Critique Manqué

whatever

2012-01-30T09:00:00.006-05:00

Yeah this isn't even a question.

But, I wanna have like

literally erry'day.

I look at porn erry'day.

Like

i'm 16 year old female,

but whatever.

Queen of England

2012-01-27T12:13:00.001-05:00

for me you are the Queen of England noisyboyz;

because for me this people are true strangers.

great!

Henchmen

2012-01-26T12:41:00.000-05:00

Tee Hee Johnson
Baron Samedi
Whisper
Adam
Rosie Carver
Charlie Francis
Pratik Patel
Small force of footsoldiers in red teeshirts and black trousers

Kananga

2012-01-26T12:37:00.001-05:00

Kananga is Mister Big, the Bond Villain of "Live and Let Die".

To the general public, he is Kananga, a humble dignatary and ambassador of Arice. But in reality, he is Mister Big, a drug lord.

When he kills an MI6 Agent, Bond is assigned to defeat him.

His Easily Escapable Death Trap consists of throwing Bond in a lak full of crocodiles.

His henchmen are: Baron Samedi (a voodoo sorcerer) and Tee Hee Johnson (a man with a metal claw in his left arm).

Bond kills him by injecting him with an air pump, making him blow up until he explodes.

Trolls

2012-01-24T10:24:00.002-05:00

emo hipster goth chick

who writes confessional flarf poems about sex

in comic sans

on a pc

i like that shark

2012-01-17T23:35:00.001-05:00

human’s are quite stupid, “it looks some kind of a snail shaped fossil”

“NO ITS A SHARK!” they have no further proof.

fuck bags

2012-01-11T18:00:00.000-05:00

This song descibes
how i feel.I feel lonely,unaccpeted,sad
usually,and live world full of mean,uneducated
people who are selfish.I feel like outcast.

This is fucking terrible, I hope
the people who made this committed suicide.
How the fuck could you butcher
a great song like this, if I personally see you fucks
I will kill you as slow as possible

And I might kill all you fuck bags who like this

I've seen it used for alias namess.

2012-01-03T12:50:00.002-05:00

I also know AKA as "above knee amputation".

A Debate about Boobs

2011-12-14T16:59:00.002-05:00

Now I don't wanna get into a debate about boobs
but she hulk is considerably bigger than others.

Shes tall as hell and bigger boobs
wouldn't surprise me.

That's just my observation let's just
admire these very cool breast cancer awareness ads.

a horrible horrible mismatch

2011-12-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

man.. this is very funny man...

hey guys, i'm an x-men fan before...

and i know what u guys say about wolverine..

and yeah, wolverine can cut mr.fantastic to pieces..

i also know wolverine and how very very taught

and indestructable his ADAMANTIUM skeleton is...

hey to all wolverine fanboys out there..

thanx for supporting wolverine...

BUT..

this is a horrible horrible mismatch here...

i mean this is doom we're talking about..

i'm no newbie either on x-men and fantastic 4 and all the MU..

but man..

dr.doom..

this is fight wolverine has a little chance to win here..

lets face reality man...

yeah wolverine can cut dr.doom's armor..

i'll give u that, he can take a shot to any weapon any heavy hitter can dish out..

but dr.doom is a lot new level here...

this guy, doom, althought defeated by squirrel girl

and MR. FANTASTIC (the smartest man alive)...

w/ out reed, this guy bitchslap GALACTUS, SILVER SURFER, THE BEYONDER...

AND YEAH SON GOKU

( no joke, i've seen son goku defeated

by teleporting him to another time by doom,

no joke man.. there's a site)...

the only thing wolvie get doom's attention

is either on his ADAMANTIUM skeleton and HEALING FACTOR...

man, even magneto pissed his pants on doom..

yeah, in the villains team up..

magneto's superior is dr.doom and althought he they fought..

see what mag's face look like after that...

this song comes happens

2011-11-30T23:50:00.000-05:00

when goku goes Super Sayian

When Gohan goes Ascended Sayian

When Natsu Beats the shit out of Jellal

When Naruto goes into fox cloak and rapes the hell out of Nagato

When Kira brings hell in the battle field with Strike freedom

When Dante gets revenge for people eating his pizza

you like rabbit monkey

2011-11-23T23:30:00.003-05:00

ur just a hater breaking
dawn was perfect the book
was great too sop
hating ur a guy
so you wouldnt like it as much but

dont hate on breaking dawn
unless u want about a million
girls coming and attacking
you like rabbit monkey
im not playin right now

Honesty, Self-Indulgence, “selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee”

2011-11-14T09:00:00.003-05:00

“i like reading things other people might describe as ‘self-indulgent,’” Megan Boyle writes half-way through her selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee. “what other people define as ‘self-indulgence’ just seems like honesty to me.” A lot of the time I’d be inclined to agree with her. Plenty of my favorite writers—Ariana Reines, Kendra Grant Malone, Tao Lin—tend toward the kind of confessional honesty that often draws of accusations of self-indulgence.

In the case of selected unpublished blog posts …, though, I’m not so sure. If there’s one thing this book demonstrates, it’s that what makes those writers great isn’t honesty in and of itself. It’s how that honesty reveals powerful, singular personalities, and how their sometimes relentless misery is leavened with wit, aesthetic daring, formal skill—all the subtle little hints of artfulness that say, “Yes, we know you’re reading this, and we care enough to keep you entertained.”

Not that Megan Boyle lacks those kinds of resources. She’s already demonstrated that she can match Tao Lin when it comes to weird, darkly whimsical charisma, and she even shows it occasionally in this book, with charmingly offhand observations like, “if i drop a toothpick i'm pretty sure it will remain where it fell for three days // not sure what happens after that.” That’s enough for a good tweet, and as Spencer Madsen has proven, if you have enough good tweets you can actually make a really good book out of them.

But that’s only if you’re willing to take the tweet—quick, sociable, ingratiating—as your literary model. Instead, Boyle’s model is the more ruminative, less interactive blog post; and not even that, but the unpublished blog post—unmotivated, unfinished, finally unread, the loneliest and least other-oriented internet artifact you can imagine. At times, that extreme inwardness feels genuinely tragic—this is the diary of someone who’s crushed by loneliness but who can’t help “consciously avoiding social interactions.” At other times there are engaging flickers of connection, or at least affecting failures to connect, in particular one scene involving the author and her mother’s differing valuations of Dave Eggers. But for the most part, the book duplicates too literally the tedium and alienation that it depicts, accumulating unvarnished lists of embarrassing personal minutiae as if anything unpleasant were inherently also interesting.

Maybe it’s to Boyle’s credit that she’s pursuing something more private, more in-depth, and arguably truer than the crafted depressive personas of a Madsen or a Lin, but in the end she’s just subtracted the craft and left the depression. That, I want to say, is more honest only in the most reductive sense, in the way that going to the supermarket in your dirty sweats might be “more honest” than pulling on a decent pair of pants first. In art, a minimum of craft isn’t necessarily dissimulation, it’s just courtesy—or better, reciprocation, the gesture through which an author acknowledges her audience as equals. That, to me, is the real difference between honesty and self-indulgence, and confusing the two sets selected unpublished blog posts… off in a well-intentioned, sympathetic, but finally unsatisfying direction.

Lounge Control

2011-11-11T11:30:00.002-05:00

Dear all,

Just
a reminder
that the staff don't clean up
after our events—
we do.

The chairs
in the faculty lounge
have been reconfigured,
and need to be put back.

Thank you,
Matron

On "Morocco" by Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca

2011-11-07T09:00:00.002-05:00

Love is a tricky subject to write about, because it makes you feel totally unique while in fact making you extremely common. It tempts you towards self-indulgence and private reference, diverts you with the goals of lovemaking rather than making art, and invests everything it touches a with sentimental value that can blind you to those very flaws. In short, unless your name is Yeats or Akhmatova, you might think twice about writing a whole book of love poems.

In Morocco, Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca deal with all those potential pitfalls by—true to form—running right at them. As a kind of shared diary of their troubled, abortive relationship, the book was explicitly written by each for the other, so any limitations of the individual poems—and none of them touch the best in Malone’s debut, Everything Is Quiet—seems less a failure of the poets and more the fault of our own (openly invited) voyeurism. More important, the book’s call-and-response structure allows the poems collectively to function on a second level, more like a work of fiction, in which each poet becomes like a character whose limited POV is contextualized by the other, and by the third voice of the narrative they create together.

That narrative could be filed under horror as easily as romance. It’s strange that that the strongest feeling conveyed by a book written by two people ostensibly in love should be overwhelming loneliness and alienation, but that’s what it is. Separated by space, by the fact that both are already in relationships, by fundamental differences of outlook, and by oceans of self-loathing and guilt, Malone and Savoca relentlessly fire and miss in a duel of self-revelation, producing ever more shuddering confessions without, it seems, getting much closer to understanding each other or themselves.

Malone comes out as the better poet—it’s hard to compete with her slashing, halting sense of line, her breaks so counterintuitive yet never wrong, so that you can tell which poems are hers before you even read them (“there was a woman / agonizing that night / she was dying and i am / so cruel / because i loved that black / ocean”). But—maybe not by coincidence—Savoca makes the more vulnerable and thus the more interesting character, trembling with a uniquely masculine kind of abjection that mixes masochistic pleading (“i wish you would tell me / i am not a real man / i want to hear you say / that i could never satisfy you”) with scarily violent clinginess (“your legs like baby trunks / and didn’t i already tell you how / i want to hang them on my wall?”).

For her part, Malone answers such threats and invitations with a more-than-sexual aggression, revealing a very different side from the infinitely compassionate martyr of Everything Is Quiet:

     i still want to see you masturbate
     i want you out lying on the ground
     pawing at my bedroom door
     humping the floor and
     crying
     every night

By the time she’s is threatening to “teach / you about your body” and demanding to be called “King Kendra,” it’s clear that BDSM for this couple is less a sexual fetish and more a form of mutual revenge. Since this is really real life, and not fiction, things never spiral to the horrific, bloody conclusion that might be implied. Instead, they just fizzle out under the burden of their own dysfunctionality, in a pair of poems with the suitably pathetic titles “just a little sad” and “ruined.”

But, in a way, that fizzle is scarier than the alternative, because it means this isn’t a story about madness or obsession, it’s just a love story. After literally millennia of poets hopelessly apostrophizing their absent, irremediably silent muses (see the aforementioned Yeats and Akhmatova), a book of love poems written by two poets in dialogue ought to feel refreshing. Instead, Morocco seems to suggest that the only thing more lonely and terrible than one person in love, is two.

Tricky subject.

10/10 and Easily

2011-10-20T14:23:00.000-04:00

This is a stupid fight.

This is one of the most stupidest fight on the forum.

Wolverine destroys any terminator (except t1000).

I dont know why this has been made and people are voting against wolverine.

I have seen wolverine take on 8 people and each of them are a terminator.

I have seen wolverine fight 200 superpowered mutants on a shield carrier
and you actually think that a terminator is going to beat him.

I have seen wolverine go berserk in the middle of new york
bringing almost every villian and some heros to stop him
with all of them getting there a** whipped (in wolverine vs new york).

I have seen wolverine take on the hulk almost killing him (as death) until he stopped himself.

I have seen wolverine fight wendigo to a stand still and also defeat wendigo,
a being that might could bench press a mountain.

I have seen wolverine take on a group of xmen defeating them any terminator.

I have seen wolverine teleported to another diminsion
(nightcrawler teleportation)
taking on 100's of demons that had hulk like strength, killing them like it was nothing
and terminator is going to bring him down.

I have seen wolverine take on majority of the alpha flight by himself
and he took on xfactor by himself but a damn robot is going to stop him.

Wolverine destroys this robot without breaking a sweat.

No matter what weapon you give them.

Wolverine vs 2 terminator, wolverine 10/10 and easily.

4 last 2 weeks

2011-10-13T16:36:00.000-04:00

We don’t need the city’s crew.
We have been self-organizing and taking care of our space!
If @MikeBloomberg cared bout sanitation
He wouldn’t have blocked porta-potty’s and dumpsters.
We won’t allow #NYPD to enter.
This is an OCCUPATION, not a permitted PICNIC!
after sleeping 12hrs i feel overwhelmed at the amount of lolcats i have to catch up on

We’ve received overwhelming community support
against the Mayor’s aggressive move
2 end #occupywallstreet.

Manhattan Community Board...
lie of the century
has given us a good neighbor policy,
a document of mutual respect,
that we have been following
together

4 last 2 weeks

Shock

2011-09-29T21:00:00.000-04:00

Nooooo freakin Wayyyyyy!!!
So is Ryu the Son of Akuma?????!!!!!!

ive been playing street fighter for nearly 20 yrs...
the notion have never cross my mind!!...

Wowwwwww its like Vader vs Luke Skywalker.....
i am stilll shockkkkkkkkk.

hotline

2011-09-20T08:40:00.002-04:00

mmmmm

music to shoot smack to

while you’re banging a 70’s porn starlet with major bush over growth

yeah i’d have to say it’s a good tune

Love Story

2011-09-19T15:49:00.001-04:00

tune always up

2011-09-17T18:35:00.001-04:00

I’m gonna ...

for once im ...

It’s gonna feel ...

gonna make ...

Gonna make ....

As I, turn up ...

my favorite ...

This wind is ...

I see the kids ...

with not ...

Who am I ...
Pretending not to ...

A summer di...,

a ....

And a one ...

They follow each other ....

‘Cause they ...
That’s why I ....

CHORUS

I’m starting with ...
I’m asking him to ...

And no message could ....

If you wanna make the ...
Take a look at yourself...

(Na na na, na na na, ...

I’ve been a victim ....

It’s time ....

That there are some ....

Could it be ....

pretending that ...

A willow deeply scarred....

And a washed...

They follow the ....

‘Cause they got no ...

That’s why I’m ....

Chorus Repeat

I’m starting with ....
I’m asking him to ....

And no message could have ...

If you wanna make ....
Take a look at yourself....

CHANGE!

Up ¸ tone ...

R Repeat X2 (tune always up)

Six Feet Under

2011-09-14T13:41:00.001-04:00

There’s been an accident

This is what you’ve been running away from your whole life, buddy boy

I just didn’t know that they can take a dump when they’re dead!

I’ve had the best time coming to this funny restaurant and having you yell

Well, I don’t understand how you can live like that

POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON

2011-08-23T19:33:00.000-04:00

POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON
POETRY BY EMILY DICKINSON

Embarrass yourself.

2011-08-12T11:41:00.000-04:00

The writer must be in it; he can’t be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
–Arthur Miller

I think this very much applies even, or especially, to critical writing. Anyway it’s something I definitely strive for, and a rule of thumb I use to gauge when I might’ve done something good (i.e., when it seems almost embarrassing).

(Speaking of embarrassing, please pardon Miller’s mid-twentieth-century pronoun usage.)

The Whale

2011-08-08T10:08:00.000-04:00

Image from 2010: Moby Dick, text from Mardi via Drew Gardner.

“Orphaned by the World”: On Recent Bernstein

2011-08-04T11:04:00.004-04:00

Charles Bernstein’s new poem, “Recalculating,” starts out as one of the lazy-seeming grab bags of aphorisms to which he’s recently been prone, whenever he’s not writing weird doggerel instead. It has all the usual usuals—the hackneyed semicontemporary references (see the title), the weak twists on familiar clichés (“Information wants to be free—from personification”), the played-out metacommentary (“The poem is a constant transformation of itself”). But then it starts to feature something not so usual: frank, agonizing passages about the tragic suicide of Bernstein’s daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein—or more so about the poet’s own process of mourning that death.

