The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention

I won't bother to tell people how much I've read or watched or done (as if that matters); nor bore anyone with any end of year de profundis reflections on my life because, frankly, I happen to be a pretty happy & grateful guy who's never considered writing a form of self-imposed misery and thankless drudgery (as all too many surprisingly still do), as if somebody's always holding a gun to my head. As if there really is such a thing as the 'starving artist' in affluent North America. Writing and blogging are their own uniquely enjoyable rewards.

And unlike Geof Huth I won't be sending, as a sort of symbolic purge, all my scribblings to any academic institution around here: though my wife's been urging me to remove all my teaching- and-poetry-related folders piling up high in the closet. I measure progress, not in numbered boxes but by the amount of heart-satisfaction every form of self-expression gives. And I'm certainly not going to make any silly prognostications about the future of poetry in 2011 and thereafter. I think poets ought not to take themselves too seriously.

In 2010 and really throughout most of my adult life I wrote what I liked and liked what I wrote. But that's not to deny that really no more than about 20% of what I've done is really publishable. The books, though falling randomly into my lap, always seemed to fill a need for knowledge & inspiration, and there is no shortage of first-rate poets, critics and exceptionally talented people out there with something significant to say about art, life and the cosmos. The authors, poets, & critics I read are really a sort of privilege I don't share with many, except, of course, Amazon.com. The name-dropper, in any sort of company, is really the most pernicious killjoy there is.

I'd like to say as well that I'm a Canadian, first and foremost, a product of a distinctively modernist (Anglo-Saxon) tradition of which I'm proud, and to our language, landscape and mannerisms I've always headed my own poetical fires. My blog was intended for an exclusively Canadian audience, the hope being that a type of Canadian poetry network could arise through interactions & sharing of resources but my interests took me to generally more receptive and sympathetic groups elsewhere. With some exceptions, I've found the Canadian mainstream crowd to be a particularly arrogant & cliquish bunch. I know what I like but am also a pretty assiduous student of different  styles, methodologies & traditions. I hope anyone who's visited my site has seen that: if not, I've got some work to do.

Finally, I would  like to begin a tradition, at every year's end, of showing my gratitude to the few out there in the blogosphere who've helped make blogging for me a particularly enriching experience. To the following people I say thank you for a year of sharing, critiquing and respectful bickering: Ed Baker, Curtis Faville, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian, Vassilis Zambaras, & Irina Moga.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou"

Asymmetries of my own: such as Hegelian "Reason"

Jackson Mac Low

It's hard to read Jackson Mac Low & resist the temptation at the same time to try some of his experimental stuff, such as the"Asymmetries", poems (in Mac Low's own words) "of which the words, punctuation, typography, and spacing of words on the page have been determined by certain kinds of chance operations." (from Representative Works: 1938-1985, 106). More particularly, an "acrostic-chance" operation by which words, phrases and even individual syllables are randomly chosen from either reading materials or the poet's own immediate environment & just as randomly displayed down and across the page. Again, Mac Low,

Usually an initial word was found in a text (or in the environment) and words (or strings) having its letters as their initial letters were then found by reading along in the text (or by careful perception of the environment). After the first line, the initial letters of the words or strings of which acrostically "spelled out" the first word, words beginning with the second and subsequent letters of the first word were found to begin the second and subsequent lines, and these words were spelled out in those lines.

But since Mac Low was a performance poet (and musician) he took great pains to spell out the various types of performance methods as well, going into meticulous detail about the intonation, pitch, silence, loudness and vocal arrangements involved in the reading of the 501 Asymmetries he'd written. And both methods and poems were to be chosen (sometimes even during performance) through an equally ingenious use of dice, numbers, & filing cards arrangements.

I've chosen as the source-text for my "Asymmetries" poem Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and "Reason" as my initial word, which was actually the first word I saw when I cracked open Volume I. I will follow the simplest version of the "acrostic-chance" method, not even omitting conjunctions, articles or bothering to change the original capitalization & punctuation in the source-text. I'll arrange words and word-strings in a format suggested by the philosophical tenor of Hegel's text (and in accordance with Mac Low's injunctions to poet & performer to be "sensitive and inventive"). First the poem and then some comments.

                  Reason embraced, any speculation of Now


                  embraced, may be relation
                                              and character
                                                                  even do


                  any nature yearning


                  speculation philosophy excluded,
                                              choose upon labour
                                              attain the in of necessary,


                  of feeling


                  Now over world

Is this a poem? Yes, certainly: one that's been derived through an "acrostic-chance" method. Having structure and I might even say the "feel" of something that's reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic, it's not devoid of unity or even of authorial intention. I see my poem's curiously undercut the source-text's grandiose Absolutist basis (in the line "speculation philosophy excluded") somehow in favour of a more Romantic appeal to "feeling/Now over world." Schlegel and Novalis were not unknown to the young Hegel. As if even the poet's turned the great dialectician on his head or perhaps unearthed a more youthful strain, long suppressed, in the older more ultra-conservative Hegel of the Lectures. Or perhaps because of my own interest years ago in Hegel's early religious writings, I'd unconsciously steered it in that direction even as I was fitting the next piece of the acrostic poem. How interesting!

The young Hegel

The poet of chance operations who means to make his artifacts say something to the reader is faced with the same difficulties as 'consciousness' theorists who can't quite dispense with (as Daniel C. Dennett calls it) the "Cartesian Theatre" in our heads. Despite all the hard evidence for the ultimately sensory origins of understanding, something's still there doing the "thinking".Mac Low, and his practitioners—now myself included—who'd like nothing better than to show that the scaffolding is the poem can't likewise get rid of the poem-maker, however random, indeterminate & chancy the construction. And yet while the poem-maker's there telling us it's the product of the most wildly experimentalist principles of design, the poem seems to have been residing there all along, somewhere deep in the theatre. Mac Low himself seems to have said something similar to this in his more lyrical "56th Light Poem":

The light of poetry's a baffling light.
It doesn't depend on what the poet thinks—or even what he feels!
That extra light that gave old Housman goose bumps.
comes from somewhere beyond or underneath
thought or emotion or will or taste or sense:
a radiation only known through words.

It's perhaps in that "baffling" sense that poetry & philosophy are objects of asymmetries.

"Sally Go Round the Roses" by the Jaynetts

I'll take the scratchy & fading YouTube version of one of my favourite 60s songs over all the others. The figurines, toy bear & potato head are the perfect foreground. It has the transistor radio feel of the first time, as well as the early adolescent fascination with exotica. A kind of 'siren song' for the boy lulled by vocals, lyrics & rhythms into secret meanings which the Jaynetts (one of the era's lesser known 'girl groups') seemed also coyly to deny. But that's an adult interpretation: to the 60s kid with the transistor to his ear the secret is felt, almost irresistably.

Funny how the ear's first taste of the enchantress still comes back after all these years.

"Old Woman in Country Winter" by Stan White: a perfect poem from the "School of Quietude" (this time)

Poet Stan White

I once remarked here on the properties of a Robin Blaser piece, "Image Nation 2 (roaming", that make it almost poetically perfect. Not something I said lightly and without some close attention to the poem's structure & details which it was then my task to give in Deleuzian language. But the claim that Blaser's poem is perfect must come with qualifications, of course. For Blaser a kind of radically unorthodox poststructuralist way of talking is always appropriate. That is one important restriction, obviously.
An intentionally incongruous way (such as I used) to get to the core of a Blaser poem will make it inaccessible to ordinary readers who perhaps read for pleasure only rather than for displays of clever criticism.

