"EUDYSIA": poetry published without "the financial assistance of Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council or any agency."

ALL RIGHTS UNRESERVED. Any part of this book may be
  reproduced by whatever means necessary without the
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  It is encouraged that those invigorated by the content
  within will use it to springboard to higher creativity.

Real poetry is a gesture that counts (Pierre Reverdy)

OmahaRisinG is a performance poet from Toronto: but more than that, a nomadic poet who breaks with genre and Canadian literary tradition: (a) by disavowing the traditional association of performance poetry with oral poetry only, aligning himself also with a social activism rooted to place, and, more significantly, (b) by freeing his poetics from the state-funded apparatus that is these days the only gateway to mainstream writing & publication. And I might like to throw his name into the Avant group (or post-Avant, as it's been lately retitled), since it's really a temperament & way of getting around by bike & not an elitism that flies off to the next Avant Writing Symposium. A true Avant is dislocation & the most radical activism designed to make everyone feel uncomfortable, one that never keeps still, never stops jabbing at the "donkey festival" that is Canada Council & CanLit, and  makes the more popular academicized versions (of Gary Barwin, Christian Bök, for example) look ridiculously tame. I'll offer the name Clifford Duffy as belonging to same class of the true few radical poetries in this country.

RISING, Omaha
     EUDYSIA

My concern is always with real poetries & real movements. I've recently read OmahaRisinG's EUDYSIA and have had the good fortune to see him read at Artbar in Hamilton, Ontario, a local "arts hub, live music venue, artists' hang-out": a social-cultural outlet for significant otherstream expression. I'm particularly pleased to be a part of. I've also commented here on bill bissett, quintessential gestural and vocal master,and the social justice drama of Melanie Skene & Simon De Abreu (a staged reading with props) told in folklorish conta storia format, two other activist art forms I've met there. As well as on the elegant figure of  poet James Deahl who founded the Artword Artbar reading series and whose 'Poets for Peace' movement, founded twenty-seven years ago, has contributed significantly to a culture of peace and non-violence & a distinctively people's poetry ethos for which the Hamilton area is now known. A place to attract OmahaRisingG & be in good company.

OmahaRisinG

Former literary editor, firefighter, amateur kick boxer and letter carrier, OmahaRisinG comes from a Toronto-based 'people's poetry' and performance poetry tradition: a figure to be associated with a liberatory poetics of peace & social activism. As a "symptomal" reader and viewer (after Louis Althusser), I can't help seeing activist poetry like his as symptomatic of a gap in contemporary Canadian literature—radical poetries must try to fill in— between the mainstream determined to "disallow control over the self" (FYRMM!!!! 1) and total "corporeal dissolution" (1) of the nomadic poet who's always circling in or always intolerably present at the borders, determined to contrast the mainstream's fake cultural life with a  "life-affirming death" (1) of its own. Through the energies of poetry performance comes a sort of Nietzschean call to life in the abyss.The OG bookends of his name suggest a snug asphyxiation, the Kafkaesque "no hide nowhere to rise/dungeonal triple-iron keep" life of unbearable confinement (COCKROACH 13) . Poetry is more than performance. In a hip-hop of  repeating sounds & rhymes, the poet in motion can represent himself as the necessarily disabled & "short/circuited" voice of dissidence that's never just staged. (Even at a reading I've noticed how restless he seems, working  the room, full of the leg-venom from which the poet & his best lyrics come):

my stance is metaphoric
the penultimate euphoric
in this wheelchair where
perambulation is electric
 a future short/circuited
   so severe selfcentric
rejects your trial denial
because I can not walk
with reality determined
 to steal this life's face
thus I must make bold
with a smile take hold
of life-affirming death (1)