I think of Emma climbing the icy rocks of our imagined world and taking a fatal misstep, one that in the past she could have easily managed, then tumbling, tumbling; in my mind she is yet still in free fall, but I know all too well she hit the ground hard.

The hardest thing is not to look back, the endless if onlys, the uninvited what could have beens. I live not with foreknowledge but consequences; wishing I had foreknowledge, suffering the consequences of not.

Its startling candor aside, there’s nothing so exceptional about this passage, nothing especially poetic in its phrasing or beyond the normal, unnormalizable course of mourning in its content. But, partly by virtue of that very plainness, its sudden appearance transforms the poem. Suddenly all the seeming jabber belongs not just to the language or to a well-established poet but to a human mind, a mind like any other, grappling not only with this fresh loss but with the endless struggle of just existing, whose self-reflexive and seemingly compulsive dialoguing about poetry and politics is and always has been, after all, part of that struggle to make the world endurable for itself and all that it cares for.

Following that revelation, there’s real pathos in hokey one-liners like “That’s no phallus, that’s the election of my impotence, writ large,” or “I love art so much… but it never returns the favor”; and it’s a pathos that’s only heightened by the lines’ weakness, by the way they enact the impotence they talk about. In fact, it’s exactly this sense of existential disability, of shared helplessness in the face of unalterable reality, that has always been the subtext of Bernstein’s thought, all the way back to his discussions of dysraphism (a type of birth defect) as a poetic device in the 1980s. It may be only now, though, in the experience of personal tragedy, that Bernstein is able to fully articulate the emotional resonance underlying what has always come across more as an intellectual credo.

Not to “get over” (as a disease) but as a way of “living with” (as a condition).
…
I can’t and don’t want to “heal”; perhaps, though, go on in the full force of my disabilities, coexisting with a brokenness that cannot be accommodated, in the dark.
…
So much of what we can’t imagine we are forced to experience. And even then we can’t imagine it.

It makes me want to reevaluate a lot of Bernstein’s recent work, to see if his apparent self-judgment in this poem isn’t far too harsh: “He had the honeyed lips of someone who’d been in poetry too long, whose idealism had years ago become a manner of speech and whose only aesthetic aspirations were for a revival of the ideas he had rejected in his youth…” Or, even if that’s in some sense the truth, to see if there isn’t some poetry to be wrung from that specific form of a universal brokenness.

Moby

2011-08-03T09:58:00.004-04:00

Image from 2010: Moby Dick, text from Mardi via Drew Gardner.

"Hulk vs. Wolverine"

2011-07-27T10:07:00.001-04:00

I’d estimate that 30 to 35 minutes of this 40 minute feature consists of an uninterrupted chain of gratuitous, occasionally gory fight scenes, involving not just the title characters but also a small ensemble of totally nineties villains (Sabertooth, Deadpool, Lady Deathstrike, Omega Red) that essentially function as a Greek chorus of eviler, more over-the-top Wolverines. All punching, all stabbing, all making elaborate threats and roaring at each other—it should be ridiculous, and it is, but fortunately it knows as much and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Wolverine and Sabertooth get batted around like baseballs at a homerun derby; severed limbs are treated with all the gravity of a Monty Python sketch; the Hulk calls everyone by funny names like “claw people.” Either it’s a goofy action romp or else it’s a vision of hell in which everyone has claws and anger issues and nobody can die.

Since it ends on a cliffhanger and is explicitly set in a version of Wolverine’s early history, you’re free to imagine a sequel in which the ol’ Canuckle head joins the X-Men, finds his moral center, and becomes a troubled hero instead of just a stab-happy asshole. As a prequel to that (never to be created—or else already told) story, this is just about perfect.

2011-07-13T11:44:00.000-04:00

Spencer Madsen Is Living in the Future So the Present Is His Past

2011-07-10T17:46:00.002-04:00

In a world where someone like, let’s say, Tony Hoagland is the baseline for what poetry looks like, while someone like Tao Lin is seen as too idiosyncratic to legitimately emulate, Spencer Madsen’s forthcoming book A Million Bears will probably get tagged as derivative. But—and this is a lucky thing for poetry, I’d argue—that isn’t the world Spencer Madsen is writing in. He’s writing in a world where Tao Lin is already the norm, where poetry has always been lowercased and dryly sarcastic, and poets have always been as deeply invested in blogs and twitters as they are in books and journals. In that world, Madsen is not only not derivative, he’s even a little ahead of his time.

Ahead of his time not because of any jolting innovation, but because of the total ease he displays while doing things that for other poets would still feel like contrived experiments. I get the feeling that in ten years, when the impact of Kenneth Goldsmith and Tao Lin and Steve Roggenbuck has been fully assimilated, every poet will be able to be as offhanded as Madsen is about opening a book with a retweet of Kanye West. Every poet will naturally treat their twitter and their blog and their IM conversations as if they were part rough draft, part journal publication; and the ability to gather all those digital scraps together and weave them into a seamless whole like this will be a basic poetic skill.

Okay, maybe not. More likely the poetry world will remain as balkanized as it is today, and while that kind of Madsen-like poet will be around, there’ll still be plenty of much less unusual writers to dismiss those poets as imitators. But A Million Bears feels to me like it was e-mailed from that other world, with only a few missteps to weaken the illusion (mainly, a handful of big-print found poems that suggest Madsen’s gifts are more subjective like Lin’s than objective like Roggenbuck’s).

All in all it’s a pretty appealing utopia: a world where poetry is getting younger instead of older, where people write about love and sadness and insecurity in the simplest way possible, with a lot of sincerity, not much hierarchizing, and no fear of using the comic or the contemporary or even the outright silly in a poem. That’s the kind of attitude it takes to write a poem about how sad your cat is and make it as touching and reflective as it is ridiculous. And a poem like that—a poem like a LOL cat, but sadder—is somehow just right to be populating our timelines and newsfeeds today.

If I seem to be calling A Million Bears both the poetry of our moment and the future of poetry, I don’t think that’s a contradiction. It’s just a sign of the need for poetry to catch up to itself. Because whatever world we may choose to evaluate him from, Spencer Madsen’s world is the one where most of the potential audience for poetry is already living.

Biz likes it too.

Transporter Bridge

2011-07-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

Too hard to resist...

2011-06-23T12:18:00.003-04:00

Image borrowed from Steve Roggenbuck, text (in total sincerity) by Anis Shivani.

Actual Thoughts on “Best Behavior” by Noah Cicero

2011-06-19T12:16:00.001-04:00

My first reaction to Best Behavior was pretty heavily colored by frustration with the text’s self-apparent shoddiness–forget a good editor, this book would’ve benefited from a half-interested proofreader. Missing periods, extra periods, references to “John Grishman” (he means Grisham) and “taking off my boats” (he means boots), even plenty of missing words and more than a few errors that genuinely obscure sense. By the time I finished it, though, I was beguiled enough with Cicero’s writing to forgive the book’s hopeless editing, and even to accept it as part of the experience. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the messiness is deliberate, but it’s certainly not at all inappropriate—the crappy, dilapidated condition of Cicero’s prose mirrors the crappy, dilapidated America he sees himself living in.

Cicero’s stand-in/protagonist shuttles between two vastly different, equally desperate and ruinous worlds within that America, and finds his proper place in neither. His political outlook is an odd mix of conservative golden-age syndrome and liberal social ethics—one minute he’s writing empathetically about the outcast position of prison inmates, the next he’s somehow connecting cell phone use with the decline of marriage and the family. If I can’t relate to all those opinions, I certainly can to the in-between position their mixture puts him in. His writing and philosophizing has no outlet in the blue collar world he lives in, yet he’s too self-consciously grounded in that world to fit with the mostly disaffected rich kids who populate his artistic circle. So he becomes an observer and a sociologist in both places, transforming people he can’t connect with into case studies he at least can understand and even attempt to speak for.

For that reason, it’s interesting to read this book alongside other Muumuu House romans à clef like Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel and Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad. Cicero is interested in people in a way that neither Lin or German really are—as characters, with histories and subjectivities that can be analyzed and made sense of. So when his author-surrogate comes to New York to participate in a thinly veiled version of Muumuu House’s photo shoot for Nylon, you don’t need much insider knowledge to figure out who’s who. And whereas Lin’s portrayal of himself in Shoplifting is deliberately depthless—more or less a mobile emitter of deadpan dialogue—Cicero’s version is an elaborate character study, with a personal history and cultural heritage that shape his unique combination of disaffection and ambition, introversion and leadership.

That kind of portraiture, along with broader sociological speculations—serious, expansive, deeply cynical and yet somehow still naive—is the actual heart of the book, much more so than its minimalist narrative. If there aren’t too many stunning insights, that’s really not the goal—ever the blue-collar workman, Cicero is less out to startle with his original intellect than to recall things so fundamental, we’re usually too shaped by them to consider them at all. What’s compelling about the character is not that he’s so smart, but that he’s so interested, that he cares enough not to let the basic, often horrible facts of our daily lives go by unremarked.

In other words, he has the same kind of unblinking and idiosyncratic eye that marks so many of my favorite poets, from Emily Dickinson to Ariana Reines. Best Behavior excited me in a way that usually only poetry does (not coincidentally, it was Cicero’s poem in Pop Serial, no. 2, that got me to buy this book in the first place). Now I’ve gone backwards to his first book, The Human War, and I look forward to reading it.

Real Boredom (Except from “Best Behavior” by Noah Cicero)

2011-06-15T21:39:00.001-04:00

Real Boredom (Except from “Best Behavior” by Noah Cicero)

2011-06-12T15:10:00.006-04:00

Minor Love/New Tao

2011-06-10T16:01:00.002-04:00

Tao Lin has just published a new story at Vice. It feels like a strange hybrid of Bed and Richard Yates—probably his two most dissimilar books—with a little bit of the neurotic phenomenology of his tweets. In a reversal from Richard Yates, the main character’s internal states are described in agonizing, meticulous detail, but only in a way as if to demonstrate why before he didn’t bother: no amount of clinical self-analysis seems to bring the character any useful self-knowledge. Instead, all he can do is wander his way into yet another epiphany about the unmanageable, merciless objectivity of the universe—the same kind of epiphany that ends almost every story in Bed, except by now it feels as awkward and perfunctory as it still is cripplingly beautiful. He’s addicted to the wrong kind of insight: the harder he tries to see into himself and to resolve the emotional problems that are wrecking his relationship, the more desperately he runs back to existential truths that are also therapeutic dead ends. By now even Tao seems tired of it (note the explicitly perfunctory title “Relationship Story”), but it’s too reassuringly true, too satisfyingly revelatory to give up. So on a meta-level the story could be a critique of the entire form of psychological realism that shares the same addiction, just like Richard Yates is but using an opposite strategy.

Like Richard Yates, this story makes me want to buy Tao Lin therapy, which means he’s doing something right because I feel sympathetic even when he draws himself (via another thinly veiled stand-in) as a complete jerk. And like all Tao’s best writing, it’s a masterpiece of minor literature, the kind that can only be praised in terms that sound like insults, and only loved by people who prefer that way of praising. Which is maybe another symptom. Which, since that describes basically all the literature I really love, is something to think about.

Uncreative

2011-05-18T11:45:00.004-04:00

Alright turn the clown off. This is who is in the White House, this is the uh this this is what I’m giving you as an example of what the Obamas have done to America uh culturally and socially. They bring a tenth rate clown like this in who boasts about that he teaches his children how to uh his students so to speak at the once ex-University of Pennsylvania, it’s become a cesspool uh what’s happened there, and he talks about uncreative writing and how to plagiarize, y’hear? Now when you have a a plagiarist in the White House, you would think that having a plagiarist pretending to be a poet in the White House at a poetry event, what is this, like Abby Hoffman 2? I mean, this is what I’m talking about here, this is not poetry, this is the debasement of our culture. It’s part of the Marxist class warfare. This is what he does. And this is what he does, and this is how he does it. You say what are you going on about, alright I’m bringing ya I’m showing you who he had there. It wasn’t just the rapper, he has this putz there talking about teaching children uh you can’t write anything creative and original, you have to plagiarize everything you turn in. This is a teacher in a college. This is what’s going passing now for a college teacher. It goes back to Obama inviting a so-called college teacher who teaches children to teach to write uncreative writing, where you’re not allowed to write anything original and you must plagiarize. It’s the same mentality. It’s the destruction of Western Civilization. In that sense Obama is acting in a rather a schizophrenic manner to have a poetry event and invite someone who teaches children to that they must plagiarize. You follow where where I’m coming from here? Alright, well it’s a little too esoteric, I get it.

On “The Black Automaton” and Douglas Kearney's AWP Reading

2011-05-01T12:51:00.001-04:00

As you can see in the video above (not from the AWP offsite reading where I saw him, but the most representative clip I could find online), Douglas Kearney’s performances are spectacular, in a strict sense. As few poets can, he literally creates a spectacle—though he does so only to bend his audience’s gaze uncomfortably back on itself, in a move nicely captured by the tentative, embarrassed way the camera follows him into the crowd in that clip. First he gets you laughing, and then you see yourself laughing, and then you wonder if you should be laughing, and then you start to feel like the butt of the joke. For a guilty, liberal white audience, at least—one that relates to Kearney’s elaborately ironic forms, but feels anxious about relating to his subject matter—it’s as if he’s acting out double consciousness in the form of passive aggression.

Somehow, miraculously, he manages to make the same poems work on the page in his book The Black Automaton, in part by giving them a visual complexity as irreproducible in speech (or on this blog) as his performances are in print. Here’s a poem without much visual fireworks, but that does give a sense of what a poem might look like that’s actually “racially complex.”

     “City with Fire and a Piece of Silver”

     how LA bound and justice lay clocked
     upon
     an intersection before that truck
     got stuck,
     I found myself alone. the church lot’s
     lines, white
     lash marks on the newly laid blacktop—
     night like
     a riot of black people crossing
     the church
     driveway, asking me, torches, street lamps,
     street lamps
     like torches, the pitchfork trees, Hill Ave.’s
     traffic,
     —was it voices—asking me over
     the starched
     choir, indoors, toning, tromping through
     that tune,
     “O Lawd I Wanna Be A Christian
     Inna
     My Heart”—are there white people inside?
     up high
     the moon, silver coin, flips—heads, tails—and
     again.

Illusion for Male's Brains

2011-04-27T16:01:00.000-04:00

Men Fantasise About What Wasn’t
It's A Fail, When It's Men

But Women Do It

Mentioned
So Visible

Of Woman's Body
In Secret Most of All

\\\
It's Shameful When It's So Visible
There is a need to get rid of it...

It's A Fail, When It's So Visible
There is a need to fight with it...

Transparent and Blind!
There is a price they pay for it...

Are you sure the movies you've seen were…
God, Save Blondes!!

\\\
Biggest Movie Things
Every Men
Have To Do In Bed
in the World to Girls

\\\
Men Fantasise About It,
But Women Do It In Secret
Never Noticed It Before?
Because these girls can...
It's extremely admirable...
Just check out this picture...
Here's the proof they really exist...

“DOWNLOAD HELVETICA FOR FREE.COM” . . . and beyond?

2011-04-20T18:41:00.002-04:00

My review of Steven Roggenbuck’s DOWNLOAD HELVETICA FOR FREE.COM is now up at Rain Taxi.

