A poem for the rioters...

                                   What had I to plead
  When death stood o'er me with his threatening lance,
When reason left me in the time of need,
  And sense was lost in terror or in trance?
                                             (Christopher Smart)

"The worms of Youth"

To the topless, & the enraged who are high! toYou kicked down,
                I concede the worms,

 vomit in yr smile, a shirt & ascot opening on true slim-waistedness
  (the odd over-45 crookback, too)

               Whether you text or crew in the streets,
  the worms, worms! Give it bad as anything old school and his royal
historian have got—

               Don't ask, "What had I to plead?"

  Interface between mouth and a crying boy's sleeve still sticks!

Invariably wrong to say it til after dark: which is a knock 'gainst blacks
  & flashing! and the young!

  Way it's been & things that never change

  Walking holding beers by the neck (for example) won't change, too
nor tattoos nor red-faced marxists:

                      ectasy captured by the gestapo who don't get
pissed off anymore but live to write the story

                       (who do it running!)

Towards a poetry of rioting...

Me, I hate the crowd, the herd. It always seems to me stupid or guilty of vile atrocities...I have never liked the crowd except on days of riot, if even then!...On those days there is a great breath in the air—one feels intoxicated by a human poetry as large as that of nature, but more ardent. (Gustave Flaubert, cited in Hardt & Negri's Commonwealth)

Creating is...a hugeness, an excedence, something which unleashes a surplus of productivity. Now, precisely at a time when labour power is cognitive, the desire for artistic expression presents itself in all places; when the mass of workers transforms itself into a multitude of of singular workers, the artistic act invests the forms of life, and these forms of life become the flesh of the world (Antonio Negri, Art & Multitude)

I would never try to romanticize the recent London riots nor use the term 'poetry' as a radically new aestheticization of mob violence. Yet it is strangely tempting to do so. Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Commonwealth make the usual sort of case for 'violent overthrow' & reorganization of society along the lines of a utopian notion of the 'common', even going so far as to say that violent acts of resistance, such as we've seen in urban uprisings everywhere, can be seen as a legitimate form of expression against the hierarchies of world capitalism. Mob violence springing almost spontaneously from a base of indignation (in the tradition of 'jacquerie revolts') can even be envisaged as a new sort of poetry of the future: "We might say, then...that we hate the crowd except in its days of rebellion, when it achieves a kind of human poetry." (245)

I like the forward-looking character of this new "human poetry". It's this notion of poetry of rebellion, while interesting as a contemporary poetics & even more interesting as a new, more significant 'avant-garde', that deserves attention. Not the traditional workbench materials of art but the streets have been turned into a collage of images of revolt and threatening mob rule. New media artist David Lewis-Baker, seeing the recent violence as "a surface reflection of a much deeper series of interrelated social and economic problems", has given artistic form to these deeper eruptive forces in his digital conceptual series entitled "London Riots" collages. Though the 'conceptual art' terminology's traditional (sounding even a little outdated), Lewis-Baker constructs from a uniquely new "geography of rebellion" (Hardt & Negri): the most spontaneous & violent type of art imaginable. YouTube has lately posted a video collage (comprising of BBC interviewer, West Indian writer & broadcaster Darcus Howe and background images of post-rioting Croydon) that's much closer to a sense of the "interrelated social and economic problems" than Lewis-Baker's.

I, too, like Flaubert, hate the crowd at its most stupidly violent and moronic but like Marxist critics I also fear & respect it. And ambivalence like mine about a poetry of rioting seems to have been exploited by media already.The Sun's infamous Wednesday, August 10 "Shop a Moron" headline is just as much new media art as a call to "name and shame rioters". As Jacques Rancière theorizes in The Emancipated Spectator, there is perhaps a "dialectic inherent in the political montage of images" like this one, with the potential to cause an  "inversion of life". The Sun's front-page presentation of the London rioters is, on the face of it, artistic 'collage' and a vehicle also for political debate about causes and consequences. But as art, and as art only, it links the outsider like me to a system that both causes revolt and yet is brazen enough to use public media to denounce it. In this new artistic regime you're guilty by viewing, but it is a first step towards the emancipation (or 'subtraction') of the spectator from complicity & oppression. Here's a new revolutionary sense of literary 'making' from which we'll be excluded if viewing eyes remain clouded by hatred, neoliberal prejudices and even a traditional poetics.

As a poet with eye on world events I have to see poetry even in places where the old familiar grounds are being wildly deterritorialized. Both the subject & means of artistic expression have been profoundly altered. Perhaps the traditional language of poetry itself, faced with the realities of aggressive new urban codes, infrastructures of inner city poverty, and handheld technologies (like the BlackBerry) wielded as instruments of mobilization & violence, is moribund. After all, language per se now shares the stage with competing images, feelings and practices of globalized life. Perhaps what the new media art reveal is the very image of the decline of language's cultural hegemony. Again, Rancière, in a discussion of the "intolerable image": "we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator... is a bad thing." (87) As a poet I have to be particularly attuned to the "intolerable image"of street rioting, and see the attempt to describe it just as spectator (namely, via traditional verse) as a "bad thing": something that amounts to a paradox.