There is another type of poetry in which language and content can combine as flawlessly as they do in a Blaser poem, but making it 'perfect' in what I consider a much more accessible sense, and I offer Stan White's "Old Woman in Country Winter" as example. Here's evidence of verse mastery able to co-exist with the fashionable academicized 'writing class' (flarf, collagist, visual, mash-up & conceptualist) poetries of our day. I'll go so far as to say it's the real reply to Ron Silliman's description of "official verse or mainstream" poetry as "neophobic", a poetry too afraid to come forth and identify itself as a legitimate movement. A fact he thinks is definitive of an entire mainstream presence that curries favour still with an ever diminishing reading public (as was recently seen in the appointment of W.S. Merwin to the prestigious American Poet Laureate position). Cowed into silence by its inability (or reluctance) to enter the arena, it's dubbed the School of Quietude. They're out there but too timid to offer themselves as an alternative to the brash, outspoken & more daring contemporary poetries.

A perfectly crafted 'formalist' poem like Stan White's, however, can cancel out in a single reading this Sillimanesque characterization. I'm not going to make any normative claims for White's style being better nor say that it's even set a standard of literary excellence of which postmodern poetries fall short (though in the minds of many of his readers, myself included, his writings certainly can): "Old Woman in Country Winter" ("Old Woman") is, in short, as good a poetry as anything Blaser, Silliman, et al. can give, offering something to the reader every bit as vital and original (as I hope to show). Silliman's way of thinking is (to my mind) notoriously format intolerant, with a penchant for labelling, and rallying progressivists everywhere to cover ground lost by the traditionalists, while I'm inclined to see the poetic world rather as peopled with variations on a theme of self-expression that is inherently perfectible and theory-neutral. Here's a poem that won't, in other words, be silenced by the theory-bullies.

I will give White's poem (reprinted with permission) in its entirety first.

Out of her hourglass filled with memory
now half empty with forget
and laden with December,
                                            falls,
from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields.
Over dawn a land reborn in style
coddles the farm in downy dreams.
                                           Its drift,
blown to the hedgerows, in a woman's curve,
cottontails the hatted house in gingerbread.
The morning blarneys the blushing barn,
its wimpled roof once handsome and metal'd.

Pristine, the ermine land invites
the ditched and foraged fox.
Footsteps along a dotted line,
                                           his sign.

How little the pen has colour over cold?
                                           Not so the page.

Close silenced, by the distant earshot-wind,
the snow-perched sparrows.
Even the chocolate stream,

                                          lucid,
crochets quietly on its icing pass.
And clement, a sun-made photo-sky,
all clear to Aldebaran.

In this Elysium,

                                         quiescent,
out of a firmament of blistering stars
and forever-rampant gravities, space curls away
as though it knows she is the centre of her universe;

                  safe from the neighbouring wars,
caught in the brief of morning glory
                  —an interlude of loveliness,
that nips her fingers and consumes her heart

Symmetry is, to begin with, the poem's greatest strength (in contrast to the fragmentary and collapsible properties in a Blaser poem); there's never any doubt about the subject (an old woman's reveries) and the most suitable lyrical language for it. The "Old Woman" is also a poem about the nature of a distinctive tradition of writing. But is it just a case of the usual form and content juxtaposition? The unity requirement is met but it's done primarily through an interestingly contrastive interplay of style & subject matter that despite their apparent incongruities do manage to take shape wonderfully on the page. "Old Woman" is a tale of fading memory and an escaping lyrical landscape but also, and more importantly, of the underlying processes that carry it forward and give it shape as poetry. The poem dares to follow a trail of "Footsteps along a dotted line" to a final "firmament of blistering stars" resolution in which memory, consciousness & an old woman living on ermine lands are eventually consigned to oblivion. This is its fateful unity. Elysium is a place that "nips her fingers and consumes her heart" as if even here the harsh narrative of her life continues.

The whole is weak without also the inner workings (subroutines, you can say) of mood, rhythm, the most elegant interweaving of imagery & meanings selected over their rivals for charm & poignancy.Though appearing to be artfully designed in practice, with one leading to the next, they ought to be explained as showing the dynamics of a single focused intention. White may himself to be experimenting with the notion of the fixed standard of a formalist poem and perhaps arbitrarily setting the limits to the ways an old woman's tale can be represented. Maybe intentions are meant to stray, almost by design, from their meanings, as receding memories oftentimes do. And if they do, the mood will jostle about, quixotically trying to set its sights on the right object. It can be, for example, mournful and celebratory: the result, even early in the poem, of a half empty hourglass commingling with "wedded icing", sadness of passing life with wedding happiness.

Out of her hourglass filled with memory
now half empty with forget
and laden with December,
                                             falls,
from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields.

After the opening "Its drift" in stanza three, placed there to mark another mood change, the poem takes a turn for the folklorish, sad landscapes feeling both cold December winter winds "blown to the hedgerows and (as if now in a Dylan Thomas Christmas)  a "hatted house in gingerbread" and "blushing barn". A kind of prelapsarian order in which "the ermine land invites/ the ditched and foraged fox." But if we continue to follow the "Footsteps along a dotted line,/his sign (an interesting concession to the textuality of the piece since we're now led to ask: whose footsteps: the fox's, poet's?) we find "Even the chocolate stream,/lucid/crochets quietly on its icing pass", and gingerbread optimism turns into a distant Aldebaran hope, now light-years out of reach. Safety in space, envisaged as the old woman's final Elysium, is hopelessly relativized. Death is envisaged as a return to a cosmic chaos whose coldness and fire continue to form processes of life.

The rhythmical effect of this quixotic "rage for order" at the heart of unity seems to have taken its cue from the pivotal "Its drift" transition noted above.The free verse supports a language of shifting moods & results in fairly detectable syllable-stress patterns of varying length and intensity, with long & sustained rhythms to support a mostly cheery, happily nostalgic mood, as in

from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields...

where the ear detects a predominantly four-beat stress pattern in each line, and an interesting formation of contrasting images formed around the first two stressed words ( 'grace', 'clouds'/'caked', 'icing'), whereas the shorter two- or three-beat lines, as in

Pristine, the ermine land invites
the ditched and foraged fox.
Footsteps along a dotted line

favour shorter, more episodic transitions to colder and more desolate realities such as a country winter. Reminiscences urged along by the old woman can hover around familiar terrain of things "once handsome and metal'd", the mood smooth & celebratory, until more quick-paced rhythms begin to scatter comforting recollections and make things feel more decidedly icy & wind-driven. Meters don't just tear unified impressions apart and form only transitory alliances; they're a sure way to keep the dance of imagery in front of us as we read.White's poem is sublimely context-sensitive—it is a poem about a person, landscape, season—but one that looks at its subject through a field of creative energies, unafraid even to dress traditional lyric in images of "downy dreams" and "chequered fields". And, as I've already suggested, if Elysium is the goal, it can also be seen as boldly asserting the uttainable outermost limits of the representational space of poetry itself.

The strength of the poem is intuited ("felt") rather than constructed regardless of its easily accessible contents. Formalist meanings cannot be predictably generated out of whole cloth either (as extreme postmodern poetries seem to do), nor succumb to a best-fit type of interpretation as per the usual form and content analysis. There's always room for unresolvable tension and ambiguity. It's rather enjoyable to see how White's poem works from a primary tension between memory "laden with December" and a "chocolate stream" landscape, with an introspective unity provided by what seem like the stray reminiscences of the old woman who recalls a joyous "blushing barn" youth. But tensions persist & unity is tenuous and the narrative of seasons, changing landscapes and starry nights skips along too joyously for its own good. Who would have expected to find a mine field in a formalist poem!

