The center holds ,and it's crushing us

Poet Mary Jo Bang has the unique ability to write a polemical poem that is both a superb example of straight talk-there is no mistaking her fevered sentiment for anything else--and an elegant sample of exquisitely placed simile and metaphor The power of "After the Fact" comes from the first lines, a narrator setting up the world he/she lives like it were subject to templates from which only tragic outcomes can result. The sin of this all, the source of the outrage, are the actors in the self-limiting melodramas--buffoons peacocks, egomaniacs, narcissists with trigger fingers mistaking the contrived circumstances of their cause for the way things required to go.

Sleep tight, you martyrs.

And you criminals who killed for a narrow share

of power and a few rotten spoils.

Enough is enough.

This is very tough stuff , an indictment with a sting, an x ray to the heart of the matters; while those who wage wars justify their aggression in the many slippery rationalizations that seek "justice" through a rhetorical back door , the results of their righteousness, their efforts to set the world right, only make the tragedies worse. The calamity multiply, the genocides continue, the planet darkens even more and becomes unlivable-the only thing that seems to renew itself is the rhetoric that proclaims a vision of aggressive human perfection, a heaven here on earth, while the heart grow harder, colder. The fatal schemes, the complete waste of what's best in this existence, contracts not just the heart, but makes the universe appear to shrink to a burned out cinder.

The corners converge, causing the globe to grow smaller

than all of time times space divided

by every petty difference.

The center would not hold for Yeats; it contracts for Mary Jo Bang, become a flaming ball of contentious bad faith . It's a simple morality tale, a simple but profound choice that each of us needs to make, to make decisions exclusively on the basis of self seeking, or to help others, create community, cooperation. Bang's poem/polemic provides the profound example of selfishness when it's codified with a language that adopts some of the leaner rhetoric of justice, peace and harmony and uses the terms to rationalize an institutionalized State of War. It is the tragedy of trying to make the mystery of life comprehensible by means of fear-- investigating the life and ways of a Villainized Other is to trade with the Devil.

The girl newly dead on the sidewalk says,

"Excuse me, but—

what kind of moral force is brute moral force?"

The poem can be said to lack subtlety, but a muted message in this instance could be so finely wrought that even an informed reader would miss the point in search for clues among the ambiguities. This has the brilliant, placard bearing power of Ferlinghetti's political poems, particularly "I Am Waiting"; it is a succession of one lines and witticisms that crystallize the crisis and makes it memorable. This is a poem meant to get you thinking about something other than whether it works as a poem. It does just that.

I don't think Bang's poems encourages passive martyrdom of any kind, if I understand your question correctly. It has more the feel of a scaled-back soliloquy delivered in the last act of a Greek Tragedy, the summation presented while the evidence is plainly visible, undeniable, to anyone who might have been involved in debating war and power-grabbing in the abstract. The poem operates under the assumption that the evil doers--politicians, generals, corporations--are shamed to silence while the damnable curses is cast, but beyond this minor suspension of disbelief --politicians, generals and corporations won't reform themselves and seek justice rather than justice as the result of a good scold--we realize the poem isn't intended for the perpetrators of misery, but the citizens who've been seduced by a well-oiled propaganda.

We are governed solely by our consent, and the further implication is that the governed population's failure to hold their representatives to higher , more consequential standard is just as responsible for the grim tales told here. Our songs, our campaign slogans, our policy discussions are geared to assure us that the greatest good is the intent ,and that it surely will be the result. Mary Jo Bang's speech--and that is what this is, finally, a speech--shows the reader that there are leaders elected in our name who are singing of their esteemed virtues while everyone else can see the devastation they leave in their wake.

A fine CD from Larry Coryell

It's been instructive to revisit jazz guitarist Larry Coryell after a decade or in other neighborhoods. A pioneer of jazz-fusion, this musician is, at his  best, wildly inventive, cranky, blistering and rapid fire, someone akin to Jeff Beck in ways of attacking an improvisation from unexpected angles of attack. Like Beck as well, his body of work is erratic, and one wonders if Coryell might have become stuck on the fence sometime in mid-career, performing an unsatisfying amalgam of mainstream bop standards, pop-jazz and thud worthy, unmotivated funk and rock blends. Fortunately, age and good sense has toughened the guitarist's technique; his album Tricycles and the more recent Earthquake at the Avalon, are both superlative examples of this man's ability to display a pristine delicacy on ballads, fleet-fingered flurries on the accelerated compositions, and a hard-nosed edge on the blues. Of the two albums, Tricycles gets the higher marks, as Coryell has a sweetly trio in bassist Mark Egan and drummer Paul Wertico bring off a varied set of styles with the ease of a unit that knows the strengths and nuances of each other's respective approaches. Coryell's guitar fairly bristles and sparkles through his rich chord voicings and pristine essays, with Egan and Wertico upping the rhythmic ante and lowering it again as the major and minor turns of the songs change the mood. There is a richness in the performance that suggests a larger group. Recommended.

Michael Jackson and the fatal spirit of the true artist

A telling side effect of a celebrity's death is the degree to which it prompts some people towards autobiography, memoir, or to indulge the urge to examine their own history as a parallel course to the trajectory of the more famously deceased. Those of us over fifty have only to recall the unending tide of essays and books where Americans recalled where they were, precisely, the day and moment that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The effort, of course, was more than merely paying tribute the brilliance the departed embodied; more than that, it is a recollection of how they'd been made to imagine greater possibilities for a  world they otherwise couldn't challenge.It's the tiresome ode to a dream deferred . There is something to the notion that celebrities cease to  be human in our estimations once they acquire certain saturation in the culture--they become, in a sense, a personal god one measures their best and worst qualities against. It is a tendency that can become pathology  Patti Davis, daughter of the departed President Ronald Reagan and someone who knows something about growing up in a fishbowl, weighed in with a brief commentary in Newsweek last year  about the unexpected death of Michael Jackson. The piece isn’t as cloying as one would have suspected—she notes the similarities between Jackson and another child star, Judy Garland, reasonably speculating reasonable that these talents were essentially raised in a bubble by a horde of managers, executives and an unlimited variety of sycophants whose interests weren’t those of their nominal employer, but rather their livelihoods. There’s more than enough evidence to support for Davis to make her case, which we find in the case of Jimi Hendrix and certainly Elvis Presley, two major talents and money makers who , it seems, lacked the discerning voice in their midst to say “no”, or to give advice that was free of enabling. Davis, though, spoils her entry with a rationalization that absolves Jackson and a host of other bright unfortunates who’ve met with untimely demises of any responsibility for the odd choices they’ve made.

Michael Jackson, Jack Kerouac, , Jack Kennedy, Charlie Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jimi Hendrix, and the lot died of causes that had nothing to do with the fact that each of them had varying degrees of talent. People die daily who haven't distinguished themselves as singers, dancers, writers, poets, jazz improvisers; they drank themselves to death, they overdosed, they committed suicide due to untreated clinical depression, they were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one, though, latches on to a single name of the average anonymous drug casualty or suicide and speculates as to the nature of the sad, early death, no one really wonders about the soul of the everyman that just might be too sensitive to deal with the harsh facts of life and is driven to end the endless pain. Rather, we shrug, we say”ain't that shame" and then go about our business, mildly annoyed. We love celebrity hood, though, we are obsessed with as a culture, and indeed celebrity has become our religion--we create a mythology about the doings of the famous Gods and wonder about their inner lives, their moods, and their ability to cope.