I also wanted to link to this new HELVETICA-like poem that Steve posted on his tumblr the other day. I feel like this poem “goes beyond” the ones in DHFF.C and even shows some of their limitations in a way, less because it relaxes the strict minimalism of the book (more text, freer visual composition, lowercase letters) than because it leaves behind any hint of ironic distance or Flarfy mockery. This poem has lots of familiar elements from DHFF.C: kitschy pop culture references, breezy misspellings, deliberate sentimentality. But by tying all those things together in one poem, it creates a richer, more human context that the HELVETICA poems only show when looked at as a group—a sense of lived reality within which kitsch and irony and sentimentality merge with vulnerability and honest affection. (To be clear, I love Flarf and I love irony, but I also love variety, and so I get excited whenever I seem to see a new tone entering the world. Steve often seems to be clearing new ground for innovative poetry, an area that might be tagged something like “niceness” or “positive feelings,” and that’s depressingly alien to so much good art.)

It’s interesting to compare Steve’s approach to appropriated language in these poems with another great contemporary practitioner of the poetic ready-made, Kenneth Goldsmith. Like Goldsmith, Steve documents the “‘nutritionless’ language” that all of us ingest and excrete at alarming rates all the time. But where Goldsmith wants us to look outside our windows and see the blizzard of cold, impersonal public speech swirling every day, Steve seems more interested in the home fires lovingly, thoughtlessly tended within the shelter of the personal. Some of Steve’s best appropriated poems (such as this one) do almost the opposite of a good Flarf poem. They make you conscious of the fact that a real person somewhere wrote this as a piece of actual, nonpoetic communication—but instead of feeling frightened and confused by that fact, as you might at the mercy of a determined satirist like Sharon Mesmer, you feel relieved. You’re reminded that there literally is love and care in the world, after all, that it’s present in ordinary interactions in a lot of people’s lives, constantly, there to be taken for granted.

Thoughts on Individual Pieces from “Pop Serial” no. 2

2011-04-10T19:50:00.006-04:00

Windswept, Aidan Koch – Really beautiful, kind of abstract and lyrical single page comic. She has a couple of other things in here that are also good, but this one is the best. I just ordered her graphic novella The Whale.

Poems by Steve Roggenbuck – A good selection of things from DOWNLOAD HELVETICA FOR FREE.COM (which is not a place to download Helvetica, incidentally, but a poetry book/website; if you want to know how to download Helvetica you’ll need to buy the book and read the page titled “How to Actually Download Helvetica for Free”). I hopefully have a review of the book coming out on the Rain Taxi site soon, so I won’t say anything else about it now.

We Will Drink our Coffee and Complete our Novels and Lay in Sunlight and Sit in Darkness, Tao Lin – A short vignette describing a pleasant, idle day together for a young, quirky-creative couple—the hook is that it’s written in the future tense and addressed to the other person directly, so that it feels like a promise or a shared fantasy rather than a story. Sweet and optimistic, but there’s also an undercurrent of sadness or even desperation in the fact that these events aren’t happening yet, may still not happen at all.

Excerpt from My Hair Will Defeat You, Brandon Scott Gorrell – Like a lot of the prose in the journal this is pretty squarely in the vein of hyper-minimalist depictions of young urban hipsters ala Shoplifting from American Apparel or Eat When You Feel Sad. Some of the weaker examples water that style down and seem rote, or else take it too far and seem like parodies—but this feels sensitive and alive, with a distinctive focus on the self-consciousness of youth. The opening paragraph alone—kind of a Homeric catalogue of hairstyles and fashion choices at an indie rock show—is enough to make me curious to read the whole novel.

Little Rock, Megan Boyle – Solid, competent, maybe a little over-familiar story about a long distance relationship. A little disappointing in that it doesn’t match the wild creativity, whimsy, and sweetness of some of her better Thought Catalog articles.

It is Okay to Feel Catastrophic, Noah Cicero – I think I’ve read some excerpts from Noah Cicero’s books online before and thought they were okay but not exciting enough to make me read the whole books. This thing is a fucking revelation, though. At different times—usually fleetingly, and never in a bad way—it reminded me of Allen Ginsberg, T. S. Eliot, and Flarf poetry. But most of all it reminded me of Ariana Reines (maybe my favorite living poet), as a free-swinging, caps-locking jeremiad against modern existence and existence in general. Like Reines, Cicero doesn’t worry too much about bad lines or rough edges, he just sweeps everything up and carries it along in the momentum of the poem like an avalanche, all sharp and passionate and tilted at crazy angles

An Interview with Jordan Castro by Stephen Tully Dierks – What I really like about this interview is the photos of Castro hanging out with other Muumuu House people in New York, goofy pictures like Castro and Tao Lin holding hands with a caption that refers to them as an “allergic-to-cats literary duo.” Sort of makes being a Muumuu House writer look like being in college, and makes me nostalgic for college myself even though my college experience was never quite as social as that.

Poems by Kendra Grant Malone – Both of these poems are from Everything is Quiet, and neither is among my particular favorites, though I can see why “insane or irate—neither of the words accurately describes the feeling that they indicate” seems to be kind of a signature poem for her, because it’s both totally relatable and really fresh. Reading these reminded me of how weird and intense her line breaks are, always very short lines with lots of counterintuitive, maybe anti-musical breaks. It’s mysteriously effective and I think does a lot to set her work apart; makes me wish I had commented more on form when I reviewed her book.

Twelve Poems, David Fishkind – These are similar to the poems by Lief Haven earlier in the journal, in that they’re short lyrics each packed with a single surprise like a firecracker that looks like a Joan Miró painting, and in that I want to write something about them but can’t think of much beyond that I like them.

AlphaDeath, Philip Tseng – An alphabet illustrated with anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables for each letter, except that all of them are being sliced up and killed. My girlfriend thinks we should get a color print of it for the kitchen in our new apartment.

Stories by Richard Chiem – Three vignettes depicting relationships, mostly long distance (there are a lot of those in here) from different angles. Sometimes the writing seems a little sloppy, but then there’s a tenderness and sensitivity about it that makes the flaws seem necessary, like marks of candor.

tonight, i mean, Daniel Bailey – I think the more I’m exposed to Daniel Bailey’s non-drunk poems the more I like them. I wish he would have a book I could read apart from The Drunk Sonnets, I think by the end of it I’d really get what he’s doing. This whole poem is good but even if it wasn’t, this one stanza would be worth it by itself:

     my head is muddy
     you sad, long fire
     I sat inside you
     and baked into something hard

DRINK BLEACH / LIVE FOREVER

2011-04-05T19:19:00.000-04:00

Kenneth Goldsmith on conceptualism and internet memes.

There’s something a little condescending about this “conceptualism in the wild” idea, as if everyone outside of the high-art world were just so many monkeys with typewriters. Still, it’s kind of exciting to see a big-time, grown-up, blogging-for-the-Poetry-Foundation guy like Kenneth Goldsmith drawing this connection at all.

Double Dragon II: A Poem

2011-04-01T10:11:00.001-04:00

These are instructions on how to experience “Double Dragon II: A Poem.”

1. Download an NES emulator.

2. Download a ROM of Double Dragon II: The Revenge. (If you don’t know how to play, some instructions are here.)

3. Play Double Dragon II: The Revenge.

Excelsior

2011-03-27T11:10:00.000-04:00

In this comic the earth is under attack by Galactus and several villains, but the Marvel heroes are up to rescue. The villains confront the Goodman family and suddenly Toby’s dad Jerry knows what to do, he wants to “end” it.

It is solved that Clyde was the first mutant of the real world, so powerful he could control humans and even bring dead people back to life. His mom was so scared by her dead husband knocking on the door, that she took a candle holder and struck him dead. But Clyde didn’t die, he was mentally damaged and lived in an asylum from that time on. He was the one who summoned the Marvel characters. Jerry Goodman steals a comic collection because that was it what the nurses stole from Clyde and which made him want to teach the people a lesson, but Clyde doesn’t react fast enough - the Red Skull kills Toby’s father with a machine gun. Clyde is shocked and sends them back at the moment. Jerry’s wife shouts at him to get him back alive, but he had promised his mom to never do that anymore.

Because the asylum was shut down and everything covered by the government, but nobody knew what to do with Clyde, Captain America offered to take him with him into the Marvel Universe. Toby then pleaded him to take his Dad, too, because that was his real home.

Toby is shown 20 years later to be an author, then his Dad is shown in a hospital in the Marvel Universe. There, he didn’t die but fell into coma from a gun shot until “Dr. Blake” fixed him and nurse Jane Foster (whom he said was his first crush as a child) is highly hearted to drink a coffee with him.

He goes to the window, because he remembers everything and thinks about how his son made everything perfect for him, so he has nothing else left to say than: “Excelsior”.

Trust me.

2011-03-23T10:27:00.000-04:00

Ju st cli ck.

All the Books

2011-03-20T10:40:00.001-04:00

Normally I read at most 3 or maybe 4 books at a time (a book of poetry, a book of fiction, a nonfiction book usually about Buddhism and/or some kind of comics), but recently things have gotten out of hand. I’m jumping back and forth so much that I don’t really have a post’s worth to say about any one of them. So instead, here’s a list of all the books I’m reading or “reading” (i.e., about to read/probably giving up on reading), with some commentary on each.

Essential Wolverine, Vol. 1 – My current morning reading. Surprisingly uneven for the all-star creative teams it has (Chris Claremont, John Buscema, Klaus Janson, Bill Sienkiewicz, Peter David, John Byrne, and others), but good enough to be an antidote to that awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie I finally watched recently, which is why I bought it. I’ve felt tempted to write an arc-by-arc review of it sometime, but apparently I’m afraid of diluting my brand or something by talking about superheroes here anymore. I should really do it anyway, I’m pretty sure “not having a brand” or at least “bad brand-management” is part of my brand.

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin – This book is sort of annoying me so far. The editors’ introductions present conceptual writing as a contemporary, reasonably bounded movement inspired by the internet (Goldsmith) or conceptual art (Dworkin), but in choosing what to include they seem to be out to appropriate all of the hipper reaches of modernism. Duchamp and Warhol are theirs already, but Beckett and Acker? When they try to walk off with a contemporary poet like Ariana Reines—who no one has ever called conceptualist, and whose writing might be the best case going for expression—it starts to look like some kind of kleptomania.

But maybe for a book of conceptual writing, a spirit of appropriation is only appropriate? The only problem is, the book is so crowded that no one gets much more than a few pages, which is particularly bad because so much conceptual writing depends on bulk and repetition. Maybe I should give up on reading this one, at least for a while.

Pop Serial, no. 2, winter 2010 – I haven’t started this yet but I look forward to it. No other journal I know of does such a good job of getting almost literally every writer I care about within a certain subfield of literature all in one place (Tao Lin, Steve Roggenbuck, Kendra Grant Malone, Daniel Bailey, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Megan Boyle, more).

Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill – I’ve been meaning to read the story “Secretary” ever since I saw the movie last year. Then a friend was recommending Gaitskill recently. This will probably be my morning reading once I wrap up Essential Wolverine.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami – I wanted some fiction to start reading and nothing I wanted was in at the library, so I went on a little bit of a recall rampage thinking maybe just one of the things I recalled would actually come in anytime soon. Instead I got the Gaitskill and this. Much thicker than I expected, not sure how this is going to fit into things. I probably shouldn’t even list it here, since I doubt I’ll be reading it for a while. Sorry to whoever I recalled it from, hope you had time to finish.

The Wasteland, Martin Rowson – A noir-style, comic book adaptation/parody of Eliot’s The Wasteland. I’ve had this forever and only started reading it once, a while ago. It seemed like something I needed to have when I first heard about it. I’m sure I’ll read it eventually.

The Zen Koan, Isshū Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki – I might give up on this, except I’ve just gotten through the Fuller Sasaki part, which is a scholarly introduction written in an annoyingly voice-of-authority tone (it was written in the ’60s, everyone wrote like that). If I stuck with it I’d be starting on the second part by the actual “Zen master” Isshū, and I have no idea what that’ll be like, it might be good.

Snow Crash, Neal Stehpenson – My girlfriend recommended/bought me this book. She just got it for me yesterday. I read like a page or two and thought it was really funny; apparently it doesn’t stay comedic though.

Chomp Away, Drew Gardner – I’ve been carrying this around for maybe a week as the next book of poetry I’m going to read. Petroleum Hat is one of my favorite books of Flarf, so I have that excited to read it/nervous it’ll be disappointing thing going. Plus, if I feel like it I might try to review it for some place, and it has a really awesome cover. Those things always raise expectations and make me afraid to actually sit down and actually read a book, too.

The World as Phone Bill, Stan Apps – A collection of essays on poetry, Flarf, and American culture. Great title, even better book design. My favorite essays in it are the ones that strike a tone where it seems like Apps can’t possibly mean what he’s saying, but also can’t quite not mean it. They don’t tell you anything except something about how it’s so difficult to actually tell you anything, and something about this: “Under the Trojan of ostensibly positive values, the real message of selfhood is that we are disgusting because we are too varied and polymorphous, too inspecific.” They’re sort of poems, really Flarfy poems, hiding in the shapes of essays. They’re also relentlessly dark and cynical; reading this book is making me depressed, I think, even though I like it a lot.

That’s it. Let me know, anyone, if you want to hear more about one of these later on.

5 Books #5: At Least Two Views of Rae Armantrout’s “Versed”

2011-03-14T21:27:00.000-04:00

Tiny poems composed out of even tinier poems placed in complex, oblique yet mysteriously exact apposition

Every possible kind of separation: line break, stanza, small spaces and wide spaces, numbers and asterisks

Frighteningly apparent intellect

Strangely sturdy and satisfying for their seeming sparseness

The very best feel as if they’ve been instantly remembered for 100 years, like lost work by a more tasteful Wallace Stevens or a more abstract Elizabeth Bishop.

\\\
Overwritten poeticisms, “limns / the wooden // filigree”

Crotchety didacticism, “The spread / of vicious talent contests,” “The new pop song / is about getting real”

Actual poems about the poet’s dreams, “All the service numbers have been changed. Why wasn’t I told?”

Trivial imagism, “A receipt / blown crazily / across the parking lot”

\\\
     So much happiness
     is caged
     in language,

     ready to burst out
     anytime

     and fade

5 Books #4: Matthew Zapruder’s “Come On All You Ghosts”

2011-03-07T20:51:00.002-05:00

In a perfect world, I think Matthew Zapruder would be Billy Collins. Or Matthew Zapruder would be Tony Hoagland and then Tony Hoagland would be Billy Collins. Or really Matthew Zapruder would have to be Anne Carson, and Anne Carson would be Tony Hoagland and then Tony Hoagland would be Billy Collins. There might be several more steps in there.

The point is, I liked this book, maybe not as much as other people, but it seems like it would make a really nice compromise.

5 Books #3: Ben Lerner’s “Mean Free Path,” the Complete Paratext

2011-02-27T16:28:00.001-05:00

MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER

MEAN FREE PATH

BOOKS BY BEN LERNER
Mean Free Path
Angle of Yaw
The Lichtenberg Figures

MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER

COPPER CANYON PRESS
PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON

Copyright 2010 by Ben Lerner

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover art: A long-exposure photograph of U.S. Peacekeeper III reentry vehicles splashing down during a test near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Image courtesy of the United States Army.

Copper Canyon Press is in residence at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, under the auspices of Centrum. Centrum is a gathering place for artists and creative thinkers from around the world, students of all ages and backgrounds, and audiences seeking extraordinary cultural enrichment.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lerner, Ben, 1979-
Mean Free Path / Ben Lerner.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-55659-314-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3613.E68M43 2010
811'.6—dc22
2009043652

98765432 FIRST PRINTING

COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
www.coppercanyonpress.org

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Critical Quaterly (UK), Jacket, jubilat, Lana Turner, Narrative, The Nation, New American Writing, The New Review of Literature, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and The Seattle Review, where some of these poems first appeared.