Now that I've looked at the whole of White's poem I can see the points of intersection with Blaser's "Image Nation 2 (roaming". If to be nomadically errant in Blaser poem is predictable, here it's a wonderful, unexpected surprise and perhaps just the right sort of critical noise to get Silliman's attention. Who would have a thought a poem from the "School of Quietude" could do as much! To Blaser's "machinic assemblage" I've arrayed the lyricist's own repertoire of mood, speech rhythms and imagery and gotten the same result; and, in fact, nothing would be easier than to replace the Elysium ending in "Old Woman" with Blaser's own dangerous night-journey: "then we, the apparatus, burned by a night/ light, are travelling in company with the messenger."
______________________________

I would like to post Stan's email reply to my discussion of his poem, if for no other reason than the uniquely insightful way he's defined the problem.

In Modest Praise of Form


With the demise of poetry as a force equal with religion, philosophy and natural science and with the advent of empirical science, some 400 years ago, as an influence of “fact,” there came with it the illusion of more certainty that we knew who and what we were and where we were going.

Over the past half century, that illusion has worn thin. Never have there been more speculation and less certainty about anything. It is therefore not surprising that artists, and poets in particular, should depict uncertainty in an uncertain way. Perhaps this explains the absence of form in much of contemporary postmod poetry.

However, our vision of uncertainty is equally uncertain. Nobody can deny that we “think” we are here. There is no uncertainty about the illusion of our world. Those of us who still might write with some vestige of form could argue that change in a mode of thinking is no more than a change of illusions.

Stan White

A gift of poetry from Andreas Gripp

Poet and friend Andreas Gripp has recently given me a gift of poetry: Perennial: Poems Selected & New Volume 2. I have looked at Andreas's first volume entitled Anathema: Poems Selected & New here. He's the lyricist of our nation, determined to give the oftentimes untold stories of personal tragedies ("Alice, Mother", "September 11th"); the chronicler in the most exquisitely personable language of seasonal wisdoms ("Autumn Green", "Elegy in the eleventh month"); and perhaps among the leading spokespersons for the reinstatement of the poetic voice in contemporary verses ("Verses", "For every poet who knows what it's like"). A voice that's been silenced for far too long in the flarf and conceptualist noise of popular mainstream poetry.

As I've said about significant poetic expression in previous posts, "To be appreciated, whether in analysis or in the act of reading, the poems have to be clearly 'intuited' as unique expressions of a single living voice engaged with a variety of significant life-experiences." It's a comment that bears repeating here in the case of Perennial, a work of lyrical beauty & wisdom.

For more details about the author, as well as online poems and purchase orders, see his official website.

"Another valley marvel" by Katherine L. Gordon

Poet, friend and mentor Katherine L. Gordon (who's in the opinion of many Canada's real first Lady of Letters) has just shared with me and Andreas Gripp a beautiful description of last night's lunar eclipse told in her typical Celtic playfulness, which she's entitled "Another valley marvel". Below is Katherine's piece followed by a poem of mine inspired by it. Dedicated to Katherine, as always.

Dear bards, last night (early morning really) I watched the lunar eclipse from my bed! The moon positioned herself directly above me in the sky light and I saw her swallowed, turned pulsating orange and extinguished by our shadow. By 3 A.M. the phenomena was over. What queen could have a better observatory! Could this rare event have anything to do with the torrential tides and weather in the Maritimes? This morning the returning sun gilded in a rosy halo, the trees and stones of the cliff.

Happy return of the light and a magic solstice to each...the Newgrange dead are awakened again.
Katherine.

    Only someone

as regal and long-hemmed,

—& shadowy, starry and blue,
    as You—
    (from her bed)
    could've seen it

instructed, at last, on how to live
    and go down the one
    passage way
    to yr King—

the deeper and deeper,
not sadder and sadder
    one

"My best Council grant, yet"

What, my dear, I'd like to
  do ( should)
        is
     draw

(and turn the valley, &
     stinky bay into)

    deer.

What the hell for?

Stipple it (stiff-brushed...) &
  drop the bitter
    vetch

—o'er which the slime runs—

   rheumy
   catch basins
         &
   muck

  right into one pot
that swings over my real cdn. coals,
   held taut to
          the unstressed steel
          & 2 good screws

          of Purdy's
          A-frame,

          Layton's
          nursing home (or

         Klein's
         psych.ward)

That's the gist of it, this time

John Bloomberg-Rissman's "Zeitgeist Spam" project: or the sources, syntax and paratext of "appropriation" poetry

There is no one answer
and no poem purporting to give one does
What your hand finds to do
do ( Jackson Mac Low)

 At Zeitgeist Spam John Bloomberg-Rissman writes what I can only call "appropriation" poetry. I first saw the term (used synonymously with "recombinant") as a genre-category in relation to an online New York Times 'Books' review of David Shields's Reality Hunger, a work that (in the reviewer's words)

consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix...

Bloomberg-Rissman's (B-R's) work is pretty much cut from the same "recombinant" cloth except that the product that's 'made' is decidedly poetic. It's the making of a "recombinant" poem— its origin, processes and artistic principles— that interests me. When I initially expressed some reservations at Geof Huth's dbqp visualizing poetics about a genre convention that had already been used, and that as poetic technique may have run its course, both Huth and B-R, sensing a faulty causal generalization, came to the defense of the artistic integrity of the work itself & not its place in any literary continuum. Among the artists who can said to be the putative originators of the text's "collage" style are Schwitters, Eisenstein, Tzara & Hanna Hoch so that the charge of unoriginality cannot be supported. Huth went even so far as to assert that "all writing is appropriation. It's merely a matter of degree and skill." A point that I accept but not without some qualifications.

B-R's most recent publication Flux, Clot & Froth (FCF) is described by Huth as a "modern-day epic", and certainly no one is better qualified to describe the experimentalist quality of B-R's work. Huth says of it that

[the poet] has harvested whatever sequences of words interested him and he has melded these into a single frame, a giant canvas, its mirrored surface hidden from us by the deftness with which he has woven these various and dischordant texts into a single song, as if from a single source, in much the same way that a river is enriched by the tributaries feeding into it even if it seems but a single rolling force of water to our blindered eyes

I haven't ordered my copy of the book yet but I do have the archival gold mine that is B-R's Zeitgeist Spam blog, from which his poetical texts derive. Editor and blogger Alan Baker referred to it as a collective "spoof of the epic works of High Modernism".Text and blog are practically interchangeable. There are more than enough writing samples there to base a critical appraisal & appreciation of his work in general: in fact, FCF is Part I of an overall "Zeigeist Spam" project of which No Sounds of my Own Making forms Part II. It's been described as "an epic-length mixtape composed of thousands of algorithmically/intuitively-derived fully annotated oft-mangled bits of écriture/parole", and B-R as the "poet of mixmastery, [who] dis-complicates a vastness of textonality, meticulously cites each source, then honors the poundage of forebears by locating a fresh, consistently revealing work, flush with ripening seeds." Praises every bit as purposely "oft-mangled" as B-R's own impressive project.