Davis, a marginally well known artist/writer herself, picks up the stalest cliches around, the most exhausted of all tired tropes, the most insipid of perspectives by wondering aloud if there is something in the tortured psyches that compels the brilliant and the intensely gifted to short circuit themselves and bring an end to their lives. The implication is that sensitive artist types are sentenced fates even an enemy shouldn't suffer, an especially perverse elaboration that artists are not really the source of their talents and the inspiration that comes with it, but rather a channel of a Higher Power's wisdom and good graces. Davis not only gives absolution to doomed geniuses and near geniuses,but offers up the notion that for them Free Will is impossible. One always has a choice, though, and anyone of the people named in the second paragraph, not least of all Jackson, all the the ability to choose what their circumstances would be and the company they could keep; brilliant or not, they, like the rest of us, make bad decisions and they, like some of us, make choices that sooner or later prove fatal. Assuming without question that the tragedy was inevitable due to predestination only makes the tragedy deeper. What freedoms and insight the work might have provided us is negated by an overwhelming assumption that divine forces were at play. The circumstances, though, are human, all too human.

It's  irritating  enough that Davis concludes her commentary so insipidly, but it is also aggravating she's given such a big microphone from which to entertain her morbid hero worship. This is the same worship of the Celebrity Dead that had surrounded the discussion of the Confessional Poets for so many years, the not-so-subtly disguised attitude that a poet so categorized would only be regarded as great if they met with a tragic death, preferably by their own hand. Only in that instance do they become poets worth taking seriously. Serious as in examples to avoid , I think, and what's to be avoided as well is Davis' unfortunate comment, in a subordinate clause, that " true artists", by in large, are burdened by the creativity God or may not have blessed them with and lack the stamina to survive a life in any of the metaphorical food chains the celebrity culture creates. Davis handily enfeebles artists in general, poses no counter argument that art is more likely to make the artist more resilient in their daily struggles, and she seems willing to let the issue rest in a bed of sighing fatalism. This won't do.

Oil spill blame game

A casual scan of the news sites reveal that the right wing noise machine is working furiously to blame the oil spill currently threatehing the Lousiana coast on President Obama, terming it his "Katrina". Well, the point with the Katrina disaster wasn't whether it was Bush's fault, but rather his administration's lack of prompt and compassionate response to the plight of the people of New Orleans. The low priority the hurricane aftermath had on that White House's agenda couldn't be more clear considering that just months prior all appropriate agencies responded with what's been called \"brutal efficiency\" in response to a similar catastrophe in Florida, whose governor at the time was George Bush's brother Jeb Bush.

This difference was glaring and telling. Obama's response to the oil spill, by any standard, has been quick and decisive; it made short order of BP's minimizing assurances that the accident was something they could handle on their own and exercised Federal Authority. This does sour Obama's declaration that he is opening up more of the East Coast for off shore drilling, but that is merely an irony, not a source of blame. This ugly disaster , if nothing else, frames the argument for weaning America from it's dependence on oil in a new light. Chris Matthews remarked on Bill Maher's HBO program that the drive and demand for alternative, green energy technologies will likely increase, maintaining that this may be the best shot in the arm solar and wind power may get. This was a graphic and gross example of what oil consumption does to our planet and that we need to get ourselves away from the Middle East wells.


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M or M?

Miracle Whip has been attempting to usurp mayonnaise as the condiment of choice among sandwich makers and chewers with a gamy, faux-hip series of television ads featuring seemingly boneless teens and college freshmen flailing about to some click-track electronica while an announcer smugly declares that the new generation of brash alt-spreaders "Will Not Turn It Down!" Chief among my complaints would be that these crazy kids are a gooney bunch of waifs whose brains , collectively, have yet to develop that sphere that helps a nascent sense of "hip" into an appreciation for quality--I'd be offended, ticked off, pissed, angry and downright irritated if I were a generic young person, seeing my generation depicted as a graceless bunch of droopy trance dancers made to bounce like addled puppets on a string in the tribal worship of a product as truly wretched as Miracle Whip. It is an item that cannot decide what it wants to be--spicy? tart? sweet? tangy? velvety? It is an amalgam of the worst aspects of all these taste differentials--it ruins a perfectly good piece of sliced ham, it soils a fine piece of chicken if offends the tongue as it turns a chicken salad into a war crime. It's not that Miracle Whip "will not turn it down": it's more than the hapless among us, sans mayonnaise, cannot keep it down. So... why mayonnaise? It's the simplest math problem you'll encounter : it tastes good, and it tastes good on nearly everything you put it on, burgers, hot dogs, chicken salad, tuna, ham, cheese, oh god yes, it has the right texture, the alchemical brilliance of sweetness restrained by the right guiding hand of creamy texture, it is a pleasure on the tongue and the blend of oils, egg and spices compliments the flavors of the food it adorns, it meshes well with the bread it connects with, it is a condiment that makes the minute you take for lunch in an otherwise dreary day of bad news, late fees and bill collectors an island of sensual solution; nothing else matters for the fifteen or twenty-five minutes it takes to make the sandwich and eat it with a relish that reminds you that your senses are elements one must bring pleasure to. Mayonnaise brings joy to the lunch counter.

On Smoking

The genius of advertising is the way it can sell products to clients who have no practical use for products . One can get a fine example of how successful these geniuses have been with an online exhibit of cigarette advertising here, on a Stanford University web site. It's enough to make one salivate and to buy into the health claims the magazine notices claim for what has to be the most useless and dangerous product introduced into the consumer market. Ouch.I smoked for near thirty years , from the early seventies through 1997, less inspired by the barroom bathos of Bogart nursing his damaged romanticism between sips of bourbon , face obscured by ubiquitous laces of smoke, and more by rock stars, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and the like, odd-haired, angular and faces gaunt as the sides of sheer cliffs, musicians hanging out on the periphery of whatever mainstream their tour buses happened to be passing.

The period was, we know, still somewhat defined by the myth of the counter culture and the notion that things corporate were bad for the planet and yourself as well, but still few of us who grew our hair were willing to grow our own food, and still fewer were willing to forsake their Marlboro 100s or Lucky Strikes for ideological consistency. It was the ironic element of the drug taking of the day that many of us who dabbled in or became overwhelmed by chemicals often times defended our recreational use of illegal materials by citing that nicotine was a drug , it was fatal, and that it was legal, the same being the fact for alcohol.

It was hypocritical, man, and the squares, the man, the establishment had better rethink their pitch when it came to mewling forth about narcotics. Whether the nebulous collective I just named examined their attitudes again is unknown to me, but what I do remember was that the thinking insulated those of us in our denim'd cliques from some harsh facts and amounted to little more for us to flaunt convention and smoke, drink, toke, inject, drop, in all senses, imbibe. We were in the vanguard, weren't we?

In my case, rock stars died, friends got older or died, the music died, corporate marketing absorbed the particular tricks and whistles of all that hippie culture and the lot of us found ourselves in haircuts, with jobs, having our values sold back to us. And at the age of thirty five years old, divorced, fired, broke, I found myself still smoking two packs a day and drinking myself to a near grave. After an intervention in 1987, I went to a famous rehab in California, and smoking was the unifying thing among patients who other wise had nothing in common besides their addictions the resulting tales of wreckage they were attempting to clean up. We'd smoke during the meditation breaks, we'd smoke the five minutes we had between group meals and the next group therapy, we'd smoke on the dorm patio at night after the treatment day and exchange war stories of alcohol and drug fueled degradation while we puffed, exhaled, coughed, and continued with our stories. Deep wells of gasping laughter were had, and I do remember the desert night, talking to voices across from me in the dark, the only light being a full moon and the moving , cherry red tips of several cigarettes scurrying about like fireflies. Oh, smoking was the sacrament, it was the last link to a life I based on trying to imitate what someone else a bad boy was. Man, oh man.

