Shot with his own gun

Andrew Hudgins wants to read peace marchers the Riot Act, as his poem "Summer of '09" makes clear enough. One assumes the narrator, a peace marcher himself, has ,by the time he comes to narrate this laundry list of  fascist ills, had a conversion experience. It is less bitter than it sarcastic, though, less a poem than an excuse to make another list of data he's gathered about an oppressive government's brutal crushing of dissent. Hudgins narrator is the idealist, a citizen mounting a symbolic protest against war as an institution who, as he details in negative integers, the painful terrors those citizens locked in country are subjected to in very material ways. Self criticism is a fine activity as far as it goes, but for all the absurdity he casts the laughing protesters at the peace rally in their being grossly removed from the horror they seek to vanish, Hudgins insulates the terror even more with the typical poet's mistake, IE trying to make the subject more convincing with an over blown language. He pulls out the megaphone, ramps up the language, and addresses the troops from the other side of the field.

—fascism's

implacable penitentiary memes

of sadism and certitude.

Hudgins intends to indict the naive here, but editorializing with Marxist Study Group about the awful ways of repressive regimes makes their sins more unreal , not more believable. Hudgins' All-Thumbs projection of his disgust with the self importance of protesters who know nothing of the real situation would be comical if it weren't for what I take to be factual basis of the did-not examples he peppers this squib with. From interviews, perhaps, biographies he's read, things he's actually seen, it's all very real and horrible, and perhaps Hudgins might appear somewhere in print and online to lay out his sources, undisguised by the burden of poetic art. Hudgins might not have intended to criticize the protesters, but that is what came across, although he tried to phrase his misgivings as self-criticisms. Something is lost in the stream of negative did-nots that highlight the horror of the State where the war is fought. He ends up speaking for all the protesters and implies the privileged position with which to protest is a universal characterization. Liberal guilt, perhaps, intense self consciousness, the inner turmoil of having so theoretical filters choking off one's moral instinct. Hudgins is tending to wander into Susan Sontag/ John Berger territory. He might have been trying to get across Foucault's point that pain and punishment become a part of a victim's body awareness that in turns defines a system of repression that operates invisibly and , perhaps, as an expression of those impulses within nature that determine a species' ability to thrive or tendency to die off. The metaphysics is fine stuff for a poem, I suppose, but the discourse ought not come in the guise of a missing index card from a lecture. I am more convinced each time I look at this that Hudgins didn't know what he was trying to do here; this is one of those things that begs for a reworking.

in their views that photograph or depiction of any sort insulates the actuality of what's being dipicted and winds up being less real, thus hampering or preventing outright the potential for any real change to take place. Hudgins' variation would be that the act of protest against an unjust war turns into a spectacle, a collective diversion where the issues are carnivalized, a citizenry's outrage is diffused , and the original horror goes on, unabated. This intriguing Marcusean insight, which he addressed as "repressive tolerance"(simply the idea that the State's allowing dissent to occur unmolested saps revolutionary impulses among the oppressed) is a handy trap, however, as many otherwise insightful Marxist insights are; a symptom is described, but no way out save for a rapture-like attaining of Revolutionary Perspective and focus will make the malaise go away. One winds up, per Sontag and Berger, having a troublesome relationship with Beauty , as in the finding of something as attractive, in itself, contributes to the greater evils of capitalism. Hudgins finds himself in self-doubt, a questioning of his motives, with the implication that it might have been more useful thing had he kept his hands and pockets and remained a tourist while in Washington. This is not a revelation of Hamlet -themed irresolution as to what do about a variety of problems, it is merely paralysis.

Hamlet finally took an action and accepted the consequence of his action , his goal, finally, to reveal the truth that had poisoned his Kingdom. Hudgins sounds like he intended to be on the side of the angels but walked away from the whole thing. There is something wrong with a perspective that at a righteous cause, a protest against a war waged against a country that never attacked the United States, is just another materialist indulgence, a fashionable pretense of concern. This is the kind of thinking that keeps people from showing up at the voting polls.


 Hudgins winds up being shot with his own gun. He wants to criticize the idealists who have their heads in the clouds with the fatal facts of the matter, and yet he can't shake the impulse to allow his language to get in the way of his point. Hudgins' clouds may be dark, but clouds they remain.

Brow Beat : Can New Yorker Poets Write About Anything Besides Poetry?

?