But technically and artistically what is at play here? How is the "appropriation' poem constructed and to what poetic principles (however they're defined) does the making of a poem pay court here? Does even the label "appropriation" apply? The "project description" given at B-R's blog even playfully parodies the work as "cutnpaste" (in reply to the critic) as if to concede the point of its obviously collagist, radically recursive and "writing through" technique. It is a "choice-determined" experiment in the tradition of Cage, Duchamp and Mac Low. The question is, to my mind, whether FCF can be experimentally successful (as Jerome Rothenberg puts it) "without any sacrifice of coherence or feeling or intelligence & in a voice that remains unified & “personal”. Sheila E. Murphy has even called it a "transcendent work". And therein lies the question and perhaps the ultimate test of the viability of an "appropriation" poetics. Can a sense (even an organic sense) of a poem's viability be maintained, and even of the poet himself who sets out to breathe life into the fragments from which he creates? I believe the "Zeitgeist Spam" experiment succeeds on both counts.

Without the FCF text it's necessary, of course, to work with Zeitgeist blog, the fons et origo of Parts I and II of B-R's epical work; and "In the House of the Hangman 307" ("307") is the particular blog text I choose for a closer look at what I see as the sources, syntax and paratext of B-R's "appropriation" poetics.To begin with, the sources are clear: the poem is a vast "appropriation" of the words, phrases & constructions of other writers. (I will fight the Marxist temptation to disclose the seamy connotations of that term.). B-R's primary text is a labour of patient gathering as well as a desire to give new life to the products of an already existent artistic life-world always ready to hand. If "307" is the text, its sources comprise as large or as small a sum of all the acknowledged sites as the poet's cared to visit, a collagist-poet who is ready to display the order of what's an otherwise seemingly scattered "sampling".

[Note: Sources: photo embedded in “Upcoming Aperture Events! including…Trevor Paglen, Jill Magid, Bruce Davidson, William Christenberry!”, at Aperture Exposures Blog, 6 Dec 010; JBR; “Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine”, at daddytypes, 11 Dec 010 (“‘When we got inside there was the cutest little girl in a pink outfit sucking her binky inside with the other toys,’ said Moon Run Fire Chief Paul Kashmer.”); Christopher Carmona, “Going To The Yonque”, as quoted in Michael Sedano, “YA Review: Of Dreams and Drums. Aztec Days Coloring Book. On-Line Floricanto Dec 7 Arizona”, at La Bloga, 7 Dec 010; “‘Lollapalooza Soundtrack’ by Purkinge”, at PennSound Daily, 10 Dec 010, etc etc

Blog articles, soundtracks, & excerpts, tv ads, mashups, & intros to academic articles, with even bits of song lyrics reported to the poet by others, etc. all comprise some of the primary sources for the final recombinant "307" product.

In a word, B-R is compelled to try to make a claim not so much for inspiration or spontaneity—the old confinements that "appropriation" poetics tries to "read through"—as a sort of methodical (though ultimately chance-directed) inquiry into untapped sources of meaning. This is presumably the "transcendent" quality attributed to FCF by Murphy. Sense derives ultimately from the syntax of poetic experience & that (as I read B-R's "Zeitgeist Spam" project) seems to come about as a result of the conscious interweaving of two creative principles at work, at the same time, in every poem-making: in the "307" verse, in other words, can be detected aggregative and synthesizing moves by which random elements (words, sounds, phrases, etc.) can be fitted into a single poetic design. By syntax I mean a system of pattern-recognition whereby poetry production is answerable to codes of learned, essentially recombinant 'reading'.  A few examples of how to read the "appropriation" poem will be sufficient.

If we consider the first block of text from "307"(copied here in its entirety), even giving it the traditional 'verse', or 'strophe' name for convenience,

As Jill Magid writes in neon, “I Can Burn Your Face.” Who’s the I here? Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine. I’m going to buy me a satellite, gonna pay the man five dollars. He says he wants Incan gold, I tell him I’m not Incan. I wear a skirt, a random party girl says, “I'm glad you're man enough to wear that.” The “piece of white bread” the man ventures in search of might be sustenance, in the form of work. In The Road, when Mortensen’s character wonders “how would you know if you’re the Last Man”, Duvall’s character responds “you wouldn’t, you’d just be it.” I don’t hate sustenance, I hate white bread. Little girl wanders market softly singing reindeer song: “And what's fate saying? / If fate’s saying anything, neither farmer nor squirrel can make it out.” The noon air, a cold compress. I am making you breakfast. We could leave this apartment and be in any city. I’ll bring you the avocado tree stolen from my neighbor’s yard. I fear my mouth is full of poltergeists. I was there when Adorno wrote Horkheimer, “I’m going

it's clear that reading is reducible to a search for levels of correspondence between poem & textual antecedents, with each verse line (such as "As Jill Magid writes in neon, 'I Can Burn Your Face.'") keyed to an exact source text, which in this case happens to be Aperture Exposures Blog, a photography blog for Aperture magazine. (At times, the sources are print publications such as Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond or online audio archives such as PennSound Daily or even song lyrics such as the "Little girl/reindeer song") The Monday, December 6th post also happens to announce, among other things, a "provocative new panel discussion" whose aim is to "explore the use of contemporary digital technologies in explore (sic) the relationship between images, surveillance and power." Above this advertisement is a neon illustration of the statement "I Can Burn Your Face". All of which serves as part of a loosely associated body of poetic material that runs throughout the entire first verse stanza and from which the poet makes his first word-selections for the opening verse line of the "307" poem.

The third verse line, "Another Day, Another Kid In A Claw Machine" is likewise keyed directly to its source-source, in this case a blog for new dads entitled daddytypes. It, too, displays the same aggregative power as a source of the poem's textual parts. However, inserted between the first and third verse lines is the question, "Who's the I here", with the personal pronoun italicized. The fact that it doesn't seem to be derived from any listed source gives it a more than combinatory power. Here's a sign of an active synthesis at work able to reflect on and suggest links between the disparate parts, making of the poem an orderly and connected structure in its own right. The I question is perhaps the poet's own contribution to the "images, surveillance and power of digital technologies" debate introduced in the poem's first line. In any event, it certainly does offer just one of a number of other ways in which to fit disconnected fragments into a single coherent "307" poem.

Some patient affixing of sources to the remaining "307" verse lines will suggest other key meaning-makers in B-R's poem The La Bloga site is the direct source of the lines from "Going To The Yonque" poem by Christopher Carmona: "I’m going to buy me a satellite, gonna pay the man five/ dollars. He says he wants Incan gold, I tell him I’m not Incan." Again, straight aggregative work.  But soundtrack and print periodical references, appearing one after the other, must serve as the origin of the next line "I wear a skirt, a random party girl says, 'I'm glad you're man enough to wear that'" etc. Though I haven't bothered to verify the sources, even in their absence from the visible text they serve as structuring principles & can lead towards a unified presentation of the poet's materials. The "La Bloga" and the Duvall "Last Man" samplings from the Larval Subjects blog serve as brackets for non-verifiable text lying in between. The poet's direct (unprepared and unfounded) intrusion into the text ("Who's the I here?") now combines with visually absent sources to give at least two ways to read the "307" poem. (Since I'm more interested in methodology here, interpretations of the poem may form the topic of a future blog post)

The question finally arises whether the listed sources in B-R's poem form a paratext: another entirely interestingly contrastive or complementary version running concurrently with the putative primary "307" text. The question is not a fanciful one: certainly no more so than the idea of a "Zeitgeist Spam" project. Acting as more than just a series of references for the main "307" poem, perhaps the collected Sources can be read as another poem. Wikipedia (citing Gérard Genette) gives the standard definition of paratext as "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it". In the spirit of Genette's definition, B-R's Flux, Clot & Froth comes with a Volume II in which appears the "apparatus" (as Huth calls it) for the entire series of endnotes. It would be interesting to look at even a small part of the appropriation poem "apparatus" to determine where that transition (& transaction) between "307" and its Source lies.

