and gold, as well as between labor and economic value. Furthermore, the ninth prose block highlights the arbitrary nature of whatever relationship the reader eventually does establish by offering a catalog of conflicting story-lines that begin with the anaphoras “in one version” and “according to” (57). It is not until the end of the image-text cycle that the speaker informs the readers that the typescript on the checks “obey a ballad meter, but one eaten away by neurological and semantic insult” (63), thus contributing to their absurdist, or at least irrational, content; the poem also traces the etymological roots of the word “check,” which “derives…from the Persian shah (king),” revealing its imperialistic origins, and eventually leading to the conclusion that “the very artificiality of the checks” within the poem simultaneously “proves their value and reproves the economy” as well as functioning as “a check against the commodification of the poet, [and] his increasing valuelessness” (63). It should also be noted that, due to the frequent conflation of Henry and the speaker (e.g. “Everywhere he went, I was. He had left notes taped all over my childhood”) and phrases such as “Hoppy Henry” (55), which alliteratively echo “Huffy Henry,” co-articulations between “Promissory Notes” and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs are not without merit.

Figures for a Darkroom Voice

2010-04-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

Gordon, Noah Eli and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Figures for a Darkroom Voice. Townshend, VT:
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007.

Gordon and Wilkinson’s collaborative book contains several different forms of poetry, such as prose poems, fragmented lyrics separated by horizontal lines, and extended, lineated pieces that are absent of punctuation and read as an angular, stream-of-consciousness. In many regards, the poets act as an “alchemist” who “is busy bending” the words on “paper” into “the softest music” by “deranging the proper techniques for” (8) poetry in an effort to create “an altered photograph” (9) or unfamiliar image that both confuses and entertains the reader so as to encourage a reconfiguration of both representation and poetry. But, even more curious than the manner in which the poets attempt “to collapse the world” (10) and words with their poetics, is how the images of Noah Saterstrom that are scattered throughout the collection interact with the text. The book, in fact, opens with a drawing of what looks to be a nineteenth-century-style dress or nightgown. On the following page, readers encounter the collection’s incipient sentence, which is: “A girl draws a picture of a dress & becomes kingly in her substitutions” (7). The first half of this sentence engages the drawing from the previous page, and thus creates a direct, representational relationship between text and image; but, as the fantastical images within the poems begin to accumulate, peculiar transformations begin to occur. For example, teeth are not teeth, but “Their teeth, winter”; likewise, “their hand, gauze; eyes, little lions” (12). As such, the “substitutions” mentioned in the first sentence acknowledge, perhaps, a post-structural indeterminacy wherein a signifier detaches from its signified. Therefore, the drawing of a dress is not necessarily a dress, and the word “dress” is not necessarily an actual dress or the drawing of a dress. To this extent, the drawing functions as an allegorical substitute of all the images one encounters, thus shifting our expectations from signification to symbolic (i.e. allegorical). But the code-switching that the audience encounters with the first image and its relationship to the text does not cease. The second image, found on page seventeen, is that of a deer standing below a painted/scribbled over crescent moon. Although the text on the opposite page references “pollen dusts a little stream from the moon” (16), which could obliquely correspond to the drawing, little else connects the two. To this extent, the image becomes, primarily, a conduit for an affective response, in that it simultaneously engenders within the reader an anticipation (e.g. When will I find out the purpose?) and confusion (e.g. What is the purpose, and how come I do not know?) over the course of the next several poems. It is not until eight pages later when the reader is informed that “these paintings don’t accentuate the walls as much as expand them” (25). Now that the questions fostered by the previous image have been answered, the relationship between text and image once again changes: no longer simply a producer of affect or representation/symbolism (i.e. the image doesn’t “accentuate” text), the images “expand” the poems. Or stated in other words, the images become part of the poems themselves. Of course, no one tells the reader exactly how this is accomplished, so the transformation is ambiguous and multivalent. Should these be read as ideographs, imagistic extensions of a fractured and chaotic narrative, or something else entirely? The next image, not surprisingly, forces the reader to re-contemplate the text-image correspondence yet again. We are told that “One hundred painters interpret this, but not equal to the way you’ve startled afternoon’s sputtering engine” (26); on the opposing page, there is an abstract drawing composed of lines that look vaguely like a tablecloth or waterfall. Does the word “this” refer, eidetically, to the image, the sentence, the previous sentence, the poem, the book, or the word “this” itself? It difficult to tell, but what is clear is that the poem acknowledges the difference between interpretation and affect, or the manner in which one is “startled,” and tacitly asks us to consider the image in both ways. The oscillation between modes of reception is promoted further when we read: “sketched like a screen, the thought continues in its flexibility” (30). The sketches on the “screen,” in other words the page, continue to develop a “thought” pattern constituted by its very “flexibility” to move beyond “thought” and into the realm of affective response.

Nice Hat. Thanks.

2010-04-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

Beckman, Joshua and Matthew Rohrer. Nice Hat. Thanks. Amherst, MA: Verse Press, 2002.

Beckman and Rohrer’s collaborative book consist of six sections, each section titled according to the number of lines the poems therein contain. For instance, the authors title the first section “Two Lines: thirty-two two-line poems” and the final section “A Note on Process: being an improvised attempt at disclosure done one word at a time.” As the closing section’s title makes clear, these naming procedures explicitly state the collection’s interest in the poetic process and material construction of the poems. To wit, the poets inform their audience that “First we thought rhyming would work because Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch thought said so…Next we tried using formal constraints” (63); yet, the authors admit that “We rhymed poorly,” and with regard to constraints: “Sometimes losing is winning” (63). Instead, they settle upon “narratives” and “Space-age experiments” wherein “I say something and then he says something” and “We record everything” (63). As for the end results, the first section of two-line poems read as oblique and absurdly humorous aphorisms, such as “Coasting downhill/ requires austerity” (9) and “Precise and diminutive,/ at least it’s your stroller” (13). While more often than not trite, the opening poems do raise some interesting questions regarding the speaker’s identity, specifically with the manner in which the poems use pronouns. For example, the first poem states: “I fell at the party./ I’m still at the party” (9). Are readers to believe that the “I” in both instances is the same speaker, even if written by different authors? And, how are we to know what author wrote which line? Does it matter? Three poems later, we encounter the initial use of the first-person plural, “We’ll team up/ and dance,” thus indicating a collective presence or identity not present in the first poem. While the three-line poem section passes as rather unremarkable, the four-line poems provide more dynamism in that the poems employ extensive and deliberate repetition, whether in the form of entire lines (i.e. “I dance with the bearded/ in both kinds of weather/ I dance with the bearded/ I dance with the bearded”) or hard-rhyme schemes. While the five-line poems of the following section contain “failed longer poems,” it begins with “three-line poems with [two-line] commentary” (33). In some cases, the associative leaps between the poems proper and their commentaries tend to be rather expansive, thus encouraging the reader to create the connections on their own. For instance: “Noelle Kocot/ is an inspiration to young people/ and birds.// I fear/ and think” (37); the relationship between the “fear” and thought of the “I” and “Noelle Kocot” being “an inspiration to young people/ and birds” can only be guessed at, as no direction correlation can logically be deduced from what the authors offer the reader. When the poems of this section are not providing dissociative logic, they unabashedly strive for sophomoric humor: “I love New York/ more than you,/ buddy.// Take that shirt/ back to Jersey.” (36). The penultimate section, titled “Long Poems,” regularly employs repetitive use of nouns, calling to mind the nonce forms of first-wave New York School poets, and, no doubt, signals particular formal constraints undertaken by Beckman and Rohrer. To wit, the poem “Tonight” repeats the name “Ezekiel,” while “Monkeys” uses the word “monkeys” in the same fashion.

Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism

2010-04-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

Nealon, Christopher. “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism.” American Literature 76 (2004): 579-602.

Nealon’s essay examines a collective of poets, loosely connected by the term “post-Language,” that, as the name indicates, follow the political and aesthetic lineage of Language poetry of the late-twentieth-ccentury. In his estimation, the author claims that these writers “have taken a kind of Frankfurt school turn in their poems” and thus “have become invested in a historical story about what Theodor Adorno called ‘damaged life’” (579). Yet, unlike Adonoro and his sometimes-Frankfurtian-peer Benjamin, post-Language poets “have struck a kind of camp posture toward the ‘damage’ of late capitalism” (579). In this case, Nealon relies on Andrews Ross’ conception of camp as “the re-creation of surplus value from forgotten forms of labor”; such an interpretation of camp encompasses its queer connotations, but also “its migrations beyond subcultural boundaries” (580). A poetry focused upon camp, then, encourages both readers and writers to engage “a polemical affection for what’s obsolete, misguided, or trivial, and to risk the embarrassment of trying it out” (581). After introducing his main argument, Nealon launches into an extended comparison of what, to his mind, differentiates Language (and, to a lesser extent, New York School) poetry from post-Language poetry. To this extent, Language poets create a specific poetic that is a) predicated upon active-readership, so as to b) decommodify a text that will result in c) “a mobile social body” (586) which will produce a “poetics of fluidity” (587). In contradistinction to this stance centered on the materiality of language, post-Language poets, “battered by another generation’s-worth of encroachments of capital, are not so ready to rely on those aspectual reserves”; instead the poetry and poets associated with the more recent trend “expend their considerable talents on making articulate the ways in which, as they look around, they see waiting” (588). To demonstrate this polemical stance characterized by “waiting,” Nealon uses four poets as examples: Joshua Clover, Lisa Robertson, Rod Smith, and Kevin Davies. Yet, while each poet composes poetry that “waits,” they do so in a variety of different manners. Clover, to begin with, attempts to “develop a new poetry of the city,” wherein an “unstable movement between concentration and abstraction” occurs and produces “a suspended grammar, detached from an object” (589). Roberston, on the other hand, interests herself “in ornament, and its uselessness” in an effort to recuperate “material waste” (590-1). Smith, unlike the previous two poets, “approaches the problem of a damaged materiality…by meditating on the allegorical character of objects” (593); but far from merely employing allegory as one would traditionally, the poet oscillates between “modes of abstraction and concentration” to such a great extent that there is a “collapsing second-order allegory that performs and figures the vicissitudes of materiality” (594). Finally, Davies’ poems, which are nefariously overwhelmed by the material world, create a “nesting of abstract objects” that foster a “pointed political irony of pretending” (595) which focuses on the historical conditions of materiality. Nealon concludes his essay with a series of qualifiers that function less as a defense of his work, and more as a catalyst for further questions and examination. Specifically, he acknowledges that his rhetorical stance veers away from formal aspects, such as “line breaks and habits of syntax,” and to a certain extent content itself, in favor of the polemical “preoccupations of these poems” (598).

PHOTOGRAPHIC OUTTAKES: Daimaru XV

2010-04-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

Click on images for bigness.

Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse

2010-04-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

Boyer, Anne. Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse. Austin, TX: Effing Press, 2006.

Boyer’s collection opens with the line: “I was attacking Culture” through the act of “Pulling a thirty-six-inch strip out of Language” (1). Due in part to her affiliation with Flarfist techniques of poetic production, one can consider this an “attack” on “Culture” because she may (or may not) have “used a search engine/ and mocked the living end” (10) when writing her poems. In other words, if one “love[s] Literature” (1), implementing previous methods of production functions less as an act of reverence toward one’s art form, and more as destructive stagnation; or, as the poem “Brute” informs its readers: “‘catastrophe is convention’” (8). Moreover, Boyer’s poems ask readers to question their methods of production and material realities through the invocation of Marxist rhetoric, such as “what I love about [Literature] is/ the reproductive organs of Capital” (1), as well references to the man himself: “We dressed in Karl Marx” (9). Of course, such an inquiry is inherently problematic in that there “is a degree of ambiguity” (11) as to what portions of the text have been generated through a Flarfist poetic and what portions of the text have been generated through more traditional means. Another important component of Boyer’s collection is the manner in which she integrates images into the fabric of the book. While there are particular commonalities between collages (i.e. all of them contain at least one image of an animal), each function a in slightly different way. For example, the first collage lineates a Guy Debord quote concerning the relationship between the “frivolous” “fashions” “of an era” and the “obvious necessity for revolution” (6), but the poet arranges the text so that it appears to be emanating from the mouth of an otter swimming underwater. Through the juxtaposition of philosophical inquiry and animalistic imagery, the collage fosters both serious, intellectual thought and irreverent and sophomoric humor, producing within the audience a particular ambivalence. At the center of the book-artifact, a collage with the text “This x is in the middle of the square” (14-5) appears. While the reader’s first inclination most likely is to look toward the image (i.e. two children lifting up a rock with a stick, all the while enveloped in what appears to be a flock of ravens) for an explanation of the phrase, the aforementioned concern with a work’s material production offers us a more nuanced understanding. “This x” is, in fact, the collage itself which does appear “in the middle” of the book, which happens to be quite similar in shape to a “square.” As such, the collage forces readers to engage the text not in a representational manner (yet, of course, one can), but through a materialist framework. Doing so, then, one takes notice of the magenta staples from the spine that rupture the surface of the collage, fracturing its organic unity, as well as highlighting the intentionally low-budget, xeroxed-quality of the images. The next collage, which contains two bears fishing by the side of a stream and the text “Is not the distinction of affection almost realm enough?” (20-1) does not immediately present audience members with a clear understanding of its purpose; unlike the previous examples, one must read the poem that proceeds the collage, in this case “Dear Diary,” to comprehend its significance, or at least establish a relationship with the collection. For it is in the poem that follows wherein we find that “flesh comments and shows a bit of biology.// Maybe that’s why I like animals” and “We fish the pity out of our mouths” (23). The final collage confuses established binaries by placing an image of a lamb in the center of the phrase “you greedy whores and criminals” (30-1), thus undermining traditional, Christian symbolism. Such displacement is reinforced and politicized by the Anne Frank quote on the preceding page that states: “‘I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside’” (29). But, perhaps of more importance is the collage’s use of the second-person pronoun “you,” and the manner in which it imbricates readers in the contemporary problems the collection addresses (e.g. economics, culture, politics, etc). Far from acting as a tidy, dénouement that affirms one’s position in the world, it accuses and unsettles us, interrogating our stances “in the loop// of…public discourse” (26).