Slate's Browbeat section does a telling survey of the New Yorker's habit of publishing poems that are about poetry, about reading, about writing, in one fashion or another. I read with particular interest, as poems about poetry has been one of my specialized gripes for years. At this point , a blogger focusing on covering the rants on poetry blogs might write a screed against rants-against-poems-about-poetry, citing a series of links to my repetitive missives as especially grouchy examples. I've tempered my protests lately, though, as it the the tendency for poets to reflect upon their own form and their relevance to the world they live in is firmly established in world literary history; although it bugs me still, I have to admit that I am subject to slipping under the conceits of earlier Modernist manifestos that appointed their authors as those who would erase history and recreate the way we see the world. I would hope most of us have learned some bitter lessons about ignoring history, even at this level. You can attempt to persuade folks, yes, but you really can't force them to like something they're not inclined by personality to enjoy, and you can't force the correctness of your opinion on them. Anyway, my grievances are a matter of record on this blog, and I invite you to enjoy the article and the ensuing discussion stream.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's novels have been remarkably strong given the length of his career, and the only one I think is subpar is his 9/11 novel; nicely fitted, of course, with some of the author's famed verbal brilliance, but it seemed more per-formative than anything else, with the estranged characters and their respective stages of psychic exile twined in pro forma fashion around that date's catastrophe. The novel seemed to have been written out of sense of obligation, that the author who had made a career out of writing about a world that fits the 9/11 cliche "everything has changed" felt compelled to give his remarks in fictional form. It alone among his books was a labor to read, as it seems to have been a labor to write.

Otherwise, I salute his post-Underworld writings The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, a delicately etched character study and a black comedy respectively who's central characters, a performance artist and a digital guru commodities broker, reach the end of the belief systems that filled in the interior absence of purpose and commitment to the world.In this instance I find much to like about "Point Omega", although I think it helps if you've read several of his books , are aware of his larger themes and appreciate the way he has condensed and concentrated his themes into a hard,splendidly spare narrative line. It is, I think, a continuation of DeLillo's examination of a culture that has had the mystery and mythology stripped from it by the harsher trends in Modernism, replaced with various wrap around belief systems ranging from political ideology, art-for-art's sake, technology and assorted other absolutist-tending habits of mass-think that each attempt to replace what had been the spiritual, the religious, the intuitive.

Our character Elster, here, is a polymath, a genius versed in a seeming unlimited variety of cross-indexed disciplines, someone whom the intelligence and defense apparatus of the State brought on as someone who's musings about their agendas and techniques might somehow give them an advantage over opponents both current and future. Elster,though, is someone who finds his learning, the knowledge and he garnered in an effort to weave his way through an infinitely complex network of warring belief systems, collapsing upon itself. Now he considers the finite essence of all things, stripped of meaning as he has been stripped of his inner life;he watches an endless artful deconstruction of an iconic movie, he prefers the limitless waste of the desert, he desires an existence that can be mute, meaningless, flat and precisely without resonance. I think this is powerful stuff, really, a lyric poem.

Tough Guys Don't Write Sissy Poems

Someone mailed me a poem by poetaster William Espy as their way of saying that poems are, by default, a pompous, elitist and obnoxious breed of ineffectual human; I assume the sender was tired of reading my posts on matters large and small. They thought they could put me in my place, a deed for which I'd be obliged to have them accomplish. Often enough I have no idea if I'm coming or going, or whether I'm advancing an argument, or retreating from something I've already said. If someone asked me where I was coming from, I'd have to answer that I didn't know; I misplaced my map of misreading. But enough of that here is the Espy verse I was sent:

YOU'D BE A POET, BUT YOU HEAR IT'S TOUGH?


You'd be a poet, but you hear it's tough?
No problem. Just be strict about one rule:
No high-flown words, unless your aim is fluff;


The hard thought needs the naked syllable.
For giggles, gauds like pseudoantidis-
establishment fulfill the purpose well;
But when you go for guts, the big words miss;
Trade "pandemonic regions" in for "hell".

…Important poems? Oh…excuse the snort…
Sack scansion, then -- and grammar, sense and rhyme.
They only lie around to spoil the sport --
They're potholes on the road to the sublime.


And poets with important things to say
Don't write Important Poems anyway.


