Rae Armantrout Tonight at D.G.Wills Books

D.G.Wills Books: "Acclaimed Poet

Rae Armantrout
will read from her new book
Versed
Saturday, February 21st, 7pm .

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: “Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience.” Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed. Rae Armantrout is Professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of ten books of poetry."

A poem by Peter Dragin

One of the grand things of being a minor poet is that one gets to make friends with those who are just better poets, but interesting and utterly cordial folks. Peter Dragin is one of these folks, a writer with whom I was in the 1996 anthology Small Rain: eight poets in San Diego. with an elegantly Buddhist drift who has the ability to frame an irony or adjudicate contradictory perceptions with an elegance I find marvelous. I have simply wondered time and again just how he can make his associative leaps without leaving a long trail of language in his wake; it's not that he's getting to a point in his poetry, he's arriving at a destination.I've been struck by a particular poem while re-reading sections of the anthology, "There Are No Alternative Fuels", appropriate to the current alarm of global warming and financial meltdown.

THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVE FUELS
Peter Dragin

We are all in all afloat

in the empty space

of our atomic flesh:

presence once arrived

greets presence

ever arriving

in the house

made of heat;

in the forest's

hospitality to

the rising sun's light,

in prime ordered

stillness and silence

where birds wing and

make song as they warm

dwells the work.

Each compression and expression of lips, teeth and tongue,

imagine it makes one dawn,

imagine brain's measure

in vibrant silence and heat;

we are all

Ancient in Days, so

tell me what you could

possibly want

from torching the Amazon,

the rape and mutilation

of every family

tribe and nation on earth:

what's your pleasure?

A car of your own?

Peter, it seems to me, identifies us all as creatures requiring heat to survive just as the planet requires the heat of the sun to thrive and sustain it's life cycles, but confronts what happens when we want more heat than what we need. We become drunk on what it is combustion can power, and we assume a kind of entitlement to having resources used to drive our convenient technology. We are the same, he writes, "We are all in all afloat /in the empty space of our atomic flesh", linked to a seemingly unlimited chain that links us to every living thing and every particle of air, but we have forgotten that our lifestyles, not just our individual actions, have consequences. Our economics and the popular culture it sustains is destroying the fertile ground every species being and living specimen require to live and reproduce.  It's a world seared by the accumulated residue of whole cities, suburbs, country sides full of citizens letting their cars idle , their air conditioners run, their televisions blasting, the inert remnants of coal and oil fires falling on our skins, choking our pores, infecting our lungs, darkening the sky, murdering a planet that was once balanced. The Eden that Peter imagines here is mythical, to be sure, and it seems he sets this up to make a point that comes straight ahead, catching you surprised. So, here we are at the end of the world that didn't have to come, and what was this sacrifice all for?

Our right to get and run our "stuff"?

The past never happened

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a couple of years ago that the world he now lives in less nice, less patient, less sane than the world he grew up in. Typical for columnist faced with deadline without a lead line, the writing machinery shifts into automatic pilot. Brooks' machinery on this day is a time machine, where we find a wonderful country called The Past. Brooks seems to visit there quite often, perhaps with a wish to be represented in better days by having his profile caught on canvas by a visiting Norman Rockwell. 

The general drift is that maybe Americans were smarter than we are now, that there was a classier way of comporting yourself through both "good wars" and less dramatic circumstances by an adherence to a private code of integrity, that magazines and publishers and the like weren't afraid to offer up features on art, opera and serious literature as means to improve the soul of its readership. Sigh...Brooks must have been having a John Cheever moment, full of diminished, muted light, chiming sounds and the smells of fall , only unlike Cheever, who realized that such security found in the lap of absurd privilege is fleeting and not a panacea for the stress that creases the soul, our columnist seems to believe the mythology of his own youth. Cheever, a noted alcoholic who conquered his affliction for the sauce late in his life brought from that experience the notion that nostalgia, untrammeled, untamed and wallowed like warm mud, is a slow and odious death of the spirit. Rather than rage, we get sighs and regrets, rather than laughter, we get weeping. Brooks reads as though he's on the border of crossing into the land of What If... Interesting, of course, that he places his nostalgic wanderings in the page of old magazines, when there was much less media to tell us how the world worked and what it all meant. It was easy to flip through these pages from decades ago and be able to conceptualize the world as a place where only a limited number of significant things happened from week to week; this was reality presented to us as lateral narrative. 