But the paradox (as the new revolutionary poetics goes) can be resolved in action itself. Only a poetry  codified in tradition is capable of sitting still long enough to watch the rioting: a position that, as we know, serves only to implicate its defenders & practitioners.The poet who preaches or theorizes only is, in other words, the most onerous, shamelessly removed from the rhythms of the suburbs, banlieue, & favelas, the storefronts and life in the metropolis, cowardly engaged in abstract experimentation only (too spiritless to change poetry from academic to real activity). Academic poetry keeps alive the oppressive hierarchies of language, thought & reality through its failure to engage with the lyrical forces of the common.To write is to dare to invert the conditions of life itself (Rancière), & always live immersed in the "poverty and precariousness" of the multitude (Hardt & Negri). In my previous post on John Berryman I've referred to this materialist dynamics of creativity as 'biolyrical'.

From the viewpoint of the spectator, the biolyrical can't help but offer up to the literary imagination only the "intolerable" either-ors: street protesters as front-page gangsters or cultural heroes, morons with a taste for gratuitous violence or the new avant-garde who use the streets, the technology of handhelds and the porous grid work of suburban London 'space' as the arena of a new poetics. It's a sort of 'bad faith' encounter with significant socio-cultural events that's to be overcome only through direct participation. As Antonio Negri says in a work devoted to examining in more depth the role of art in a new communist order, "the artist is...the symbol of realized subversion and of liberated freedom." (Negri, Art & Multitude, 52) It's a hope (both Negri and I share) that doesn't come without commitment to the democratic processes at work in cultural production & overthrow of the pernicious solitude of all academic theorizing (which Negri calls an "aesthetic illusion"). True art can only be done in communities, even when they occasionaly have to erupt into street violence.

John Berryman: and lyricism to die for

I've mentioned the name John Berryman at only one place here but choosing the most opportune occasion to do it: referring to him in a discussion of my own poetry beginnings as the one poet to whom a true contemporary lyric is most beholden, even going so far as to make him (certainly the Henry persona) into a 'body without organs'. It's a poetry that's found in a clear identity & position of the lyrical voice: in fact, so closely tied to the bloodied body of its subject is Berryman's lyric in general I'd be tempted to call it 'biolyrical'. But the biolyrical, of course, can never be torn from its host body: whatever the torture being inflicted.

Berryman's "The Song of the Tortured Girls" on YouTube isn't just the best poem I've ever heard read anywhere by anyone (compare it to Yeats's awful lilt): it's quite possibly the only way to read a poem. The poet's anguished narrative, told in Berryman's own hoarse, scarcely sober rhythms, cannot be separated in intensity and truth from that of the young girl ("heroine of the French resistance") who's being tortured by the Nazis as we read. There are possibly two places in the poem where pain's at its most unendurable. The rending of a spirit & body is to be identified in the poet's (the poetic) voice alone.

Berryman's is not the lyrical voice poised outside of life (as how can the lyric tied intransigently to the body every be); in fact, so much fashionable 'intellectual' poetry, having cast off the word's true flesh, is often coldly indifferent to social relevance. The poem's heart—and there are as many hearts as girls who fought for liberation, the French heroine of Berryman's poem metonymic for an entire movement—is to be accessed, even as we read, through the movements of torture & resistance themselves: it's the very life world that's indistinguishable from Berryman's verses, and not just a narrative. What an artistic achievement!

Anything as powerful as this (both a poem & a reading) has the potential to help the reader find a way out of the 'heartless' hegemony of pastiche, installation and language poetry today, towards a lyricism to die for. When language has the force of resistance & physical pain inscribed within it, poetry writing in Berryman must necessarily be conceived as both corporeal and lyrical activity, i.e. 'biolyrical'. Here's a poetry with the power to restore to a position of centrality the subject of verse all but submerged in too abstract post-avant theory.

Hear and feel for yourself.