Copyright © 1986 Willard R. Espy

I'm not crazy about the Espy poem for the usual reason, it rhymes, it clanks, it clicks, you can hear the parts move as you read it. And, despite the notion that Espy is a public poet, accessible, readable, "gettable", this remains a less-loathsome example of a loathsome narcissism among poets in general, a poem about poetry. It is ironic that a poet who bucked the tendency of Modern Poetry to be abstract, coded, enigmatic and self-referential would choose to exercise their whimsy on his own medium. This habit, whether requiring an extreme hermeneutics or graspable after the first read, is an elitism that has done much, I think, to keep potential readers away from investigating the craft.

It might have something to do with poems like these are the ones that become heavily anthologized or reprinted in various places by editors who are attracted to works that would rather gavotte among its particulars rather than chance a subject matter a reader would recognize and, in turn, interrogate. The potential reader, wondering if poetry has anything to say to them, picks up a volume and comes across like this, and places the volume down again, thinking that the poets are thumbing their collective nose at those unfortunate enough not to have had good English teachers in high school.

It doesn't really matter who writes Poems About Poetry--Language poets, School of Quietude, whimsical rhymesters--it's a sad, involute habit. His readership, though, is not the Ideal reader, the nonspecialist who potentially is interested in poetry and the stylistic perspective the art might bring on how ideas and experience intermingle, but rather other poets, who, as a class of professional, are not likely to change their ways. We have, in essence, something that's more an interoffice memo or motivational talk to the boiler room of smile-and-dial telemarketers. It's clever, wind up a contraption that, in its own way, forsakes the mission of any poet, regardless of aesthetic preference: to be in the world. This is as much an Ivory Tower as anything more elliptical, diffuse. What distinguishes it is the noise all it's moving parts make in their scraping attempt to achieve an effect.

 I overstate, perhaps, but my gripe against Espy is that he attempts to put "difficult" and "academic" (both terms meant as pejoratives) poets in their place by writing A Poem About Poetry; 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 insists, 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 principal 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 its rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned. Subjectively, I prefer poets who engage, interrogate the ambivalence and incongruity in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. The internal battle is what interests me at the bottom of the at long barrel of concerns, the personal narrative individuals can't seem to help constructing about the direction and implied purpose of their life, and Life Itself, a larger and dispute plain that does not fall prey to the limitations of our best designs and metaphysics attempt to impose. First, there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of its 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.

When Narratives Shrink

I find myself again leafing through the brown  pages of college texts, most having to do with the string of Gordian knots called Contemporary Literary Criticism, the variety that infiltrated American English Departments in the Sixties and drove out the last vestiges of Romanticism and killed whatever taste their was for New Criticism. These are things I've pondered on the run since getting my degree in 1981, riffing on matters reducible to Lyotard's book The Post Modern Condition.

Do postmodern writers avoid grand narratives? Hardly, as the point of post modern writing was to confront the formerly dominant notion of master narrative and investigate the inconsistencies in the conceits, and to devise alternative ways of telling big stories and conveying big ideas. The doings of Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth seem not to want to destroy the grand narratives as such, but instead to re-tool it, re-build, tweak and switch-and-swap styles, one for the other, in the practice of pastiche and parody, in order to extend the potential of fiction with interesting accounts of either Historical processes, or the banality of daily life. The points posted about Pynchon being particularly strong with knowledge of history are well taken, since his fictional project is to imagine and elaborate on the gaps and alienated niches left out of an allegedly all- encompassing narrative sweep, the events and personalities otherwise that reside at the margins of, the periphery of the storyline. A task of postmodern fiction, among other ploys, is to bring the trivialized and the ignored to the center of the action, and weave them into the structure as elements no less essential to what ever conclusion a novelist might come to than are the efforts of Presidents, Kings, or Philosophers directing hypothetical History to some final, defining resolution.

The narrative is not made less grand, but bigger, denser, more intriguing to suss out. It's not that either Pynchon or DeLillo had set out to debunk the notion of that fiction can give a reliable accounting of history or the resonance of real-life; it would seem that both remembered that what they want to do is write fiction, after all, and that neither they, nor their fellows, are required to produce work that attempts verisimilitude. Grand narratives aren't shunned by post modern writers, but are played with, expanded, adapted to new shapes and intentions; this demonstrates resilience, not exhaustion, and the undertaking is more interesting for the fiction-writing post modernist. I am of a mind that philosophers of post modernism have different sympathies than postmodern novelists. It's not as though all postmodern writers are set on debunking or re-tooling grand narratives. Quite the opposite. Other writers, arguably post-modern, settle on smaller realities, dioramas of kind, worlds self-contained within their own subset: Burroughs, Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Kathy Acker, Ron Sukineck, among others of more recent vintage do their work at the borders, creating a vivid narrative sense with their particular experiments that mirrors, I think, a tradition of short stories and novellas, life in obscured corners brought to light. Skewed, though, skewed and wacky, a post modernist signature.