In 1997, nearly ten years sober at the point, I was still smoking, frequently sick with colds that didn't seem to go away. I wasn't enjoying the cigarettes anymore, and was, in fact, tired of trying to be cool in any sense I thought it meant; I was too hold to get away dressing like a junkie guitarist, I wanted to act my age. I was on the bus in December, a rainy day, cold and miserable, and noticed various stores along the route where clerks were in the service entrances, standing in the shower, smoking away. Not unusual to note, of course, but no one looked happy or to be enjoying the drags they took off the cigarettes they lit in the cloud burst; they were smoking because they had to smoke, rain or no, cold or no, five dollars a pack or no, they looked like drug addicts, and quite suddenly I felt like one myself.Addicted to cigarettes. It was the "aha" experience. It was liberating. I quit that month, and haven't had a cigarette since.

DID SOMEONE KILL PAINTING?

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Back in the late Nineties I was involved in an online debate as to whether painting were a dead art , in view of the then emerging new digital media which promised to give artists a new canvas, a new palette, a revolutionary way of creating art that hadn’t been done before. I harrumphed and pouted and tried to be sage in my remarks, but there wasn’t much of anything I could offer to the discussion other than this: Painting will be dead when artists stop painting and when art lovers stop desiring to look at the work of past, recent, and current artists. So far, there are no so-described symptoms of paintings' impending demise. In any case, what is with the impulse for some to declare entire mediums "dead", as if a literal body had been discovered somewhere, knife in back, bullet in brain, i.e., "the death of literature", "death of the subject", "death of the novel", "the death of the author", "the end of history", "jazz is dead”,” history is dead", "rock is dead", and so forth. I've read these declarations over the years, some with, some without arguments, some articulate, others ruthlessly abstruse, and save for a momentary rush of certainty that the many threads of history are suddenly woven together to the precise moment that the respective professors are making a case for, one realizes that the activities still go on in strength.

Humans have a way of tending toward their business and their pleasures, in the ways that suit their needs and personalities, quite despite the cloudy forecasts of aesthetic morticians. There seems to be an easy habit-of-mind that wants to advance a more recent set of techniques, usually attendant on new technologies, only at the mortal sacrifice of older mediums. Co-existence seems a concept that makes a self-conscious avant-garde nervous. In any event, shall we say that there are things that can only be done with painting that nothing else, really, has come close to? Even if it did come close to achieving the effects, good oil or watercolor can, what makes the new medium anything other than an advanced species of clip-art and simulation. The body count, I think, is greatly exaggerated. Devalued, no, if the aim of new art is to re-create, faithfully, effects produced by painters. Sadly, this seems to be the only motivation behind many competently technologized artists whose work is often little more, really, than the reproduction of painterly effects. I'm willing to think these new medium artists are still wood shedding and experimenting with what they can do with their "new canvas" and "new palette", but it's plain that many have yet to make Real Work.

We have fascinating results that have an inescapable crisis of its own, an utter soullessness coming from any intrinsic lack of character apart from the shiny, show room sheen of simulacra. Clip art is the result, I believe, if that is the only impulse motivating the particular artist. Newer methods can indeed co-exist with older--it's all around us--when artists drop the show-offih instinct of duplication and instead reconcile themselves to the limits as well as the advantages of their particular form. The crisis, I think, festers on the other end. The death of painting not withstanding, it seems that painters long ago accepted the terms and strictures of their chosen craft, and are in a long and envious history that they can play with at will, add to, diminish, broaden, contract, what have you. No painter I know feel crunched or sickly because of the imagined malaise --human need to express itself perseveres and is acted upon whatever revisionist rhetorical brackets are set around them, trying to diminish their worth, relevance, or health. The death or crisis of their art is meaningless to the working artist. The announcements that arts or particular mediums are "dead" or in "crisis" are melodramatic inventions that comes from bad, over generalized criticism that's in a hurry. It's better to get on with the honest work of art making, and focus commentary on the interaction between art styles and periods. Technologized, digital art is the art that is having the crisis, if anything: a personality crisis and one wonders what his new art wants to be when it grows up. This is a real question: what is "real work?"

Work that artists manage to do that's unmindful of having to illustrate a critics' or a harried art historians' criteria. What that evidence is endlessly subjective, and will vary artist to artist, medium to medium, but it will be the work, I think, that seems the most self contained, mature, and complete, with all influences assimilated and artists experiences and personality full enough to inject an individual intelligence into the work. It will be the work that utters precisely the ideas the artist has about ways of seeing. It is art that works as art, not demonstrations of yet another manifesto. We're talking about professional adult artists here, not small children or plants that need tending. What makes a form of art- making grow are artists who dedicate themselves to their process, their work, and who focus their energy on how the medium they've selected for themselves. A healthy self-criticism probably doesn't hurt the production of new work either, as with the notable artists who can tell the difference between pandering to an imagined niche market, or a specialized audience that inoculates the work from honest appraisal, and the real work that is made quite apart from anyone's expectations or demands, except those of the artist. Good art-making is a rigorous activity, playful as it is, in whatever mode one operates out of. Everything else seems to take of itself if the art is good, worth being noticed. One advances into a their art with no real concern about making history--their obvious concerns are about making their art, with some idea of what it is they're advancing toward, and what past forms are being modified and moved away from. But the judgment of history--as if History, capital H, were a bearded panel viewing a swimsuit competition--will be delivered piecemeal, over the years, after most of us are dead, and our issues and concerns and agendas are fine dust somewhere.

The artist, meantime, concentrates on the work, working as though outside history, creating through some compulsion and irrational belief that the deferred import of the work will be delivered to an audience someday, somehow. That is an act of faith, by definition. The artist, painter or otherwise, also casts their strokes, with brush or mallet, with the not-so-buried-dread of the possibility that that the work will remain unknown, shoved in the closet, lost in the attic, and they will be better known for their day job rather than their manipulation of forms through a rarified medium. Less that democracies are anti-artistic than they are resistant to the notion that aesthetic concerns and artistic expression are reserved for a cultivated elite. Democracy rejects this sublimated priesthood on principle, and opens the arena, the galleries so that more who wish to do so may engage in the intuitive/artistic process and keep the activity alive in ways that are new and precisely relevant to the time--this is the only way that the past has any use at all, as it informs the present day activity, and allows itself to be molded to new sets of experiences. Art is about opening up perspectives, not closing them down, and that is the democratic spirit at its best. Otherwise, the past is a rigoured religion, and history is an excuse for brutal, death wish nostalgia. History, for that matter, is not some intelligence that has any idea of what it's going prefer in the long run--the best I can offer is that history is news that stays news, to paraphrase a poet, which implies that the painter who survives the tides and eddies of tastes and fashion and fads will the one whose work has an internalized dynamic that is felt long after the brush is dropped and the breathing stopped.

HELLO BARRY

Uncollected or Unloved Poems?