"The Song of the Tortured Girls"

After a little I could not have told -
But no one asked me this – why I was there.
I asked. The ceiling of that place was high.
And there were sudden noises, which I made.
I must have stayed there a long time today:
My cup of soup was gone when they brought me back.
-
Often ‘Nothing worse can now come to us’
I thought, the winter the young men stayed away,
My uncle died and mother broke her crutch.
And then the strange room where the brightest light
Does not shine on the strange men: shines on me.
I feel them stretch my youth and throw a switch.
-
Through leafless branches the sweet wind blows
Making a mild sound, softer than a moan;
High in a pass once where we put our tent,
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.
- I no longer remember what they want. -
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.
                                   (from Collected Poems 1937-1971, 1989)

Faces: Jack Spicer

If I am old when you read this,
If I am dead when you read this,
Darling, darling, darling,
It was last night
When I wrestled with you.
I am wrestling with you. (Jack Spicer)

If there were any poet, dead or alive, to whom I'd be likely to tell my own story & feel confident he alone would understand, it'd probably be Jack Spicer. To begin with, to make a poetic career out of wrestling with ghosts, as the West Coast poet active at the crossroads of significant American literary movements felt compelled to do in his verses, is a move in the right direction: certainly something that appeals to me personally. Making the envisioned reader as the angel "darling" to his Jacob is quite inviting. It's perhaps a way for the both of us to castigate the present, (& particularly the sordid mania for literary fame in one's own lifetime that must have sickened Spicer as it sickens me); perhaps align our sympathies with an idea of reader who's as dead to the present as we both happen to be at the moment. Dead is dead, whether you're reading Spicer now, and wish poetry existed in an eternally apoetical present, or will in future.

And we don't look to the dead or future readerships only faute de mieux: it's all there is. Spicer can be read only apoetically, which is a form of living death. And friendship is its basis, strangely enough. A friendship's been established between us to be honoured as anything's to be honoured that begins with the dreaded "If I am dead when you read this" & can appeal to anyone who's just happily enough self-alienated in his own time to appreciate it. I can describe the affinity between the dead and living poet no better than by comparing it to the strange closeness I presently feel to a dead childhood friend whenever I revisit the very places he'd walked with me long ago, looking for phantom footprints along a thorny stip of beach or familiar neighbourhood sidewalks. Spicer leaves in his poetry signifiers of just the same type since friends, dead or living, are interchangeable only in this way. As he says in After Lorca,

I yell 'Shit' down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as 'Alas.' But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the world 'Shit' will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear."

But phantom footsteps (like phantom limbs) or ocean echoes are not just tropes: friends of Jack Spicer don't trope but troop through a landscape of ghosts. And what caused the break with the living is, of course, language ("my vocabulary did this to me"). The poetry of Billy The Kid  (that a "cold, cold" Canadian stole years later), and After Lorca, for example, on one level serve as primers for translation & epic, the Juan Ramón Jiménez and Debussy pieces in particular being unsurprisingly haunted by the real dreams and shadows of the poet from Granada. But at another they are just funerary offerings: one to the lyrical sympathizer of the peasants' "black pain" and the other to a mid-western American renegade figure whose story (like Lorca's, perhaps) can only be told in terms of the poet's own personal "hell flowers". It's precisely at that language as "hell flowers" and American folklore rupture that ghosts appear. For the sake of generations of future ghostly readers, the story even has to be 'faked out' in order to keep the legend within the realm of the barely perceptible:  

   Let us fake out a frontier—a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him—a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles—a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.

The 'barely perceptible' field of poetry and readership is exactly where two kindred ghosts like us can meet. And I believe we always will. Poetry is a shadowy thing, obtainable only in the garish moment. To live perpetually defeated or awkwardly misaligned with the times & express the nonreality of it all in language that instead of warm bodies just yearns for things "with no hard corners", like Lorca poems & half-expressed bad boy myths—that's the essence of the ghost, of Jack Spicer fellowship, of the poem. In the absence of reassuring interiors poets live, walk, & write on a perpetual "outside", an ideal circle of Truth that's usually been stated enough times to turn it into a mass grave: "On the outside of it is what everybody talks about. On the outside of it are the dead that try to talk." ("A Textbook of Poetry") Or rather the poem, its form or whatever meaning Spicer may have intended, is something lying enigmatically between a corpse and a ghost, always amounting to a perpetual "defeat" (See the poem "Who Are You"?).

But why necessarily a "defeat"? Spicer's friendship, like his poetry since both are of a piece, can sound at once faithful & temperamentally resistant to a contemporary's approbation, always to be found somewhere between the living and the dead. Qualities that make him desirable but at the same time tragically enigmatical. Am I drawn to the tragedy or elusiveness of the man? The poet's interest in readers he's envisaged as old or dead to begin with (like me) isn't a rhetorical pose. This invocation, like everything else that's potentially fatal in friendship with a great poet, only seems haphazard, unsteady, and yet it makes the passage to the other side possible: he may have said to me what he said to Jim Alexander, "...do not become too curious about/your poetry/Let it speed into the tunnel by itself/Do not follow it, do not try to ride it" ("Imaginary Elegies"), sagaciously anticipating the tendency (always in the overimpressionable) to mistake the impetus for the man himself.