The Ohio System

2010-04-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

Tynes, Jen and Erika Howsare. The Ohio System. Lincoln, NE: Octopus Books, 2006.

Tynes and Howsare’s collaboration contains a series of untitled prose poems that undertake a meta-exploration concerning the (a/e)ffects of conflating identities and genres, more often than not through the trope of a constructed body. Beginning with the incipient poem, the collection greets readers with a “story” that has “twisted its head back,” “Oblique fibrous bands,” a “knee-joint” and a “clavicle,” as well as “your ligaments, my tongue…tailor’s muscle” and “the bones of the face” (5). The body is “the story” and “the story” is the body. In other words, while the content of the poems references various parts of the human anatomy, audience members must also consider the fact that the text itself is a body which has been constructed, in other words, composed. But, due to the fact that there are multiple authors constructing the body named The Ohio System, readers cannot assign a unified or authoritative identity to the text as a whole. Perhaps, a more appropriate manner in which to comprehend the text is to recognize not just the constructed qualities of the text-body, but to grant particular attention to how the construction occurs. For example, in one piece the poets write: “Amusing how the river begins from me, ends at you” (12); while the “me” and “you” function as binary nodes, what is between them, “the river” which Heraclitus claims is never the same due to its perpetual flow, will constantly alter, transform, and necessarily affect the “me” and “you” at either end. To this extent, the authors acknowledge the transformative interlacing of their identities when they write: “What it meant on our end was a braid of two waters” (12). But soon the water imagery becomes untamed and breaches the surrounding banks, “braid[ing]” itself with a nearby city’s “architecture” (12) and the previously mentioned body imagery. The result of this “braid[ing]” is a fantastical new body composed of all three: “the tiny cities of inflammation began moving downstream. Town inside its lower jaw…What seem like cathedrals at the source were, at the mouth, the inner parts of oxbows” (12). Such metamorphoses, which entail a head twisting backward and a town lodging itself into a lower jaw are just a few examples of “how we will grow into each other” (20), or stated differently, how “one planet folds into another” (23). But while each transformation is a “condensation” of disparate images into a connected (but non-unified) aggregate that acts as a “gauge of its own violence” (31) and produced by a “violent muscular effort” (24), this is not violence for violence sake. In fact, violence is a necessary precondition for metamorphosis in that, to alter an object’s fundamental traits, a certain amount of force must be applied to it. Yet, a particular, self-imposed decorum between writers, images, and readers inheres within this violence, thus merging it with mutual respect; or, as we are told midway through the collection: “You are what keeps this place respectable” (19). More precisely, there is an expectation of etiquette predicated upon full disclosure that necessarily is equivocal; or, as the poets inform us: “You tell me whatever you know. A word that means both storm and sadness, where we could have lived but didn’t, the difference between one mile and another. But join with each other…give way to concentric disturbances” (6). Stated differently, “A word that means” is not a singular meaning, but a “word that means” means a multiplicity of meanings; moreover, although one can “live” in one meaning, a more advantageous position would be to “live” and maintain a location within “the difference between one…and another.” Such a stance is not a position aimlessly adrift, but a pragmatic position that is concomitantly conciliatory (i.e “join with each other”), yet inherently effused with “disturbances” (i.e. metamorphic violences): the poem as prose, the author as a complex network of identities and physical bodies, and the body as an amalgamation of disparate objects.

A Little White Shadow

2010-04-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

Ruefle, Mary. A Little White Shadow. Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2006.

Ruefle's collection engages the relationship between image and text in several different manners. The first, and most evident, is the material artifact itself. The poet's A Little White Shadow is actually a reproduction of E.M.M.'s story A Little White Shadow, originally published in 1889. Ruefle manipulated the original artifact by “painting” over text with white-out, creating erasures from the original. For example, the entire first page has been erased, or condensed into the following: “one in ruins// struck// notes whose sounds// spent a winter here” (3). In a manner of speaking, Ruefle produced the new artifact from the “ruins” of the original, and those “notes,” or words, which signify particular “sounds” are surrounded by the “winter,” or white-out, she covered the text with. Re-creating the artifact fosters a particular set of affects upon the audience. To begin with, one is predisposed to read the new text in the left-to-right, top-to-bottom order of the original prose; if an audience member could not see the physical layout of the book-format, reading words as wrap-around text would not be an intuitive reading style because of spatial arrangements and alignments. Another effect of the re-production is a constant, visually reminder of appropriation and silencing, or at least transformation of, another writer's language, ideas, and narrative. While all erasure methods inherently participate in said practices, Ruefle's collection visually imbricates itself throughout its entirety. Finally, the whited-out text, at times, is semi-perceptible, and thus creates a “shadow” text that works in conjunction with the text that has not been whited-out. The reader, literally, is “brought in contact/ with the phenomenon peculiar to/ 'A shadow'” (15), which is to struggle, both visually and cognitively with the “pale, and/ deformed but very interesting” (23) type beneath swathes of lightly applied white-out. Other visual techniques that Ruefle employs, albeit not as frequently, are a) a metaphoric correspondence between the perceivable text and the margins of the white-out; for example, the text “a heart/ a heart when/ laden hearts/ cause” is encased in a heart-shaped outline; and b) the incorporation of actual images into the fabric of the text. Within A Little White Shadow, there are two instances of image integration into the text, both functioning differently. The first occurs when Ruefle pastes an image of a chair into the marginal area after the phrase “it was she was not known beyond her own little” (25); while there are no explicit instructions to do so, placing the image directly after the text causes the audience to “read” it as an ideograph. As such, one “reads” the text as “it was she was not known beyond her own little chair.” The second instance occurs when Ruefle pastes an image of an envelope over a whited-out portion of the original artifact and next to the text “a letter// God/ changed” (41). In this instance, the image does not function as an ideograph, but merely as a descriptive, visualization of the text. Finally, the stained and aged letter, possibly dated “April 29, 1948,” contributes to the antiquated aura fostered by reproducing a artifact from the nineteenth-century.

Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays

2010-04-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions +: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Zukofsky's collected essays spans the poet's career, beginning with the early 1930s and continuing on through 1970. The subject matter of the writings deals with poetry and poetics, specific poets (e.g. Pound, Williams, and Carroll), philosophy, history, and art. Of particular interest are the essays within the section subtitled “For”; these pieces provide a framework for Zukofsky's poetic thought and the Objectivist movement in general. In the essay “An Objective,” the poet defines two terms, “sincerity” and “objective,” that are particularly relevant for understanding his poems. Zukofsky explains the former of these two terms to be the moment when “shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of...completed sound or structure, melody or form,” while he defines the latter as the “desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (12). Within the aforementioned essay, the author also outlines the components of a poem, which are a) the poem “as object,” b) “the materials which are outside...the context,” c) “the context based on a word,” d) “the object in process,” and e) the “'musical' shape” of the object (15-6). In “Poetry: For My Son When He Can Read,” Zukofsky makes some more generalized statements about poetry, such as verse is determined by “a precise awareness of differences, forms, and possibilities of existence” (7), that poems are “Phases of utterance,” which should “avoid clutter,” and the reciprocal nature of the auditory and the visual; “what is sounded by words has to do with what is seen by them—and how much what is at once sounded and seen by them cross-cuts an interplay among themselves” (8). Of importance in this collection is not just the content, but the form of the essays as well. Take, for example, the piece titled “Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography”; Zukofsky composes the majority of the text using direct quotation through collaging Adams' language into an argument of the subject's understanding of history, offering an example of how the written word alters itself through re-presentation, similar to Benjamin and his Arcade Project. Finally, regardless of what one reads about poetry, Zukofsky realizes that one must read poetry to understand it: “The best way to find out about poetry is to read the poems. That way the reader becomes something of a poet himself...because he finds himself subject to its energies” (23).

Complete Short Poetry

2010-04-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Zukofsky, Louis. Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991.

This collection anthologizes all of Zukofsky's non-“A” work, beginning with 1922's “I Sent Thee Late” and concludes with 1978's 80 Flowers. As such, the volume encompasses most of the aesthetic tendencies that were staples of Zukofsky's poetry. For example, the early poem “Poem beginning 'The'” uses quotations from a variety of different sources in every one of its three hundred thirty lines. Other notable aspects of Zukofsky's poetic are counted verse, such as in 80 Flowers wherein each piece contains eight lines, with each line composed of five words; extensive use of homophones, which finds its pinnacle of expression in his collaborative translation (with his wife, Celia) of Catullus that “follows the sound, rhythm, and syntax of...Latin” (243), instead of adhering to the semantic meaning of the content; and serialization, in which some poems have as many as twenty-nine separate sections within one piece of writing. Furtermore, Zukofsky's poems use elision rather often, primarily in an effort to enhance the sonic qualities of a particular poem. This can be seen quite clearly in the sixteenth section of “29 Poems”: “Crickets'/ thickets// light,/ delight:// sleeper's eyes,/ keeper's;// Plies” (48). While the poet truncated much of the connective grammar within the poem, it is done for the sake of developing a specific cadence and rhyme scheme that attempts to embody the cricket's song. With regard to content, Zukofsky will provide observation in the manner of an Imagist, such as “Gleams, a green lamp/ In the fog” (24) or “Blue sealed glasses/ Of preserves—four—/ IN the window-sash/ In the yard on the bay” (77). Meta-poetic commentary regarding the function of music and sound in relation to verse is another staple; for example: “Comes a flow which/ if I had called a song/ is a song/ entirely in my head// a song out of imagining” (52), or, likewise: “a voice not a meter/ but sometime a meter's voice” (224). The most obvious example of meta-poetic statements occurs during the poem “Manits.” The first portion of this work is a sestina concerning a praying mantis that finds its way onto a subway car in New York, while the second portion of the piece is an interpretation, in verse, of the previous section's meaning. Zukofsky, by the end of the interpretation, parses the poem out at the line-level: “Of the last four lines/ Symbolism,/ But the simultaneous,/ The diaphanous, historical/ In one head” (73). Other, less frequent (but no less interesting) techniques he uses are: incorporation of staff ledger (i.e. “Motet”), hyper-hyphenation (80 Flowers), self-reflexivity (e.g. “I's (pronounced eyes)/ the title of his last// followed by After I's” (222)), and multi-lingual texts, some of which weave English, Yiddish, Spanish, Latin, and French into the fabric of a single poem.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

2010-03-31T06:50:00.000-07:00

Wittengenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. New York, NY:
Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1922.

Wittgenstein structures his text around seven propositions and their corresponding sub-propositions, indicated by a series of increasingly specific decimaled numbers. The main focus of the text is to map out a theory of logic predicated upon mathematics that “claims…to have solved all the problems of philosophy” (ix). But within his study on logic, Wittgenstein also explores the manner in which language operates; specifically, the philosopher believes that man “possesses the capacity of constructing languages,” but does not necessarily have “an idea how and what each word means” (37). To wit, man creates the “logical scaffolding” (43) of language, but meaning, or that “which expresses itself in language…cannot [be] express[ed] by language” (53); in fact, language “disguises…thought” (37). Therefore, when constructing a language system, “we can build symbols according to a system” without recourse to the meaning of “single symbols” (115). While meaning may be elusive, one must pay special attention to the internal relationships between and among symbols. Wittengenstein further complicates his notion of language construction when he states that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (117). In this sense, one’s world, or reality, is determined by one’s language, not the other way around. An important proposition derives from this belief: “The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing” (119); the subject is absent because it is “the limit of the world” (119) and only what is inside the world can be expressed. Tractatus closes with the philosopher’s admonition to leave behind his writing, or his world, once one has read it because, like all philosophy, it is senseless; therefore, “when [one] has climbed out through [his propositions], on them, over them…[one] must so to speak throw [them] away” (155). But this proposition, of course, is commiserate with the logic of Wittgenstein, in that one’s world, or one’s language, can only be understood by that individual (119). To speak of another’s world is to speak of what one can never comprehend. Fittingly, the seventh proposition, the only one not further enumerated and expounded upon, is: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (155).