I would like to thank Geoffrey, Cyrus, Ed, and my parents for their attention to these poems.

Dedication
3

Mean Free Path
7

Doppler Elegies
27

Mean Free Path
37

Doppler Elegies
57

About the Author
69

MEAN FREE PATH

DEDICATION

MEAN FREE PATH

DOPPLER ELEGIES

MEAN FREE PATH

DOPPLER ELEGIES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Lerner’s first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, won the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, was a Lannan Literary Selection, and was named one of the 2004’s best books of poetry by Library Journal. His second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), was a finalist for the National Book Award and Northern California Book Award, among other honors. A former Fulbright Scholar in Spain, Lerner teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was recently appointed poetry editor of Critical Quarterly.

The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.” It also serves as pressmark for Copper Canyon Press.

Since 1972, Copper Canyon Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. The Press thrives with the generous patronage of readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, teachers, students, and funders—everyone who shares the belief that poetry is vital to language and living.

Major funding has been provided by:
Amazon.com
Anonymous
Beroz Ferrell & The Point, LLC
Golden Lasso
Lannan Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
Cynthia Lovelace Sears and Frank Buxton
Washington State Arts Commission

For information and catalogs:
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
360-385-4925
www.coppercanyonpress.org

The poems have been typset in Adobe Garamond, designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems. Headings are set in Gotham, a sans serif type designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Fere-Jones in 2000. Book design and composition by Phil Kovacevich. Printed on archival-quality paper at McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.

$16/POETRY

MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER

In physics, the “mean free path” of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with an-other particle. The poems in Ben Lerner’s third collection are full of discrete collisions—stutters, rep-etitions, fragmentations, recombinations—that track how language breaks up or changes course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. Failures of communication articulate what escapes description. Lines are often out of order or belong to several possible orders simultaneously, inviting the reader to collaborate with the poem. Both a book of love poems and a book about the difficult possibility of writing love poems within a commercialized and militarized language, Mean Free Path is at once Lerner’s most personal and most formally adventurous work.

Unhinged in a manner of speaking
Crossed with stars, a rain that can be paused
So we know we’re dreaming on our feet
Like horses in the city. How sad. Maybe
No maybes. Take a position. Don’t call it
Night-vision green. Think of the children
Running with scissors through the long
Where were we? If seeing this as portraiture
Makes you uncomfortable, wake up

IN PRAISE OF BEN LERNER’S POETRY

“[Ben Lerner’s poems] compact layers of thought into a language of emergency. No offhand commentary, no prophecies, no reassurances . . . Instead, a sane voice orbiting the failed authority of a culture. Instead, the radiant sanity of dissent.”—from the National Book Award judges’ finalist citation for Angle of Yaw.

“Lerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing.”—Publishers Weekly

“Sharp, ambitious, and impressive.”—Boston Review

COPPER CANYON PRESS

Cover art: U.S. Peacekeeper III reentry vehicles
Cover design: Phil Kovacevich

ISBN 978-1-55659-314-7
51600
9 781556 593147

Why I didn't buy “In Rainbows” even for free.

2011-02-18T11:13:00.002-05:00

A while ago, without their music becoming any less good, per se, I stopped liking Radiohead.

I stopped liking them because they are the Seriousest Band.

They are seriouser than U2 (they would never score a musical about Spider-Man).

They are seriouser than Arcade Fire (they would never actually show up at the Grammies).

I have literally never had any emotion that was serious enough that I could relate to any Radiohead song, I think.

I don’t think I would want to, seems like it would be terrible.

But does the fact that their new video consists entirely of Thom Yorke doing silly dances while wearing a Joshua Tree–era Edge costume make them more or less serious?

I think it actually makes them more serious. I think they’ve reached the transcendent level of seriousness where no matter what happens, they can only continue to become more serious.

Wait, no, I take it back: this makes them seem way less serious.

This is just for Erin

2011-02-14T09:30:00.004-05:00

BatmanFlirt.gif by Emmy Cicierega via Ryan North.

5 Books #1/2: Anne Carson’s “Nox” and Tan Lin’s “Seven Controlled Vocabularies . . . ”

2011-02-12T17:24:00.004-05:00

In a typically ill-conceived effort to fit in, I decided to read 5 books of poetry that everyone was talking about last year. I’m going to talk about the first two in real time with revisions also in real time, just a different real time (later).

One of them was Nox by Anne Carson, which turned out to be wonderful but infuriating and tedious. Carson makes these beautiful shapes by cutting up her own photo albums, but then she craps all over them with things that are none of our business or lecture notes from her Latin class. I love Anne Carson and I love this book but neither one is even slightly tolerable actually.

A second book I read is Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking by Tan Lin. Tan Lin is not Tao Lin, but in the world where more people are as smart as Tan Lin, more people hate him instead of Tao. This book has (fake?) CIP data on its front cover, a library call number on the back, and like three conflicting title pages. Reading it is like watching someone slowly remove their own organs as performance art while narrating the procedure, except instead of someone it’s a book and the narration keeps talking about Chloë Sevigny (sp) and disco. This book is sort of like what Nox would be if it had been written as a book of poetry.

Later (after this post), I read 3 more books. I’ll tell you about them after that happens.

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Also later (before this post) I actually finished Seven Controlled Vocabularies... and had the following additional thoughts:

The entire book is like an instantiation of Derrida’s il n’y a pas de hors-texte (sp), especially if you realize that in the original French hors-texte is a pun: literally it translates as “outside-text,” but actually it means the front matter of a book. Actually it means inset plates, which might have been even better if I knew it yet, since Seven Controlled Vocabularies... is full of plates or blank pages labeled as plates. In Seven Controlled Vocabularies..., the normally transparent architecture of the hors-texte is scrambled and shuffled into the text proper, so that even a list of permissions has to be regarded as part of the poem. (It’s like he’s found the found poetry inside the book itself.)

But the book pursues Derrida’s adage in its other sense, too, incorporating snatches of (fake?) autobiography and discourses on the nature of love into its garbled aesthetic arguments, so that love and life become just two more aesthetic forms in the big constellation of TV/shopping/poetry/film/art/architecture/cooking “The activity of lovemaking, like film or reading, should function in the same way as a hotel room, fringe area, e-mail address, train ticket, parking garage, or light manufacturing building converted into luxury condo or nightclub.”

It’s necessary to imagine the whole book taking place in the interior of a Wal-Mart or contemporary art gallery, and to imagine those 2 spaces as indistinguishable, like the supermarket in the video for “Fake Plastic Trees.”

Four Changes

2011-02-03T12:08:00.002-05:00

Why is Jon Stewart such a tool of the corrupt democratic institution?

Who wrote the book of love?

Who of you are going to the Rally to Restore Sanity?

First, delete “group.”

Second, delete “individual.”

Third, delete “signed by hundreds.”

John Stewart = not a tool.

John Stewart = one of the many people who regularly shit on Democrats for being pussies.

You = noob.

You didn't want it to happen this

way, but it did. Aggressive lawyer.

Pretty Well Proportional Post on Timothy Willis Sanders’s “Orange Juice”

2011-01-28T21:26:00.003-05:00

This book is good. It’s a collection of short stories written in something like the same minimalist style as Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, but not as strictly maintained. That’s mostly a loss, I think, because with this type of minimalism strictness is kind of the point. But Orange Juice makes up for it by catching lots of familiar, mundane details—spilling a bottle of Pepto Bismol, lying to a homeless person about having cash, getting Facebook invites from people you haven’t seen in ten years who live in other states—that would normally be lost to fiction for the sake of tired concepts like plot or drama.

It also has the advantage over EWYFS of the shorter format, which lends itself to this kind of slice-of-life writing, with less of the temptation to create artificial tension/significance in order to hold a reader over 100-plus pages. Mostly this book is about what doesn’t happen, catching the characters in stretches of vague anxiety about little things and abandoning them before the anxiety is resolved, as if to say, “It doesn’t matter how this turns out; one petty anxiety will just be replaced by another.”

It’s not so earth-shaking, not radically new, but it is really true and convincing and, because of that, very easy to like.

5 Totally Ridiculous Blondie Songs (That Are Also Awesome)

2011-01-19T19:32:00.039-05:00

5. “Attack of the Giant Ants”

     Everybody drowns
     The moon falls on the ground
     La la la la la la la la la la

4. “Contact in Red Square”

     Gotta hide inside my trench coat and be clev-ah



3. “Love at the Pier”

     No more love splinters in my rear end

2. “The Hardest Part”

      In a wire mesh cage
   With a twelve-gauge

1. “X Offender”

     I think all the time, how I'm gon’ to
     Perpetrate love with you
     And when I get out, there’s no doubt
     I'll be sex-offensive to you

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Also, this site scored a sweet cameo midway through this clip celebrating the, uh, three month anniversary of Steve Roggenbuck’s i am like october when i am dead.

Disproportionately Long Post on Rodney Koeneke’s “Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)”

2011-01-13T20:36:00.012-05:00

Anyone who’s ever flipped through the index of first lines in the back of Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems has thought, “Hey, these would make a pretty good poem just like this.” In case you haven’t, here’s a random sample:

     I am afraid to own a body
     I am alive I guess
     I am ashamed - I hide
     I asked no other thing
     I bet with every wind that blew
     I breathed enough to take the trick

But it takes a practiced eye—the eye of a trained Flarfist—to have that same thought while browsing the titles of hit songs by Diane Warren, which is what apparently inspired Rodney Koeneke to produce this little chapbook. Warren, incidentally, being the “Emily Dickinson of Pop” according to a prominently displayed quote on her Wikipedia page.

Listening to the CD of Warren’s songs that comes along with the book, I have to question that comparison—songs like the KISS-recorded “(You Make Me) Rock Hard” are just as clever lyrically as that title sounds; or actually a little less so. But in the chapbook itself, which takes probably under a pop-perfect three minutes to read, Koeneke uses a more or less alphabetical list of titles beginning with “I” or “you” to tell a dumbly affecting little love story. Here’s the turning point, right before the narrative shifts from the honeymoon phase of the I section to the painful breakup of the you section:

     I Feel Beautiful
     I Get Weak
     I Hear Your Voice
     I Just Wanna Cry
     I Keep Hoping
     I Know You Too Well
     I Learned From The Best
     I Love You, Goodbye

And, if you really listen to the compilation of songs—or better, just kind of half listen; like squint while you listen—the same kind of unfiltered pathos comes through. In fact, these songs are totally fucking pathetic, full of swarming, smothering desperation, like the dick-wilting one-upmanship of the Trisha Yearwood jam “I’ll Still Love You More”: “And for every kiss I’ll give you back a hundred times / And for everything you do I’ll just do more.”

(Stick around for the delightfully wtf shirtless, headless back rub that Trisha scores around 1:58, by the way.)

Come to think of it, maybe that kind of emotional extremism isn’t so far from some of Dickinson’s love poems. But Dickinson was lonely and weird and obscure; the fact that Warren is one of the most successful songwriters of our time suggests that these sentiments aren’t just hers, they’re ours—this blinding crucible of nuancelessness is our ideal conception of love. And, before I get too carried away, I should point out that the schmaltz-addled, love-crazed speaker/singer that emerges from the songs isn’t so unsympathetic. She’s the same wounded, needy romantic that we all remember being, hiding out beneath the covers of some very slick production.

That’s the scary upshot here. What Koeneke (along with Alli Warren, who edited the mix) has made is a nice little piece of social critique through the vehicle of rock criticism in the form of a conceptual poem. It’s a hell of a lot to get across in thirteen songs and thirteen matching poems, all without writing a single word yourself. But then that, to me, is the beauty of the conceptual poet as appropriator/arranger—as much can be said with a tiny book like this or with a huge tome like Day, it’s all about the efficiency of the gesture. In that moment when you saw the poem in Dickinson’s first lines, it was already written; all the potential content was there. To be as good as Rodney Koeneke, you just need the eye to spot poems hidden in less obvious, more revealing places.

Hoarders

2011-01-09T15:44:00.000-05:00

A couple who both suffer from hoarding risk losing their children if they don’t comply with numerous citations given to them by the city. A woman’s food hoarding is so bad that she places herself at risk for food poisoning. A woman’s compulsive shopping has depleted her family’s finances to the point where her marriage has become strained. She must clean out and sell the family home as part of the divorce settlement. A man is at risk of eviction from his government subsidized housing as his apartment is filled with garbage, human feces, bottles, and cans. A woman’s compulsive shopping habits have taken over the entire house. Her children were removed by authorities as a result of the living conditions. A man’s hoard of both home renovation supplies and outdated materials is so bad that his common-law wife broke her arm tripping over a pile of his things. After seeming unfazed over the accident, he is given an ultimatum to clean up or move out. Adult Protective Services removed an elderly woman’s sick alcoholic husband from their home because of the hazardous conditions. The family’s financial problems are complicated by their schizophrenic daughter, who is also a hoarder. A woman who is an obsessive collector faces eviction if she fails to clean up her home. A young man, who also suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoards garbage (snack wrappers, empty bottles, and rotting food) in a two-bedroom townhouse he shares with his alcoholic father. An elderly woman’s animal hoard is so bad that every room of her home is cluttered with over 75 living and dead cats, cat feces, and urine soaked carpets and furniture. A couple are facing imminent foreclosure on two houses as a result of a decision to buy a second home to solve the wife’s lifelong hoarding problem. A woman’s relationship with her boyfriend is in danger as a result of her hoard, which has taken over their entire townhouse. A man has failed to meet three court-ordered deadlines to clean his yard which is filled with junk cars, scrap metal, and old appliances. A single mother is concerned about her hoarding behavior when her seven-year-old son begun to exhibit hoarding tendencies. Her son has cried hysterically over things like a rusty chain and an old used cotton ball when she attempts to throw them out.

A woman’s son was removed from her home as a teenager as a result of the squalid living conditions she lives in, and she now lives without water, gas, heat, or appliances. The courts have become involved and are forcing her to clean up. Time is running out for an elderly woman whose cluttered home has been condemned as a result of the squalid conditions that progressed over time to deteriorate the value of her house. A woman who was once a disciplined ballerina acquired most of her hoard from her deceased parents. Her house is so full of possessions and critters that she risks facing another winter without heat and water. After her son is stillborn, a woman tries to fill the void with possessions that jeopardize custody of her daughters. A man is at risk of eviction from his city-subsidized apartment filled with materials for art projects. The parents of four children must clean out their entire house or risk losing everything. A retired veterinarian’s dozens of costly collections have come at the expense of his marriage and lifestyle. A series of tragedies triggers hoarding that leads to a woman losing custody of her son to her ex-husband; Child Protective Services arrives with police at a couple’s squalid home to remove their four children. A woman risks losing her children and marriage as a result of her hoarding. She blames her hoarding on his alcoholism, and he blames her hoarding as the cause for the latter. A self-employed beekeeper struggles with compulsive hoarding as his daughter threatens to call Adult Protective Services on him if he doesn’t change his lifestyle for the sake of himself and his eight-month-old granddaughter. A woman’s family has been torn apart by her hoarding. Despite her threats of suicide, her family has given her an ultimatum to either clean up, or her husband will divorce her, and she will lose all contact with her children. A man who has been collecting hobby items since childhood is given an ultimatum by his girlfriend to either clean up or the relationship is over. Despite their mutual agreement to start a family, he is unsure how to begin. A woman’s hoarding has spun out of control following the death of her husband. She shops compulsively and has filled her home with supplies in hopes of redecorating the house. A former psychologist is literally suffocating beneath her things. She has filled her home with clothes for her twelve-year-old daughter. Although most of the clothing has been unworn for years, she refuses to part with it. She now must clean up before her health problems worsen. An elderly woman’s house needs major home repair, but she needs to clean it in order to do so before her surgery. A self-employed heating and refrigeration specialist ends up taking his work home with him. The house is filled with old refrigerators, tools, and supplies, which creates an unsafe environment for his toddler son. A firefighter’s coworkers worry his hoarding is affecting his job performance. A woman’s two sons suffer due to her unkempt home. A woman faces the loss of her mobile home and her daughter if she doesn’t get help for her hoarding. A single father must clean up his home if he hopes to keep his two special-needs children. A married couple blame each other for their hoarding compulsions. Two sisters whose parents were hoarders try and combat their own hoarding but find the process difficult. A woman’s hoarding threatens to tear apart a very large family unless she changes her ways. An elderly woman’s animal hoard is so bad that her husband of 30 years has been chased from the home by the animals and the hoarded piles that in some places reach five feet high. A pharmaceutical sales rep risks unemployment if she can’t get her hoarding under control. In this special follow-up episode, Hoarders checks in on the progress of Jill, Jake, Betty, Bill, and Paul from the first season.