Why then would you think of Pynchon at all as a PM while Steinbeck is considered the quintessential Modern? There seems to be no difference. Pynchon would be postmodern because there is a knowingness about his virtuoso use of myth: besides the fact that he mixes his cultural dictions, high to low and middle brow in the center, he's aware of the ultimate transparency of myth as being just another good yarn one may play with however one decides. Steinbeck, in his faith in the final truth of narrative function, sees myth as containing symbolic Truth about human nature that resists critique. Pynchon’s' use is playfully skeptical, though Steinbeck’s' best work is no less compelling for his use of archetypes.

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 redescribed" 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. A professor I saw in a lecture point out that something becomes art once it is framed, no matter what that object may be .This Marcel Duchamp’s' idea, a classic dada gesture he offered with his ready-mades, such as 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.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 an 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 use that is sufficiently economic, 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.

King Crimson, the Kings of Prog Rock

Absent Lovers-- King Crimson

Adrien Belew and Robert Fripp


Double cd set of a 1984 concert in Montreal, during their Beat, Discipline, & Three of a Perfect Pair period. This grouping is one of Fripp's best line ups, with Adrian Belew , Tony Levin on bass and stick, and Bill Bruford on drums, and what we have is something sounding no less than a more muscular Talking Heads (check out "Man with an Open Heart"). One needn't choke on that if Heads aren't their idea of heaven, because the abrasive textures, the angular riffing, gamelon rhythms and swarming-bees improvisations abound aplenty here. Tasty. Crankier, spookier, harder, this is the goth side of Crimson, though there is little in the alternately playful/deadpan visage of the band's characters that gives you any hint of just how serious you need to take them. Hint: just seriously enough. Belew is one of the great rock guitarists, for sheer whammy bar genius-- no one does six-string torture bends like him, save the sainted and departed Jimi-and I admit, I'm a sucker for his Kerouacian lyrics. I'm hardly the biggest Kerouac fan ever--in fact, I think he's an absolutely horrible novelist-- but Belew is someone who picked up on what was trying to be done and made art out of it. Choppy rhythms and jerky pops and beeps; truly a band of great surprise. Fripp is the great Bringer of Chaos, and what's impressive is that he's been able to provide an art-context for his unique music and incoherent aesthetics quite apart of the usual lockstep spheres and institutions that crush true innovation with the same avant gard template. Note: this is a 1998 release that Fripp and his DMG company have been sitting on for years. Somethings are worth waiting for. Another note: disc one is a cd-rom that is clunky and hard to navigate. There is a video, appearently, that comes among its features, but I've skipped it after trying too long to access it, and landed straight on the audio portion of the show, which, I hope I've made clear, is wonderful and wild.

A Valentine's Day Poem

Those Goddamned Roses

They are talking with all
the fingers on their hands,

he motions down, finger
to the ground,


circles a finger at his
left temple,

he seems to say that
there is something

crazy about where
both of them are standing.
The woman pulls back,
I pass as he glares  up the alley,

scanning creeping vines that
festoon high cyclone fences.

I don't like the look of that
he says, his head vanishing
in the corona of a cold sun
coming between buildings,

what are you looking at? she asks,


he grunts, he coughs, my light
turns green, he says

those goddamned roses
are the wrong color
for that kitchen window's brown trim.


I cross with the light,
I mind my own business.

Ozzy Osbourne

James Parker has a fine appreciation of Ozzy Osbourne in Slate, inspired by Osbourne's new book I Am Ozzy. Less a review of the memoir than contained think piece that contemplates the essence of Osbourne's former band, Black Sabbath, and Osbourne's peculiar form of haplass genius, Parker does a good job of revealing why this pioneer of fuzztoned dystopia is the enduring guilty pleasure he is. Regardless of what one has read about him with regards to communing with Satan and the dark side in general, Ozzy is likable. Very likable.I interviewed Ozzy for my college paper in the 70s, and he was actually one decent guy, a decent sort and all.