There's a nice piece by Jennifer B.McDonald in the New York Times' Paper Cuts book blog about publishers using the phase "Uncollected Poems" as  a subtitle. She correctly wonders why the word "previously"  went missing , noting that once a clutch of stray poems have been formally gathered, edited and published, they become, ahhhh, collected.Hailing a poetry book as either "Collected Poems" or,less impressively, "Selected Poems" offers the buyer the sense that the object in their hand is the result of a specific project, or a coherent chronicle of an especially subject-rich period in the author's life. Those evocations may be true to varying degrees, but packaging for the marketplace has as much to do with it; few of us wish to invest in an untidy and ill considered grab bag of verse.

The hope, I guess, for the "Uncollected" sobriquet is that might resonate with as much as authority as the previous two qualifiers.The intention being that these poems are distinct in their own right. But distinct exactly how? As in that they've been ignored, set aside, forgotten about or rejected over the years for ever-multiplying and varied reasons? "Uncollected Poems" sounds like a hasty euphemism for "unloved poems". They hadn't been collected up to this point for reasons of quality; I can't shake the feeling that "uncollected" suggest a batch of poems a poet might have tossed out if he suddenly found himself having to move to another location. The first thing to go is whatever one has no use for , or is no longer found of.  The

Cannibal Quietism

 We've had a surfeit of poems about teachers instructing students in the use of language, and it has become a tiresome game. Lesley Wheeler offers up the premise in her poem Oral Culture , the plot line so to speak, brandishes a few instructional vocabulary words , and then pronounces them, emphasises them for texture, sound, the way the resound in enunciated sequence. The aim, it seems, is to present these words as aesthetic things, in themselves, full of echos and thunderings that come off as both subtle and dramatic music , but which, despite their dictionary definitions, distance us from the grain of the image being accounted for. We are in an age old quandary--the further we parse words and the meanings they take on as individual terms link with other terms , we become less settled , less centered.

Wheeler's teacher recalls her own recollections of childhood, her memory comes alive with aromas and tactile reminders--but something is lost. The teacher deconstructs her own memories by nothing that the pleasant items that emerge from the stream of associations were not ageless examples of perfection.

The became flat, they went stale, the blessed things of growing up broke, splintered and eroded; this would be a neat turn around if we were reading this thirty five years ago and the context were a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem posing a less digestible version of the problem that texts, whatever their intended argumentative aims, contain their own counter argument. Poets Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman , Michael Palmer and a number of others foregrounded language as subject matter and problematized the notion of the lingua franca bringing a static totality to The State of Things. The State of Things, if they remain things that matter to an alert mind negoiating the daily happenstance, are not static, but fluid. The LANGUAGE Poets' various projects of exposing how the hard and slippier implications of codified rhetoric --overlapping lexicons that reduce the percieved self into an indentity that serves entrenched power-- leaves us with a body of work that makes us aware of that phrases we borrow to evoke our inner life are more like fashion items than tools of honest introspection. It's a daunting fact, and there remains a difficult beauty in this school's expressed discontent with the mortified traditions that came before it. In 2010, the method has become a conceit that becomes used for an over utilized irony--the words we use to inscribe the world with a precise definition to meaning and purpose only exacerbates the situation. Which leaves Wheeler no other option other than to go on parsing lexicons and experience until something like a profound boredom overcomes her.

Keep your pants on

It's springtime, the temperatures rise, the flowers blossom and the nostrils swell with the scents of clean air, a sweetness that hearkens you to younger, hardier, randier days. At the drop of a hat, when the instincts overcame your better thinking in tandem with a like-minded partner--heads and genitalia swelled with the flush of urge and there was no argument to stop the rearrangement or removal of over and underclothes. Desire had its logic, but it was without language or syllogism, no conventional tools at all; it was an eroticism of things in your surroundings being focused, like perspectives that vanish to the same point, the same conclusion; you have to get your nut. This moment in the day, after the stolen looks, the limping banter and sly insinuation, has been dictated. You vanish, you get your rocks off. And for the rest of your life you relive those moments, as there is in the accumulated memory the incidents that have the psychic tabs sticking out. The days at work, the conversations you find yourself having, your appropriate discussion with someone half your age set you up for visions of old youth and the energy stream you hadn't dipped into for years. The current race reminds of you of every erotic thing you'd performed; for a moment you find yourself slipping between dimensions, the conversation you're actually having and the bedtime story you're presently reliving.

BIG BOX ENCOUNTER

My student sends letters to me with the lights turned low.

They feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui.

Like intervening and kinetic and tumult. He strings words together

like he's following a difficult knitting pattern. He is both more

and less striking without a shirt on. I know this from the time

I ran into him at Wal-Mart buying tiki torches and margarita mix

and, flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic

shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned

to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest,

the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hip-bones. I write him back.

I tell him there are two horses outside my window and countless weeds.

I tell him that the train comes by every other hour and rattles the walls.

But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation

but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water. Like sugar in water.

I dissolve. He writes enthralling. He writes epiphany and coffee machine.

He is working in an office, which might as well be outer space.

I am in the mountains. The last time I worked in an office, he was ten.

I was a typewriter girl. I was a maternity-leave replacement for a fancy secretary.

I helped sell ads at TV Guide. I was fucking a guy who lived in a curtain-free studio

above a neon BAR sign on Ludlow Street, and all night we were bathed in pot smoke

and flickering electric pink light. Here, the sun goes down in the flame

of an orange heat-wave moon. The train thrums and rattles the distance,

and I think of his chest with the rounded tattoo in one corner and my youth,

the hollows of his hip-bones holding hard, big-box fluorescent light.

—Erika Meitner

Meitner's poem gets that layered desire right, exquisitely so, especially as she tries to talk about her young male friend's seductive use of big words while trying to study his shirtless chest and bone structure. She dissolves, she says, and her memories are no longer ordered by date, but become, it seems, a series of membranes she passes through. The connection with the actual moment is tenuous as the euphoric recall gives way to biographical detail, wonderfully, enticingly offered up here in the guise of bars, tiki torches, Walmart stores.  The community she lives and works in, for a moment, seem cruelly banal as the light of previous glories of skin loom large. The authority of the senses rules out any other possibility; for a moment, a fleeting moment, the promises one has made and the commitments one has taken matter, not a wit. But one is anchored to the moment they are in--the mate, the job, the children all require your attention. All you can do is step from the time machine, brush off the dust, return to the world at hand.

Not that, but this

I like to write poetry with long sentences, complicated somewhat with line breaks that are short and not precisely sticking with a rhythm a reader can dance too. I enjoy William's idea of the variable foot in reference to the practice of free verse; since he never strictly defined what how that variable foot is to be applied in a composition, I just assume my erratic posture is my variation on that lovely phrase's evocation. But there are doubters, the spontaneous police writing tickets , a violation of a familiar charge; this isn't poetry, it's prose in sheep's clothing. I will  not shrug and say "busted".

There is a  history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos, from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments.



What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry interesting is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artists remains, by nature, didactic ,chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that , as a species , they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's Doors of Perception.

The lecturing component is only as interesting as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp on innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is distraction, a diversion from the noise of he world. Poetry, even the clearest and most conventional of verse, is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my super hero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience were spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?

Notes in the night

Richard Rorty, in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" defines an "ironist" as someone who realizes "that anything can be made to look good or bad by being re described" (73). Are postmodern writers this kind of "ironist"? No more, it would seem , than any other writer scribing under the modernist tenet of "making it new", or to another extreme, 'defamiliarizing" (from Bahktin) recognizable settings , characters and schemes in a language that's meant to provoke readers to see their world in new ways. This is a modernist habit that the new, cubist, cut-up, stream-of-conscious takes on the world will sweep away past aesthetic interpretative models and lead one to a the correct formation of the world-- there remains a faith that language and other senses can apprehend and describe a tangible , material world and capture its complex composition, a "metaphysics of presence" that art can unearth.