Daughters help their mom in an effort to clean her home to keep it from being condemned. A mother of two is threatened with divorce if she doesn’t stop hoarding. A hoarding couple and their adult children who are still living at home are given 72 hours to vacate their house if it isn’t cleaned. A man collects goblets, dolls, fountains, and artwork. A woman’s hoard is so bad that the city has condemned the house and has plans to demolish the property. A man is just weeks from a court date where he faces six months in jail if he doesn’t clean up his home and yard. A young woman’s seven-year-old daughter is so distraught about her mother’s hoarding that she has contemplated suicide. An elderly woman’s house is a collector’s dream but is destroying her marriage of 48 years to her husband. A woman in fragile health attempts to clean her home in a last chance attempt to unburden her family and give them back a home. A single mother’s hoard is so bad that her toddler son has been forced to sleep with her on the living room couch. An elderly woman is hoarding more than 30 sickly cats that have completely destroyed her home by using it as a litter box, which is also filled with piles of hoarded food and garbage. A thirty-year-old fifth grade teacher has already lost one job by bringing her hoard from home to the classroom. She now fears that her current job is at stake and that her three-year relationship with her boyfriend is in jeopardy as a result. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her son gave up his college scholarship for fear of leaving his sixteen-year-old sister home alone with their mother. A minister’s wife is struggling to come to terms with a couple of tragic losses and a strained marriage is giving her one last shot to clean, or their marriage is over. After losing a cousin on 9/11, a woman’s hoarding spiraled out of control, filling much of the house and part of the yard. Another woman’s hoard is so bad that her diabetic husband is unable to maneuver through the home by himself. A terminally ill woman’s hoard is so bad that it jeopardizes her recovery. A man’s hoard is so bad that he has been cited by the county to clean up his property or face jail time. A single mother’s hoard is so bad that her teenage son made up a story about her abusing him just to get into foster care. A woman’s impulsive shopping is so bad that the delivery people are advised to stop delivering to her home. A woman’s handbag collection has depleted her husband’s retirement fund. A former lawyer’s drug addiction and hoarding is fueled by thirteen years of grief following the loss of her three-month-old daughter. A man’s hoard is so bad that his three-year-old son was taken away by Child Protective Services after it was revealed he took his son on dumpster dives. A woman’s hoard is so bad that she and her husband were unaware that a homeless woman had been living in their cluttered basement. An elderly man suffering from dementia must clean up his property or face an enormous fine from the county. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her husband has threatened to divorce her if she refuses to part with her paper collection. A woman’s hoard is so bad that her husband is forced to sleep in his car in hot, humid weather. A woman’s hoard is largely obtained through theft, causing rifts in her family. A man’s hoard literally has forced city officials to condemn his home and put his grandchildren at risk to be apprehended by Child Protective Services. A woman’s hoard of dolls is so bad, that it has forced her husband, who is recuperating from surgery to retreat to a chair in the basement. The clutter on a man’s property has led to threats from the county to have him removed; the situation is complicated by a long-running dispute with his brother over the settlement of their late father’s estate, as well as the presence of a homeless man living in the backyard. A teenage girl asks for help controlling her hoarding, but her mother proves to be the real reason that nothing is ever thrown out at the house. A 19 year old man struggles with hoarding behavior, which he has acquired from his mother and fears he will continue to carry on her hoarding tendencies if he doesn’t get help. A woman whose son is paralyzed and soon to be released from hospital is forced to clean out her home to accommodate him, or risk having him placed in a nursing home against his will. A consignment shop owner risks losing both her home and business, after it is revealed she is near bankruptcy after blowing through an inheritance fund on items for her store. A woman’s hoard is so bad, that she risks putting her marriage of over 40 years in jeopardy as a result of being unable to part with her belongings. A woman’s property is cluttered with farm animals, many of which are in poor health and garbage to the point where she is forced to sleep in a windowless single-wide trailer with her chickens. A hoarding couple faces eviction after it is revealed that their rental home has been damaged by the rabbits which have roamed around the house freely, destroying the property in the process. A man’s rat collection has forced him to retreat to a shed in his backyard. A woman, who hoarded her father’s home faces eviction if she does not clean up and part with many of her animals.

Madeleine as Blog Post about Paul Legault’s “The Madeleine Poems”

2010-12-27T15:41:00.003-05:00

Back in November, UVa-alum Paul Legault came to the Bridge PAI in Charlottesville for a great sort of homecoming reading. The entire reading came out in one nervous, charmingly fumbling rush, just the right amount of between-poem banter seamlessly tumbling from one poem into the next. Afterwards, I think Paul sold a copy of his first book, The Madeleine Poems, to just about everyone who showed up, including me.

Now that I’ve finally gotten around to it, the book turns out to be just as good as the reading, but in an almost totally opposite way. It’s all pregnant pauses and quiet control, with elegantly balanced, even quasi-metrical cadences and a subtle, sculptural use of white space. The ending of the first poem sets an accurate tone, packing genuine menace into every period, and inexplicable meaning into a few odd indents (which I hope I can at least approximate):

                 Woodsnail, breathe for me,
        or beware for your life
        which I will shudder just to hold it.

     Everyone was rich.
        We hunted wild animals.
     The worst was when they looked at you.

Stevens is clearly a big influence (there’s even a poem about a snowman), and like Stevens the book can come across as affected, even prim. But it’s never too stodgy to pull off a quirky gag—yetis in police cars, James Dean as Jonah—without looking sillier than intended. The turn from J. Alfred Prufrock to William Moulton Marston at the end of “Madeleine as Heroine” effectively caps one of the book’s best poems:

     One would give it—it being
     it all—one would gladly siphon
     all of one to say
     I have watched her seal an envelope.

     Or worse, I have seen her
     take three paces back from me,
     reach to a door in the air,
     step into her invisible plane and then nothing.

It’s not a perfect debut. The long last poem, “Madeleine as Crusoe,” slips into the same kind of dryly abstracted philosophizing for which Stevens sometimes gets panned. But even there Paul keeps things interesting, in part by interjecting the jig-saw ellipticism of another obvious influence, Emily Dickinson, and pushing that influence to a pretty near cubist level of fragmentation. I quote here at length because it’s impossible to know where to break a sentence:

     What was not
     and what—the bell-eyed-horse

     horse-carts of—was was only
     —which the mere look of which

     —not once—meant
     a music even to—then it was

     only once—the dark-
     horse—not

     only what—or that it was then—or

     how it was each of them or was not
     in these—the impressions
     of places where

     we reined in
     these days our lives.

Parts of that read like the particlized language of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, until you notice that the fragments might actually fit back together if you rearrange them just right (“What was not and what . . . was was only . . . the impressions of places . . . ,” e.g.). But try it and you quickly find that there are a dozen patterns they might fit in and no pattern that’s complete.

It’s a contemplation of (among other things) the opacity of language, delivered in the most opaque language in the book. And it’s an interesting counterpoint to Paul’s earlier chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader, an “English-to-English translation” that comically turns Dickinson’s notorious difficulty inside out. More on that later, probably.

“Why am I always saying I’m anointing when what I’m really doing is abluting?” or Sharon Mesmer Keeps the Faith

2010-12-17T15:44:00.000-05:00

While a lot of other Flarfists are moving beyond or backing away from the style, Sharon Mesmer’s recent work online seem to be burrowing in, mining flarfy aesthetics and materials for untapped thematic possibilities. Flarf as Buddhist meditative practice? Flarf as vague devotional poetry? Awwwww yeahhh.

There’s less aggression in these new poems, either directed towards or emanating from their speakers—which makes them much less bracing, and maybe a tad less funny, than the ones in Mesmer’s great Annoying Diabetic Bitch. But as someone who’s always imagining links between Kenneth Goldsmith’s self-transcriptions and Buddhist mindfulness, or between the antireferentiality of avant-garde poetry and the transrationalism of Zen koans, I can’t help looking forward to where this might lead.

On Affect and Appropriation/Nada Gordon’s “Scented Rushes”

2010-12-12T11:23:00.004-05:00

Nada Gordon’s new book, Scented Rushes, takes a big step away from the Google-sculpted Flarf poetry of her previous one, Folly. The internet does remain an influence, whether through the occasional direct sampling of text (as in “Apex of the O”), or through the seemingly lolcat-inspired distortions that occasionally inflect her grammar (“Have you ever fall into loops with me?”; “I wish I can answer that”). But for the most part, language culled from the internet is replaced with Gordon’s own woozy, swooning way with words—for good and for ill.

For good insofar as that pell-mell, polymorphously perverse diction is undeniably one of Gordon’s great poetic gifts. Her vocabulary is a unique instrument, large and eclectic and luxuriantly weird, and she uses it to smoosh together conflicting registers in ways that suggest a kind of sensualist Charles Bernstein. It’s hard to fully articulate what makes phrases like “the phooey condescension of wryness” or “decorative blame arcade” so physically satisfying, but the sensation of reading—or, maybe better, saying them—unmistakably evokes a mouthful of gooey, sticky caramel.

But also for ill, in that the move away from appropriative poetry leaves Gordon available for a flirtation with more traditional lyric, one that, for me, remains as unconsummated as the romantic infatuation the book ostensibly recounts. The kind of direct lyric that Gordon approaches in “Form Dissolve,” and many of the other poems towards the end of the book, demands as much skill in the economical suggestion of narrative as it does in the poetic use of language. But the most realized scenes in Scented Rushes are of the poet riding the subway and thinking about her emotions, without enough structured detail to get the reader invested in those emotions with her. By the penultimate poem, she winds up citing and decoding lines from earlier in the book, as if trying to explain a joke she knows hasn’t quite gone over.

That we all get tangled in these kinds of hopeless attachments is potentially profound; that any one of us does is generally banal. That’s why Gordon is usually at her best when she finds a kind of collective voice, one that can tell an existential story rather than a personal one. It’s why one of the most affecting poems in this book, “Is Nourish a Noisy Quarrel?,” is also one of the most mediated, like a sampling of Yahoo! Answers posts fed through Google Translate a few times and then stuffed in a blender (if you imagine Gordon’s poetic sensibility as the blender, the rest of that description might well be literally true):

     Is nourish a noisy quarrel?
     Mature size of foxes?
     What are some dialogues that show irony?
     Why grooming is important in aviation?
     What is the voice of the girl the lovely?
     What did Mary Wollstoncraft argue for?
     How do you use being?
     What is the definition of a boyfriend?

As in so many of the best poems from Folly, the alienation that this language imposes between poet, poem, and reader only adds to its keening loneliness—like that tragically inarticulate, sobbing undercurrent that starts to emerge a certain distance down in any online comment stream. From inside the echo chamber of Google, Gordon hits that cold yet reverberant tone better than anybody—and it takes all this book’s linguistic verve to compensate for the lack of that emotional prosthesis, not quite successfully.

Also his new album is ridiculously good. (On Kanye)

2010-12-05T19:06:00.005-05:00

Does anyone else think Kanye West has his sights set on the wrong rock icon, in his arguable fascination with Michael Jackson? In the era of online distribution and niche marketing, neither Kanye nor anybody else is ever likely to be the new King of Pop—but as a certified hit-maker now entering a sumptuously weird, contentiously independent late period, he could already be the Prince of his generation.

Hell, he’s even worked out how to use his vocoder to chop & screw himself a pretty fair guitar solo:

Up to two of these statements are true.

2010-12-03T13:19:00.000-05:00

Think I might rewrite my dissertation chapter on Charles Bernstein to be about [whatever it would need to be about] so that I could retitle it “The Reference of Critique.”

Think I might write a defense of Ke$ha in which the key line would be, “To hate Ke$ha shows a lack of imagination; to hate on her publicly shows a lack of courage.”

Think I might write a longish essay on Tao Lin as hustler and hipsterism as consumerist-critique-of-capitalism called something like “Tao Lin and the Critique of Effort.”

Anne Boyer’s “The Romance of Happy Workers”/ Taste and What to Do with It/Questions Marks, Parentheses

2010-11-21T16:33:00.000-05:00

Anne Boyer’s The Romance of Happy Workers takes me out of my usual poetry comfort zone. It’s written in medium length, normal-looking free verse lines and little two-line stanzas. It’s often very pretty and only occasionally very funny. It has lots of similes, many of which are surrealist. It seems vaguely Russian or Eastern European, in kind of a sophisticated way.

It looks like poetry, and also it is poetry. It’s even labeled “Poetry” on the cover, right above where it says “Anne Boyer,” like that was her name, Poetry Anne Boyer. If I hadn’t come to Boyer via her social ties to flarf, I might’ve preemptively dismissed the book as hybridist something-something, “not my thing.” Even with the flarf connection, I’d might’ve prematurely written it off as a disappointment if I hadn’t already read and loved Boyer’s biting prose poems in The 2000s, which are so, so very up my poetic alley.

But I’m glad those prior experiences encouraged me to give this book more of a chance—because it’s really a pretty good book, but more so because enjoying it reminds me of just how easy it is to let my tastes calcify and shrink. I mean—“Snow peas, I don’t like the great atmosphere sings”—that’s not exactly Tony Hoagland, right? It’s typical of this book, more in the range of John Ashbery, Susan Howe, or Lyn Hejinian, and guess what—I totally like those poets, but if I met any of them now I might be disposed to dismiss them, too.

I’ve been lucky in the past several years to find multiple waves of funny, prickly, yet sincere poets who match my taste more squarely than anything I’ve seen since I first formed that taste on Dickinson and the modernists; but I don’t want to let that turn me into a finicky eater. After all, it’s bound not to last, and I don’t want to wind up one of those guys roaring through comment sections like he thinks he’s Harold Bloom, declaring that poetry is dead because it hasn’t produced anything precisely to his taste in a while.

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All that said, let’s play Harold Bloom for a minute. This book also makes me hope that Boyer won’t—as she’s sometimes cryptically threatened—walk away poetry altogether, because she’s getting better. Those .pdf books from earlier this year (The 2000s and Ma Vie En Bling) seem so much freer, fuller, more confident and sincere to me, whereas this one seems ever so slightly cowed by an idea of what poetry is supposed to be like, rather than unselfconsciously pursuing what these poems might be in themselves. For every startlingly weird phrase, there’s at least one you’d swear was a quote from Stevens, or from some one of dozens of latter-day Stevens-wannabes—like: “Given / the hermeneutics / of pincers, one could / mouth a theory / of leafcutters.”