Why there weren't gays on Star Trek

    Threatened with

wanting    some softer, more

              natural love

up there,

    a leaf, in an alien sense

             (a symbiont

 leaf!) is

    still closing on itself

    Which isn't why at all

    An alien's hope is to be freed

from    an elitist rock

    Anything closing

as smartly as its resistant curl

—alone in a parasitic Star—

            weirdly visible,

with one eye set on warping need

            only,          

     is bound to be mashed

    The smart alecky, leafy way to

            stay soft

            up in space!

When reading turns into writing: or my version of what the blog is

We should change our theory every five thousand miles just like we change oil in our cars. New injections improve performance and keep us from clogging up the system. (Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture)

I am drawn to imagining a cyberdrama of the future by the same fascination that draws me to the Victorian novel. I see glimmers of a medium that is capacious and broadly expressive, a medium capable of capturing both the hairbreadth movements of individual human consciousness and the colossal crosscurrents of global society. (Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace)

Among the many productive uses of the blog is its power to change reading into writing: in fact, the blog resists reading only. This is the only type of problem it can pose for the user (which really isn't one). I don't see any tension between technology (and its software creators) and the many opportunities for creative self-expression it affords. The Internet is no corollary of state power that, as communist Jodi Dean has suggested here, results in a need for a standard Marxist overthrow of media production through "street-level activity"or informed networks of cyber-hacking. This line of thinking seems comically outdated. In the Web 2.0 world workers, who are aware of their role in the new productive forces of the informational age, can no longer be seen as alienated from the fruits of their labour. Italian philosopher Antonio Negri refers to this new technologized worker as the 'cognitariat'. The blog is not just another fetish. It's part of a set of overlapping networks where technologies and new literacy strategies join and change into new cultural goods: where the program text is, in other words, constantly being rewritten by 'cognitariat' workers.

Blogging can also make you a concerned theorist of your own reading practices. Being more than just an 'archival' medium, it invites critical (and anxious) distancing from the act so that bloggers can asses the scope & limits of their practice. The question of whether blogging is or isn't a form of "communicative capitalism" (after Jodi Dean), the prevalence of online literacy in general and the relationship between ewriters and their audiences are all relevant aspects of blog theory. But what about reading? So few talk about the very thing that's being changed beyond recognition. I've always wondered why, while inviting reading and reader-responses, the blogosphere won't tolerate in the end anything but distinctively writerly impulses. Writing is what the internet is primarily for. A screen inlaid only with readable graphics, links, video & other modes of online interconnectivity isn't something with a very long shelf-life. It can't even be considered a page out of a book anymore.

The blog's a participatory subculture that by virtue of its own distinctive appeal to the Other (not as 'peer reviewer' but as a collective reader with a stake in the material) and textual interactivity is consistent with the pluricentric grid of contemporary media. What every type of communication, from plasma TV to iPad, has in common is this marked aversion to stillness. I tried to show, in a post on the relationship between Blake's "Tyger Tyger" and  iPhone technology, how the iPhone served as essential intermediary between text and a virtual plethora of 'apps', browser and sensors features. The latter, in fact, served as conditions for the former and were so pervasive as to make the two seem virtually indistinguishable. It very much looked as if the passage from Blake's "Tyger" resisted the poem and became instead a virtual platform for ways to rewrite itself (perhaps proof of the materiality of code), eager to jump from iPhone text to 'screenshot' to 'App store', etc. "The Tyger", as I concluded, has been reduced to a purely 'contextualized' piece with simultaneous visual, audio and textural properties all competing for the reader's attention.

But reading online can never be a passive sort of viewing. It's as though the senses geared for reading, once technologized in this way, must transgress their own boundaries & release a 'digitized' (liberatory) Other that is the form of Internet literacy. Rather than the illusion Dean says it is, the Other serves as an outlet for a type of differentiated being attuned to a pluricentric world. Reading isn't necessarily just a visual phenomenon: it's rather the creatively amorphous product of touchscreens, apps & competing browsers that can reveal their powers only through use.The Other is a real entity that can read the reader: lately there's even talk about the way Google, through what's termed a "contextualized discovery", can "provide you with content in the browser or on your smartphone based on information you have supplied before, or on information the device 'knows'..."The blog, as part of this communicative constellation, is seen as an expression of an emergent globalized world of socio-cultural expression that is the source of a new wealth (capital). In a reformulated version of Bishop Berkeley's famous dictum, to be is to be perceived indeed but not by god but rather by Internet media: to see yourself as part of a productive freedom that's neither illusionary nor subject to capitalist control.

The blog is the activist medium par excellence. A preoccupation with reading only is almost reactionary, in the sense of hearkening back to an old-school model of literacy that privileges pedagogy, monkish readings and slavish devotion to academic vetting. The framework of scriptoria, silent reading rooms and smoky lecture halls gives way to more privatized centres of resistance. One thinks here of the role of online activism in the case of the Zapatista movement. It marks a shift from Truth to truth in the usual post-humanist fashion: from professorial diktat to the contemporary perturbations and creative chaos of more individualized socio-cultural expression. The idea of higher education itself will have to be reformulated in view of this democratic radicalization of language & writing. Contemporary thinker Jason Rovito even envisages the idea of the university, one worth defending, "as a certain, and certainly political, organization of curiosity. "The inability of the blog to be a read-only medium is a sign of its radical contingency, suited to becoming a tool of the chronically Curious who won't brook interference of any kind.

The blog is a site that resists the tight controls of print literacy, and, in deference to it will even preserve the look of the traditional page until it's actually read, at which point the text undergoes a process of rapid 'contextualizations' that suits matter to such elements as content, links, images, data storage & retrieval, format, etc ( See the recent if:book post for an interesting discussion of the concept of pagination in "the digital era"). A case of 'scriptural being replaced by a decidedly virtual economy' (as media theorists would say).

Essentialists who are in denial about post-humanism & who try foolishly still to separate language from being, might protest, as they oftentimes do, that digitized writing is a tool only, good for problem-solving, application of algorithms to new technical uses, & ever more intrusive marketing strategies. Bloggers, they say, will never have the impact on cultural production they claim to have nor will they ever form any significant literary vanguard: not this glorified crew of chroniclers of diatribe and unedited rants. What detractors don't seem to realize is that use of Internet media equals the power & prestige of which the old 'academic' purveyors of knowledge & publication were once sole owners: that no one cultural medium, in other words, can claim ascendancy over any other just by virtue of an outmoded print technology.

The radically democratizing effect of IT on business practice is instructive. Companies actively encourage employees (in fact, offer them financial incentives) to put laptops to creative marketing & advertising uses, with even social media sites targeted as valid market research and promotion opportunities.As technical writer Mary E. Schacklett says in a recent "Internet Evolution" article, "business users are jumping on Internet social media to conduct business as they continue to face conditions that change so rapidly that they feel compelled to use any tool at their disposal to communicate, collaborate, research, and report." Workers empowered with this sort of control over IT means of production can literally (or virtually) strip CIOs of their top-down hegemony: here is a clear case of technical workers (Negri's cognitariat) who can't be seen as pawns in exploitive productive processes. Why can't a similar sort of language/writing democratization be envisaged for the blogger, one that makes a similar sort of paradigm shift in the means of literary production & distribution?