The truth is not that the world used to be better and has become worse, more coarse, but rather it's gotten bigger, continuous, multi-headed, sleepless, with a limitless range of Internet, cable and satellite venues to tell us what in the world is going on, with limitless slants, angles, perspectives, interpretations and fanatical absolutism to color each and every report. Brooks mourns the death of the Grand Narrative, the unifying but frayed line that connects the progress of our race through time, and finds himself upset at the surfeit of smaller narratives that have their particular ideas of history, culture, religion, political expedience. Brooks has a bad case of Post Modern Condition. A typical symptom is the writing of columns like this one that, while well phrased and richly detailed, actually has no message other than that things aren't what they used to be. The harder lesson after that is realizing that things never were they way they used to be.

Poe's Memory from Before Birth

It would be a mistake to approach Edgar Allen Poe with the expectation that there's a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems.He might insist that there is, in his essays like "Eureka" that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker. He wasn't a thinker, but he did give articulation to undercurrents of human desire that have had, perhaps, a farther reaching effect in the culture than any straight explication could have.In any case, I think it a mistake to approach Poe with the expectation that there's a solid intellectual argument occurring in his poems.He might insist that there is, in his essays like "Eureka" that have been unearthed over the decades by scholars trying to bring the poor Poe man up to par with the smartest literary sorts, but the fact is that Poe was not much of a thinker.

He was a , as a poet, a virtuoso of leaping rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could suggest the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects, but he was also a a genius of mood, despair, obsession; much of the time what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision.(One does admit, though, that his dissociation of sensibility in the sheer sensory overload of decay that made his metaphors and similes ripe with rot likewise sacrificed sense and logic and as often as not became a species of hackwork, an exercises of hackwork the writer of which tried to elevate to greatness by extreme bouts of overwriting the same limited scale of ideas.)"The Raven", "Lenore", "Annabelle Lee" are fairy tales for depressives, explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough.

Poe was a precursor of decadence to come, through which beauty had been redefined as something being achieved only in a living thing or object's point of decay. Poe's is the poetry (and stories)that gave rise to the notion that funeral detail and a desire for the last nap called death are attractive and to be desired, and suggesting that the the dark side was actually a means to achieving a higher aesthetic being.

Poe's work is about disintegration, evaporation, dis corporation in all manner, where expertly honed rhymes and rhythms of his writings disguise but then reveal the burning, churning glory of pure form, energy, freed of the bondage of corporeal existence. Poe wrote quite a few essays outlining these ideas, particularly "Eureka" and "The Philosophy of Furniture". In his fiction, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is his most vivid and brilliant realization of his idea of metaphorical entropy.He was a , as a poet, a virtuoso of rhyme and alliteration and had a chiming quality that could suggest the phonic equivalent of fifes, flutes, bells and other kinds of sparkling effects, but he was also a a genius of mood, despair, obsession; much of the time what the artist explores and renders exposed in terms of material we learn from is not the result of conscious decision."The Raven", "Lenore", "Annabelle Lee" are fairy tales for depressives, explorations into a world where everything has run down and had the joy sucked out of it; the correlation with the bruising details of his own rearing is obvious enough.

In one of his essays, Edgar Allen Poe summarizes one the essential elements of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with "the memory from before birth", a slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place and there was nothing of the distortions or crass money, family, or religion to make us nervous, devious, only half alive (if "alive" at all). The upshot of his baroque hypothesizing was, to be sure , our constant and at times overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stress less state, a return to the womb, perhaps; in any event, his misgivings were a desire for sleep from which one needn't wake up from, death in other words.