Paterson

2010-03-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing, Inc., 1995.

Williams' long poem contains five books, each one subdivided into sections. The initial book appeared in 1946 and the final book came out in 1958. The collection as a whole focuses on the city of Paterson, NJ, but as Williams' notes in the introduction, more than just a chronicling of the city itself, the poem attempts to generate a “resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city” using “a language we can understand,” one that is both “recognizable” and a “symbol of communication” (xiii). Yet as the poet himself mentions, such a language is not a given, but a process; the poem is “the search of the poet for his language” (xiv). Throughout the course of the collection, and thus his “search,” Williams employs many techniques in which he harnesses a language particular to himself and his subject matter. One of the most evident features of Paterson is the inclusion of both poetry and prose. For example, in section one of book one, Williams writes four to seven stanzas of poetic material, then incorporates several paragraphs of prose that concerns historical accounts and events related to Paterson and the Passaic Falls. At other times, he excerpts letters he received from family, friends, and admirers, and in an even more radical departure from normative poetic forms, includes lists such as one that documents the composition of substratum between sixty-five and two thousand one hundred feet for a well dug in Paterson. The poet, as well, breaks lines on weak words, such as articles and prepositions. By doing so, the cadence of the lines alters drastically and produces a unique rhythm not found in poets of his day. Type-setting also plays an important roll in the visual presentation of the material; specifically, in the third section of book three Williams aligns the text in an angular fashion so the words do not run in a horizontal or parallel manner with the page's margins. Likewise, most (but not all) of the prose portions uses a smaller font than the poetry portions, and thus offers the reader a visual rupture within the text, corresponding to the rupturing of genres. Finally, the idiom of the collection grounds itself in the plain-speech of the times. But more than temporally contingent, the language is geographically and culturally contingent as well; or, as the author writes: “We poets talk in a language which is not English. It is the American idiom” (222). Of course, the poet also complicates the notion of plain-speech poetry, in that, although “anything is good material for poetry” (222), the language itself must be “charged with emotion. It's words rhythmically organized” (221).

Tender Buttons

2010-03-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997.

Tender Buttons is a prose poem divided into three sections. The first, titled “Objects,” provides brief sketches of household items such as a carafe, a chair, a piano, and a dog, etc. “Food,” which is the second section, functions in a similar manner but with regard to edibles. The final section, titled “Rooms,” differs from the previous two sections in that it is not subdivided into smaller sections, but unfolds as one continuous rumination on the rooms within Stein's domicile. In addition to the actual things Stein writes about, there are several other reoccurring themes. One is the concept of the center, specifically that one should “act as there is no center” (43); another is the notion of difference and how it “is spreading” (3) throughout the text so as to create a “space” where one can find “a hint of more” (48); and finally, silence, which “is not indicated by any motion” (45), but may or may not “choke speech” (47). Stylistically, the collection exhibits many non-normative properties in an effort to “attack...the denotations of words” (vi). Stein accomplishes this through “repeated words,” and the way she “recast them, rhymed them, and strung them together in unusual combinations” (vi). Or stated in Stein's own language, she created “a sentence of vagueness that is violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also a certain prison” (24). To this extent, she develops a language that is “like a very strangeness” (25), yet retains some of familiarity by using common words that would be comprehensible to most audience members. While the semantics of Stein's sentences may be “in between no sense,” they elicit a “music memory, musical memory” (31) found in their “cadences, real cadences, real cadences and quiet color” (48). Such poetic maneuvers, no doubt, work so that readers may “see a fine substance strangely” (4) in “the narrow the quite narrow suggestion of the” (51) substance. Or stated differently, in the very “slanting...light,” these objects, foods, and rooms become a type of “secret” (50) that produces an “incredible justice” (52) in the text that allows a reader to construct meaning (or not construct meaning) in the most egalitarian manner language can afford.

My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

2010-03-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Collecting both scattered early poems and the entirety of Spicer's published work, this volume presents a nearly complete representation of the poet's career as a publishing poet. Aesthetically, Spicer enlists many different forms while exploring the possibilities of verse. One such example is After Lorca; the text contains both letters to and from the deceased Lorca, as well as “translations” of his poems. The fidelity of the “translations,” of course, is suspect, and the dead writer vocalizes his suspicions when he “writes”: “Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting...words which completely change the...meaning of the poem...Finally, there are an equal number of poems that I did not write at all” (107). The conversation that Spicer initiates with Lorca, then, has more to do with entering into a particular tradition, or “generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining or losing something with each transformation” (110-1). The epistolary form also surfaces in Letters to James Alexander and Helen: A Revision, just to name a few. Spicer incorporates the dramatic form into his poetry as well, including short plays into the fabric of After Lorca, Helen: A Revision, and “The Unvert Manifesto and Other Papers...” But, as far as form, these were not the most radical departures the poet experimented with. For example, he wrote poems in the form of questionnaires, manifestos, textbooks, footnotes, and “fake novels.” Most, if not all of the aforementioned forms make liberal use of prose poetry. Reoccurring tropes within Spicer's poems include the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the moon, ghosts, the ocean, and the heart. While many of these tropes had been employed quite a bit before Spicer began writing, he discovered unique manners to incorporate them into his texts, often by a) juxtaposing them with “obscene” words such as “cocksucker,” “shit,” “fuck,” etc., or b) altering them ever so slightly to become tropes for homosexuality, usually filtered through camp. Spicer also writes meta-poetically, especially within his “Textbook Of Poetry” and Language. For example, in the former he writes: “The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it secondhand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making” (300), or, as in the latter: “We make up a different language for poetry/ And for the heart—ungrammatical./ It is not that the name of the town changes/...But that syntax changes” (390). Other aesthetic variants are extended parenthetical asides and breaking lines on prefixes and suffixes.

It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems 1974-2006

2010-03-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

Scalapino, Leslie. It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems 1974-2006. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 2008.

Scalapino’s Selected Poems opens with pieces from her first book Considering How Exaggerated Music Is and continues on through her most recent writing in Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night. While there are some superficial shifts in poetic form that occur throughout her career, much of Scalapino’s work focuses on the specific aesthetic and conceptual concerns of “Movement (or shape in writing) [that] is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge” (147); or stated differently, the poet explores the differences that occur between what one thinks and the language one employs when attempting to express those thoughts. For Scalapino, the difference is irreducible. Her writing, likewise, seeks to understand the act of reading as movement through language, not as communication between writer and reader; or, as Scalapino writes: “the mind is action literally, not departing from that—being events or movement outside, which is inside, so the mind collapsing into and action” (142). As such, the result of reading as “action” is the “collapsing” of the “movement outside” (i.e. the text) into the “inside” (i.e. the reader) so as to become an “event.” As far as aesthetic idiosyncrasies are concerned, the poet tends to write in a heavily fragmented style that lacks concrete imagery or normative punctuation and capitalization. Scalapino employs liberal use of the em-dash, parenthetical statements, and repetition, the latter of these traits finding its fullest expression in “The Floating Series”; these short, lyrical pieces concentrate on a finite set of words arranged in alternate orders with differing line breaks. For example, she writes: “the/ women—not in/ the immediate/ setting/ —putting the/ lily pads or/ bud of it/ in/ themselves” (72), and then: “not/ being able to/ see the/ other people—and/ to be sticking the/ lily pad/ in/ themselves” (75). These repetitions develop “reciprocal relationship[s]” that contain “a certain degree of relative autonomy” and “indeed must be unique” (60), even though they exhibit a high degree of superficial similarity. The series, then, demonstrates a tension between difference and repetition as one perpetually oscillates between the two. One of the more unique aspects of Scalapino’s writing occurs in Crowd and Not Evening or It. The collection contains a series of black and white photographs with short, lyrical phrases handwritten around the images. Most of the pictures are taken on or near the beach and their connection with the associated text tends to be oblique. For example, underneath an image of an elderly man in a bathing suit walking along the shoreline are the words “wading on the grass—trunk of woman on the grass/ in it” (133). Furthermore, the poet experiments with the genre of drama, as well as right-justified text.

The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi

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Rakosi, Carl. The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi. Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

Unlike most collected volumes, Rakosi organized his poems into conceptual units, instead of chronologically. In the author’s own words, he thought it would be “more creative and interesting to organize the poems as if [they] were making up a book for the first time” (17); the poet cares little for the “reader who is bothered by this” (18), particularly academics. But far from being a tangential or trivial detail, this aspect of the collection speaks to some of the overriding concerns of the content. Frequently, the speaker of a poem will address critics and scholars in a highly satirical fashion, such as: “Critic/ remember/ that when/ I was neither/ prophet/ nor mad/ I was only/ a minor bard”; in such instances, Rakosi chastises critics for playing both sides of the fence with regard to scholarship. The poet writes with sincerity as well, but this tone most often occurs when he addresses the economically depressed (demonstrating, no doubt, his Marxist affiliations) and the intimate relations he shares with friends and family. The poems in the “Americana” section, particularly “Welfare,” “Coca Cola Sign,” and “Longshoreman,” exemplify his aforementioned interest in matters relating to class struggle, while the poems in the “L’Chayim,” such as “The Father,” “To My Granddaughter’s House,” and “Evening with My Granddaughters,” function in a similar manner with regard to his intimate relationships. Concerning modes of poetic presentation, Rakosi evinces a Williams-esque sense of imagery, writing short poems such as “How quickly the dandelions/ come up/ after the rain./ I picked/ them all/ only yesterday,” but he differs from his predecessor by incorporating both dialogue and regional dialect within the fabric of his texts. The poet believes that poems are “a small model/ into the world” (185) that should be presented clearly and without adornment. To this extent, he is skeptical of metaphors because, when employed, a material object’s “origin has been deleted” (192). Moreover, Rakosi contends the poems need to create an “inner/space” (198) that “penetrate[s] the particular” (204) with “hard,/ inevitable/ …language” (227). Finally, while his poems tend not to be as aesthetically daring as some of his Objectivist comrades, he does implement radical usage of the half-line break that provides a visually staggering of the text and forces the reader into an inherently staccato rhythm while reading the pieces.

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes

2010-03-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Puchner’s critical study examines the manner in which Marxism, the manifesto as a genre, and the avant-garde art movements of the twentieth-century operate in conjunction with one another. In addition to claiming that Marx and Engles' Communist Manifesto was the first “proper” manifesto, and subsequently, the template for all future manifestos, Puchner also forwards the argument that Marx realized that “it is their [manifesto’s] form, not their particular complaints and demands, that articulates most succinctly the desires and hopes” (2). One of the key, conceptual touchstones for Puchner’s study is the manner in which manifestos enact both Austin’s theory of performativity, as well as theatricality. To this extent, the author believes that, traditionally, “speech acts” must battle and conquer the threat of theatricality in order to become speech acts”; but manifestos, being inherently theatrical in nature, “speech acts occur in an unauthorized and unauthorizing context.” As such, the language therein “tries to exorcise its own theatricality by borrowing from an authority it will obtain in the future” (25). After his introduction, Puchner systematically demonstrates how the “art manifesto had split off from the main branch of political manifesto” (69) with the advent of the Futurist movment. Yet, the split was not absolute, as evidenced by Marinetti’s ties with the Fascist Party in Italy. Puchner then narrates the art manifesto’s history and its ties with the avant-garde from Vorticism to Dada, Surrealism, and the “neo-avant-garde” movement of the Sixities. Within each section, Puchner articulates both the similarities and differences between the individual movements and the ways in which they each employed the manifesto genre for their own ends. The study concludes with Puchner challenging writers such as Burger and Perry Anderson who believe that the avant-garde and their corresponding manifestos are either “dead” or historically specific to the early twentieth-century; while he does disagree with these other thinkers, Puchner does vocalize concern that “the poetry of the revolution has been co-opted by the poetry of capitalism, a capitalism so rampant that it leaves no place from which to launch a manifesto that would be unattained by it” (243). In the end, the author calls for “a new, instrumentalist manifesto” (262) that relies upon “repetition and replacement” (261).

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound

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Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. New York, NY: New Directions
Publishing Co., 1968.