Irony, in this sense, is usually contained within the story, a result of several kinds of narrative operations coming to a crucial moment of ironic intensity that then drives the story into directions one , with hope, didn't anticipate. Post modern writers start off with the intent of being post modern from the start, and rather than have their inventions gear us for a challenge to see the world in a truer light (contrasted against previous schools of lovely language but false conclusions), the project is to debunk the idea of narrative style all together.

Irony is intended to demonstrate some flaws in character's assumptions about the world, a description of the world that emerges contrarily after we've been introduced to the zeitgeist of the fictionalized terrain. Post modern writers are ironists of a different sort, decidedly more acidic and cynical about whether narrative in any form can hone our instincts.  It's a tenet of Modernism that in order for writing to be truly contemporary, it must achieve a level of difficulty that allegedly force the reader to reassess their take on experience. Impenetrability was encouraged, so far as the Modernist project encouraged any specific tendency among its early practitioners.

"Make it new" was a chief slogan at the height of the Modernist literary movement, courtesy of Karl Shapiro, and the works, assimilated into academic study, don't comprise the sort of literature that makes for lazy readers. Rather, it's techniques set up the ideal reader, say, "reared in the Modernist style", to grasp the manner and aim of a Postmodern writing, which again, I believe, in it's best expression, is an extension of the Modernist agenda, albeit tweaked about the edges with a bankrupt critical apparatus. The theory cannot keep apace with the actual imaginative writing: sorry, but many theorists seem like bright children adept at taking things apart who cannot quite put them back together in anyway that's useful, meaningful.

Words and Music

John Barth's short story, "The Night Sea Journey" from Lost in the Funhouse, is a strange little allegory that plays empty when inspected. As Bill mentioned earlier, the Heritage that's supposed to be passed on , in this instance, is only a grab bag of superstition, speculation and teleological gossip.  Substituting , presumably, a species of human fish for Christians and System-locked beings in general, we have a neat inversion of the collective self-denial that keeps a system working, churning.

It's a system here, a faith system pegged on the need to keep the population swimming to the unreachable Shore, that has all questions about existence channeled back to the anonymous need to keep the population treading water in the dark: we get traces of a theology that once might have sounded glorious, an ideology that might have once cast the future as bright and on dry land, but the disillusionment with the process is heard, the skepticism comes forth. It becomes nothing but a process for process sake: exhaustion, which Barth has used a key term in some of his essays on the problems of fiction narrative, hear becomes the theme of things being done for their own sake, unchanged to the conditions that exist at the margins of a self-perpetuation lexicon. The promise that the swimmers hold out, after the poetry of their plighted is played out, is that all will be well when they reach the shore, is revealed as bunk: it is a promise that will be kept only in the dark, when one is still blind, thrashing about.

__________________

The Hours works because author Michael Cunningham doesn't try in any obvious way to assert a connection between the women, other than a tenuous connection with Woolfe and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. It's the skillful use of the stream-of-conscious the connects the stories, really, the women and their time periods, the way in which the on set of depression and slowly inhibiting despair is explored in the ways that these women think about the world they live in.

Family, duty, loyalty to others, all the things that the characters have to be loyal to and whose cause the central figures argue for, are seen to come into a continuing conflict with personalities whose centers are eroding, slipping into darkness. Like Woolfe, Cunningham continually deploys the facts and the images of the external world, a sign that the alert mind is struggling to stay engaged with the world, but we see these images become abstractions, mere definitions , blurry and meaningless as the corridors get darker, colder.

Applying this to Woolfe herself, as a character, was a brilliant touch, perhaps critiquing the notion , the myth that one may write their way out of a chronically dour state. In any case, this trio of tales is delicately rendered, and the author's touch here is sure, if not invisible.
__________

Corea Concerto: Spain for Sextet and Orchestra
--Chick Corea w/ the London Philharmonic Orchestra featuring Origin (Sony Classical)

The word "pretentious" comes to mind, as well as "waste", in so much as Corea, one of the surest and most ingenious musician/composer talents alive, takes one of his most perfect compositions, "Spain" and elongates into a series of "movements", no doubt meant to explore new ideas, poetry, impressions. What he has here is near unrecognizable from the original, except when the orchestra kicks in with some obligatory figures: the improvisations from Corea and the worthy members of Origin are tentative at best--they sound like they are sitting next to insane wrestlers on a crowded bus-- and the piece, long, shall we say, stops and goes with no real dynamic emphasis or emotional wallop delivered, or even hinted at in the foreshadowing. Corea  should have known betterought to know better; he can certainly do better.

Rae Armantrout Wins The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Rae Armantrout has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Versed; it is a great and glorious event. I became aware of Rae Armantrout's  work in the Seventies while an undergraduate literature student at UCSD, and whatever value or lack of it one thinks the Pulitzer Prize has in terms of distinguishing the best work from the passably acceptal, I am glad that someone I know (if only slightly) has grabbed A Big Prize. It means not only that she will have here tightly constructed poems read and considered in a more mainstream context--the broader readership is now part of a discussion on poetics some of us have been having for years--but it gives the lie to the notion that her work, and the work of other poets falling outside the peripheries corporate press deigns to cover and review, is too difficult, alien, abstract or incomprehensible to bother an over taxed reader with. The idea that Rae Armantrout's work is difficult is, as has been remarked about "Ulysses", is made too much of. There are items, phrases, condensed cadences and references that need to be parsed, examined, considered thoughtfully , but as with Joyce's musicality , wit and sensuality, there is a tangible presence in Rae's work with which a reader can frame their own response.

1.  It's an old distinction that one notices in the best voices--the emphasis is more on creating a sense of things rather than making sense, "making sense", in this case, being that the one wants to define and contain experience as if it were a commodity. What Rae achieves (and what Stephen Burt spoke to in his New York Times review of  her previous collection "Next Life") is that the facts of our lives, the joy, the agony, the aches and illnesses, are too slippery in their larger implications to place within convenient brackets. She understands what happens when a recollected event and a later idea merge in the stream of the alert psyche.

Her method, perhaps, is the reverse of that of John Ashbery or A.R. Ammons,two poets who have, with frequent inspiration, written at length to suggest the collisions of subjective responses to the material plain.Their musings have different notions--Ashbery is ambling between the perfections of Ideal Types and the contradictions of felt experience and memory while Ammons prefers a direct address of how the senses fail the organizing mind as the years stockpile upon him--both write at length, inspecting each stone and exotic plant on their path, each otherwise unconsidered detail a topic sentence inspires, until they're satisfied that they've explored enough nuance, refined or rough hewed. Rae Armantrout has something more closely resembling radar; she gathers the precise details, chooses the right words; her poetry balances a breath taking clarity with the sense of the ephemeral, that what she isolates is fleeting , soon to be lost amid the stream of continuous thinking.  Rae Armantrout gets the exact moment when a history of impressions meet each other on the long highway. She places the reader in the moment, amid the particulars her poems highlight. The reader finds something of their story in her rigorously pared-back sharing. The readers get it, and it would be nice if her being awarded a Pulitzer indicates that larger media are done ghettozing poets. In the meantime, it's a good thing that she has the award. A very good thing.