Following suit are Poe's peculiar interest in things decadent and decaying, those thin , reedy and tubercular characters of diseased gentry and errant aristocratic stock who hang on to the waking life by a mere thread, effete and defeated and gracefully blended into the material realm, waiting for gravity to take its toll and to become themselves receivers of the dirt nap, freed of the binds that only punish you for having nerve endings.

There was, among the decadent writers and artists following Poe, a literal worship of an aesthetic principal that the greatest beauty was in a person or a thing in it's decline, when it was letting go of the struggle and was reduced to it's basic, most true and frailest form. An aspect of this, I suspect, was envy of the declining aesthetic object, be it a human or a diseased elm; a deep and permanent rest awaited them, and death would be that thing that gives the lie to the certitude of philosophy or economic determinism that insist that life must forever be thus, a certain way, without change. Those who die have escaped, and there are no arms to bring them back to suffer more with the rest of us pining over a grave.

Poet Patricia Traxler gets all this wonderfully in her poem The Dead Are Not in this week's Slate, succinctly in her poem The Dead Are Not; as rob and others have already remarked, the poem is brief and each finessed line conveys the complicated, conflicting and confused set of emotions one
journeys through as yet another death comes closer to one's inner circle of confidants and family. Indeed, the dead are not dead yet,

Always they take
their time, and we wait
politely, dreading
how real it will
have to be, sooner
or later, and at the
same time longing
to know that reality.


There are arguments one has with the departed, negotiations still in session, curses and protests of undying love are uttered, self-recrimination and blaming goes on for days and nights until one tires of the their tears and breathes easier because sunrises still come inspite the weight of grief. We mutter to ourselves that the dead are
"in a better place", that they "felt no pain" or that
"...at least they died quick..." all so we get on with our lives and our responsibilities, and yet an echo of our accepting rhetoric stays with us as we shoulder our daily responsibilities, that "better place" doesn't sound so bad, and we become envious and petty all over again, we blame the dead for being cowards and laggards who would do anything to shirk their duty, and we come to envy them and that place they've gone. Gravity takes its toll, our bones ache, the mailbox is filled with bills, someone else you know has told you they have a fatal disease, your back hurts like shit:

Nights, as we reach
to switch off our bed lamps
and close our eyes,
we dare it to take us
into its mouth
that smells of tar,
saltwater, sludge,
take us up then let us
tumble endlessly,
blameless again
and helpless as any new life
forced out for the first time
into the terrible light.

Traxler gets to the center of that guilty little secret
at the core of grieving, the scourge of envy and the many faces and tones of voice it takes. Without metaphysical baloney, faux piety, or even a tone of anger, she writes in the cool, reflective calm of someone who has investigated their feelings and discovered an unknown fact about their thinking. This poem has the remarkable clarity of genuine self-sight, unnerving in its tone, beautifully expressed. Her skill gives us the chance to see something very private, unobscured by clouds of delusion. A very fine poem.

TV makes you nervous

There are those smartypants lovers of popular culture who've marketed the idea that television makes us smarter. I'd counter that the boob tube, now an accessory to larger telecom media tentacles, makes us more nervous;there's the frequently made error of thinking that heightened awareness of what's going about you for an increase intellect. Rather, I think it makes for the kind of overwhelming where the raw input becomes a torrential blur ; static , in other words. Television used wisely diverts the smart mind when it's time to uncork , but it becomes a nagging, noising chain of it's own accord.

TV has succeeded in making us measurably dumber. Not stupider, mind you, just dumber, which is tendency to accept mediocrity across the board in the kind of false-consciousness that embraces the equality of all cultural matters and mediums .God has a cruel wit if what we have are real people with fake lives watching TV shows full of fake people acting out real ones. Social anxiety disorder is a real condition, though we dispensed with the trend of making every discomfort a disease and just referred to sufferers as either existentially perplexed, or more simply, "neurotic".