Is this another covert statement of my general aesthetic, then, hidden in a supposedly specific evaluation—like poetry jokes and poetry-as-perversion and “description” vs. description? Would I want to speak up for poetry that’s a strong expression of personality without being openly lyric—poetry as the continuation of personality by other means, Eliot’s line about only those who have personality knowing what it means to want to escape it? Does that aesthetic favor poets with somehow extreme personalities, individual strangeness somehow authenticating the writing? Would that contradict some of my other aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical values—and would I care if it does? And should I?

I guess what I’m really thinking about here (and by here I mean, on this blog, always) is how to make publically useful discourse out of subjective impressions—in other words, how to do criticism (including in that reviewing and interpretation and just idle chatter about art) in a way that’s relativistic and noncoercive while it also has intersubjective meaning and consequence. That (in my subjective opinion, of course) would be a useful and enlightened angle from which to address the perennial question of the supposed need for negative reviews (even if it leaves aside the practical core of that issue, namely the need for more disinterested reviewers).

hate fear mondays fridge magnet

2010-11-15T11:48:00.001-05:00

“When he looks at submissions to [the Paris Review], [Lorin Stein] said, he is searching for pieces that could be ‘stuck up on the fridge’—stories and poems that resonate because they are about real life.”
     —Yale Daily News

“I’m having one of those days where I want to KILL SOMEONE”
     —jroota

I hate Mondays
toad magnet

I’m an employee
Racoon magnet

I hate Mondays
gerbil magnet

I hate Monday
Fridge magnet

\\\\
Office humour
A monkey’s job
Work sucks
I hate Mondays!

\\\\
(multiple products selected)
I hate Mondays
(multiple products selected)
I hate Mondays

Monday magnet
Monday fridge magnet

Fanciful ape
I hate Mondays
Refrigerator magnet
Mondays suck

I hate Mondays

Monday magnet
Monday magnet
Fanciful ape
Mondays suck

\\\\
One of those days
Sulking rhino
hate fear mondays
I love Mondays

Mondays,
no one likes them
Monday morning blues

Cat magnet,
Scream if you hate
Mondays fridge magnet

I don’t do Mondays
I don’t do Mondays
I hate whatever today is
I don’t do mornings

Sleepy kitten, I don’t do mornings
I’m an employee
Casual Fridays
Love on Sunday,
Fridge magnet
Love on Sunday,
Silly:
        Happy Monday
Good morning to you too

Two Sentence Review of Andrew Cedermark’s “Moon Deluxe,” Padded with a Youtube Video Which I Think Is from the First Time I Saw Him Play (It Was LOUD)

2010-11-12T11:18:00.004-05:00

You know the kind of riff that gets stuck in your head and you can’t remember where it’s from, and then later you figure it out and realize you’ve never really noticed it before and you can’t understand why because suddenly it’s your favorite song now?

This whole album is like that.

One Sentence Review of “Everything Was Fine Until Whatever” by Chelsea Martin, Prefaced by 4-6 Paragraphs Explaining That Sentence

2010-11-06T13:59:00.002-04:00

I like funny poetry best but there’s a difference between “jokes” and “poetry jokes.” A joke is shaped like this: There’s an initial incongruity that disrupts normal expectations, and behind it a different level of congruity that makes things make sense again. A poetry joke is shaped like a normal joke, except it doesn’t have the second level, or the second level it has is malformed, it doesn’t quite make things make sense again or it doesn’t make any more sense than the first level. A normal joke is ruined if you explain it; a poetry joke can’t be explained and thus can’t be ruined.

So poetry jokes often stay funny longer than regular jokes. But then again they’re funny “for no reason,” you read them and start to laugh and then you wonder why, and worry maybe it’s just because you saw something shaped like a joke.

Here’s some examples. Neither of these is particularly funny, but they have the advantage of being sort of parallel.

     A waste is a terrible thing to mind.

That’s a joke. It disrupts normal expectations because it reverses two words in the common saying A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But the reversed sentence makes just as much sense as the original, while also kind of reversing that sense, in that the original is sort of optimistic and inclusive and the inversion is sort of cynical and mean. Invert the words and you also invert the meaning; scratch the surface of something optimistic and you get something mean. It’s easy to fairly exhaustively explain, it disrupts your normal expectations for a second but then it’s based on premises that feel just as familiar. There’s a kind of conservation of meaning going on.

Now here’s a quote from a Charles Bernstein poem (“Lives of the Toll Takers” from Dark City) (This should have some crazy indentations but they’re not going to show up right in your browser no matter what so screw it) (Charles Bernstein might be one of the pioneers of the poetry joke as we know it).

     I had
     it but
     I misp
     laced
     it somewhere
     in the
     back burner
     of what
     is laug
     hingly
     called m
     y
     mind
     (my
     crim
     e). A
     mind is a terrible thing to steal:
     intellectual property is also
     theft.

“A / mind is a terrible thing to steal” doesn’t make a lot of sense; adding “intellectually property is also / theft” kind of just makes it worse. The only reason to substitute “steal” for “waste” is that “crime” almost rhymes with “mind”—in other words no reason, really. It’s maybe not any funnier than the regular joke, but it doesn’t conserve logic. It creates the same moment of confusion as the joke and then it just hangs there, so even if you successfully explain it once you can come back later and laugh for different reasons, and then explain it again. Poetry joke. Okay?

So: Everything Was Fine Until Whatever has a few more jokes than I usually like in my funny poetry (“She seemed maternal to me because she cursed a lot and always asked me if I was pregnant”); but then they’re mostly really good jokes, so I won’t complain.

DRUNK MODERNISM

2010-10-28T16:11:00.003-04:00

SO MUCH DEPENDS
UPON
A RED WHEEL
BARROW
GLAZED WITH RAIN
WATER
BESIDE THE WHITE
CHICKENS

***

I HAVE EATEN
THE PLUMS
THAT WERE IN
THE ICEBOX

AND WHICH
YOU WERE PROBABLY
SAVING
FOR BREAKFAST

FORGIVE ME
THEY WERE DELICIOUS
SO SWEET
AND SO COLD

***

WHIRL UP, SEA
WHIRL YOUR POINTED PINES
SPLASH YOUR GREAT PINES
ON OUR ROCKS
HURL YOUR GREEN OVER US
COVER US WITH YOUR POOLS OF FIR

***

I WISH THAT I HAD SPOKEN ONLY OF IT ALL

[modern drunks]

Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (in Helvetica)

2010-10-20T22:22:00.014-04:00

if you call me, i wont answer

i am sitting under the moon inside of a wheelbarrow

***
Actually, no, that’s a poem from Steve Roggenbuck’s new chapbook i am like october when i am dead. But “‘In a Station of the Metro’ in Helvetica” seems like a good enough description of Roggenbuck’s poems—which are quick and lyrical, like that one, or else weird and funny (“i dont care about reading a poem / who do you think i am, robert frost?”), or occasionally weird and creepy (“i am like the killers of people”). Or else they’re pop-conceptualist appreciations of found language that less sensitive souls might mistake for unpoetic (“oh, you have a smock on”—that’s an entire poem), which is something that Roggenbuck is also doing a nice job of through his series of visual poems based on chat logs.

I’d quote more examples, but since the whole book is only about 300 words I think I should leave some. It’s free, it’s good, it’s short—there’s basically zero investment on your part, you could just go and read it.

T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (in Comic Sans)

2010-10-20T12:44:00.005-04:00

THE WASTE LAND

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu.

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?

'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

'They called me the hyacinth girl.'

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Od' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!

'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,

'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!

'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

II. A GAME OF CHESS

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.

'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

'What is that noise?'

The wind under the door.

'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'

Nothing again nothing.

'Do

'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

'Nothing?'

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It's so elegant

So intelligent

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'

'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?

'What shall we ever do?'

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.

And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.

Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can't.

But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don't want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. THE FIRE SERMON

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother's wreck

And on the king my father's death before him.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc'd.

Tereu

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows on final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

'This music crept by me upon the waters'

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

'Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.'

'My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised "a new start".

I made no comment. What should I resent?'

'On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.'

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

IV. DEATH BY WATER

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and place and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

D A

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

D A

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

D A

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off . . .”

2010-10-13T23:01:00.005-04:00

Meet Emily Pumpkinson, the Gourd of Amherst.

Unfortunately, Emily isn’t bright enough to photograph in the dark.

Also, the inside of her head is infested with brain slugs.

Generally feeling a little sad about Emily right now.

“The sky the color of tenure”: On Jim Behrle’s “Succubus Blues”

2010-10-11T18:00:00.003-04:00

If all the poet-bullies on the internet were as funny, weird, and self-deprecating about it as Jim Behrle, it might actually be a bad thing that Silliman closed down his comments. Behrle’s online persona is like a broken clock that always points to “self-important douche”—except that since he’s talking about other poets, he’s right way more than twice a day. So: refreshing.

That would only make him an interesting online curiosity, though, if his poems didn’t back it up. Well, I’ve just finished reading his most recent chapbook, Succubus Blues, and I feel that I can fairly say he does alright. I’m not sure if he’s really (as he’s declared himself) funnier than most of the Flarfists, but he sure as hell holds his own, and by pairing his cut-up/standup routines with a more straightforward first-person voice, he gives himself a chance to really maximize the dynamic of comedy and pathos that Flarf usually only teases.

If that doesn’t quite happen, maybe it’s because Behrle’s sincerity remains more artificial than Flarf’s artifice. Where the best Flarf poets can—by channeling their own deepest anxieties through the chorus of Google—tap into something that feels both fundamentally human and utterly impersonal, Behrle’s shticky pseudo-confessions tend to bury him further in a kind of hard-luck, “don’t-get-no-respect” persona. There’s huge poetic potential in his strange mix of exposure and artifice, vulnerability and facetiousness; but as of yet he may be best tapping that potential through his series of endlessly churned-up, ambiguously one-sided internet feuds. He may just be the first literary artist whose true medium is the flame war.

Whatever else he is, though, he’s also kind of clever smart-ass that poetry still needs more of, full of sick satirical burns like “I adored the blurb you gave me so much / I wrote you a thank you blurb,” or “I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way.” And then there is that other voice that lurks behind the wisecracks, the one that, in “I Establish Rapport,” seems to genuinely wish it could do just that—the voice that hates all the careerism and fakery not for its own sake but for the way it isolates and dehumanizes; the skillful lyric voice that can instantly pivot our viewpoint from the togetherness of the crowd to the loneliness of the performer: “We can’t help it, Jim, we touch and feel loved / Although completely alone / Behind the mic I’m burning too.”

“This is as good as I’m ever gonna be / So, you’ll have to be the one to change into a green brutal / Diamond,” Behrle writes in one self-deprecating yet ironically wonderful moment. Could be—but I wouldn’t be surprised if he still got better. Or if not, hey, there’s always the flame wars.

Inexplicably, the only place on the internet to ask this question...

2010-10-09T20:45:00.006-04:00

Are cats our friends?

On “A Pulling from the Inside Downward or to Wherever” by Bryan Coffelt

2010-09-26T23:45:00.006-04:00

I had to wait a while for my copy of Bryan Coffelt’s chapbook The Whatever Poems, long enough to generate a kind of private hype in my head that might be difficult for any chapbook to live up to. But if the extra build-up made The Whatever Poems itself seem merely-good in my reading, the wait was more than paid off by the other micro-chap that I bought along with it, A Pulling from the Inside Downward or to Wherever. Tiny rectangles stitched with virgules and dashes, the poems there (or is it a single sequence?) visually recall Emily Dickinson; but in their swirling, mosaic use of shattered fragments of language, they’re closer to Dickinson’s latter-day acolyte Susan Howe. This one might be my new favorite poem:

     phantoms
     April / adorned with — the blossoms
     adorned with — the pallor, the guilty
     erasingly tingly Wi-Fi
     dying fingers
     / adorned with —
     the bricks the Harvard bricks, suited
     adorned with — doggie-style analog
     spectrum — the being mule-like of it —
     adorned with —
     reunions & reunions & reunions

Coffelt is a young poet seemingly still sorting through a range of influences—language writing, Flarf, MuuMuu House–like minimalism—and sometimes his work seems visibly experimental. In this little pamphlet, though, he’s hit on a style that feels both timeless and blindingly contemporary, luminous and depopulated yet scab-pickingly emotional. Like Howe’s—or the more intensely focused of Pound’s or Dickinson’s—it’s the kind of poetry that seems carefully chiseled and at the same time totally authorless, as if it condensed out of the air, or radiated from the sun.

And in a show of great instincts, Coffelt has underlined that effect by not putting his name anywhere on the book. With its landscape orientation and slight page count, the book feels like some kind of reverse-polarity Chick tract, a subtle bit of viral marketing that cries out to be passed on. If it weren’t for the fact that I want to keep it more, I’d be tempted to leave it on a bench somewhere—a little mystery (which of course Google would make it easy to solve, leading the finder back to Coffelt’s blog and perhaps out into the wider world of good poetry) for anyone called to pick it up.

***
Oh and I guess you can read the whole thing as a blog post, too, though I think it must lose a lot without the clean, poem-per-page presentation of the print version.

TEAM POETS

2010-09-21T22:45:00.006-04:00

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Places Where I Read “Richard Yates” by Tao Lin

2010-09-21T11:27:00.008-04:00

—Laundromat on Preston Avenue.
—Charlottesville train station.
—Train from Charlottesville to New York.
—Friend’s apartment in Manhattan.
—Sushi restaurant near that apartment.
—Train from New York to Charlottesville.

I think that’s all I want to say about it right now.

Things That Always Work

2010-09-12T19:36:00.035-04:00

When someone yells out “solo,” or something similar, to announce a solo—that always works.

You can do it earnestly:

You can do it ironically:

You can do it like a little girl who just saw a spider:

Or you can do it all like “Whatever, I don’t care”:

Doesn’t matter. It always works.

Partial List of Things That Ariana Reines Can Do, Based on Her Book "Coeur de Lion"

2010-09-06T22:32:00.002-04:00

She can write and even publish a poem in what seems like the next thing to real time, as kind of journal of a failed relationship, and yet still give it a shape and arc that couldn’t have been planned out to be any more satisfying or true. She is able to burrow through the weltering, needlingly poetic emotions of breaking up and somehow bring the whole thing down for a safe landing in the prose of getting-over-it, without any feeling of anticlimax—she is able to make an anticlimax that feels earned? She is able to take apart this guy, the guy she had the relationship with, so intimately and so relentlessly that you actually feel sorry for him even though it’s pretty clear that he pretty much deserves it, and she is able to make herself more and more engaging as a narrator the meaner she is. She is able to make you feel embarrassed for the guy and for yourself just by quoting a few bits of his love letters, which are pretty normal, among her own language, which is seriously not. She is also able to drop old-school poetry lines like this on you and make you fucking believe them:

     Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
     Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
     Where are the bitches who know what they want
     Who love what they do, bosomy and declarative,
     Happy to be artistic in this stupid night.

She is able to write a second book in the year after publishing her very successful first book that is better, more profound, and yet also more accessible than that first book, and then publish it herself in a tiny run with no blurbs and little promotion like, “Oh, here’s this great book I wrote, I’ll just toss this out there, I’m sure there’ll be more where that came from.” And, unless I’m seriously wrong, she is able to be right about that, because this woman seems to produce poetry the way that other people produce sweat, as if she just has some special glands that make her excrete amazing poetry just by sitting around. Or else she is really good at giving that appearance, like Yeats wrote, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”; I wouldn’t want to give the impression that she doesn’t do that, I’m sure she does, or she might anyway.

The Coeur de Lion of the title turns out to be a cheese, which at some point in the poem gets compared to the poet’s vagina. She is able to make that comparison work, as like, the central motif of a one hundred page love poem. She could write stuff like “Where is the ‘you’ of You / Tube” all day and it wouldn’t make this book any less amazing; delivered in her skinny, almost violently controlled lines, with her mysterious and unrelenting conviction, that shit sounds fucking profound.