My original allegiance to the man still stands, though. These days I'm not feeling like a Canadian ghost for nothing, & I don't choose my dead poets lightly. Cid Corman's "Dead or alive/I'm in it for the poetry" could have been inscribed over the passageway to Spicer's hell. It was Spicer's genius, however, to have softened it (maybe just for my sake) by making friendship the cost of entry.

Bahraini poet Ayat al-Gormezi freed!

Ayat al-Gormezi

Due most likely to international protest, Bahraini poet Ayat al-Gormezi has been recently freed after being sentenced on 12 June 2011 to a one-year prison term for reciting a poem critical of her government's anti-democratic regime. Bahrain's National Court accused al-Gormezi of “inciting hatred of the regime and of being involved in a rally to commit crimes.” While in prison she was subjected to terrible indignities:

Media reports indicate that since being in custody Ayat, a student teacher, has been beaten across the face with an electric cable, spent nine days in a tiny cell with the air conditioning turned to freezing, and was forced to clean with her bare hands toilets just used by police. Almost certainly as a result of this brutal treatment, Ayat on 21 June 2011 made a televised apology to the Bahraini king and prime minster for what she had said and done (from Change.org)

Below is the text of her poem (reprinted with permission):

Khalifa

By Ayat al-Gormezi

Hear me:

You, the elder,
the “good man”, who “safeguards justice”
(so you have always declared),

if I were to make excuses for you,
I, for you,
for the things you have done,
I would only look the fool,
for you would continue in your ways,
and murder us as “traitors”.

Hear me:
Hear us all, for we all demand likewise -
both sects, all Bahrainis:

You must go.
Take His Majesty with you,
and leave your deeds behind.

You, oppressor,
from where do you derive your power,
the power to keep your people down? -
all your people,
even women
even children
even men.
Yet you call for “dialogue”,
even in the midst of your brutality?

No! … No! …
One word: No!
One demand:
Give us back our Bahrain.
Return this country to its people;
to us, its people.

Our Bahrain is ours.

I've dared in a previous post on Mohamed Bouazizi (the Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor whose self-immolation started a revolution) to herald this type of poet (& poetry) as the new world avant-garde. I stand by that claim. I wrest that title from its self-satisfied academic usurpers and give it to writers who matter. A forward-looking poetics can no longer be separated from the all too real material conditions of life for which the Tunisian has chosen death to official tyranny & al-Gormezi has had to suffer the worst sorts of human mistreatment.

When will the anthology for the new avant-garde be compiled?

"The Dolphins": a personal mourning

Sometimes I grieve more for the friends of the dead than the dead themselves: especially when friendship had sustained a vital need for communication. And in the case of the friend who needs desperately to hear the voice when vision has been all but taken away, & the accustomed call remains the only route to human contact there is, the sadness of her loss is all the greater.

Poet Betty Kaplan has recently passed away: a kind gracious individual with with whom I'd had the privilege of conversing in my Eastern days. A poet's death is always the occasion of irremediable loss. But what saddens me now is the thought that one person in particular, perhaps Betty's dearest confidante, can no longer feel, in her darkness, the link to a live poetic heart.

Fred Neil's song speaks the absence better than I ever can. I grieve for friendship's end.

Faces: Federico García Lorca

As I recently travelled through Spain (especially Andalusia) I kept wondering if we'd passed the unknown grave of the great poet who'd been assassinated for any one of a number of 'crimes' against the state: homosexuality, support of the Popular Front, a privileged upbringing. I also wondered if clues could be whispered even to the tourist.

If Lorca despised the tourist, it didn't seem obvious to me.

________________________________

"As Lorca lay dying"

Write 'storm' on the towers, and don't choose

  clear pools over rain ah camioneros,

never, never!

   Mine's a ruined casa low in the highway,

          a yard's wild overgrowth;

 tiles after the heat spill over me at times like ivy.

   Language betrays

  If you sequester groves under the netting

(Sant Déu!), make space deep for Moroccan suns,

                                                             at least

     Palms look rusty this side of white-graped mountains

  where I'm led, & the farmers mean

of course, to make lusty parcelas feel the jagged teeth, too. Again,

  gardens on the coast—all a mirage

                                                                         Sultan

  of god recedes from where I lean

Between steppes and mounds, steadying to the passes or

                                                white-washed tombs

          I can be found

Storm! storm! Olivo of desire or

  piscinas: take paradise as it comes, real or not

Or if not, bust the dams and shoot at the devil yourself—

  Sierras thru the heat is

nearer to me!, with clouds the odd relief.        Three

  shades, greenest of the date, one ficus green, & that

of dry villages, and then the hills, again—again, all illusion!

  But take each as it comes

One churchtower, two separate at the bridge to find me

  but learn to doubt them, too

  enlarge their hate beyond words

I know the mists will enclose, & the white coast

  in a dream                                                  Look,

  African winds make an olympus of almost nothing,

   and springs between boulders

   trickling to my feet