Any good post-war coffee cooler philosophe knows the cure to the constant fretting and despair: GET A LIFE, or at least create one. In the current age, we can start with turning off the TV and getting a library card, for nothing makes you smarter as well has reading books , one page at a time, at pace where you're allowed, or rather compelled to develop sound thinking. TV has replaced the ability to abstract with the mere capacity to summarize, which is the difference between synthesizing information and formulating a solution to a problem under inspection, and the other merely a form of inventory taking, hardly more than putting everything in specimen jars, labeling them, and categorizing them in a method that renders the information inert, useless, and mere clutter. We're coming to approach ideas like statistic laden sports fans who have amassed data very quickly but have nothing they can do with it. TV, as fine and brilliant as some of the drama has become, does not provide for a structure through which critical thinking is possible, as would the reading of books. With the latter cannot argue with the screen, cannot add to a conversation under way. It remains entertainment best assessed with other disciplines hopefully read from books that were thoroughly interrogated by personalities that are aware that images are fleeting and forgotten, but words are forever and therefore powerful.

It's misleading to argue that TV overall is better and more brilliant than it was in the past and that as a consequence viewers have become smarter as they interact with the subtler and more complex programming. To my mind, the ratio of quality programming to the rot is about the same, ten percent to eighty percent (in descending order); those shows that one isn't embarrassed to admit to watching--Sopranos, The West Wing , et al--are better than the fabled Hill Street Blues, but the promise of cable television never materialized as you might have hoped. With some exceptions, we have five hundred channels with nothing to watch, to paraphrase Springsteen, and what we have, really, are millions of viewers who are knowledgeable about scores of things of little consequence at all. Being able to link the difficulties with the goon show that was the Michael Jackson trial with the daily debacle of the O.J. Simpson murder case in the minutest detail is not the same as garnering information that would help you devise better ways to educate, employ and protect a community. Television only makes you smarter about television, and I chance it to say that what people remember about Hardball are Chris Matthew's volume and how well or badly his haircut might have been, and not the details of his questions to his political guests.

The situation hasn't made us any smarter in ways that make interaction more successful; most of the discussion that one places so much stress on happens online, alone, in private, which more or less reduces the phenomenon to the consumption of pornography.

Stephen Metcalf and the Decline of the West

Rock criticism had a heyday in the sixties when the primarily male likes of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, and Robert Christgau combined their counter-culture hedonism and the civil-rights informed progressive spirit and composed an ecstatic body of writing that supposed that rock music was more than a newly arrived art form, it was the future itself singing to us. Those of us old enough to remember can replay our favorite bits of prose that underscored the historic struggles embodied by the Beatles v The Rolling Stones or the creative accounting of Bob Dylan on the plight of our collectively bedraggled spirit. What of all that? 

Well, there was some excellent writing, deluded as much of it tended to be. Greil Marcus has become an ersatz cultural critic who chases around Bob Dylan's reputation in much the same fashion as the later writing of Harold Bloom rides Shakespeare's coattails, Dave Marsh has become a dour Methuselah, serious and dull as a paper clip, Robert Christgau has at least left the past behind and continued to listen to and write about new music, and Lester Bangs, pour sainted Lester, is dead as a doorstop. Not that rock criticism has stopped being written or that there's nothing good being said about younger artists. But their times when the younger critics read as if they're performing an Andy Kaufman-like parody of an older generation of serious reviewers. It's disheartening when you discover these guys aren't kidding. I've come across the latest case in point is Stephen Metcalf's hand wringing piece in Slate about Bruce Springsteen's performance at the Super Bowl. Springsteen had sinned somehow, and the additional crime, from Metcalf, hints at, was that The Boss couldn't sense the beleaguered critic's reservations through the ether over the digital transmissions. Bad dog! I am not a Springsteen fan and have written for years on the fact that the good man is severely overrated by babbling pop pundits like Metcalf ( the likes of whom seem unable to even take a dump without summoning summaries of zeitgeists past, present, and oncoming), but I do have to say that Bruce isn't required to live up to any coterie's collective fantasy about what his "purpose" is. 

Metcalf here seems increasingly like those noisy, bellicose, and useless color commentators who shout statistics and jargon-clogged truisms over the airwaves while the real players, like them or not, are doing the best they can on the field. The piece had nothing to do with music and everything to do with the author's sadness that he's older, more cynical, and just a little bitter that he aged his way past his earlier zeal and optimism. Springsteen still plays music with much the same spirit that animated him when he was a much younger man; I don't care for his music or lyrics to any significant degree, but I do admire his honesty and his refusal to let age depress his vitality. 