Pound's collection of literary essays is divided into three sections. The initial section of the book focuses on the art and craft of poetry, the second deals with tradition and the historical development of the poetic genre, and the final section engages the work of specific writers who were contemporaries of Pound. On several occasions throughout the collection, Pound attempts to define the nature of poetry; at one point, he claims that poetry “is a composition of words set to music” (437), while on another occasion he argues that poetry, and “good” art in general, “is a sort of energy” (49). Moreover, the difference between poetry and prose is that “poetry is more highly energized” (49) and produces “a sensation” (51) within both the reader and writer. Over and above these general definitions of poetry, Pound's collection goes to great lengths in articulating qualities of poetry one should be mindful of when both reading and writing verse. For example, in his essay “A Retrospect,” Pound calls for “direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective,” as well as to use “no word that does not contribute to the presentation” (3). Of course, the attribute he focuses on the most throughout the book is the admonition “to compose in the sense of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” (3). To this extent, Pound believes that traditional meters do not afford words and language the ability to express their natural cadences and rhythms. Language's ability to do so is called melopoeia, which is when “words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning” (25). But more than directing meaning, melopoeia also distracts “the reader from the exact sense of the language” and thus creates a linkage between one's “consciousness and the unthinking sentient” (26). It is important to note that Pound does not condone divesting meaning from poetry; in fact, he argues for just the opposite when he writes: “The touchstone of an art is its precision. This precision is of “various and complicated sorts” (48). Or stated differently, Pound champions an “efficiency of expression” that enables a poet to express “something interesting in such a way that one cannot re-say it more effectively” (56). While most of his collection concentrates on what he believes poetry consists of, he occasionally addresses that which poetry should not be; specifically, Pound states that poetry is not made for entertainment (64), and to that extent, “poems are not made for after-dinner speakers” (65). In this regard, he develops an elitist conception of producing and consuming poems, as well as art in general.

Sun

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Palmer, Michael. Sun. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1988.

Toward the beginning of Sun, Palmer writes: “Some stories unthread what there was” (25), and a bit later: “They refuse you their stories, pour soot on you/ and into you” (35). Both of these passages, to a large extent, speak to the manner in which the poet’s writing undermines narrative and rational thought through the use of a highly disjunctive lyric mode that offers both images one can only connect through wide associative leaps and meta-linguistic commentary. But these features are not merely toothless artifice; what could digress into fanciful evasions of social realities is actually highly politicized speech. Palmer writes: “We, the center, offer narratives” (62); and if the “center,” or locus of power controls these “narratives,” then the desire to “Give me something in words for a change” (15) can be read as a call for marginalized poetics to assert themselves. Such an assertion will be, if not antagonistic, at least a source of uneasiness for the “center”: “Moans can be heard coming from poems—poems you, Senator, want desperately to read but will not let yourself, since you are a citizen, proud and erect” (32); if the “Senator” and his constituents will not read the moaning poems, poems that provide “Unutterable/ pages/ of counterlight/ in the fluid window” (55), it is because they have a language of violence, of the “proud and erect” to enact: “Write this. We have burned all their villages// Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them.// Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress” (83). This, then, is what Palmer’s verse attempts to combat: the burning of villages, the massacre of its denizens, and the appropriation of their culture through the hegemonic force of the dominant modes of language and writing. As an alternative, one should have “Words pass backward// onto the tongue” (59) and “churn hymns into fragments” (60) so that the “mirage// of the referent” (61) can be exposed; not so as to drift into a foundationless subjectivity, but to understand “all things are what they seem, at last. Rain is rain at last, and not rain” (33). Or stated differently, we as producers and consumers of language can grasp words as both signifiers relating to a signified within a particular context, but must know the arbitrary nature of these signs that a) can be altered, b) do not directly correspond to material objects, and c) can be used to promote a progressive politics. While it may take a leap of faith to substitute “F for alphabet” and “Z for A” (86), one must begin somewhere, pulling back language by pieces and re-writing it. Or, as Palmer writes: “I sang my name but it sounded strange/ I sang the trace then// without sound,/ then erased it” (66).

Collected Poems

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Oppen, George. Collected Poems. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation,
1975.

Oppen’s collection begins with 1932’s Discrete Series and concludes with Myth of the Blaze, which contains poems written as late as 1975. To a large extent, the work within this book can be divided into three distinct phases: the Discrete Poems from the early 30s, mid-career poems (beginning with The Materials and ending with Of Being Numerous), and culminating in the poet’s later output from the 70s. Each phase exhibits particular aesthetic and content-based traits. The poet’s early work consists of lyric fragments that employ short lines, hard enjambments, irregular line breaks, and intentionally banal content. This last feature, no doubt, exemplifies “The knowledge not of sorrow…/ …but of boredom” (3). After a thirty years hiatus from writing poetry to pursue his interests with the Communist Party, Oppen’s mid-career verse explores much longer lines, focuses on content that is ideological in nature (i.e. “If the city has roots, they are in filth./ It is a slum…/ ...some black brick/ Tenement, a woman’s body” (55)), and investigates meta-poetic commentary that casts poetry and language within a skeptical framework: “Even the verse begins to eat away/ In the acid” (68) and “Possible/ To use/ Words provided one treat them/ As enemies” (97). The poems Oppen wrote toward the end of his career demonstrate the most radical alteration in his aesthetic and poetic output. Punctuation almost completely disappears, white space separates phrases and words from one another within individual lines, and the associative leaps between images and units of thought are much greater, sometimes leaving the reader unable to determine connections between them. While the poems may “speak the estranged// unfamiliar sphere” (248), these “tornado…words// piled on each other lean// on each other dance// with the dancing” (238) in an effort to simulate movement and affective correspondences. Yet, there are several traits that cross-cut Oppen’s career, one being the serialization (i.e. sequence) of poems, and another being “A limited, limiting clarity,” of which the poet claims: “I have not and never did have any motive of poetry// But to achieve clarity” (185); and, in order to do so, Oppen more often than not practiced “saying simple things” almost to the point where it appears as though “nothing was being said” (190).

Selected Poems

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Olson, Charles. Selected Poems. Ed. Robert Creeley. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997.

The Creeley edited collection separates Olson's work into two distinct but equal sections: the poet's shorter, collected poems and selections from The Maximus Poems. The former of these sections contains many anthologized works, such as “The Kingfishers” and “Variations Done For Gerald Van De Wiele”; these poems, as well as the others, exhibit many of Olson's idiosyncratic aesthetic practices, such as exaggerated use of the comma so as to create a highly complex, and often times undiagramable, syntactical structures; leaving parenthetical statements open; developing a visual field on the page through excessive indentation of stanzas and lines; as well as employing hard enjambments, wherein the line break occurs after one or two words of a discrete syntactical unit. The content of these poems is often meta-poetic, exploring subject matter Olson wrote about in his critical work, such as: “the whole brook system got transversed to what it was below/ near where I lived, Hill's Farm getting its fields/ from the change of the direction of its flow” (48-9). Key words, like “system,” “field,” and “flow,” signal to the reader, especially one who has read his manifestos, that the poet is indeed speaking of poetry. Additionally, Olson investigates the nature of being and an object's place within the universe. For example, in an “An Ode to Nativity,” he writes: “the cries of men to be born/ in ways afresh, aside from all old narratives” (45) and, in “For Sappho, Back,” one finds: “of your own making you are/ the hidden constance of which all the rest/ is awkward variation” (24). The Maximus Poems, found in the latter half of the collection, are a small segment of the poet's epic poem, which he wrote over the course of his lifetime. Specifically, the poems explore the city of Glouschester, its history, and Olson's relationship with it. Many of the earliest Maximus poems function as lineated historical narratives, while the later pieces develop a psuedo-autobiography that situates Olson and his family among that first colonial inhabitants and the fishing communities that sustained the area for nearly three hundred years. In many ways, Maximus, as a whole, serves as a corrective to the incipient poem's declaration that “I stood estranged from that which was most familiar” (101), in which “the whole of it/ coming,/ to this pin-point/ to turn/ in this day's sun,/ in this veracity” (108-9) so that the poems, in their “pin-point” specificity, allow for them to “lie/ in the thing itself” (104).

Human Universe and Other Essays

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Olson, Charles. Human Universe and Other Essays. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1967.

The centerpiece of Olson's critical prose collection is the essay “Projective Verse,” which outlines the primary tenets of the Projectivist movement, also, at times, called “open verse” or “composition by field” (52). The three main principles are a) kinetics, or “energy transferred from where the poet got it...by way of the poem itself to...the reader, b) the declaration that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” and c) harnessing a process wherein “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (52). Furthermore, Olson claims that individual syllables are “the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together lines, [and] the larger forms of the poem” (53). But, ultimately, what the poet believes to be the foundation of this movement is breath, or more specifically, the manner in which “a poet manages to register both the acquisition of his ear and the pressures of his breath” (53). In addition to stating what Projectivist verse consists of, Olson addresses what it is not: simile, traditional meter, and “observation of any kind” (55). Likewise, in an essay on Robert Duncan, titled “Against Wisdom as Such,” he writes that, of the poet, and thus poetry, “there is no symbols to him, there are only his own composed forms, and each one solely the issue of the time of the moment of its creation” (69). Of course, this last statement should not be misinterpreted as a validation of subjectivity; in fact, the Olson outright dismisses such ego-driven conceptualizations of poetry when he writes that it “is now too late to be bothered with” it, and that subjectivity “has excellently done itself to death” (59). The poet explicitly refutes the discrete subject; instead, he champions a rhythm that embodies “the flow of creation itself, in and out, intensive [and] extensive” (119), which is comprised of “velocity, force and field strength” (120) that the poet is both subject to and active agent of. Or stated differently, the poet creates “structures” that are “flexible,” and in doing so, “dissolve[s] into vibrations” of “inertia” (122). To this extent, the poet, the poem, and external realities are not as important as “what happens BETWEEN [these] things” (123).

Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005

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Notely, Alice. Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Second generation, New York School poet Alice Notely's career as a publishing poet encompasses a variety of aesthetic and content-related concerns throughout its entirety. Early on, Notley explores the first-person, autobiographical lyric in an extended (i.e. several pages) and fragmented form that is, more often than not, filled with idiosyncratic grammatical tics. For example, in the book-length poem Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, the opening section alone spans seven pages and contains lines such as: “but I had to flesh and, flesh, be fleshed and flesh again/ raised to morbid heat/ you, you kind of anagrammatic puzzle” (30). The long first line, coupled with the shorter lines, foster a staccato rhythm, while the repetitive use of the word “flesh” and the corresponding lack of end punctuation mark the excerpt with a highly specific style. “A California Girlhood” follows the New York School tradition of incorporating rules into the process of composition; in this instance, the poet inserts the name of a famous writer into each stanza. Humor, another New York School trait, manifests itself in the poem “The Prophet,” which is a series of elaborate and often absurd pieces of advice that concludes with the lines: “Do not generally/ Go about giving advice. That which is everybody's business/ is nobody's/ Business” (106). Yet, as her career progresses, Notely veers a way from forms and aesthetic mannerisms one would normally associate with the New York School. For example, her poem sequence “Waltzing Matilda” is a series of letters from “Anonymous” to an “Advisor.” But the poetic trailblazing she undertakes does not come without insecurity; within these letters, “Anonymous” expresses concern that she is “having troubles with my writing because the words aren't jostling each other glittering in a certain way & they all have referents” (121). It would seem that her worries are unfounded, though, in that the poem offers the first of many aesthetic shifts that aid in the construction of both a protean and unique voice. The book-length poem Beginning With a Stain is the first instance in which the poet creates verse completely from quoted and collaged material. For example: “'I'm' 'saying I though, I, as if'/ 'before there were bones'” (181). The line reveals a hypersensitivity to“I's” possible identities and whether or not one can consider collage a legitimate form of creation. Much of her later work investigates the prose poem, feminist issues, radical breaks with normative grammar, and overtly political poems. In “Homer's Art,” Notely writes: “Men...have tended, or tried, to be near the center of the politics of their time, court or capital. Thus, how could a woman write an epic? How could she now if she were to decide the times called for one?” (187). The answer, it would appear, comes in the form of books such as The Descent of Alette, which use the aforementioned collage techniques to tell the story of Vietnam from a woman's perspective, and Alma, or the Dead Woman, which tackles contemporary politics through classical allusions. For example: “the furies were before Apollo was. i bind Bush and Chenney and Rumsfield, and their tongues and words and deeds; if they are planning was for today let it be in vain” (318).

Collected Works

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Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2002.