The blog is (to borrow a film analogy) the auteurist medium sans pareil. The only claim it makes on the blogger is that it be taken as a multimedia site of which the reader is the necessary but never sufficient condition. Every blog post is a text that rather than being viewed only—for the act of reading only "clogs up the system"— begs to be written, edited, linked, archived and integrated (even fed) into other sites. Perhaps the word 'fan' (after the participatory culture theory of Henry Jenkins) is a better term than reader or user to describe the interactivity between bloggers: as Jenkins says in Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, "In many ways, cyberspace is fandom writ large." (138) And in reply to Jodi Dean's rather disparaging treatment of jouissance as preliminary always to a state of "capture and entrapment", Jenkins (after Nancy Baym) offers "epistemaphilia", a kind of invigorating knowing that results from both sharing and exchanging significant content across the Web.

Ed Baker's memory theater

Poet, sculptor and friend Ed Baker has kindly given me permission to post his wonderful 'memory theater'.

My memory theater

Joseph Hutchison, in his recent post, has shown a picture of part of his library to complement a fine article by Nathan Schneider entitled "The New Memory Theater". I'd like to start a "memory theater" movement in which poets concerned about the imminent disappearance of "the printed page" proudly post online a picture of part of their own private library. As Schneider calls it, the final repository of "words, ideas, convictions, memories, identity, and language."

Poet in picture is optional.

Poet among his books

The blog, and how the poet can save it from cynical communists

Jodi Dean, communist, political theorist & blogger, has written an interesting work entitled Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive  in which she critiques the dynamics of the blog as both a technology and, unfortunately, also a tool that's being unscrupulously used by techno-capitalists for the exploitation of unsuspecting Internet users. A view that's (in my view) too alarmist and too closely tied to the specialized terminology of both Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan to be of interest to the average, even computer-savvy reader. A far more convincing media theorist with roots in academe, Henry Jenkins, can be straightforward enough to claim in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture that he's trying to import his "ideas into new spaces beyond the university bookstore ghetto". (2) Dean has badly politicized a topic that deserves a more fair-minded & broader treatment, especially as it impacts on language and poetry. But it's a book worth reading and replying to. Its strengths lie in its delineation of the politics of technology and description of the concept, design and limitations of this one very prevalent type of networked media: the blog.

It's her conclusion of the techno-mastery of the owners of a digitalized means of production (Microsoft, Google, etc.) that makes it decidedly communistic; and it's the disparagement of language and authorial integrity in the age of Web 2.0 that makes it cynical. So gloomy is her prognosis for the media future that her only solution at the end is an overthrow of the means of Internet media: taking aim particularly at the neoliberal politics that brought it about in the first place, and even going so far as to encourage both "street-level activism" or a system of "communist hackers" to destroy exploitive technologies like the blog from within. (126) The argument that leads to this violent overthrow runs as follows.The potential for manipulation stems from both the nature of the technology and the way it plays on people's desires & drives. The blog becomes the occasion for a kind of psychoanalysis of the blogger him/herself, with blogger-activity as such read as symptoms of a deep-seated anxiety about self and self's relation to the world. Internet use in general, and blogging in particular, is of interest to Dean in terms of its propensity to reveal a psychoanalytic dynamics of technology and user: one in which the notion of 'self'' itself is deeply problematized, almost to the extent of a complete absorption of user in the black hole of computer networks.

The blogger (as her argument goes) is impelled to search primarily for a sense of an Other, other bloggers, gamers, friends, an audience of technical support groups ready to assist, subject-specialists with whom to converse on equal terms, etc., but only to be thwarted, of course, by the realization that the Other is an illusion. What's thought of as a stable "symbolic order" personified as an audience & the stability of a writerly persona on which the blogger relies turn out to be a "gap or excess", a sense of the blog's providing too little or too much, with the big Other (the ultimate ego ideal to which the blogger in search of an audience & sense of meaningful communication appeals) reduced to an objet petit a, terminology Dean takes entirely from Lacan. And having been punched down to size in this way and released into a cyberworld of endless identities, and modes of expression, the blogger is vulnerable to entrapment, manipulation & control by the purveyors of computer media. The Real becomes the imaginary (more Lacanese) and freedom from the big Other now means living in a world of radical instability, uncertainty and exposure to what Dean's termed the snares of "communicative capitalism":

In the terms of Lacanian theory, the decline of symbolic efficiency is accompanied by a convergence between the imaginary and the Real. Imaginary identities sustained by the promise and provision of enjoyment replace symbolic identities. The global information and financial networks of communicative capitalism offer new ways for us to imagine ourselves, immense varieties of lifestyles with which we can experiment. Each can and must be creative, different, unique. Each must develop a distinctive personal style. These unique identities, though, are extremely vulnerable. The frames of reference that give them meaning and value are constantly shifting...So while it may seem that the decline of symbolic efficiency ushers in a new era of freedom from rigid norms and expectations, the fluidity and adaptability of imaginary identities are accompanied by fragility and insecurity. (56) 

That initial "desire" to search for authorial integrity and a stable audience base for our writings (or artistic productions), a symbolic efficiency that gave us destabilizing "gaps or excesses" now becomes a repetitive "drive" to reenact an original desire for the fake wholeness of identity and acceptance. Except that the promise of communication technologies, through the proliferation of blogs & social networks, has been reduced to fragments among which the blogger's condemned to experience repeatedly the loss of those original desires from which a "techno-utopian" dream of self-expressivity began. What starts as need to communicate degenerates into a very real entrapment in the "circuit of drives" that is now the essence of blogging. In this radically fragmented 'space' the blogosphere (the "blogipelago", as Dean names it) can never be seen as a community where members are visible to themselves: the blog is a place of radical multiplicity, of "ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, and feelings" (73).

Encountering the endless possibilities of contemporary reflexivity, post-disciplinary subjects [in the age of globalization and communicative capitalism] are propelled to move through a variety of imaginary identities. We imagine ourselves one way, then another, never sure of how we appear because we don't know before whom we appear. (77)

 In this maelstrom of "imaginary identities" loosed into a world of endless sources of recreation, pleasure and play, the blog has been usurped as a profitable instrument of control. And with this last stage of her analysis, the overhaul & capture of desire in blogging, Dean's Marxist critique comes to a close.I'd like to suggest that language alone, and poetry in particular as language's most powerful form of "contemporary reflexivity", is a clear exception to Dean's cynical Marxist thesis. There's nothing she's said about "communicative capitalism" that can pose a real threat to a real communicative drive and the ways in which writers (in blogs or elsewhere) keep its circuits alive through meaningful exchange. There's no greater obstacle to this sort of cynical discourse than the figure of the poet him/herself: the word-dreamer.

I'd like to return to the "loss is drive" presupposition, restoring to the discussion of the nature of writing a vital Bachelardian insight into the nature of imaginative (primarily poetic) activity. Reading Giorgio Agamben into her own theory, Dean makes the point that in the age of communicative capitalism language has undergone a kind of transformation itself: the prevalent contemporary world of "Networked whatever beings" (111) has gutted language, stripping it of significant content, and given primacy to the speech-act only. "Insofar as whatever beings experience their own linguistic being, they turn their attention from the content of language, from trying to communicate something, back to themselves as speaking." (85) A conclusion that follows, of course, from her characterization of blogging (Internet writing in general) as a repetitive drive grounded in the loss of the big Other that initiates communicative activity in the first place. It's as though (again, borrowing from Lacan) the writer were without a subjective personality, a soulless head-less freak in search of the impossible object of writing: the object petit a or the loss that is now the act of writing itself.

objet petit a

How different things are for the Bachelardian imagination and the poet where le rêve is the indispensable condition of writing. One victim of this "desubjectivization of the subject" is "fantasy" or dreams or poetic rêve: as Dean says, "There is also no space for fantasy (the formula for fantasy does not appear). " (88) I will only highlight the main tenets of my Bachelard discussion as I've described them in a previous post. The point I was trying to make (and that I'll repeat here) is that Bachelardian language anticipates that of cyberspace and introduces a view of  digital solipsism that's a convenient way to foreground the nature of online writing. Bachelard refers to the poetic immensity that resides in the poet working alone as a "quiet daydreaming":

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man [sic]. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming. (184)

The word-dreamer (Bachelard's term for the poet compelled to "give back to us the situations of our dreams") is then a term for a lost imaginative ego- ideal that is fully actualizable in cyberspace. Far from the "stuckness and movement, rupture and creativity"(119) in Dean's account, the word-dreamer is all creativity, seeing in life the same dizzying multiplicities, frustrations and repetitive drives as the philosophers of the post-critical age but drawing out of them the very frameworks for artistic vision and form. It won't ever come as a shock to the word-dreamer that the world's been without a "sufficiency of the symbolic" for quite some time now: it's precisely in this very abyss (as French novelist, dramatist & essayist Jean Genet put it in his famous essay on Giacometti) that the very greatest artworks have always come into being.

