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