This collection of Niedecker’s work spans her entire oeuvre, beginning in 1928 and concluding in 1970. The poems at the inception of her writing career exhibit distinct Surrealist tendencies, with pieces such as “For exhibition,” which references the “subconscious,” “wakeful states,” and “full consciousness,” not to mention absurd imagery such as “curved banana-moon” and “hornets’ nest in tobacco pipes” (27). Other characteristics of her early poetry are long lines, as in the poem “Stage Directions,” conflating genres, which can be seen in the play-poem “Domestic and Unavoidable,” as well as a “particularly strong…material presences” (5), evident in “Next year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous,” which she wrote and presented in published form on a pocket calendar. Her mid-career manuscript, one of two published during her lifetime, titled New Goose, established a remarkably different aesthetic and marked a new stage in her writing life. Poems from this collection are most often less than ten lines in length and contain considerably shorter lines, most usually no more than a few words long. Just as evident as the shortened spatial arrangements is the sing-song quality of the pieces. To wit, the “Mother Goose” nursery rhymes and stories of Niedecker’s childhood acted as inspiration for most of the poems. Additionally, New Goose offers a “rich and subtle study of folk habits” (11) by concentrating on subject matter, such as “Ash woods, willow” (39), “clothesline post[s],” (100), and “spitbox[es]” (94), that were emblematic of the “Niedecker tribe” (93) residing in Atkinson, WI. She wrote her next collection, For Paul and Other Poems, in honor of Zukofsky’s son and she attempts more fully to incorporate Objectivist tendencies into her material, particularly by jettisoning the hard rhymes of her previous collection for a more natural, rhythmically inclined musicality. In this sense, her poems more fully capture the music inherent to nature, or “the full note/ the moon// playing/ to leaves” (156), than prescribed meter and rhyme are capable of achieving. Toward the latter half of her career, Niedecker appears to abandon matters outside of her own life and locale (excepting her Thomas Jefferson poems) and focuses on an aesthetic that exhibits an intimate, haiku-like quality in their brevity and simplicity. North Central’s “My Life by Water” and “winter Ridge” embody this new style rather well in their desire to represent the “wild green/ arts and letters” (237) of nature in an effort to harness “light/ and silence// which if intense/ makes sound” (253). Her poetry, then, is a culmination of a “life/ in the leaves and on water” (261).

Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge

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Mullen, Harryette. Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge. Saint Paul,
MN: Graywolf Press, 2006.

Recyclopedia is a reissue of three Harryette Mullen books writeen during the 90s. The first two collections, in Mullen’s own words, are “poems that talked back to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons” (vii). While employing a fragmented and oblique style similar to her predecessor, Mullen attempts to “recycle and reconfigure language from a public sphere that includes mass media and political discourse” (x), whereas Stein’s writing focused on the intimate details of her private life. Take, for example, the following excerpt from S*PeRM**K*T: “Eat junk, don’t shoot. Fast food leaves hunger off the hook. Employees must wash hands. Bleach your needles, cook the works” (88). In addition to conflating drug addiction and fast food eateries, wherein the slang “junk” refers to both heroin and mass produced food, Mullen includes both street-language (i.e. “off the hook”) and corporate signage (i.e. “Employees must wash hands.”) so that the two tropes not often associated with one another develop an association through linguistic slippage and spatial proximity. Many of the prose poems from the first two books examine what it means to be a woman, particularly a woman of color, in a contemporary moment that simultaneously bombards us with stereotypes and targets those stereotypes as consumers of a ceaseless stream of commodities. Whether it be tampons, in which “It must be white, a picture of health, the spongy napkin made to blot blood” (71), or struggling with “How anorexics treat themselves” (89), Mullen offers fractured visions, each paragraph a “shadow [that] wears color, arms full of flowers” (11) just clear enough to provide us with the outline of an image, or a woman’s “body wearing language as clothing of language a body of thought which is a soul” (62). The final book, Muse & Drudge, contains a series of poems composed of four stanzas, each stanza comprised of four lines, that Mullen “imagined [as] a chorus of women singing verse” (xi) akin to the blues; but, by incorporating “the tradition of lyric poetry” into the blues form, she tries to “unite audiences often divided by racial and cultural differences” (xi). The individual poems use strong rhymes and a distinctive rhythmic pattern to create “a path through tangled sounds” (104), often made more tangled by extreme alliterative qualities, as when she writes: “some little bitter/ spilled glitter” (166), or when her verse transforms into scatting: “tussy-mussy mufti/ hefty duty rufty-tufty/ flub dub terra incog/ mulched hearts agog” (146). Such techniques, then, create a “leaning meaning/ signifying say what” (131) that offers readers “honey harmonies” (135) and “rhythm docked for trick crimes” (137) more than a comprehensible narrative. This is not to say that the poems do not tell a story, but that story is an accumulation and inextricable from the sonic elements of the poems.

To Hold My Hand: Selected Poems

2010-03-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

Morley, Hilda. To Hold My Hand: Selected Poems. New York, NY: Sheep Meadow Press,1983.

Morley's Selected Poems spans her entire career as a “serious” poet, from 1953 to 1983. Aesthetically, the poet's writing remains consistent throughout the extent of those thirty years. Her poems, and the lines therein, develop and structure themselves around the breath and the organic process of actualizing breath in the written word. As such, Morley uses half-line breaks extensively; or, in her own words: “exact in separateness,/ as she is/ in her words, no waste in her/ & moving in ways most needful only,/ seeing/ within exactitude, with clarity/ in what the body/ needs, what it remarks on” (12). Not surprisingly, then, the poet's content most often centers on a) movements and b) the manner in which nature and the individual enter into a reciprocal relationship. Both of these characteristics manifest themselves in the poem “The Shutter Clangs,” when Morley writes: “those birds you imaged/ flying out of your mouth/ in thousands/ at your death/ & what were light & fire stretching themselves/ ever farther into fire & light/ danced with them,/ shaping & forming—dispersed, dissolved” (181). Ultimately, these relationships and movements work to transform, or metamorphose the speaker so as to facilitate “an exchange of all things” (22) through “fragment/ along fragment,/ phrase over phrase,/ sentence,/ image joined to each other” (41) wherein “words take on/ direction/...turn/ away” into new and unfamiliar territory, all the while retaining a “rightness,” speed, and rhythm (207). In this sense, many, if not most of her poems in the “Makers” section of the book can be read as meta-poetic statements, particularly the Matisse poems.

Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Work

2010-03-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

Mac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Work. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2009.

The Anne Tardos (Mac Low's partner) edited collection divides the poet's work into three distinct groupings. The first division encompasses Mac Low's writing between the years 1937 and 1954. During this date range, the poet employs traditional means of inventing and generating poems; this, of course, does not mean that the end products were traditional. Take, for instance, the piece “HUNGER StrikE wh At doeS lifemean.” Within the title alone, several traits found throughout the poem evince themselves: non-standard capitalization, unorthodox (yet highly intentional) implementation of white space, and concatenation of words so as to form neologisms. Moreover, the poem explores repetitive keystrokes, underlining, and strike-throughs to create a visual field on the page. The second division within the collection documents Mac Low's writing between the years 1954 and 1979. At the inception of this era, the poet began to employ both “chance operation” (xxii) and “nonintentional,” yet “deterministic” procedures (49); the latter of these two composition methods use a variety of rules, algorithms, and computer programs to generate content. Producing texts in this manner forces the reader to reconsider both what it means to produce a text and what a text, ultimately, can be. Or, as Mac Low writes: “Traditions hold examination/ Forms of range compound examination/ Between examination traditions” (60). But toward the end of this period, the poet altered his methods of composition once more. Mac Low addresses the shift explicitly when he writes: “Objective, systematic/ chance operation gave me/ many poems & pieces/ in the past// fifteen years or so, but now/ I only feel like writing/ living subjectivity:/ —inwardness!” (154). And thus begins the third division of the book, dated 1979 through 2004, in which Mac Low uses “determinstic procedures” (almost exclusively in the form of computer programs), but “always, to some extent, modifying the results of the procedures, making personal decisions of many different kinds” (376); additionally, during this period his admiration of Gertrude Stein's poetry continually resurfaces in that he regularly uses her texts as source material, most evident in his Stein Poems. Other notable characteristics of the collection, and his work in general, are several visual inserts that offer images of the poet's output as a visual artist and the manner in which he blurs the relation between text and image by creating words rendered as visual texts, and his affinity with music. Mac Low wrote many “translations” wherein he ascribse letters or words to musical notes, and vice versa. Likewise, he would often write process notes that stated how many beats a particular amount of white space was to indicate; in fact, Mac Low included process notes for all his poems derived from chance and deterministic methods that are highly Oulipian in nature.

Splay Anthem

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Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Co., 2006.

Mackey’s Splay Anthem continues two, career-spanning serialized poems: “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “Mu.” Although the two poems appear to, at times, be separate entities, their aesthetic concerns and sonic capacities obscure their differences to the point of one being indecipherable from the other. Each poem is inspired by, and attempts to mimic, specific songs; the former a is Dogon funeral dirge, and the latter is a jazz piece of the same name by saxophonist Don Cherry. As one would expect, then, the collection as a whole evinces a poetic that corresponds rather closely to both tribal music, in the form of the chant, as well as the improvisational techniques of jazz. For starters, repetition is a key component of these pieces. At the most basic level, one finds musicality in the poems’ alliterative qualities. For example; “So spoke the/ singer,/ so ran the song,/ long sought/ circle” (8). But more than just sounds, words reoccur throughout the entirety of the book, as well as within individual sections. “Andoumboulou Brush” explores the sonic possibilities of the word “clavicle,” while the poem “Song of the Andoumboulou: 60” serves a similar function for the word “Nub.” But through the repetition inherent to extended and serialized poems, the meaning of the words alters when placed into new contexts, and as in jazz, the words themselves begin to alter through improvisation. Such improvisational techniques evidence themselves during the following passage: “‘Stra, short for Stranger.’/…/ ‘Stronjer?’ I asked…/…/…Stronger,’ he/ whatsaid back” (21). This verbal, mutatitve play finds its zenith in the scatting that occurs throughout the collection, such as when Mackey writes: “zuhless,/ web,/ no zuh, no buzz” (95). Additional aesthetic maneuvers the poet employs are the fragmented narrative, or an “elision/ we embrace” (120) that is “so elliptical it seemed, unsay said it/ best” (112), and the exaggerated use of proper names. With regard to this last trait, we find names such as “Dread Lakes” and “Lone Coast” proliferating throughout the text. What Splay Anthem attempts to accomplish as a whole is the fusion of content and sound so as to generate an affective response within the reader. The text develops this concept within the content by continually presenting images of the word/sound melding with images of the body. At varying moments during the book, we find a “head of echoic welter. Head I/ hit upside. Curlicue accosting my/ neck, ears bitten by flutes” (58) or “I wanted/ trickle turned into flow, flood,/ two made one by music, bodied” (65). Music, then, has the capacity to join two bodies, or hit a listener “upside” the head. These sounds and words embody a force that functions outside semiotic systems that most Language poets find so fascinating. In fact, the speaker of the poems states this explicitly: “It wasn’t sings/ we were after, we sought what signs/ replaced” (84). And this search for the pre-linguistic is, in the end, admirable, because it offers “a/ healing song…/…/ a soothing song” (84).

The Differend: Phrases in Dispute

2010-03-07T11:03:00.000-08:00

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

At the onset of Lyotard's book, he defines the differend as a “conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule or judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi). To demonstrate how the differend functions, Lyotard applies the concept to phrase regimens, which are “heterogeneous [and] cannot be translated from one into the other” (xii); since there is an irreducible space between phrases, one needs to construct “genres” as bridges between “the abyss that separates” (123) phrases and “inspires a mode of linking” (128) them together. Of course, such linkages suppress the differend, and hence, difference, by attempting to reconcile the incommensurate and repressing alternate possibilities for the sake of those aforementioned linkages, is mitigated; or stated in other words, genres involve “forgetting the nothingness...[and] filling the void between phrases” (138). Additionally, social-political judgments that function as tribunals and create norms, ultimately, determine the linkages and their corresponding rules within a particular genre that bridge the differend, thus dictating the manner in which future linkages may occur. Lyotard relates these judgments made by tribunals to both “war and commerce” (151) and are most prevalent, yet also most inconspicuous, in the form of narrative, specifically with national myths and the way they universalize a particular tradition. In the end, Lyotard claims that the most ethical manner in which to proceed amidst phrases and genres is to employ “love as the principle operator of exemplary narrative” (159). Unfortunately, material conditions act as an obstacle for love because “humanity is not made of creatures in the process of redeeming themselves” (161), but instead of creatures seeking to authorize their own narratives.