Rachel Hadas and the turntable of history

Getting older has many things that bring us down, the most pervasive being, of course, that one has seen it all and said it all ; the consequence of lingering too long in this funk is having oneself consigned to a crowded gallery of elder cynics passing judgement on a younger generation's aspirations and inventions. This is avoidable, to be assured. The earnest cultivation of new adventures, new interests, new people of which and whom one might not have investigated at a younger age--the difference between generations , let us say, being that a younger crowd believes that history has a determined end which they can influence, and the older, which would come to equate human experience as analogous to basic cable channels subsisting on reruns of old TV shows who's plot lines and outcomes are variations on a small selection of templates-- offer a cure for the cheap sense of superiority of the been-there/done that variety.Rachel Hadas' dilemma isn't nearly as global, though, being described, rather , as a sort of free-floating depression , in her poem "Generic". The joys of reading a book to a six year old elude her; perhaps the book was read to her when she was young, fifty five years earlier.

The little boy who snuggles next to me
while I read him Millions of Cats,
and we meow together
"No, I am the prettiest!" "I am!" "I am!"
is five. I'm sixty. The book is eighty-one.
I have read it before.

Hadas elects not to offer miniature essays on the subject of the dissociation from her own experience and instead attempts and, I think, achieves an echo effect with this poem. While she reads the book in the animated voices , it's suggested, elliptically yet strongly felt in the absence of fuller explication, that as she reads the book she remembers and so hears the book being read to her from a previous decade. This crisply outlined introduction sets us up rather well to the narrator's psychology, the encroaching feeling of being estranged from the history and the ongoing events of her life. She is even aware of the terms she hs used to mark the episodes, the verbs and adjectives intended to make her experience unique and significant:

Durable, evocative, stale, weary;
renewable, exhaustible, and placid;
benign or neutral, shifty as the moon;
obedient to undeciphered laws:
What we take for granted
vanishes, reconfigures, disappears.

Her psychology turn the words against themselves, the irony being that their use is supposed to define what is worth holding onto from our life and so give the longer view of few of our journey a narrative quality that will resolve itself in an appropriately poetic fashion; the words themselves are reruns themselves, becoming terms of revision rather than words that mark the singular essence of specific deeds in particular circumstances. The Hadas narrator has not only done any and all the these things before, she has already used these words to contain the problematic dynamics. Language seems, in this revelation, not the means with which we understand the world and our experience in it but rather a convenient device we are clever with to catalogue and index our lives . There is no term pondering, no introspection;one will pull from experience when it's convenient, expedient toward achieving an end."Generic" is a poem about a nagging doubt finding a clear, articulate voice. The achievement of Rachel Hadas is her side stepping the attraction of rudderless introspection and isolating instead the odd remove one feels when what one is doing in real time is no more engaging than a broadcast drama one has seen before. There is , for me, a tangible feeling of dislocation. One can almost feel the curtain drop between the narrator and the events .

Who is afraid of poetry?

April again, National Poetry Month again,and we ask ourselves, in an attempt to make conversation among the the clan, whether poetry intimidates the average American reader. The general response ,from anecdotal evidence,is that Americans haven't the collective wit or attention span to read anything that's over detailed, elusive and allusive in the way a point is made, or which doesn't offer an easy cure for an media-influenced dread of nuance.  I don't think Americans are afraid of poetry; rather it's a matter of not many Americans, comparatively, think of poetry as a resource since we, as a culture, are not an introspective culture, but instead one that continuously looks forward to a future to be created. Poetry, so far as the general reader is concerned, is a matter of one being alone with their thoughts and structuring their experience in a narrative form, a narrative that not only chronicles events along a time line, but also the nuance of experience, the fleeting sensation of something changing in their psyche.

This requires making the language do extraordinary things to accommodate an uncommon interpretation of experience, and Americans, a people reared on the ideology of what can be done in the face of adversity, have no expansive desire to do something so impractical. Language is a thing meant to help us solve material problems, to achieve material goals, and poetry, a strange extension of linguistic twists and shadings, does nothing to put food on the table, put money in the bank, to further the quest to cure an endless variety of incurable diseases.

Poetry is immaterial to purpose, function, policy; the absence of larger audiences for poetry isn't about fear from a perception that it's a mode of expression that is the least useful among several the lot of us might select on a given day. There are those of us who would argue that poetry's lack of identifiable utility is exactly what attracts us to the form--I happen to think that , like Wilde, that all art is quite useless in practical application (save for the fact that I believe humans crave beauty in form and in expression) and adhere to Harold Bloom's running definition of what literature , in general, avails the reader : to paraphrase, literature (poetry) helps us think about ourselves. Americans , I think it's safe to say in the broadest sense, have no real desire to reside individually and psychically work their way to an "aha" experience with poetry as a conduit. We do think about ourselves, but more in terms of accumulation rather than an inner equilibrium. The measure of a man is his wallet, not the subtlety of his thoughts, and this a form of fearlessness that borders on insanity.

The Take Down.

What I'm saying is that
you ought not to park campers on your lawn,
tire tracks deep in the mud
slowly becoming merely mire
with each rain that happens by.
Nor do I endorse leaving old couches and refrigerators
in the alley three garage doors down
or dumping in on empty lot
where combinations of abandoned furniture
and appliances can stare
at the world that passes by them,
mute as if in unending astonishment
that anything comes to a finish.

What I am saying
is that you don't have to give away
all your clothes because churches
don't fill the pews as do movie theatres
or ball games during a series
where so much depends on ball being hit by a stick
that might fly over the cheap seats
and into a window, into history that is.

Religion hasn't been as good
as the movies in decades anyway,
and those kinds of ball games are rare , being ,
as it were, miracles true and factual only place
where prayer makes sense
and the game is more important
than what any man or woman wants
to with their appetites.
Find yourself a face to kiss
and leave the Laundry undone
just for one day,
wait until the net day off
to sharpen the knives for battle
(while I pray that day never arrives
for that reason), stop for a moment
and think about what
you've been thinking about.
and when you're confused enough,
come see me,
when I'll put
on some coffee
and we can read each
other from any book the house,
my treat.

Marcel Duchamp and Bob Perelman Stare Back at the Ready Mades

Reanimates, an idea from artist Marcel Duchamp idea, a classic Dada gesture he offered with urinals hoisted upon gallery walls, and snow shovels on pedestals. The point, though, was that the object became an aesthetic object, denatured, in a manner of speaking, from its natural context and forced, suddenly, to be discussed in its very “thingness”. The object becomes art by the lexicon we wrap around it, a linguistic default. We are forced to look at what's been joined and view them as phenomena instead of as common place things we use, pass by and think nothing otherwise. Quite remarkably, things intended for specific uses become extraordinary, we study them intensely and notice things that otherwise eludes us.

That may or may not play in the aesthetic of poet Bob Perelman, a poet associated with the Language school and a sharp critic of poetic processes and priorities (The Trouble With Genius, The Marginalization of Poetry). Not to speak too generally of what the Language poets have committed themselves to , it is safe to say that their project has been to foreground the language we use as subject, freeing the constructed, all-inclusive, autobiographical “I” from the rhetorical practice, and presenting a body of work investigating the ways our given tongue has been formalized and arranged so that only  so many concepts of what writers and readers can accomplish are available to the imagination. The Language poets are a rich and varied lot with quite a range of ideas about their work, and methods of writing their ideas down; Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Michael Palmer, Barrett Watten, Carla Harymann, just a few among a good number of others, are distinct poets with their methods of dismantling and reassembling the factory-issued approaches handed to us since grade school. Bob Perelman appeals to me in particular because it seems he gets into the Dada mood and welds the hard, metallic surface of the phrases that spin about in the advertising culture. Phrases, slogans, bits of instruction manual babble, a quote from a philosophical essay, tangential lit-crit speak--divorced from a context that apologizes and smooths over their laconic lack of meaningful signifiers , becomes a poetry in themselves, strange phrases and neologisms full of unspoken promise and potential, liberating forces and keys to imaginary heavens. 