It was the week of the mass cult suicide of Jonestown, and as I and the photographer asked Osbourne the usual questions about life on the road, groupies, drugs and guitar strings, the television in Ozzy's hotel room was blaring an update on the unspeakable tragedy. Ozzy turned to look at the screen where a news film clip showed a jittery scan of the bodies lying over one another in the fatal compound.

"How can anybody do such a fucking awful thing" he said, "forcing little kids to drink cyanide. You know what that does to your insides? It eats at you, it's a terrible way to die, fucking sadists..." His gaze drifted off for a few seconds and then he returned to the interview when his manager knocked on the hotel door to remind him that there were other media folks waiting to talk to him. We spoke some more about rock and roll in general, and when the photographer and I rose to leave at the end of our interview, a "Star Trek" episode came on. I forget which episode it happened to be, but what was certain was that the special effects were cheap and cheesy even then.

"Oh, man, this is the greatest fucking show" said Ozzy as we left, and that's where we left him, at the extreme ends of things, Jonestown and "Star Trek". Fucking Awful or Fucking Great. And that's how he remains.

Stress: a prose poem, sort of

There's nothing to say at the moment about which trends in popular media or literature please me or offer me a prickly kiss, but I did come across an old sociology book, from the fifties, called "The Stress of Everyday Life" at D.G.Wills Books . It was less the subject matter that made me pick up the used book than it was the title's type style; blocky, bold,all capitalized, one word up upon the other like a tottering tower about to give way to lethal gravity. The Word "stress", as you see it here, was askew, cracking under strain , as if , well, under stress.Suitably, I grabbed it and virtually yelled "STRESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS" to ride the rest of the a-ha! wave. I bought the book, scanned the cover, and cropped the single word you see above. It's become a seasonal mantra, a one-syllable password to a fellow human being likewise feeling pressed upon by the Holidays and news events that have no real bearing on their life.

Now, stress is the operative term in this tanking culture of theoretical money and jobs that low dividends to one's self esteem. On a head set, taking calls from all over the country, hundreds of people call hundreds of customer service representatives trying to order gift arrangements at the best price, both client and representative aware of the need to save money and show a seasonal kindness to wives, kids and sick friends, hourly negotiations between common courtesties, polite refusals of service, a plea for some more room to move around in as the final costs are calculated , a poetically phrased paragraph denying service uttered by a voice that shows empathy but gives no promise of compromise, and then a silence, deadly , chronic silence that makes one think they here locusts in the background, swarms of obnoxious things come to feed on the leaves and the books and the last dollars in your billfold.

Everyone, of course, says thank you and forget about it or, biting the leather strap, let's go for it, and either hangs up the phone or offers up a charge card. One wants to conserve, withdraw, pull the sheets and electric blankets over their head on the worst weather of the month, but one goes on, one does not want this to be the day they die , alone, without having said a personal thing to a loved one, touched another's arm, sat in living room with friends watching football or a DVD cursed with swear words and explosions. The sword is over our collective heads, we check the ads, file our applications, we talk in falsely warm voices in temporary spots of commerce, the days drag on when the buses are late and the nights are crowded with rain. In the background, under the babble of the feuding dualism of isolation vs venturing further from the nest, we here the eternal grind, the phrase that equals the electronic chirp of igniting circuits, the buzzing SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSttttttttttttttttttreeeeSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSssss

that remains the soundtrack of the century. An infernal machine that does not go off.