Just Gaming

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Lyotard, Jean-François and Jean-Loup Thébaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Lyotard and Thébaud structure their collaborative work as a Platonic dialogue with the former functioning as the main orator and the latter as the interlocutor. While the second half of the book focuses mainly on the concept of justice and how it can be most appropriately formulated within the discourse of contemporary politics as a “multiplicity of justices, each one of them defined in relation to the rules specific to each [justice] game” (100), the first portion of the book covers, at length, language and its pragmatic usage. Over the course of the first half of the dialogue, both men provide aphoristic quotes that pertain to writing, such as “writing is irresponsible...because it does not come in response to a question. It proceeds of its own pace,” and “there must be a kind of absence of readers to write the way some of us wish to write” (8). Furthermore, Lyotard claims that “the artistic vanguard knows that it has no readers, no viewers, and no listeners,” but what “is at stake in artistic language today is experimentation” and if an author immerses himself or herself in the experimental moment, the work itself will eventually “wind up producing its own readers” (10). Moreover, Lyotard discusses the manner in which pagan cultures employ narratives as an avenue of experimentation within the language arts; specifically, narration becomes kinetic when “stories are animated with movement and they pass over you, [and] you must pass the movement on” (35). This movement is not merely a reference to plot arc, but, literally, about the dissolution of origins in that, with regard to the narrator, there is “no subject because s/he changes bodies, and by changing bodies, s/he, of course, changes passions as well as functions” (40). Eventually, Lyotard relates language and narrative discourse to justice in that the most just language game is the one in which a speaker “speaks only inasmuch as one listens, that is, one speaks as a listener and not as an author. It is a game without an author” (72).

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems

2010-03-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems. Ed. Roger L. Conover. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.

Loy's collection covers the majority of her career as a publishing poet, beginning with her poetic output in Europe during the early twentieth-century, continuing on through mid-century when she lived and wrote in the United States. While some of her early work gets bogged down with a heavy reliance on abstraction (e.g. “I am the false quantity/ In the harmony of physiological potentiality”), Loy experiments quite a bit with white space and absence of punctuation. Such techniques, arguably, derived from her affiliation with the Futurist movement. In fact, her essay “Aphorisms on Futurism” states that poets and artists must produce “new forms” that “readjust activity” of readers, so as to disrupt “mental lethargy” (151). Not only do these readjustments occur via punctuation and spacing, but they occur through language play (e.g. “Ho for the blue and read of her” (37)) and surrealist imagery (e.g. “Lepers of the moon/ all magically diseased” (77)). Other aesthetic and poetic considerations that could be considered innovative for her time were the refutation of metrical verse and the “deliberate hijacking [of] Victorian vocabulary...in order to subvert the values” considered normative. Loy's writing also develops a particular musicality reliant upon assonance, as when she writes: “The jeering jangling/ jazz/ crashes in silence” (87) and “The absolute act/ of art/ conformed/ to continent sculpture” (79). Not surprisingly, then, she writes in her essay “Modern Poetry” that poetry is “prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea” that constructs itself around “the spontaneous tempo of [a poet's] response to life” (157-8). Much of Loy's writing focuses on the position of women in modern society, and the manner in which they can undermine patriarchal authority through direct confrontation. In her “Feminist Manifesto,” she writes: “No scratching in the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about REFORM, the only method is ABSOLUTE DEMOLITION” (153). As such, much of her verse questions traditional notions of the feminine. For example, she dispels the belief in a woman's chaste existence when she writes: “All virgin eyes in the world are made of glass” (17), claiming that the only females who are virgins are, in fact, dolls. Likewise, she writes frankly about sex: “No love or the other thing/ Only the impact of lighted bodies/ Knocking sparks off each other/ In chaos” (59).

Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960

2010-03-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

Levertov, Denise. Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960. New York, NY: New Directions
Publishing Co., 1979.

This compilation of poems begins with the uncollected work of Levertov during the twenty year span between 1940 and 1960, followed by selections from her first book, Double Image. After this introductory material, the volume contains her next three books in their entirety. Many of Levertov's early poems adhere to traditional forms, regular stanza patterns, and formal rhyme schemes, but as her career progresses, an organic, breath-based poetic develops. As with other writers associated with the Black Mountain and Projectivist schools, lineation by breath evidences itself in liberal use of half-line breaks and irregular indentation. Both characteristics generate poems that, visually, appear fragmented but aid in the development of a speech pattern and rhythm that, to a certain extent, conflates the auditory and visual senses. Other aesthetic features that mark Levertov's poems are a) the use of doubling, or highly localized repetition, and b) breaking lines on soft words, such as “the,” “a,” and “an,” similar, in many regards to William Carlos Williams. The former of these two aesthetic particulars occurs most often in Levertov's book Here and Now, for example, in the poem “People At Night,” she writes: “A night that cuts between you and you/ and you and you and you” (33); likewise, in the poem “Jackson Square,” she writes: “A triangle of green green contains” (38). The poet explains this doubling as a response to impotent language: “I repeat/ gestures that make do when speech/ has failed” (34). The failure of speech, to a large extent, is the primary focus of Levertov's content, manifesting itself in the continual references to silence, or that which “surrounds the facts. A language/ still unspoken” (35). This is not to say that the poet advocates the dissolution of language in favor of silence; but, instead, she insists that we “DESTROY OLD LETTERS” (40) in order to create language that is music bound to the “humble rhythms, the/ falling & rising of leaf and star” (30). As the poet who developed the concept of “organic verse,” it is not surprising that Levertov believes such a musicality needs to be rooted in the rhythms of the natural world.

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

2010-03-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. New
York, NY: Anchor Press, 1999.

Lehman’s narrative begins with an overview of the New York School of Poets' disparate members, their poetic lineages, and the historical context in which these young writers developed and honed their skills. The second section of the book focuses on a detailed account of the four founding members: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara. Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. The author examines each poet’s aesthetic proclivities, literary importance, and biographical narrative. The final section of the book investigates the term “avant-garde”; specifically, its etymological origin, its initial application and purpose, the manner in which literary movements appropriated the term throughout the early twentieth-century, and, finally, Lehman’s claim that the New York School (both painters and poets) represents the last instance of avant-garde. Outside of the individual narratives, Lehman goes to great length explaining the over-arching, aesthetic traits of the New York School. For starters, “writing was properly understood to be an activity, a present-tense process” (3), and as such, how one constructed a poem was just as, if not more, important than the end-product. Furthermore, “all poetry was the product of a collaboration with language” (3), lending to a materialist outlook with regard to poems; or as Schuyler wrote: “The words are themselves/ The thing said/…/ A word, that’s the poem” (358). Moreover, the poets shunned overly serious posturing, opting instead for “aesthetic pleasure” in the form of “wit, humor, and the advance irony of the blague” (4). The poets wrote “hoaxes and spoofs, parodies and strange juxtapositions, psudeotranslations and collages….ad hoc forms…and self-assignments” (4). Incorporating overheard conversations, pop culture references, and self-reflexive turns are hallmarks of the New York School poetry as well. When expounding upon Ashbery, the New York School’s most well-know poet, Lehman finds his poetry to be “the least autobiographical of modern poets” (94), as it traces “the serpentine gestures of the poet’s mind” (96); additionally, his poems “toss off complex truths about human behavior in a disarmingly off-hand way” (96), all the while obscuring comprehension through techniques such as disorienting pronoun usage, wherein “the ‘I’ has a feckless habit of sliding into ‘you,’ ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘we,’ and sometimes ‘they’” (98). Such maneuvers lead to “the idea of ‘misunderstanding’ as a liberating aesthetic principle” (100) that defeats “the analytic methods of New Criticism” (105). For Ashbery, “poems are made of words and names, not ideas, and the immediate source of these words” (107). To this extent, Ashbery does not reject mimetic experience, but “extends it to new areas: the recording of his own mind in motion” (109).

Dura

2010-03-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

Kim, Myung Mi. Dura. Ed. 2nd. New York, NY: Nightboat Books, Inc., 2008.

Kim’s book explores the process of immigrants’ language acquisition, specifically those of Asian descent assimilating into American culture. The collection’s structure, in many ways, mirrors that process. The first section, titled “Cosmography,” contains mostly fragments, sometimes isolating single words in the fashion of a vocabulary lesson; for example: “Bora barium buffer” (6). Likewise, the section includes translations with handwritten, Korean symbols in a column with the English equivalent in type-script next to it. As the collection progresses, the poet provides readers with less fragmented language. But as a narrative begins to accumulate, concepts of global capitalism, imperialism, and cultural/linguistic hegemony associated with the American idiom begin to surface. One can “Name a capital. Name a city” (56) and find a “Guatemalan, Korean, African-American sixteen year old working check-out lanes” (67), which no doubt, is the expressed “value of A over B,” or the “Dominant relation…of owners of commodities” (65) over those who travel to the United States in search of a better life, but without the necessary language skills to express themselves. Kim, by juxtaposing contemporary contexts next to lines such as “translate: the first shipload of African slaves was landed in Jamestown” (62) makes clear the book's rhetorical stance with regard to global capitalism and the slave trade of America’s past. As far as aesthetics, Kim incorporates several unique elements; she creates poems that mimic textbooks or tests one would encounter while learning a second language so as to be nationalized in a foreign country. In one instance, there is a fill-in-the-blank: “______________ arrived in America” (61), in another we find a series of enumerated points: “9.8 One of the first words understood in English: stupid” (73), and in another poem, an actual translation test: “Translate:/ 1. Praise beasts and their worthy marks./ 2. Wear a red scarf while grinding grains” (91). Finally, in the last section, titled “Hummingbird,” Kim employs non-normative usage of the bracket character in order to both isolate discrete units of text while simultaneously creating a foreign syntax within the dominant language. For example: “Visions of the form] [bloody mess of the city” (96). In the end, Dura seeks the “Modulation, raising, slackening of the voice” (92) in an effort to forward a new, more egalitarian proposition: “constant translation” and “sound combinations” that remain “nameless” outside of a sphere where “capital grows” (72).

Singularities

2010-03-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

Howe, Susan. Singularities. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

Singularities contains three separate books written by Howe early in her career: Articulation of Sound Form in Time, Thorrow, and Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk. The first book explores historical narratives and their relation to fragmentation. The opening section of the aforementioned book provides a “standard” account of Hope Atherton and the details of the Falls Fight Massacre; the second section extracts part of a letter, written over one hundred years later by a Stephen Williams and recounts the Atherton story; finally, Howe writes a series of fragmented lyrics that are supposed to be Atherton's journal entries as he wandered, lost, through the forest. At its most experimental, the lyrics exhibit little more than free-associative connections, antiquated spelling, and various typographical explorations. For example: “flicker skaeg ne/ barge quagg peat/ ~~sieve eatacomb~~” (10). The form Howe uses, at times an “incoherent inaccessible muddle” (21), produces an “infinite miscalculation of history” (17) so as to demonstrate the manner in which both form and aesthetics shape how audiences interpret historical narratives. The second book, Thorrow, investigates place, specifically Lake George, NY and how language foists a “positive efficiency” on nature, otherwise called a “primitive indeterminacy” (40). Again, through the implementation of highly fragmented lyrics, Howe's writing is “Revealing traces/ Regulating traces” (46) of the natural world in an effort to show that “There are traces of blood in a fairy tale” (44) (i.e. history); furthermore, the incorporation of non-normative grammars function as a tool for “slipping back into primordial” (49) eras. Toward the end of the book, as well as in the final collection, Howe uses the page as a visual field by altering the direction of the type-setting and writing in a cross-hatched fashion. While chaotic, the poet claims a certain amount of organic unity to the material re-arrangement: “The Frames should be exactly/ fitted to the paper” (57) and not simply defaulted in the traditional left-to-right, top-to-bottom, well-aligned format one normally writes in. Instead, the “Frames,” or characters the writer types, should be “fitted to the paper” itself, ignoring as best as possible the hierarchical ordering considered normative. The accumulative effect of Howe's aesthetic forces “the Narrative [to] wander” (66), generating a “Mysterious confined enigma” (55) that allows us to “drift in the rise and fall of light and snow, re-reading, re-tracing” the histories we tell each other in a style nearer to the natural landscape, surprisingly, through the use of hyperbolic artifice.

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

2010-03-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Standford, CA: Standford University Press, 2002.

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Enlightment, or “the advance of thought,” does not liberate humanity from the natural world through understanding, but increases nature's domination over man by further alienating him from his surroundings. As such, Enlightened thought is not radically different from the myths and magic that preceded it. The first chapter addresses the main argument and provides a framework for its basic movements, while the second chapter examines the story of Odysseus as an allegory for the dialectical relationship between the Enlightenment, myth, and nature. The following section develops a mode of thinking that directly relates Kant's “instrumental reason,” or the foundation of Enlightened thought, with fascism (i.e. the culmination, or pinnacle of the Enlightenment). “The Culture Industry” chapter demonstrates how culture homogenizes and dominates man via exchange, as well as the manner in which culture and power interrelate. Important to the German philosophers' argument within this portion of the book is that we imitate “cultural commodities” at the same time we “recognize [them] as false.” Toward the end of the chapter, the authors' analysis of art and language and their complicity with the culture industry is also beneficial. Chapter five further explores the Enlightenment-fascist connection, specifically the Germna predilection toward anti-Semitism. In the final chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno investigate a variety of topics in a fragmentary style, similar to Minima Moralia; topics in this section include the prison system, the division of labor, and man's relation to animals.

My Life

2010-03-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Saint Paul, MN: Green Integer Press, 1987.