Of the term 'word-dreamer', and its applications to an actual poetic practice, the following things may be said:

• the digital solipsism decried by Žižek as a form of harmful political escapism and, by extension, Dean's notion of "circuits of drive" are rather (in my view) a retreat into a pure imaginative freedom;
• cyberspace can be taken to be not a substitute for but rather the very condition of the essential daydream quality of artistic creation in general;
• despite its oneirc properties, the work of the poet as word-dreamer is to be seen as the creation of new organic wholes gathered from the fragments of the "old harmonies";
• a new sublime ("immensity") opens to the imagination, magnificently imaged in the poet's essential aloneness in cyberspace. The word-dreamer sees (or rather feels) the angst of repetitive drives as the condition of artistic work in general. Terms like 'blog', 'web' and 'cloud' are its true horizons;
• to write the dream is a continual search for the image of the poet's restful self-absorption: poetry and the poet subserve the Image.

Carol Malyon: poet without an email address



Poet Carol Malyon

MOON & COW

they exist for each other,
this moon, this cow

cow watches
bright dappled clouds
graze like cattle
in fields of sky

moon lightens
cow's white patches
until a cloud
lies on the ground

on a moonless night
there's no such thing as
cow (from Headstand, 19)

As I always do when I'm at the Artbar in Hamilton, I meet people known for their unstinting devotion to art, poetry & music. Whether poet, dramatist or musician, publisher or translator there's something remarkably unique about each of them I usually like to take away with me, & I do this either by purchasing their work or through the ritual of conversation and hopefully an exchange of email addresses at the end. The internet's an ideal way to carry on the discussion & keep in touch: to me, in fact. it's become something of a sine qua non of literary expression itself.

How surprised I was to discover that Carol Malyon, one of two featured poets reading at the Sunday, November 7th Artword Artbar reading series didn't have an email address to give me. As elegant, articulate and gracious a spokesperson for contemporary Canadian poetry as she is, publisher and editor, writer of novels, short stories, poetry and children's fiction, friend to many established literary figures and a very familiar presence herself in the poetry reading circuits: I seemed unable to connect this respected, well known literary figure to cyber anonymity. It was hard to imagine how the real Carol Malyon I had the pleasure to meet for the first time at Artword was all but virtually nonexistent online.

No email address. By cyber anonymity I don't mean that information about author, background and her works can't be easily accessed (of course, nothing could be easier). She does have an online presence in that sense. It's just that Web 2.0, with all its resources, tools and literary cyberfora, has been a way for me to write for a public of more than one and receive the sorts of  responses the writer looking for attention is likely to get. If nothing else, Internet writing is a fast, complex and omnivorous affair that keeps in its meta-data stores a distinct literary imprint of every writer & work that crosses its path. And when I knew I wouldn't be able to fix my own brief encounter with Malyon on the usual cyber coordinates, the effect was a little disorienting. The computer, far from being a benign influence, actually threatened to turn this meeting between us into a non-event. Malyon, sensing the imminent extinction of a vital moment, purposely slowed the pace & tempo of our talk, making it very difficult to converse on my own terms. I felt forced (but not against my will) to pause at the threshold of a real encounter.

She made me feel, perhaps for the first time, the palpable tensions that do exist between two very different media that frame our lives: a live and a digitized one.Talking to her reminded me, in other words, of the more significant cadences & pauses of conversation with a live poet, unfiltered & unconstrained by digital technologies. It wasn't in anything she said to me for the entire discussion lasted just minutes, centered around general pleasantries of a first meeting and the purchase of two books of hers. Perhaps she sensed in my own rather busy (perhaps intrusive) presentation a typical privileging of the cyber over the real world of face-to-face dialogue that's all too fashionable these days & that must have struck her as unacceptable. As if she was trying to say to me, plus ça change plus ça reste la même chose! There's is to be no hurrying with her, and if the conditions are right, conversation with Carol Malyon can very well last for hours. Perhaps months & years: perhaps throughout an entire lifetime.

How lucky bill bissett is to have co-authored with Carol Malyon a book of recorded conversation entitled griddle talk: a yeer uv bill n carol dewing brunch, a work that seems to have offered a view of human communication as antidote to the highly impersonalized Facebook & Twitter varieties. How lucky we all are. I understand what inspired the great Canadian avant-gardist to record (as only bill bissett can!) conversations with this remarkable individual. If ever there was a case of human interaction that purposely transcends language, idiom and two very different poetic sensibilities, this is it. But I feel now as if Carol Malyon's included me in the same human community of poetry, language and compassion for the writer's calling: as if I'd been included in the same griddle talk.

Not only did I walk away with a sense of a potential friendship and a conversation to continue into the years ahead, I also felt inspired to read Malyon's Headstand (Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1990). The presence of the poet I met at Artbar is particularly strong (and profound) in the poem "Iris" (49) to which I've written my own response poem (dedicated to Carol Malyon, of course). Eager for a reply, I will have to call Malyon by phone and announce my blog article and response poem directly to a real person, dialoguing with a live voice. And if the call happens to last for hours, I can't say I haven't been prepared for it already.

"Hollyhocks and a rose"

A poet's hollyhocks, a rose real as the vase,

  stem in water:

one's in a Malyon poem

 the other exfoliates in front of me

 Like a Malyon poem

in which a daughter & elderly mother

 at sunday dinner,

can't bear to look into each other—

  the hollyhocks (in my eye)

and a real late autumn rose set in a vase,

  don't sit together anymore,

at my table

"Sister"

("Wish upon a star if that might help" ABC)

(for RD)

 So, dialectically
is the One there a browning star,
 rough-edged,
 or just Two

falling through each other?

Can I still want the One as sad as
  it looks,
crossed & chaotic,
 too?

I saw a star, she and I did, probably
   One in the pines
—the wings set for flight—
   & a sky

 that really wasn't

Best advice yet to poets

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Samuel Beckett)

How language changes around here: speculations and a poem

You wish to make a good friend?
Look at the pine and cypress trees.
Amidst the frost, they do not fall to earth.
When winter comes, they do not leave.
               Po Chu-yi (Bai Juyi) (9th century)

As I approach my outdoor classroom I look for at least one star between the two pines ahead. And wonder how often the crow's beaten me to it. Not to the star so much as the poem that usually follows. It's not a competition & I'm more interested in the poem that may appear between the spaces than the crow itself, though he's sometimes the reason I look and sometimes the reason I don't. It strikes me that the star is very cordially indifferent to our looking.