Bob Perelman has the satirist instinct and has the skill to compose in these tongues, these conflicting pitches for one's attention and wallet, with an assured tone that tames the contradictions and inconsistencies, converts an unsubstantiated claim into finely honed vowels and syllables for an announcer to intone with his or her resonating, sweetly cadenced voice. Finding ourselves in a world where very few sentences that are written are cogent on their own, as remarks who are meaning and purpose can be inferred, Perelman is our spokes-poet, the first poet to understand that the entire culture and the population's attention span has been colonized by advertisers, banks, nervous senate committees. But there is more to Perelman's poems than merely shoving the phrases back into the mess from which they came-- there is the human part as well, the emergence of someone discerning themselves among the constraining turns. “Trees” is a fascinating, layered lyric of a camera, a family situation, the capture, and use of an image. Through it, one loses the sense of what just happened; are we all together in this place to be together, or to have our picture taken, and in turn have our experience and perception managed for us?

TREES

A melody composed of solid obstacles

Dictates itself onto paper. The sky adjusts

Automatically. The most popular prison

For sight is imagery. Light separated

From matter shines on a parking space,

A lane change. I think

That I shall never see without

Nameless grasses whispering generalities

Inside the object code which colors

Once removed at various distances

Spray onto my retinas. The proper

Study of trees is trees. A live-oak leaf

Lands upside down on a madrone branch.

Inside the curve of an ear

Each point contains all lines

Drawn through it by the insistence

Of a complete world of days. Any word

Flowers in the face of the climate's

Ornamental attacks. Moving parts

Produce the voice, the airplane,

The frenchfry. The baby on film

Wants to play with the camera.

" The sky adjusts/Automatically.” And what we are to take away from this encounter with one another is adjusted automatically as well, as the images of ourselves, the trees, the baby reaching for the camera, pivots on how well a designated technology works. If everything operates as the instructions promise, all is well and good, and it's possible to walk away from what should be a joyful encounter untouched by anything. It is a memory because we have right here, on film. If the camera failed, though, we need to ask ourselves, will be remembered it at all? And would be worth recalling if our camera didn't capture the image. Perelman seems aware, under the calm of his style, that we are after strange gods here. He suggests, softly but insistently, that we look at the phrases we use to describe our presence in the world, and to find our where those phrases came from. 

We are turned into objects ourselves, ready to have something sold to us, receptive and pliant. Whether the object is art as most understand art to be--the result of an inner expressive need to mold, shape and hone materials and forms into a medium that engages a set of ideas about the world, or unearths some fleeting sense of human experience -- isn't the point here. Ironically, art, generally defined as something that is absent all utility, any definable function, is suddenly given a sufficiently economical use, which is to keep an art industry in motion; it is the sound of money. Duchamp, and other Dadaists who sought to undermine this idea of art and its supposed spiritual epiphanies for the privileged few, instead furnished a whole new rational for art vending. Duchamp and Perelman might share the desire for another kind of heaven, a space where concepts, structures, and the like weren't handed to us like crisply packaged uniforms.

The MC5 in the marketplace

Never toss out your old suits, it's often said. You never know when wide lapels will become again. You also never know which grossly non commercial, limited appeal band will become sanctified in the market place. Guitar Hero introduces "Kick Out the Jams" by the MC5 to the guitar starved:





I saw the MC5s play in Detroit between 1967-69 when they played the Grande Ballroom and teen clubs and free shows around Wayne County, and there was a real dangerous, outlaw method in the way they did their business. They did things their way and the consequences be damned. Everyone in the mainstream press and the rock press hated them, and Elektra Records dumped them after one album after the band took out a full page ad in the local underground paper The Fifth Estate for it's first album, Kick Out The Jams. A local department store chain, Hudson's, wouldn't carry the album because the title song, because the song had the word "motherfucker" exclaimed at the start; the MC5, in a likely combination of integrity and ego, had the ad read

KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKER! And kick out the door of the store that won't sell you the MC5. FUCK HUDSON's

 To the horror Elektra Records executives, the band put the record company logo on the ad, which made it seemed as if they had approved of and paid for the ad themselves. I do paraphrase the exact wording of the ad, but it is faithful to the cadence and , well, spirit of the band's marketing approach. Hudsons' was perhaps the major outlet for new album releases at the time, and the record executive quite likely didn't want to be dropped from the store sales racks. The revolutionary 5 were dropped from the label in quick order.

 I am gratified that the MC5 are getting their due. The irony is that their music has had to be commercialized with things like Guitar Hero, meaning that the 5 have had to become as consumer friendly as the artists after them who cite them as a major influence.

A half minute of doubt

There are the times when, after bemoaning yet again a noted poet's latest poem-about-poetry and the attending self-admiration (or self-justification) , I am tempted to do my inventory and investigate the possibility that I've turned into a bored drudge for whom all the exciting things in the language have already haven't; I dread spending the rest of what I hope of are many years of life tossing soggy bombs at the poems that come from a younger generation of bards. I suppose it's a matter , partially,of the perennial search for a usable past--is there anything in the standards and tastes one  formed thirty years ago still workable in years where tastes and formulas have been modified to relevantly account for the alterations in the psychic landscape?   I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic.

The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of it’s own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflexing tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Punk rock

Malcom McLaren has passed away, the man commonly credited  by quick study journalists and water cooler culturati with creating  punk rock, in the form of The Sex Pistols. I usually sniff when I hear this; grand as they were, and visionary though he was, I thought they and their like were redundant to rock and roll's evolution. Rather than make something new, they reiterated old noise and pre-owned attitudes. I grew up in Detroit in the late Sixties, where the local bands included The MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and The Amboy Dukes, not-give-fuck punks who kicked out the jams a good decade before the Brits made what was punk rock into a design fetish. It's not that I  thought the Sex Pistols weren't called for, as the pretentiousness of the musicians and the gullibility of the audience had choked off the life force that made rock and roll exciting and worth caring about. Some of it might be laid at the feet of rock criticisms, since the advanced discussions of Dylan's relationship to Chuck Berry's everyman existentialist demanded a musical technique and lyrical concept just as daunting. This is the danger when folk art is discovered: it stands to become something distorted, disfigured and bereft of vitality. I was lucky , I guess, in that I was a fan of the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges long before the Sex Pistols caught the punk wave. They , and bands like Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath were a grounding principal--rock and roll is beautiful because it's energetic, awkward, and stupid, but profoundly so. There are "concept albums" I admire and still like, if not listen to, but I won't name them here. I am pleased, though, that the idea of the Album being a literary object has been dropped in a deep grave and had dirt thrown over it's bloviated remains. What we can thank the late Clarine for is reminding us that rock and roll is a loser's game, the noise of the empty stomache.

Life off line?