Hejinian composed her lyrical, prose autobiography in forty-five sections, each containing forty-five sentences, corresponding to the forty-five years of her life up to that point in time. At the beginning of each section, there is a short, lineated fragment that recurs throughout the entirety of the collection, but as a sentence within the fabric of the prose, such as “a pause, a rose, something on paper” (74), or “The obvious analogy is with music” (79). To a certain extent, the purpose of these lyrical fragments can be found when Hejinian comments meta-critically on her work; she writes: “Only fragments are accurate. Break it up into single words, charge them with combination” (75). It would appear, according to the poet, that “Only fragments are accurate” because, when one inserts (or re-inserts) “single words” into a variety of different “combinations” or contexts, the meaning of that particular word alters, thus demonstrating the manner in which language fosters equivocal “truths” and challenges conceptions of monolithic absolutes and the foundations of representational writing. Another aesthetic concern of the book is the transformation of prose into a lyric medium. Hejinian addresses this matter extensively throughout the collection, such as when she writes: “Speak—only to concentrate instability on the bird whose song you describe” (148), or “When you speak you play a language. The obvious analogy is with music” (116). Other issues that arise over the course of the book deal with the nature of the personal narrative, or “An 'oral history' on paper” (9), and how “a strict chronology has no memory” (16). Moreover, when one relates a historical narrative, it is of the utmost importance “how one goes about educating that would-be audience,” and such educational techniques “may very likely determine the history of that moment, its direction, the qualities that become emphatic and characteristic of its later influence” (32). Likewise, “how one goes about educating an audience” is multi-faceted and contingent on whom the speaker/writer is: “There were more storytellers than there were stories, so that everyone in the family had a version of history and it was impossible to get close to the original, or to know 'what really happened'” (27). Finally, the poet examines language as an object and the way in which one can think about it in terms other than simple representation or communication. For example, toward the latter half of My Life, Hejinian writes: “A paragraph measured in minutes” (93) transforms it into a “time and place, not a syntactical unit” (137), or “a certain geometry of purely decorative shapes” (66).

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest

2010-02-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

Guest, Barbara. The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Guest’s Collected Poems includes all of her published work, beginning with 1962’s The Location of Things and concluding with 2005’s The Red Glaze. Much of her early work explores imaginative landscapes through narrative and associative imagery. For example, in the poem “Piazzas,” one finds “Imagination/ thunder in the Alps yet we flew above it/ then met a confusion of weather and felt/ the alphabet turning over when we landed in Pekin” (5). While she sometimes elides punctuation and provides tangential images such as the “alphabet,” most her lines during this period are comprehensible. Later in her career, specifically with the publication of Defensive Rapture, Guest’s most prominent and enduring aesthetic shifts manifest themselves. Within this collection, the poet experiments with the page as a field of composition, making liberal use of white space, both vertically and horizontally. But far from leaving the reader aimless within this radical aesthetic alteration, Guest continually provides meta-poetic clues as to the purpose, or at least the possibilities, of this new form; she writes: “more liquid/ than eyes adulterous surface—//…// a fluid haze divides/ the rhythm vault//…// gradual broken ascent/ —means intensify” (266). But if, visually, the form of the poems corresponds to a “fluid haze” that is “liquid” for the “eyes,” there is also an auditory framework inherent to the form as well: “the spatial breath—/ delicate mouthing//…// brevity emphasized—an unnatural heartbeat” (267). The “spatial” arrangements foster a particular “breath” within the reader, dictating a “delicate mouthing” that emphasizes the “brevity” of each line; as such, “these intervals control//…// the motion” (267) of the readers’ sight and voice. But more than just an alteration of form, the content of Guest’s poetry is abstract and disjunctive content. Take for example, the following passage: “in window—field—to establish multiple erasures—/ a plain mobility—diatonic—released cloud cuttings—/ a simplex—within the marginal// —giant origins” (273). The linguistic connection between each word cluster has been elided in favor of em-dashes, leaving the correspondence between individual clusters ambiguous. But this, perhaps, is the point. For, as Guest mentions, “multiple erasures” and “cloud cutting” produce “original” thought through “elemental softening” (273). If such indeterminacy fosters a “strew of doubt” (278), it also generates a “massive intimacy” (278) wherein the reader produces their own meanings for/from a text. Ultimately, it is not Guest’s poetic project to represent images in a mimetic manner, but to create an “apparition that desires to remain on the page, even haunt the room in which the poem was created,” that is, not to write about a flower, but “encourage the separation of the flower from the page” (369).

Howl and Other Poems

2010-02-27T12:56:00.000-08:00

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1956.

The center-piece of Ginsberg's book is the title poem, “Howl,” which is divided into three parts. The first section structures itself within the syntactical confines of a single, eleven-page sentence comprised of appositives and digressions that expounded upon the lives, goings on, and locations of the “best minds of my [the poet's] generation,” otherwise known as his “angelheaded hipsters” (9). In addition to the extended syntax, other aesthetic elements of the poem include an anaphoric refrain beginning with the word “who” followed by a verb in the past tense, the use of highly sexual language, which more often than not is homoerotic in nature, for example, “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly/ motorcyclists, and screamed in joy,/ who blew and were blown by those human seraphim” (13), the use of a Whitamanesque catalog, a diction effused with the colloquial jargon of jazz musicians and the counter-culture movement that mixes the sacred with the profane, and deviant syntax, either in the form of absence or excess (e.g. with regard to the latter: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!” etc). Poems in the collection explore the prose form, such as “A Supermarket in California” and “Transcription of Organ Music,” while other poems, such as “Sunflower Sutra” and “America” employ excessively long lines. Juxtaposing these poems side by side interrogates the difference between the two in an associative manner. The final three pieces of the collection could be considered, by traditional standards, more “poetic,” in that they use shorter lines broken into stanzas and offer the reader customary tropes and images, such as flowers, love, and the physical body.

Selected Poems

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Duncan, Robert. Selected Poems. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Co., 1997.

Duncan's Selected Poems begins with his earliest pieces (1939) and traces his career as a publishing poet through his final book, Ground Work II, which appeared in print in 1987. Much of his early writing establishes its foundation in ancient myths, religious stories, and classical literature, whether they be selections from Medieval Scenes, or later poems such as “Dante Etudes.” Reliance on the re-telling of these narratives, wherein “Again his words come into ours and...draw us back/ into the orders of...art” (130), acknowledges that we should “remember this time for it returns/.../ with new faces” (134); in other words, Duncan understands history as repetition, articulated most eloquently in the arts; it is merely the proper names in the stories that have changed. As such, classical and mythological allusions function as a reminder of this fact. As far as aesthetics, Duncan experiments most radically within his collection Letters. Liberal use of white space, non-normative stanza breaks and indentation, coupled with the inclusion of lists, footnotes, and non-grammatical syntax can be found throughout. Moreover, the poet explores language at the level of individual words and their vocalizations; or, as Duncan writes: “Why knot ab stract/ a tract of mere sound/ is more a round/ of dis abs cons/ t r a c t i o n/ —deconstruction—/ for the regarding of words” (41). Other aesthetic variants employed by Duncan are: the prose poem (in the Steinian lineage) constructed around hyperbolically repetitive Cubist word combinations, which can be found in A Book of Resemblances and Writing Writing, as well as accumulation through the serial poem. His two longest poems are “The Structure of Rime” and “Passages,” both which span the course of several books. The culmination of these strategies serves to create “a disturbance of words within words/ that is a field folded” (54) in an effort to produce a “voice/ shaking, in the throes of the coming melody,/ resonances of meaning exceeding what we/ understand, words free from their origins” (128). Once the origins of words have been dislocated from the words themselves, writers can “come again and again to their few words,/ not of what they think they are saying// but of the thing they are telling, the mode” (86). And this mode, for Duncan, is pure musicality, or “the sounds/ that the lips and tongue/ and tunings of the vocal chords/ within the chamber of the mouth and throat/ can send upon the air” (140).

Writing and Difference

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Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1978.

Derrida's essays focus on the deconstruction of thought and writing of canonical thinkers such as Foucault, Descartes, Levinas, Freud, Hegel, and Levi-Strauss. In doing so, Derrida does not seek to provide an oppositional stance from which to argue, or in his own terms, not “introducing [a] foreign substance” into the debate that serves as “an aggression and an infidelity” (154), but instead “draws upon the concepts of a mode of thought in order to exhaust it” (270). In a manner of speaking, Derrida attempts not to erase a discourse, but to interact with established thought patterns in such a way that his writing “multiplies words...engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution” (274). As such, when Derrida “shakes” a mode of thought through its intensification, what he produces is difference, or more precisely, that “irreducible difference” (293) between concepts. What must be highlighted though, is the fact that difference “is not an essence, as it is not anything” (203). We can only speak about it as a trace, something transitive that can never be solidified into a presence. Derrida, in the face of such ineffability, promotes not an anxiety that laments “the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin” (292), but rather affirms “play,” or a world that revels in “the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin” (292). Throughout the course of the text, Derrida creates concepts of great interest to poets and poetry: parole souffle, or language that is spirited away and reawakens the “sonority, intonation, intensity. And the syntax governing the succession of words” (188); the “sliding” of language, which is the manner in which a word moves toward “other objects” and words through a series of “ruses...stratagems...and simulacra” (262-3); and the “supplement,” which is fostered in the “movement of play” and creates “a surplus” in language, but a surplus that is always “floating” through it (289). And what needs to be avoided in Derrida's view? For starters, one should be done with metaphor because “the analogical displacement Being” inherent to the poetic technique “irremediably repress[es]” language and discourse “into its metaphysical state” (27). Likewise, representational writing needs to be avoided because, simply stated, “representation is death” (227). In contradistinction to representation, “the materiality of a word” should be harnessed so that the word “becomes poetry” (210). Ultimately, then, Derrida's concepts leave the poet “exiled from speech” (67) in order to save it.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975

2010-02-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1982.

This volume gathers Creeley's first nine collections of poetry, in addition to several uncollected poems that were written between 1945 and 1975. Poems in his first two books often adhere to a hard-rhyme scheme and contain longer lines that extend the width of the page. For the most part, these traits disappear, or at least diminish considerably, by his third book, titled Words. One characteristic that cross-cuts all, individual collections within this volume is lineated rhythm; or, as Creeley states in the introduction: “the specific lines of these various poems are, in each case, the defining rhythmic unit” that construct “a poem's underlying beat” (x). The poet addresses his concept of rhythm, in both content and form, during the poem “Rhythm,” when he writes: “It is all a rhythm,/ from the shutting/ door, to the window/ opening” and “The rhythm which projects/ from itself continuity/ being all to its force” (265-6). To this extent, for Creeley, rhythm associates itself intimately with form; and therefore, form consistently occurs as content, or the subject matter of his poems. To wit, the poet writes: “The/ mind itself,/ impulse, of form// last realized” (310). If, for Creeley, the rhythm is form, and the “mind” is “form// last realized,” then the lines, or rhythmic units, signal a specific moment of concentration on the part of the poet, and that moment is inextricably tied to the particular breath or music inherent to the rhythm. As such, mind and body meld: a dissolution of the Cartesian binary; in other words: “The plan is the body/ There is each moment a pattern/ ...Plan is the body. The mind/ is the plan/ ...The mind is the plan of the mind.// The plan is the body” (601-2). Other aesthetic characteristics of Creeley's poetry are disjunctive enjambments, such as “The day will/ not be less than that. I/ am writing to you,/ wishing to be rid of// these confusions. You” (337). In this particular example, line breaks either a) break on soft words, b) break at the beginning of a syntactical arrangement so as to create an unbalanced grammatical structure within the balanced rhythm of the poem's formal structure, or c) employs breaks so as to alter meaning when one reads a line as a discrete entity as opposed a component of a syntactical unit. Another aesthetic feature that Creeley begins to explore near the end of this collection, and one that will continue to develop in his post-1975 writing, is the elision of articles, both definite and indefinite. For example, instead of writing “A roof's peak is an eye,” the poet writes: “Roof's peak is eye” (625). Other poetic innovations Creeley uses, albeit not as frequently, can be found in “Hi There!” (61), “Broken Back Blues” (65), and “On Acid” (508). Furthermore, it should be mentioned that Charles Olson's influence can be seen in many of Creeley's early poems, for example, with the use of the unclosed parenthetical statement.