But today I did manage a bit of speculation on the development of language. I didn't need a prompt from a book this time but a visible example outside of the way a pine drawn against the sky (and particularly the space between a crow and star) can open like a vowel & even discard its branches like so many useless median letters. It seemed to poke at rather enunciate the first word . And I imagined how that evolving lingo must have looked to one Simon of Rome sitting in his limestone tower, at the most northerly edge of the bay.

As it turns out, I beat the crow to the poem (which follows below)


Simon of Rome says,

Between 2 pines, there's at least 1 star
The whims and sins of a
a few stay the same
Conventions of the crow are hard to change,
way up there

Works are now to be written in the oracular!

Simon, in his luminous attic,
editions of Luther, Du Bellay beside him,
held his ground
and foretold a change in language

(a change towards the oracular, as he said!)

the needle to supersede the leaf,
stem's gothic stiffness,

as memorable an event as when the sturgeon's
                                                              fair
replaced the zebra's

Under his care
the High bay dialect will be shown to triumph over
a cold cold lake,

mobilizing the scattered eel,
replacing the silent 'o's of the ancient gulls

Consider the long-necked 'fork' in the Pine,
revered—
it's not just a cross
but a letter,
while the plentiful cedar-gin, & the hummer's
beak,
are the book


He who reads, says Simon, reads the sand in a star,
& the moon below
& the lakes above, for once

As easy to do as
swooshing the pesky bugs off an ol' maple scroll

Digital solipsism and poetry: some reflections on the "word-dreamer"

“The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.”
                                                                         (Gaston Bachelard)

My favourite contemporary thinker, Slavoj Žižek, has got me wondering lately about cyberspace: particularly the question of my own status as reader & writer in relation to a medium that's threatening to replace print literacy itself. In his book In Defense of Lost Causes he has coined the phrase "digital solipsism" to describe a type of social atomism to which the Internet's reduced us. A reveling in private space where any Master-signifiers ("grand narratives") cannot intrude without being instantly trivialized and, more significantly, dematerialized through the most rigorous deconstruction. The poet in me saw something significant in what was intended by Žižek to be a philosophical sidebar to a wider discussion about the politics of space, & the ideological abuses to which it can be put by unscrupulous political ideologies. The poet saw the rebirth of the poem.

The question I ask myself is: can a radically privatized medium like cyberspace serve as the most profound metaphor yet for poetry itself? Privatized in the sense that for the user (e-reader, gamer, tweeter, etc.) to write is essentially to dream since the ship of Absolutes has run aground, and that only imaginative artifacts can be properly made online. The thinking mind's been shattered, with the pieces to be gathered up into new unities. Žižek's claim is that cyberspace is a place distanced so far from reality that to live in it is necessarily to be self-absorbed, almost to the point where we live in a world of pure multiplicities (31), each of us affixed to our own language, truth & reality. The world's most renowned public intellectual understandably worries about the effects of this human and technology disconnect on the notion of participatory democracy. I see in it, rather, a poetry on the wing. The farther away poetry is from the world, the better it is.

We can say language and language-user are virtually the same so that the user deals in only language-dreams (signs or images torn irreparably from their stable referents in reality) rather than indubitable things. Everything's reducible to a new universe of One: and the person most likely to use a language of pure imagery, the poet, necessarily becomes the word-dreamer. It's only in relation to the sources of dream that anything has being, including the poem. Has poetry found its Mount Parnassus here? Does the Internet have the potential for revealing the conditions for a pure Mallarméan interiority and subjectivity without having to anchor the poem, at last, to the usual poetic externals of 'form'', 'affect', 'trope', terms that are as necessarily problematical as things in the world?

It's an intriguing idea worth pursuing. We seem to have rid ourselves of those old confining either-or's; a little criticism, in fact, is all it takes to reduce the Idols of old-school modernism (such as the nation-state, family, community) to the unstable language games they really are. After Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty, nothing is easier to do these days. The old harmonies have turned into what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed the "atonal world" of choice and liberal-secular tolerance for all viewpoints. Without "the big Other" looking over your shoulder, a pure unfettered reign of expression may finally be possible at last. And what has done more to restrict creativity itself than the 'big Other' of  rhyme, metre, genre, etc. Timothy Steele, whose plea in his book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter is for precisely a return to these traditional poetic accoutrements, certainly figures among those who've lost their voice in this new digitized era. But the poor disenfranchised Formalist poet & critic can take comfort in the return of a true poesis.

If any new digitized poetry is to arise out of this literary utopia, created without the old restrictions, inequalities and frustrating editorial fiats, (a type of the "multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise"Žižek critiques in his work) it'll have to be a work of pure imagination. Sensory appeals only will lead us only to chimeras anyways, the very stuff of poetic imagery. There are no textual exemplars against which to make absolute comparisons in a world that's had the ground virtually pulled out from under it. Can the processes be described? Of course, books on multimedia, media-technology & digital poetry devoted to them are already legion. Can the products be named? I can certainly cite the poets who've exploited cyberspace resources and identify types of Internet-based literary artwork dependent on them, such as Robert Kendall's "Word Circuits", Bob Grumman's mathemaku, Geof Huth's pwoermd, video poems, Flarf, etc. But the word-dreamer is not the name of a techné, a blueprint for a future poetics, and the poet not an employee who works at the sign of the Microsoft logo.

The word-dreamer's a person whose language must now be that of a pure rêve as if s/he lives in a disembodied state answerable to nobody, being his/her own reader, editor and publisher, radically free to set his/her own artistic coordinates and agendas. As if the poet can do nothing but continually write his/her own dream in an environment of pure unfettered choices. It's French literary critic Gaston Bachelard who coined the phrase and who says the following about the true freedom found in contemporary poetry:

Time was when the poetic arts codified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry, however, has introduced freedom in the very body of the language. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon of freedom. (The Poetics of Space, xxvii)

Bachelard refers to the scope of imaginative activity in the daydream state as an "intimate immensity" (183), a type of imaginative activity that experiences the feeling of "elsewhere"while working in its own "natural surroundings"; and it's here he comes closest to our sense of the nature of the artist's solipsism in cyberspace. What the artist working alone online does is give expression to a "phenomenology without phenomena" (184): to experience the immensity and almost dizzying dimensions of poetic activity and yet remain bound, at the same time, to life's purely processual pro tempore framework. The process is a self-referential one: as Bachelard says, the impression of immensity the poem conveys relies on nothing but the pure imaginative activity of the individual isolated in his own daydream. Cyberspace and daydream mean the same thing here. If we want to get a sense of type of poetry only the self-absorbed produces, we must (retracing Bachelard's journey to the "imagining being")

enter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenology—a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stabilized in completed images. In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. (184)

And in language that anticipates cyberspace and digital solipsism, Bachelard refers to the poetic immensity that resides in the poet alone as a "quiet daydreaming":

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man [sic]. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming. (184)

The word-dreamer is then a term for a literary ideal that is fully actualizable in cyberspace. Of the term itself, and of its applications to an actual poetic practice, the following things may be said:

1. the digital solipsism decried by Žižek as a form of harmful political escapism is rather (in my view) a retreat into a pure imaginative freedom;
2. cyberspace can be taken to be not a substitute for but rather the very condition of the essential daydream quality of artistic creation in general;
3. despite its oneirc properties, the work of the poet as word- dreamer is to be seen as creation of new organic wholes gathered from the fragments of the "old harmonies";
4. a new sublime ("immensity") opens to the imagination, magnificently imaged in the poet's essential aloneness in cyberspace. Terms like 'web' and 'cloud' are its true horizons;
5. to write the dream is a continual search for the image of the poet's restful self-absorption: poetry and the poet subserve the Image.