WHAT I THINK

Literature, by whatever definition we use, is the body of writing intended to deal with more complex storytelling in order to produce a response that can be articulated in a way that's as nuanced as the primary work, the factors that make for the "literary" we expect cannot be reducible to a single, intangible supposition. Use is a valuable defining factor, but the use of literature varies wildly reader-to-reader, group-to-group, culture-to-culture, and what it is within the work that resonates loudly as the extraordinary center that furnishes ultimate worth, varies wildly too; there are things that instigate this use, and they aren't one determinant, but several, I suspect. Literature happens to be those stories that are written that do something no more and no less crucial than helping us think about ourselves. The goal of literary criticism, ultimately, is not to create the terms that define greatness but to examine and understand what's already there, and to devise a useful, flexible framework for discussion. Ultimately, the interest in useful criticism is in how and why a body of work succeeds or fails in their operation, not establishing conditions that would exist before a book is written. One can find a respite from interpretation with a long vacation in the archive of post-structural hideaways from comprehension if one were a lazy academic belatedly coming to the discussion with more cant than enthusiasm.B ut laziness is a choice enforced by a trend, and trends fade, ultimately, leaving the task of real interpretative work still to be done.
 Poststructuralism denies the ability of any language used to address the world before us: bluntly, that is the sum of their position. I think language, and literature by extension, does have the capacity to say authoritative things about phenomena, hence my emphasis in the how and why this form of language, books, works in giving us representations of the experience of the world, psychological, spiritual, and material, that have a corresponding effect on a broad, generalized readership over time. This is not skittering into structuralism; this is seeking further comprehension of the human experience. This project originates with a bed-rock faith that language contains an absolute ability to make accurate statements about the world and life in it. There are many things that make language produce it's communicating effects, gestures, and nuances, none of it so supremely simple, none of it arbitrary. I tend to think that these things are innate, by the best arguments, and that the language attached to them is geared to cross-platform expression. The task in criticism is to comprehend how these matters work in their use, and from there devise a workable aesthetic that's meaningful beyond the current moment.

Gail Mazur: a tourist at the Canyons of Your Mind

This seems a plain old case of someone falling into the mind/body divide, that time in any competent poet's career where they consider the intractable vagueness of the world their senses reveal to them, a cosmology tempered and flavored with the nuance of personal history and association, and the world as it is. Gail Mazur , with her poem "Figures in a Landscape", wandered too close to that precipice and falls straight to the bottomless bottom, perhaps stupefied by what amounts to the poem's punchline; our perception of a scene being beautiful and arranged in pleasing "natural" alignments are a frame we impose on the raw phenomenon, a meaning we assign it from our collective troves of useful metaphors and purposes. The scenery, though, is unmindful of our presence, has no use for our notions of beauty, harmony, or the disguised meanings our desperate symbolism creates. Nature merely is, constant, churning, violent in its cycles of destruction and creation. We are only elements among other elements, subject to the same conditions of survival and extinction as are forests, oceans, diminishing species. My principle concern here isn't the subject matter, relentlessly pursued as it has been and continues to be, but with Mazur's admittedly fine tone and style. Graceful and as carefully selected as her phrases are, something does not ring true:

We were made things, deftly assembled

but beginning to show wear—

you, muscular, sculptural,

and I was I, we were different, we had a story.

On good days we found comedy in that,

pratfalls and also great sadness.

Sun moved across the sky and lowered

until you, then I, were in shadow, bereft.

She describes the experience of what she witnesses from a distance,as if standing on a sidewalk and describing a store's displays through the display window, with some creative and overly acute details and glaringly "literary" words to shore up what the limited visage can furnish. This thinking, of making this phenomenological befuddlement make sense in a short verse, comes through a few stops along the familiar template, first with a not unexpected epiphany ("we were made things, deftly assembled..") that sets us up for the finalizing grand slam, that the scenery is real and not dependent on our scenario's to make them mean anything.

If no one looks at us, do we or don't we disappear?

The landscape would survive without us.

When you're in it, it's not landscape

any more than the horizon's a line you can stand on.

All well and good, I guess, but Mazur has belabored the obvious point that we cannot set aside our framing devices and see the world in-and-of-itself; as creatures of a culture through which we are compelled to achieve things with the knowledge of our own death, we need structure, continuity, community and the attendant virtues of purpose,love, unity of being. We create meanings that make the hardships worth the struggle; in short, we create of meaning-giving fictions to alleviate the constant dread that there is nothing beyond the biological imperative to eat, procreate, and die. Mazur , grace notes and all, reads more like a product tester's report. A brave face, perhaps, but this poem is territory others have been in as poets, with more interesting , intriguing revelations.

Would that more people read John Ashbery and ceased with demands that he make sense; the beauty of Ashbery's method of engaging the mind/body division is that immerses himself in, allowing his mind to navigate, with frequent brilliance, in the harbors and along the shorelines of Wallace Steven's world of Supreme Fiction. There are those stretches when the good Mr.Ashbery does not connect with an interesting line or a maddened mix of idiomatic and learned allusion--he does seem like he's treading water too often--but I more attracted to his willingness to explore the structures of the tropes he imposes on phenomena and the contingent wonder at how far his words fail to get to a mythical center of things. There is no "there", of course, but for Ashbery, if not Mazur, it's the journey that energizes the poems.