Theory of the Avant-Garde

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Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bürger’s critical analysis of the avant-garde situates the movement as a historically contingent moment that sought to both affect and inform social praxis. To this extent, he forwards three propositions that guide the conceptual framework of his entire argument. First, the avant-garde “can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society” because it focused on negating “art as an institution that is unassociated with life praxis of men” (49). Moreover, such a negation was not possible before the rise of Aestheticism because the latter of these two movements was the first to conceptualize art as autonomous and not an extension of another institution (i.e. religion or government). Likewise, the avant-garde could not sustain itself as a movement after the surrealism of the 1930s because the techniques they employed, as well as those of Dada and Futurism, adhered to an “aesthetic of shock” that necessarily “loses its effectiveness” (81) relatively soon after it is initially used. Secondly, as a means of re-integration into life through shock, the avant-garde developed art manifestations that were non-organic and strove to refute myths of organic art functioning independently and disassociated from reality. Organic works of art forward the claim that the parts of a work are unified or subsumed in a totality, whereas the non-organic manifestation privileges fragmentation: the parts no longer form a whole, but contain “a much higher degree of autonomy and can be read and interpreted individually or in group” (72). This trait is most evident in collage, montage, and ready-mades. Finally, Bürger notes that the avant-garde failed in its original vision to re-integrate art into society, but did succeed in the “destruction of the possibility of positing aesthetic norms as valid ones” (87) by revealing the art institution as an ideological construct that manipulates power dynamics to forward its own agenda and notions of acceptability; although avant-garde movements may not have revolutionized life, they did revolutionize art. An important caveat to Bürger’s thesis of revolutionary art is that one should not consider specific aesthetic techniques inherently avant-garde; in fact, “the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art” (58) and necessarily negates the original movement’s intent.

The Sonnets

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Berrigan, Ted. The Sonnets. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2000.

Berrigan's sonnet cycle consists of seventy-eight poems (numbered one through eighty-eight, due to the fact that he cut several that did not measure up to his standards) and, outside of their fourteen line structure and oblique references to lovers, do not overtly resemble traditional sonnets. As Alice Notley mentions in the introduction to this updated and annotated addition, Berrigan used “collages and assemblages” (viii) to compose most of these poems, as well as “aleatory methods of composition” (ix) based upon the theories and writing of musical composer John Cage. Furthermore, his sonnets investigate Whitehead's theories regarding time; or, as the poet himself writes: “Whatever is going to happen is already happening” (47). Other methods Berrigan constructs poems with involve chance operations and systematically selecting lines from previous sonnets, for example, using the first lines of the previous fourteen poems. Likewise, since he also extracts material from sources that are not his own, and these sources cover a wide expanse of time and context, the diction is at once colloquial and academic, modern and antiquated. The overall effect of such procedures produces sonnets that contain highly disjunctive imagery, narrative, and linguistics. Additionally, Berrigan writes meta-poetically of these results in lines such as “I strain to gather my absurdities” (4), “Meanwhile, terrific misnomers went concocted” (5), and “Its patterless pattern of excitement” (16). Other aesthetic devices Berrigan employs are the use proper names of friends, family, and personalities he admired (a technique that Notley mentions in the introduction is “at least as old as Dante's work” (xv)), strategic use of white space, and, perhaps most importantly, the accumulative effects of repetition. For instance, regarding the latter of these traits, a line such as “There is no such thing as a breakdown” occurs many times throughout the collection. With each instance, the context alters and creates a new meaning for the line. But, in addition to understanding the specific meaning of that instance, the overall meaning of the line throughout the entirety of the book mutates through augmentation. In the end, the radical aesthetic choices that Berrigan uses within the sonnet form seeks to buttress the claim that “the sonnet is not dead” (14), but in fact can be a redistribution of human experience where “Everything turns into writing” (53) so as to prove that the “logic of grammar is not genuine” (64); even so, “Meaning [still] strides through these poems just as it strides through” the poet (45). But meaning, of course, has itself been dislodged and re-oriented.

Republics of Reality: 1975-1995

2010-02-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

Bernstein, Charles. Republics of Reality: 1975-1995. Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer, 1996.

Republics contains all of Bernstein’s published material, beginning with 1975’s Parsing and concluding with 1995’s Residual Rubbernecking. Throughout his career, Bernstein retains a faithfulness to anti-capitalist artifice; for example, in Parsing, the poet explores the use of the first-person pronoun through its hyperbolic presence in a de-contextualized setting so as to empty the signifier of any “true” meaning. As such, when the reader approaches “I was groping to understand.// I looked at him.// I was so different// I went on thinking.// I joined different clubs” (27-8) little is gleaned from the speaker’s pronouncements, even though he provides us with a glut of information. Likewise, we “grop[e] to understand” the identity of the speaker, but fruitlessly, because there is no “contextual disruption” (44), or in other words, the poem presents no recognizable context to the reader. Another aesthetic technique Bernstein employs is the cut-up; through the implementation of disjunctive fragments within his lyrics, the poet undermines the linear continuity of narrative. Take, for example, the following: “se e/ ‘OR’/ verfrumsdungseffect/ autonomous explosions/ taste as/ blocks, circling/ like (star), fl…m…n…g…” (85). In addition to the fragmentation, one finds non-standard spacing and capitalization, multiple languages, incidental italicizing, random parenthetical statements, and ellipses interspersed throughout an individual word. Bernstein’s most aesthetically adventurous collection is, arguably, his book of prose poems titled Poetic Justice. The pieces therein, in addition to exploring the aforementioned fragmentation, investigate the possibilities inherent to aberrant capitalization. As such, a reader finds passages similar to the following: “stewing in its bASIL bUnting & now here” (159); this type of writing alters the visual field of the type-written word and forces the audience to slow down the reading process in order to comprehend the text. The text as a visual field reaches its height with poems like “Lift Off,” in which lines such as “HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineopcv I iibalfmgmMw” (174) are not so much to be read, as to be viewed as a concrete object. Toward the latter third of the volume, the poet’s language becomes more comprehensible, and his aesthetic experiments tend to focus more on sound and the manner I which one can “take this/ split (splint/ of sound/ mumbling/ murky dormer/ as in” (352). Whereas “sound” often functions as a “splint” or support system for poetry, Bernstein’s later poems seek to “split” those sounds so as to create a “mumbling” that fosters within the reader a “murky” understanding of what the poems attempt to convey. Ultimately, Bernstein’s poems look to language and the written/typed word as an object in and of itself (i.e. through a materialist lens). Therefore, the poet believes “It’s not my/ business to describe/ anything. The only/ report is the/ discharge of/ words called/ to account for/ their slurs” (359).

Veil: New and Selected Poems

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Armantrout, Rae. Veil: New and Selected Poems. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2001.

Armantrout’s New and Selected gathers poems from her first six books, as well as a collaboration with the poet Ron Silliman and more recent, uncollected work. The predominant aesthetic characteristic of Armantrout’s poetry is the short, lyric line and the manner in which meaning accumulates over the course of the poem. To this extent, when the poet writes: “I too/ am a segmentalist,” she acknowledges that global meanings or messages of an individual poem develop through an aggregation of words, lines, and stanzas, while simultaneously retaining an isolated particularity. As such, there is a contingency inherent to her language based upon form, “circumstance,” and context, that is to say “the way a single word/ could mean// necessary, relative, provisional” (101). In addition to the unfolding of meaning through time, the shorter lines provide a “syncopated,/ almost cadenced…way/ that…invent[s]/ ‘understanding’” (58); or in other words, “syncopation” and “cadence,” or the musicality and rhythm of a line aids in the construction of “understanding.” Regarding content, Armantrout focuses much of her attention on the manner in which both representation and reference function in relation to language. For instance, she writes: “If I can avoid these words, what remains should be my experience” (82); but avoiding words, especially for a writer, is not feasible. Instead of direct experience, then, there is mediation that produces a “measure of fear [and] Distortion” (18). The “fear” derives from the fact that language as a system of reference, to the poet’s mind, “is inimical” (104). She voices a similar sentiment when she writes: “’I think he’s hiding/ behind a screen// of words// and I think that’s/ very dangerous” (143). In addition to the commentary on the nefarious character of language, the incorporation of dialogue and quotation permeates Armantrout’s work because “Ventriloquoy/ is the mother tongue” (56); this allows for the poet and the poem to, literally, say things they otherwise could not by allowing for a poly-vocal text. Other aesthetic considerations in Armantrout’s writing are abstraction, which is used to “discover how/ two things/ can constitute a recurrence” (111), and disjunctive, or seemingly non-associative phrases. The poet writes with regard to the latter of these two characteristics: “When I say ‘dissociation,’/ I may have said ‘real-time action’” (112). In this regard, it would appear that associative images or phrases form only through contemplation, whereas “dissociation” and disjunctions are actually the initial or “real-time” condition in the mind functions; Armantrout, therefore, attempts to capture the incipient thoughts of her mind in motion.

Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poem

2010-02-23T08:33:00.000-08:00

Ashbery, John. The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University
Press, 1957.

New York School poet John Ashbery writes, arguably, his edgiest collection with The Tennis Court Oath. The title poem opens the book with a series of fragmented lines that offer a strange syntactical and semantic experience; for example, the poet writes: “The person. pleaded—‘have more of these/ not stripes on the tunic—or the porch chairs/ will teach you about mean—what it means’” (12). Earlier in the poem, the speaker references a “mystery you don’t want surrounded the real” (11); one can, quite rightly, read this as the speaker understanding his audience’s trouble with comprehending obscure passages and their desire, perhaps, for a less rigorous text. The center-piece of the collection, no doubt, is the twenty-two paged “Europe,” divided into one hundred and eleven sections. While the piece contains mostly small, fragmented lines such as “A wave of nausea--/ numerals” (64), which is the entirety of section two, other sections contain prose poems, and in one instance, a matrix with alternating boxes that contain white space or individual words. While readers can “piece together secret messages contained in” these poems (71), the poet’s interest in Abstract Expressionism, collage, cut-ups, and other European, avant-techniques challenges the reader to experience “the sense of the words…/ with backward motion” (46), the “words” being “passions…divided into tiniest units/ And of these many are lost, and those that remain are given at nightfall” (57); or, stated differently, words are “divided” into the smallest syntactical “units” possible and arranged in a new, less representational order, sometimes even by chance operations. While semantics or communication may be “lost,” those aspects of language that “remain” are unique and, more often than not, wholly new; thus, words signal an affinity with “nightfall” and its corresponding difficulty of apprehending objects at the onset of darkness. Other poems exhibiting curious aesthetic features are “To The Same Degree,” wherein the poet divides the poem into two vertical columns of fragmented sentences that can be read either horizontally or vertically, and the piece “Idaho,” which employs liberal use of white space, both prose and lyric modes, a highly disjunctive narrative about “Biff” and “Carol,” and excessive punctuation. Regarding this final characteristic, Ashbery sometimes writes: “##############” or “???????????????????????” (91-2) within the fabric of the text. To this extent, the string of characters forces readers to engage these portions of the poem within a visual field, as opposed to a linguistic or temporal field. Overall, the collection concerns itself with stretching language past the limits of representation and its traditional usage. Ashbery claims as much when he writes: “you…will want something other than nauseating clear sea framed in window…the loggia in the picture. You see well, the perverted things you wanted gone” (54).

The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book

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Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein. Eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

The Andrews and Bernstein edited collection incorporates much of the material from the first three volumes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine into a single volume. The book itself is divided into three subsections: Poetics and Language, Writing and Politics, and Readings. The first of these sections explores the manner in which a semiotic-based view of poetry, particularly of the post-structural variety, alters the aesthetics of a poem. Of course, before delving into these essays, Andrews and Bernstein make clear in their introduction that such an aesthetic does not promote “the idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference” (ix), rather, “reference…is one of the horizons of language, whose value is to be found in the writing (the world) before which we find ourselves” and that reference contains “multiple powers and scope” (ix). Moreover, what comes across in the essays from the first section is that the poets loosely defined as Language-oriented do not have an overriding aesthetic concern, outside of the materiality of language itself. For example, Jackson Mac Low’s essay “MUSELETTER” focuses on the presence of emotion in process-oriented writing, Ted Greenwald’s “Spoken” examines the sounds of “spoken speech” grounded in the “locality of words” (23), Andrews desires “‘unreadability…which requires new readers, and teaches new readings” so as to usurp the malaise inherently produced within traditional texts that “destroy[s] our attentiveness” (31-2), or McCaffery’s interest in sound poetry and the relation to tape recorders. The section closes with an essay by Bernstein reconfirming not the referents death, but “rather a recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has,” which “are ways of releasing the energy inherent in the referential dimension of language” (115); he also champions the rearrangement of “the order of words, the syntax” (166) etc., so as to provoke a heightened sense of awareness within the reader, as well as “the sense of music in poetry” (117). In the second section of the book, Ron Silliman’s essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World” best encapsulates the conceptual trends of the Language poets’ politics. Specifically, he attempts to answer the question “Does capitalism have a specific ‘reality’ which passed through language and [is] thereby imposed on its speakers?” (123). Silliman contends that capitalism “reduced…commodities [i.e. language]” to a fetish object by means of “description, or referential, and…narration” (126). The task of the poet, then, is to recognize “the philosophy of practice in language” in an effort “to search out the preconditions of post-referential language within the existing social fact” to initiate a social revolution that will aid in a contemporary “class struggle” (131). The final section of the book contains readings and reviews of poems and poetry collections by Language poets.