When I got to the page in the book where the following lines appear, by themselves, I actually read them over a good five or six times, because she told me to, that’s why:

     I love words
     Cos they’re so weak
     (repeat)

Basically, she can do what the hell she wants, is what I’m saying.

The Conspiracy Against Growing the Hell Up Already

2010-08-31T11:39:00.007-04:00

So Adam Fieled wants to “take up cudgels” against the “outré,” the “ethnic,” and the “deviant,” because they constitute a “conspiracy” against “consensus opinions... borne out or subtly shifted over long periods of time.” But don’t leap to accusations of “regressive conservatism”; it’s just that in today’s world, “the way forward is the way back” because “it must be.”

Okay, that’s a cheap shot, but not that cheap. Those quotes aren’t that far out of context: Fieled really does link “the ethnic and the deviant” as the two things that “political correctness” gravitates towards (which means that “deviant” stands for what here—gays, women, outsider art, all of those?). And the essay contains a quantity of metaphoric violence that would make Marinetti blush, all starting fires and burning things to the ground and building on the ashes.

Here would be a less cheap response, and the reason why I normally try to abstain from responding to this kind of thing at all: The entire argument that poetry has “has ceased to be itself” because there’s a lot of it you don’t like should be embarrassingly solipsistic. I happen to read a heck of a lot of poetry that I like all the time, and I bet a lot of it is exactly the stuff that Fieled thinks is “moribund.” Some of those “grayish fortresses” he wants “burnt to the ground” happen to have people living in them, you know. Somehow, though, he seems to feel that the world would be objectively better if he could displace those people to make more room for himself. Poetry becomes a weird kind of aesthetic colonization, a zero-sum game in which the would-be conqueror's personal satisfaction is equated with the right alignment of the universe.

If Fieled wants to see a different kind of poetry in the world, all he has to do is write it, or spread it where he finds it in the writing of others. These are activities that I gather he’s participated in, and none of them require him to destroy the work of others to make room—as should be evident from his own healthy list of publications, apparently none of which were canceled in order to publish an extra book by (I’m guessing here, since he doesn’t name any names) Kenneth Goldsmith or Ron Silliman. Seeing poetry you don’t like isn’t a reason for a revolution; it’s a reason to go read a different book.

This kind of attitude is so prevalent, and I find it really frustrating and depressing. Maybe I should set fire to it?

(A much funnier response to similar attitudes that everyone should read is here.)

not experiment but equipoise

2010-08-27T09:42:00.002-04:00

not heroics but healing

not nostrums but normalcy

not revolution but restoration

not agitation but adjustment

not surgery but serenity

not the dramatic but the dispassionate

not experiment but equipoise

Tao Lin, Lorrie Moore, a Chimp Washing a Cat

2010-08-21T13:23:00.005-04:00

I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s Like Life, realizing how directly Tao Lin imitated her in Bed (this is not an unfounded accusation, he’s more or less said so here). Yet somehow that doesn’t take away from my appreciation for Bed at all. Maybe it’s because of the way that Tao Lin’s reflections of other writers—whether it’s Moore in Bed or Anne Beattie in Eeeee Eee Eeee—are so cracked and distorted, in ways that are more idiosyncratic than most writers’ originality, ways that he maybe couldn’t help even if he wanted to. Even the flaws of Moore’s writing get picked up and heightened, as if unconsciously. Example: If Moore uses appositive descriptions along the lines of “the refrigerated smell... the vague shame and hamburger death of it” distractingly often, Lin in Bed uses them more often, more weirdly, and even more distractingly: “the word awning… the complete, incomplete word of it,” “the air conditioner… the biscuit-brown plastic appliance thing of it,” “her teeth, the private collection of them,” etc. What comes through is a kind of untameable unprofessionalism, rough edges and self-indulgences that would be polished away in any decent workshop, but that for Lin constitute something like a voice, one more vibrant than correct, more distinct—even in pastiche—than controlled. An overdriven version of his models that, for all the times I might wince at the weird grammar or repetitive tics, seems worth the costs for the sheer electricity and volume of it.

It’s kind of like watching a chimpanzee wash a cat. Bear with me here. You know the chimp’s only doing it in imitation of a human, you know you’ve seen humans do this a million times before, you even know that a human would, by some standard, do it “better”—but none of that makes it any less funny to watch. Whereas with a human the cat would be the star, somehow the chimp kind of steals the show. And, though the human might be the best way to get your cat clean, you know which one you’d rather watch on an endless loop on YouTube.

Of course, Tao Lin never really uses what he’s called his “Lorrie Moore” style anymore; it’s all about the “concrete style” now. But from what I’ve heard in advance of and about Richard Yates, due out in just weeks, I’m hopeful that he still won’t—still can’t—lose those rough edges.

Click My Name

2010-08-12T15:11:00.004-04:00

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what is spoof, what is crazy and what is the actual truth.

But it is easy to see the direction we are headed in. Martial law is a definite possibility.

Click my name and see my blog.

"Death is the Mother of Beauty" (on "Man on Wire")

2010-08-06T09:59:00.000-04:00

Note: I've just got Netflix, so this may become something of a film blog for a while until I catch up on the many, many interesting semirecent releases I've missed.

The construction of this documentary sometimes strays towards the cheesy, as with the computer-animated plane that tracks the protagonist’s travels, or the borderline Unsolved Mysteries–style reenactments. Yet the incredible story of Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers fully shines through, aided by some incredible archival materials and by Petit’s own pleasantly hammy storytelling. It’s almost a stroke of luck that no motion footage exists of the walk itself, turning that impossible reality into a kind of sublime semi-absence at the heart of the film, leaving the filmmakers to linger over still-shots of Petit grinning as he strides confidently across the wire, or lying languidly on his back gazing up like a picnicker on a hill—except seen from a quarter of a mile below. Seeing these images, knowing what Petit went through to get up there, it’s difficult not to feel as overwhelmed by the event as the eyewitnesses telling the story—and even the cop who arrested Petit afterwards (captured in a contemporaneous news interview) appears to tear up a bit as he speaks of “watching something that somebody else would never see again in the world.”

Whatever pall of grim prophecy is cast over those words by the subsequent history of the World Trade Center is consciously ignored by the film, yet not tonally inconsonant with its implicit critique of the monomania, and the attendant selfishness and irresponsibility to those who aid and support him, that drives Petit to his miraculous performance. The image of this man defying all authority, from the police on up to gravity itself, to achieve something like tranquility and freedom on a literal walk through the clouds—it’s truly beautiful. But it’s also impossible to forget—indeed, it’s necessary not to forget, since the beauty depends on it—the 1300-foot deep mouth of death above which he balances.

When Mumblecore Meets Hardcore (on "The Girlfriend Experience")

2010-08-01T22:24:00.001-04:00

I’m pretty pleased that Steven Sodergergh hired the world’s most market-savvy porn star and used her to make what amounts to a big-budget mumblecore movie about capitalism as prostitution. I dig the film’s implication that our high-gloss, sell-or-be-sold culture encourages us to hollow out our actual lives for the sake of our personal brands; and I love the postmodern twist of casting someone who’s by all appearances living that critique (and owning it?) to play the lead role. But—and this is a real question for anyone who’s seen the movie—how is the last scene not Ezra Pound–levels of anti-Semitic?

It's So Cold

2010-06-29T22:58:00.000-04:00

It’s so cold at work that I still can’t shake it even at home

It’s so cold at work that my life feels empty even though everything is going better

It’s so cold at work that some guy won’t stop talking loudly on the phone outside my apartment

It’s so cold at work that I can’t get my work done

It’s so cold at work that I can’t even worry about her anymore

It’s so cold at work that I want to kiss all my friends

It’s so cold at work that I can’t wear nice shoes

It’s so cold at work that my Scott Pilgrim review is 1000 words too short

It’s so cold at work that 90 degrees outside feels refreshing

It’s so cold at work that I’m keeping a jacket there

On Ariana Reines's Sex Appeal (and Poetry as Perversion)

2010-06-24T23:17:00.003-04:00

My whole body writes.

My whole body writes.
–Ariana Reines, “In the Most Holy Place Shalt Thou Eat It”

Today’s Reading: Ariana Reines, The Cow

I’ll go ahead and say it: Ariana Reines might be the sexiest poet alive. Not just because she herself is physically very attractive. And not just because her poetry is full of feverishly horny lines like “If I don’t fuck today I’ll die.” Not even because, in blogging out her recent trip to Haiti, she’s established herself as an heir to the late, similarly sexy Kathy Acker.

No, Ariana Reines—in her writing and in the persona that swirls like a pheromone-laden postcoital funk around it—is sexy in scary, counterintuitive ways. Sexy in the way that knife play might be, for some people: through the careful handling of keen edges and the threat at any moment of splitting the surface and drawing blood. Or like erotic asphyxiation: through the impairment of normal brain function under a looming shadow of death only slightly less terrifying than the display of trust the entire act implies.

In other words, her poetry (like all good poetry?) is a perversion, not only of the normal (“normal”) use of language, but of normal relations to the body and the world, of normal boundaries between public and private or between fearlessness and submission (like all good perversion?). I first really read her work in the Gurlesque anthology, but that label seems completely inadequate to these poems: there’s not much about them I’d call girlish, and absolutely nothing -esque. Instead, they’re intensely feminist and female without ever being doctrinaire or exclusionary. They depict the itchy, refractory experience of embodiment in ways that play rough with the politics of modern gender, yes, but can also powerfully resonate with anyone who’s ever suffered from a body of any sex:

Imagine a gut for the writing to go around. The dark can be a place. The gut. Imagine it. The mental city means it’s built of menial jobs that make it become itself. The mind. Uncensored thirties. A hovel to live in. The best way to go is the endlessest. I will not train myself to love this shit.
–“Dear Marguerite”

Not to mention that, as seen above, she can drop those vision-blurring, spine-tingling, top-of-the-head-removing lines of the sort I usually associate with personal icons like Dickinson, Yeats, or Plath. Like Anne Boyer or Tao Lin, Reines seems to suffer from a special, prophetic kind of crazy, and the rest of us are just lucky that whatever existential dis-ease plagues her also drives her to bring those struggles to light in such startling and raw ways.

All of which is just to say that she’s a really fucking good poet. Not much sexier than that.

Okay, Kendra Grant Malone, I guess you win.

2010-06-16T15:29:00.010-04:00

Today’s Reading: Kendra Grant Malone, Chasing Pigeons Makes Me Feel More Powerful

Kendra Grant Malone is a poet and fiction writer I first came across on the same DRUNK blog where I discovered Daniel Bailey and Bryan Coffelt. Like Bailey, she could be seen as part of a “New Sincerity,” a wave of young poets who eschew the impersonality of most innovative poetry and even the rhetoricalness of most mainstream poetry to just, sort of, write what they feel, in a way that looks like nothing so much as the poetry you remember from your undergrad lit mag. (Here’s the thing, you (I) actually liked a lot of that poetry, and felt somehow that it was “wrong” or just not permitted for you (me) to do so.)

Now Malone has a little (tiny) e-chapbook up that takes that tendency all the way. These poems are as self-involved and exhibitionist as they can manage, full of self-flagellations and sexual confessions that more or less openly invite you to judge the poet personally (“i don’t even know who i would call / tonight, for sex / because i don’t feel like trying hard / or listening to anyone talk about themselves / which is a courtesy you must provide / if you are about to use them / for their body”). And as I read the poems, I found myself doing just that, looking not so much at the content of the confessions as at the self-dramatizing narcissism that seems to prompt them and thinking, “I don’t know if I like this poetry because I don’t know if I like this person.”

Then, eight poems into the ten-poem selection, Malone pulls off a trick that reminds you (me) that this really ain’t your college lit mag after all: she drops in a totally self-aware and really affecting poem about the very act of judging that she’s just been baiting you (me) into, about the meaninglessness of judgments and the pain and confusion of being judged and the impossibility of refraining from judging others even while you’re begging not to be judged yourself. And then you (I) remember that that’s what all these poems are about, not just in their desperately insecure content but even more so in their quietly confident form, in their choice of an aesthetic that does away with all kinds of artistic point-scoring and then defies you not to dismiss it as amateurish. You feel a little ashamed to like these poems as you feel a little ashamed to like this poet, but you do and you’ll be happier if you just go ahead and embrace it.

When I got to the end of this book my first thought was, “Okay, Kendra Grant Malone, I guess you win.” Which means, “Yeah, okay, I will go ahead and buy your full-length poetry collection when it comes out,” and is maybe all I needed to say here.

Wow, John Campbell.

2010-06-04T16:34:00.001-04:00

Just wow.

"It was played to death / and its remakes are crap / but still it sounds okay Walt Whitman"

2010-05-29T19:16:00.005-04:00

Today’s Reading: Anne Boyer, The 2000s: A History of the Future in Advance of Itself (click to get the whole thing free, because Anne Boyer is open-source and awesome like that)

The form of these poems—hyperparatactic prose—should be familiar to readers of New Sentence writers like Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian. Their tone of Jeremiac hysteria might ring a bell for fans of contemporary mad-poets like Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, or Hannah Weiner. But Boyer is witty, weird, and, yes, sincere enough to make these familiar ingredients feel completely fresh and genuine.

She has tricks for taking you off-guard, for one thing—like when she launches into a somewhat scathing, though never unbelievable, close reading of her own poem midway through it; or when, just a few pages later, she suddenly shifts into the language of a fully blown and beautifully aching love poem. But what really animates these poems is the merciless critical eye that Boyer turns on her contemporary moment, the same crabby righteousness that makes her blog and even her twitter feed such harrowingly essential reading. Somehow Boyer manages to be both a defiant dropout from modern life and at the same time a deadly accurate observer of it, as unnerving to see as someone standing in the doorway at a party and taking notes.

Boyer’s observations can take the form of deadly one-liners: “It was like an art exhibit after postmodernism: 100% subtitle,” “They say irony and I say good luck with that.” But more often her shots are deeper and darker, depicting a world of infinite connection and wealth in which somehow every experience is one of isolation and poverty. She can strike an impossible balance between satire and vulnerability: “I searched on the Internet for that guy’s name + freedom and that other guy’s name + love.” Or she can write with bitter realism about the quiet desperation of American life:

I was alive for years and had a job then. Whoever said we worked without risk has lied or spoken only for herself. I sit all day and everything around me is brutal and sloppy. They get angry with me. They always have. Someone bites my fingers. Someone yells. I was on the porch telling the visitors that I would like to feel a little less battered by the facts.

As those quotes suggest, Boyer is also fearlessly self-implicating (“I was a poet who wrote on the Internet. History provided me with my future’s true love”). That sense of standing in the doorway—disgusted by the scene but ultimately trapped both by social pressures and by one’s own desires, if not by the fact that there’s literally nowhere else to go—gives the book its overarching tone, one of wounded ferocity or self-emulating tenderness. It is, as Boyer recognizes, not just the twenty-first century condition, but a fully existential plight. Time past and time future are contained in time present, as Eliot wrote, and all time is perhaps—as he also feared—unredeemable: “What I was thinking was not contingent on the millennium. What I was thinking was ‘life has been so hard for many of us and what we really need to do is rest.’”

***
Meanwhile, her other free book, Ma Vie En Bling, is roughly equally as good. It has poems with unnumbered sections that each start on a new page, so you finish the first part and think, “That was a really good poem,” then you turn the page and think, “Oh cool, there’s more.” Major themes include pornography and rabbits, and damn-I-wish-I-had-written-that good titles include “He Hates My Life of Art and Beauty.”