Artist and writer James Strum outlines his plan to leave the internet in Slate article where he confesses misgivings about turning 45 ; it's less about middle age than it is about having spent the previous decade and a half on the internet, both working and doing nothing important at all.A moving tale of middle aged anxiety, that naked moment of clarity when one realizes how much time has gone by in that fabled blur. Facts are, though, that the Internet is an integral part of our lives, intimately so, and swearing to go without it is likely to make life even more awkward than it already is. One could, of course, change their lifestyle and come to resemble a hardened survivalist subsisting solely on bare communicating essentials--newspapers, snail mail, land line telephones--but the amount of work and sacrifice required to sustain it makes me think that one , after a period, will likely come to a second moment of bewilderment and wonder what it was they were trying to prove. Difficult as it may be, the answer is that one needs to accomodate the technology that is the connecting tissue of our times and learn to use this tool as a means to get out of the house, away from the computer, engaged with the world. Being on line is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Finality, Beginning

The Day You Left / Mammogram  in Slate intrigues me.

This isn't so bad a poem, but it is awkward, the way it begins in the middle of a description , only adding specific detail and the associated metaphor in slow, deliberate packages of ambiguity. It is exactly like coming in late for a lecture and trying your best to suss out the meaning of terms, the importance of incidents, the interconnection between the highlighted portions. But while we slavishly attending to the imagining of back story , situation and how they inform the narrator's choice of confounding allusions, poet Terri Witek does a capable job of not giving too much away. We know only that which she allows us to know tangibly; the rest of the poem's sequence is something of a daze to an absent friend or mate , and the absence hints at the vanishing of all things certain. There are probes, there are scars, there is fear that what was young , vital, yearning is now aged and now conspicuously revealing the terms of decline .




So we're relieved both worlds include

only the grayish skies they drift through

and just one cupola or darkened hut.

These last, by signaling each other,

can gather, as the great head of Buddha

does from his amazing topknot,

all tender, contradictory feelings.



So what to do, rage, rage against the dying of the light, or slip into a cocoon of morose self pity and regret. Better to be the Buddha and embrace both the rage and the sorrow and merge them into a fluid state of being, a psychic equilibrium that might be accomplished with the acceptance of the exact facts of one's contradictory impulses and the inevitable death we are guaranteed. The body is the perfect analog of the earth, and will return to the earth at the final moments, ready to rejoin the great cycle of being and make another life possible.

There is, I think, an argument the narrator is having with herself, simultaneously mourning the loss of what had been anchors of certainty in her life--a mate, friends, her health an positive attitude--while at the same time appreciating a larger sense of things. She is, I believe, in the process of convincing herself that she is still situated in a framework that gives her life meaning, or at least certainty. It's not clear, though, that the narrator is entirely convinced, and this may well be merely a snippet of an ongoing monologue. Lack of resolution is an element I enjoy in contemporary poems--I dislike pat resolutions through lazy analogies or writing program tricks of how to get out of hopelessly muddled dead ends-- and Witek presents her protagonist as someone we come upon , in mid thought, and whom we leave, with her thoughts and contemplation, perhaps no where near the serenity she desires. What is tantalizing is the idea that her thinking, her considerations are the process itself with which she remains sane, balanced, and that this is less about the issue of the Mammogram and the abandonment than it is about how a good any of us are constantly rearranging the priorities and values in the rooms of our interior lives as an ongoing effort to keep from being overwhelmed with each bit of news that portends discomfort, inconvenience, finality.

The lop sided divide

Poet Amy King went to some effort to compile some discouraging statistics regarding women writers and the ratio of literary awards given between men and women. The survey, published here in Willa, show that for all the talk about the great distance women have come since the bad old days, the lion's share of the top prizes , with the attendant status and acclaim, still go to men.  For all the talk of progress in the task of leveling the playing field, not much distance has been gained.

A large part of the problem, perhaps intractable, is the nature of the awards themselves; most of the ones we think matter–the Nobel, The Pulitzer, The National Book Award, The PEN Awards– were founded by male editors , who created categories and criteria reflecting their aesthetic, which is male, straight and, for all they knew, the single standard by which other writers are to measured. Women writers have made gains in terms of critical reception and the receipt of awards, but the standards by which women are judged, I fear, is whether they write as well as a better known male.

Lorrie Moore is constantly compared to John Cheever, Nikki Giovanni cannot escape being contrasted against Amiri Baraka; well intentioned critics try to explain the inevitable alignments, but the enterprise of letting the girls into the boy’s domain seems a faithless affirmative action move. I am reminded that Dick Cavett had said to his guest Susan Sontag that her name is unavoidable linked to the term “intellectual”. Sontag responded that the journalists doubtlessly think they are doing her a favor by telling readers that she’s a smart woman, but noted that male writers don’t need their introductions so qualified. She said that no one felt compelled to say that Norman Mailer was an intellectual when his name came up. It was taken for granted. The sad truth is that I think this onerous habit of keeping women writers at the margins will continue until there is a new canon formation.

Bachelder and Boyle Spoil the Party

Tortilla Curtain

a novel by TC Boyle

Culture clash is the theme in Tortilla Curtain , and leave it TC Boyle to go beyond the abstract curtain of statistics, policy wonkery and three-hankie tragedy mongering and provide the reader instead with a contradiction that is harshly comic; well off Southern Californians, nominally liberal in their politics, are forced to deal with an illegal couple who are in the most dire situations. It works to the degree in that the suburban pair preferred to have their causes at several layers of removal , preferring safe memberships in organizations forever raising money for non controversial progressive causes; a check or a credit card donation was the exercise of their social responsibility, an acceptable penance for what is largely a consumerist lifestyle. Boyle does not sugar coat, euphemise nor glorify the awful trials and fate of the Mexican couple that had stolen over the border looking for a better life. Against a backdrop of  sunshine, opulence and Conspicuous Consumption, Boyle tenders life at the margins, at the edges of glittering downtowns and cascading suburbs. Boyle is stinging and blunt in the way he describes the ordeals economic desperation that drives good people. He is unsparing at offering up a priceless, painfully recognizable banter of a privileged psychology that inspects the hard facts of injustice and responds by trying to worm their way out of any sense of responsibility for others less well endowed.

U.S.!
a novel by Chris Bachelder

Chris Bachelder is a lovable prankster who likes to turn the nicely fitting glove of literature inside out. while the rest of us are looking for meanings and various forms of significance in the interior decorating of conventional fictional devices--to this day, we all yearn to have poets and novelists to tell us The Truth-- Bachelder prefers to spray paint on the props and show us the cluttered backstage of these settings. And better yet, he rather likes in tying the shoelaces together of the pompous, the serious, the bizarrely sanctimonious. "U.S.!" has him imagining a world where the true believers in an American Socialist Revolution manage, through some vaguely revealed ritual of magic realism, to bring the dead activist novelist Upton Sinclair back to life; back to life the poor, steadfast, solemn socialist does, looking increasingly awful and putrid at the edges, going on the lecture trail, writing and publishing more of his cardboard narratives, trying to convince an amazingly uninterested citizenry the exact nature of what's killing them. Nothing comes of this, as expected, and the intrepid Lewis finds himself talking himself hoarse , only to find himself being killed violently and then ingloriously resurrected yet again.

A surreal fish-out-of-water story, Bachelder has a perfect ear for duplicating the static prose of the late novelists, and excels at demonstrating the striking contrasts between those who think that literature can make populations shed their entrenched and deeply rooted versions of Bad Faith and rise to the selfless cause of The Common People; this is a story of where the idea of the progression of history toward a final and just time, intersects with a culture where history does not end anywhere at all. Rather, it splits off into many tributaries, a crossroads every five metaphorical miles. Sinclair Lewis, tragicomic figure he is, stops at each of them, scratching his head as to which road to take.