Constipated depression is what oozes between the sentences of Metcalf's mewling essay. The astonishing thing is that somehow he seems to hold the Boss accountable for not aligning his performance on the author's soured mood. This is not heroic criticism on the level of William Hazlitt or Matthew Arnold; this is sophistry on a par with the snobbish sniveling of Dave Marsh. As far as TV performances go, it was good, quite good, but Metcalf is just an inconsolable sourpuss because he didn't get his standard Transcendent Effect. But what galls me, really, about the diatribe is the author's odd conceit that he knows intimately what the "National Mood" is and how anyone should behave in a downswing. Springsteen is there for his fans, the ones who pay to see his concerts and buy his records, not the likes of Stephen Metcalf, who wants music written and performed by others to a soundtrack for his personal gloom and disgust. Plus, it's absurd to go on the way he did; if he thinks Springsteen was inappropriate in his performance, why didn't Metcalf chide The Steelers for daring to win the game? Would writers be out of a job if they decided to grow up?

2 poems for Valentine's Day

I Like the Hat

The articles of faith
are written in
an ink
that looks
like B movie blood,
but this isn't
a movie,
'though 'tis a script
in rehearsed real lives
whose lines
come trippingly
from the slightest of clues.



"Do you like my hat?”
you asked, feigning vanity,
high beam eyes
looking at me
like I were an alley,
a short cut home,
"Do you think this outfit
is myself external.
or was it just
the sales pitch
I was attracted to?"



I was shaving
a mustache that
refused
to mature

and I was grimacing
at the feel
of the snipers' tug
of the blade
caroming over my skin
when you popped your head
in the bathroom door
and asked the
question.

I dropped
the blade
into the sink
and ran the hot water
until
all
the mirrors steamed.


"I like the hat" I said,
towel in hand, face in towel,
"I love the hat,
I love the dress,
and
I even like you,
and I find your
whole attire
is you
under floodlights
of moon and stars,
full and courtly,

at the beach
on the end
of a long pier
where short walks
took us
where we lost ourselves
in chatter
and my hand found your nylons
while waves beat the pylons
and your hat
went soaring

over and into the water
as your feet
dangled in the breeze
in a whole other direction,

"No,
it wasn't the sales pitch your fell for,
it was the sales man
falling for you

and forced
to speak the truth of beauty as it was presented,
he wanted to dress you in hats
and gowns and long white gloves
and imagine lives
in alternative universes
taking the clothes
off you
at the close of days
at the end of piers,


"I love you
with or without the hat
and threads,
that much
I know by heart."



This isn't a movie,
but I can't think
of anything
else to do.
I dropped the towel
and looked
at you
as you dropped
the hat
and some more
and we stood there half undressed,
taking in views
embracing the ivory of enamel,
your legs pointing to the door,
you
taking me in.


--------

From the top of your head


From the top of your head
flowers grow that I've never seen
in the nature of my asking
the meaning of this thing, so beautiful, the wind.

The wind in all uses highlights
the shift of your hips
leaning against rocks, the meaning of this,
the earth, the mother of the deals
that have us eating out
of the hands that pick the roots of your hair
that goes on growing like flowers on hills
with all the houses we 've never lived in.

A clap of thunder is applause enough for pausing
to smell the turpentine that revives the hem and haw
of the wood under our shoes,
rainy nights are ovations and the trance
of still looking into your eyes
where I've always seen them,
on pyramids, in circles,
thirsty yearning.

From my hands comes ruined meaning
about hammers and nails and the holes that made them,
I've stared at your face on the ceiling all night,
water flows where there is no resistance,
insistence makes me forget and remember your names,
every center has a heart
and every heart is broken.
Into your face t
all roads split down the middle,
the wind is a whisper
and a rustle of notes
coyotes cry
in the wake
of our progress,
so beautiful, the wind,
and water rolling
in circles, in circles, in peace.