Patio Chair vs. "Patio Chair" vs. a patio chair

2010-05-26T11:27:00.002-04:00

If “the materiality of language” is such an important object, there must be some more interesting verb we can apply to it than “foreground” or “be concerned with.” The materiality of language vs. the language of materiality.

***
Is there really such a thing as the materiality of language? Is it different in kind from the materiality of a chair?

***
The link between language and mass production is iteration. Even before mechanical reproduction made it possible to stamp out hundreds of thousands of indistinguishable patio chairs, any chair was already rendered infinitely repeatable simply by the existence of the indefinite article. In this sense, language could be seen as the negation of materiality. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that language can’t also have its own materiality.

***
Does the materiality of language encode history? If so, it can’t be encoded as materiality, since any encoding is inherently an abstraction, a signification—immaterial. (Does the materiality of a chair encode history?)

***
Is there a difference between “having materiality” and “being material”? Materiality as an attribute rather than a substance. (Materiality is not itself material.)

***
What is the materiality of a chair? Is it the aspect of the chair that exists in the absence of language? Then what is the materiality of language?

"Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life."

2010-05-23T13:15:00.006-04:00

“I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: 'Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.’

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whisky, bread and water.”
-Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

By the way, I read this book in the wonderful Harvill edition that, like the Japanese original, comes in two tiny (just over 4"x6") volumes. Even with the original box tossed and the color-coded covers replaced with heavy institutional rubber by the UVa library, there’s something really charming and appropriate to the novel about this design. It gives an illusion of serialization that speaks to the youthful quality of the story, as if this were a manga or young adult lit series. And it cries out to be tucked in a pocket and carried out into a meadow like the one in which the book’s key scene takes place. Most of all, it corresponds with the elegant slightness of the novel itself—the way in which Murakami’s prose (as translated by Jay Rubin) achieves lyric beauty while never pressing for literary grandeur, the tragic seclusion in which events befall his seemingly orphaned characters.

The novel left me wanting more, so much so that I immediately started in on Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase. So far I’m enjoying it, but reading it in a clumsy 6"x9" edition, big enough for a hardback bestseller, I realize that what I really wanted was more like Norwegian Wood volume 3.

"Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?"

2010-05-15T18:48:00.002-04:00

Today’s Reading: Robert Fitterman, Rob the Plagiarist

Conceptual writing seems to thrive on realizing the seemingly impossible, or at the least impossibly unpalatable: write a poem using only one vowel per section; transcribe everything you say or do for a week; write a book in one continuous sentence. So much so that a book like Rob the Plagiarist—a collection of shorter conceptual pieces written by Robert Fitterman between 2000 and 2008—seems almost oxymoronic. How can you write a conceptual poem under ten pages? How hard can that be? Is it even long enough to be unboringly boring?

And yet in many of these pieces Fitterman comes close to achieving something even more oxymoronic-seeming: a conceptualist lyricism. The book is explicitly concerned with subjectivities and the chasms and connections that exist between them, using the “plagiarist” techniques of appropriation and collage to turn the traditional narcissism of the lyric almost literally inside out—to create poems that look in on the subject from without rather than gazing out on the world from within. In “A Hemingway Reader,” Fitterman extracts the “I” statements from The Sun Also Rises in order to create a bleakly phenomenological record of the protagonist’s perceptual wanderings; then he revivifies the resulting text by “translating” it into his own contemporary New York experience, revealing a pattern of likeness and difference that suggests a genuinely touching meditation on the intersubjective value of literature. In “This Window Makes Me Feel,” the conceptual-lyric joining is even more explicit, actually declared in Fitterman’s gloss on the poem, which he explains was “propelled by my interest in subjectivity through appropriation. I.e., what would a text read like if it were entirely subjective, but not my personal subjectivity.” What it reads like, incidentally, is a chorus of lost, lonely, occasionally funny, often insecure voices that, through Fitterman’s linking of the poem to 9/11, becomes a chorus of the dead—anonymous voices and silenced voices being eerily isomorphic.

If Rob the Plagiarist doesn’t achieve the monumentality of Day or the virtuosity of Eunoia, well, it’s clearly not aiming to—it’s really more of a rarities and b-sides collection backing Fitterman’s ongoing epic project Metropolis. And for just that reason it offers a refreshing alternate take on conceptual writing, a break from the technicians, salesmen, and solicitors that can put such a Warhol-cum-carnival-barker face on the movement’s public presentations. There are bold and novel pleasures to be derived from that sort of thing, and no one would champion them more than me. But a book like Rob the Plagiarist offers smaller, quieter pleasures that are no less deserving of appreciation and, in their relative fragility, perhaps even more deserving of attention.

Café Press

2010-05-10T16:45:00.010-04:00

in a mad world only the mad are sane

Magnet in a mad world only the mad are sane

Mini Button in a mad world only the mad are sane

Trucker Hat in a mad world only the mad are sane

Rectangle Magnet (100 pack)

in a mad world only the mad are sane

Mousepad in a mad world only the mad are sane

Wall Clock in a mad world only the mad are sane

Teddy Bear in a mad world only the mad are sane

Round Ornament

Large Mug

Messenger Bag

in a mad world only the mad are sane

T’s

Dog T’s

True or False

2010-05-01T16:15:00.005-04:00

Today’s Reading: Hannah Weiner, We Speak Silent

Even though the book came out in 1996, I insist that Hannah Weiner actually intended the Bob Dylan voice in We Speak Silent to sound like George W. Bush. Listen to this: “heh heh heh I sneaked in another two pages // heh heh heh im just fooling i love ya     smush.” Or how about: “heh heh heh you put that book away or else.”

The book’s all about some kind of telepathic communication anyway, so who’s to say she wasn’t inadvertently channeling the governor of Texas? And he gets such good lines!

    sweetheart please the torture of meeting someone new is
    impossible they ask you how old you are and what
    you do for a living

    sweetheart what are you gonna do when you meet me
    have fisticuffs or somethin

    sweetheart next time call when youre supposed to and
    never mind your mysteries or i'll punch ya

I mean, c’mon! It’s too good not to pretend it’s true.

Fighting the Flarf Wars

2010-04-27T19:34:00.004-04:00

Michael Robbins has written that Flarf is “a flash in the pan,” “a fart in the wind,” “stupid,” “boring,” and “garbage” (both in the comments, scroll down).

Michael Robbins has also written this and this.

Okay, I'm lost.

Best Poems I've Never Read

2010-04-26T22:22:00.015-04:00

Today’s Reading: Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems, pp. 158-183

Remember those alarming, spectacular lines of Anna Akhmatova’s I quoted here a while back: “Change has made me weary, / Fate has cheated me of everything.” I read them in a copy of Akhmatova’s Selected Poems that happened to be hanging around town, and they inspired me to pick up her Complete for myself. It’s a different translation, and in it those lines from my previous post read like this:

    The whisper of the autumn in the maples
    Was pleading: “Die with me!

    I am betrayed by my doleful,
    fickle, evil fate.”

Yikes. That sucks. Right?

So, do I question the quality of this $30, thousand-page doorstop I just acquired? Or do I have to concede that the lines that seduced me into buying it in the first place were more the creation of a translator (there are a few different Akhmatova selecteds, so I’m not sure which) than of the poet herself? The truth may lie somewhere in between, but my guess is more towards the latter, since the Collected is, I think, a more recent translation, and why would you take those lines out except for fidelity to the original?

But I’ll probably never know for sure. If it were French or Spanish or even German I could look at the original and take a decently educated guess, but Russian?—they don’t even use real letters! I admit to reading very little poetry in translation, and this is maybe why. What a helpless feeling, to be looking right at something so beautiful and yet not really be able to hear or see it, not even to verify if it’s really there. Actually, it’s not so out of tune with the melding of desire and despair in so many of Akhmatova’s poems:

    I no longer smile,
    A freezing wind chills my lips,
    One less hope becomes
    One more song.
    And this song, against my will,
    I devote to desecration and mockery,
    Because it is unbearably painful
    For the soul to love silently.

Wow. Okay then, if there’s some poetry lost in this particular translation, there’s still plenty left in which to rejoice.

***

On a sort of thematically related note, someone at Harriet is blogging about what might be my favorite book of poetry that I’ve never read, Alice Notley’s At Night the States. That I’ve never read because it seems to be tragically out of print; my favorite because of the thrilling poems it contributes to Notley’s selected, Grave of Light. But Emily Warn seems to have shelled out for a used copy (starting from only $65 on Amazon!) and is writing about it, along with my favorite Notley book that I have read, Margaret and Dusty.

I hope she’ll get around to writing about the title poem as she promises. In the meantime, you can read that poem at the Poetry Foundation’s website, or you can hear Notley read it herself at Pennsound. (Oh internet!)

Why Friends Are Better than Conceptualism

2010-04-19T22:28:00.011-04:00

I guess I’m not really sure where Vanessa Place is coming from with this. Is she serious? If so, it seems a little hostile and even kind of domineering. I mean, did anyone actually ask why Conceptualism was better than Flarf? And if they did, would “Conceptualism is cool kids in suits, Flarf is dweebs in spaceman costumes” be the most enlightened/enlightening answer?

And if she’s not serious, then didn't the whole pretend Flarf-Conceptual War end after the Whitney reading? In that case, ironically, she’d be the dweeb, showing up late to a meme that everyone else is already done with.

Either way, Drew Gardner kind of pwns her with his response. I mean, the whole bit about Conceptualism recycling forty year old moves from the visual arts is a bit of a cheap shot, but “Conceptualism wants you to know it has read Lacan”? Oh, snap.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I have to pick a side, I’ll go with the funny ones. But seriously, why do we always have to fight? Or even pretend to fight? There are way more fun things to do, and I hope some day Flarfies and Conceptualists will all get to sit around in heaven and do them to one another. Until then, reluctantly:

The available words in whatever order works

2010-04-18T20:57:00.005-04:00

Today’s Reading: K. Silem Mohammad, Sonnagrams 1-20

I could wax academic about how these anagrammatic scramblings of Shakespeare’s sonnets reclaim lost affective territory for poetry, how they recover the “superficial” values of wit and formal skill from the cult of meter-making argument and content-extending form. I could add that using Shakespeare as source material is the perfect way to make such a reclaimation, since the Bard is both the literal poster boy for the kind of poetry-person who sneers at such “mere” cleverness, and a classic practitioner of it himself.

But any kind of dissertating would seem counter to the spirit of these poems. They’re simply fun, and funny as hell. Like Christian Bök in his Eunoia (a clear influence), Mohammad has set himself a formal challenge so elaborately impossible-sounding that content can be left to shift for itself—there’s delight enough in seeing him crack yet another lettristic rubik's cube and still manage any kind of sense at all.

Mohammad clearly realizes that fact, and he uses it as fodder for a couple of pretty good self-deprecating jokes (“something something something, rhymes with girl”), but also, more radically, for self-celebrations that seem part battle rap, part ghazal: “I am the holy idiot of rhymes; / I dish these tasty iambs in my sleep,” “...I pray this adage may hold tight: / Mohammad sweetens seagull panties right.”

When is the last time a poet was allowed that kind of swagger? And really, in the net-down world of post-confessional, free verse lyric, what could a poet ever do to earn it? Prior to all of the very legitimate conceptual readings that can and should be offered about these poems, it’s a joy to see a poet simply taking joy in the endless recombinatory possibilities of language.

There’s “the best words in the best order,” and then there’s this.

****
Lots of Sonnagrams around the web, here are a few:

Boo
BOMBlog
Gammm
Lemon Hound
Wag's Revue
YouTube

"I support anything that goes against nature."

2010-04-15T21:35:00.007-04:00

No Wrong Way?

2010-04-13T11:10:00.005-04:00

Today’s Reading: Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, pp. 245-315

Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel told in footnotes to a long poem, presents some unusual choices for readers. Do you read straight through, preface then poem then notes? Read the notes as you go, along with the poem? Do you read as you might a real critical edition, the poem first without notes, then again with the notes? Or do you take the narrator/editor’s typically egocentric suggestion and read the notes first, then the poem with the notes, then the notes alone for a third time? Do you follow the cross references in the notes even though they may refer you to later plot developments? Do you read the whole index?

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed the book, here’s not quite what I did but what I wish I had done: read poem and notes at the same time, referring back and forth; followed most of the cross references, but bailed out if they seemed to be heading for anything too “spoilery.” The novel drops some hints, I think, about what would've been Nabokov’s own preferred reading, but it also seems to be designed to be fairly resilient in the face of other choices, able to be read as a linear narrative with a few twists or as a more Faulknerian sort of out-of-sequence meditation.

Interestingly, the book allows you to choose your own level of modernist difficulty—you can read one thing at a time, or you can be juggling at least three. And, at the same time, of course, it’s a novel about reading, about the narrator/editor’s failure to read the poem and (to an uncertain degree) the world as it really is. Meanwhile the book’s slew of irresolvable choices reminds you, the reader, not to look down too much on his misreadings, as ludicrous as they often seem, because reading isn’t always all that easy, is it?

One thing I’ll say for certain: DO spend some time with the index. Written in-character, it’s full of clever bits like a series of cross references that lead around in a never-ending loop, and possibly the solution to one of the book’s minor mysteries (though I couldn’t work it out). And, I think, its last entry should be regarded as the real ending of the novel, the kind of simple, lyrical eulogy you expect as the final signature to any of Nabokov’s books.

Belated Movie Reviews: Did Ron Silliman Already Say This, I Feel Like He Probably Did

2010-04-06T10:40:00.004-04:00

Sunshine (2007) – As a 2001 for the actual twenty-first century, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is quicker, slicker, and shallower than its ancestor—but then how could it not be? Stylish to a fault, the film features a cast of inexplicably young and hot space travelers headed by Cillian Murphy, who’s apparently become one of the world’s elite physicist and an astronaut at an age when most people would be lucky to have finished their PhDs. But whatever—the cast is hot, and Murphy is perfectly sinuous and watery in the role, and whatever the movie lacks in intellectual depth it more than makes up in an overwhelming sense of physicality.

The real subject of the film is mortality—its inevitability and its shockingness—and for that purpose seeing the young and vital bite it is much more powerful anyway. The film’s freshness comes from establishing a scenario in which the characters’ deaths are inevitable, their lives expendable, and then, unlike so much recent sci-fi adventure, not flinching from that setup. As every character’s death becomes more and more of a foregone conclusion, the stakes become how they will die—heroically or indignantly or in horrible suffering or, usually, in ways that combine two or three of those things at once. Characters are incinerated by the sun and frozen in the vacuum of space, they are slashed and impaled and crushed, they face asphyxiation and hypothermia and insanity, and they do it all 93 million miles away from a home that’s a dying planet anyway, while orbiting an impossibly giant ball of fusioning hellscape.

Every death is inevitable; most fiction lets us forget that by providing an arbitrary end point beyond which a character need only survive in order essentially to live forever. Aside from being simply thrilling and beautiful to look at, Sunshine gets its power by reminding us of that fact. You walk away from the movie with a sense of your own mortality that’s not only heightened but also elaborated, a consciousness of the infinite possibilities for extravagant suffering and irreparable harm that lurk just beyond the safety caps of our everyday existence, and that are bound to be visited on all of us sooner or later. But you walk away, too, with a deepened sense of what it might mean to give meaning to that death—that the ultimate act of sacrifice can’t be to give up one’s life so that someone else can live, because everyone dies and, as Derrida (roughly) said, no one can die in my place. Rather, the ultimate reality of heroism—if that means anything—is to suffer, to suffer greatly and potentially without limit, for the sake of a good that you yourself will never see.