Unlike the many self-satisfied mainstream lyricists out there, here's the recalcitrant performer "wreaking face vengeance/poet justice pronounced/for that evitable death" (KOTARO 3) that is the poet's world. Performance in the OmahaRisinG sense is not to be delineated into a superficial opposition of text to public presentation: a boundary that he transgresses by giving audience members a copy of each poem read. The text he offers is an active material record of live history: prequel to the event it must face outside, after the performance, in the living streets. Poetry that's read as a bar code, "red-eye scansion" ( BAR CODE 54) fit to reveal a "disembodied eloquence of lives" (LIFE SPAN 5) and the searing paradoxes of intrapersonal relations. In MAL (14), for example, he asks, "can the jew/catch a break/from the hates/of the likes/of you"? And to the anorexic girl the poet likens a "personal holocaust" (DOMINION 17). Boundaries that separate imagery and the realities of discrimination & self-willed starvation it reflects can't stop shifting or morphing because every familial & social relation is too porous for institutional fixes. It's interesting to consider, as another example of this restless shifting, that self-willed starvation, a few pages later, finds in the poem ENDURA (22) its own double in the image of ritualistic fasting and spiritual bravery of those (presumably the Cathars) who seek to redress earthly injustices through self-induced death:

you voiced the soft dead
always in red, the premise
shift in justice, the promise
blacked by stone enemies

  ballsy testimony upworded
 bewildered autumns to a sky
fazed by a perishing urgency
grasping for your last breath(22)

EUDYSIA, is not just putative title for urban utopia but (as the poet told me in email correspondence)

my neologo. It comprises two prefixes: 'eu' (from the Greek meaning 'good')and 'dys' (from the Greek meaning 'bad'/'badly'). That makes my neologism an oxymoron. Its cognate would be 'eudysic'.

I created 'eudysia' to replace 'postmodern', a term that is many decades beyond its best-before date.

EUDYSIA represents the post 9/11 period. September 11th, 2001is the defining moment of our era. Almost everything of a critical nature flows from it. We live the oxymoron of my neologo. The good (primarily inherent in technological advances) fights with the bad for dominance. And there is more bad than one can imagine: the threat of terrorism, worry about future pandemics,economic meltdowns, global warming, armed conflicts, etcetera (Saturday, August 21, 2010)

The "oxymoron of my neologo" is rather to be understood as a dream artfully mismatched with (or rather negated by) a prevalent culture of video game ontologies (KOTARO 3), 'gamer' names (like KOTARO, O MEGAMAN, KENTRON) attuned to robotic resonances rather than to things & a general picture of crumbling socio-cultural borders where "scuffling dead sand" people (DOMINION 16)— or so the actors & their dramas sometimes seem to me—can't be distinguished from real atomic death (SADAKO) and the despair of Ethiopian mothers who prefer suicide over another empty well (SEMA KEDIR).The murder of Anthony Walker can't be too easily dissociated from "manchester united" popularity either (MAYBE NEVER 43). But it's not a question of opposing names to the tyrannies of signification they oftentimes designate: for names have practically shifted into (culturally traded places with) the places reserved for their own terrible undersides. I believe the poet's purposely chosen a naturally evolving lexicon with the potential to outline an imminent cultural apocalypse.

If I'm fancifully reading titles and maybe even intentions, it's as a way of validating a more general truth about the way a neologo-title can disclose interesting pathways to cultural critique, perhaps along the lines of Naomi Klein's No Logo and the politics of branding it unearths.The title is the self-gutting name of all names and the mark of the impetus, still visibly present in our culture & subject to radical critique, to attribute personal, societal & ecological murders to the tyranny of signifiers. OmahaRisinG gives in performance & in language the terrible disconnects of this EUDYSIA-post 9/11 reality and for that alone his work is revolutionary & a pure poetry performance.

son of sam used to
    listen to that dog
     you talk to god
   sometimes saying

  then go out without
 waiting for an answer
grab a pepperoni pizza

          between bites
          you chew fact
            then sicken

               leaders
           may reverse
          but in the end
           they all say
          the same thing
              (ITE 36)

Poetry seeks to play on the difference between the title's self-canceling senses as earthly utopia (of the social-activist poet) and the reality of language appropriated by the Metropolis nightmare in which we live. I believe his EUDYSIA primarily works as both a self-emptying of language through speech & performance and critique of the tyranny of brand society in general. It's what makes the poetry a performance and moves it restlessly forward at the same time, and perhaps what makes the poet himself try to arise out of the "parisian crypt" (CID 69 32) that is his stage name. OmahaRisinG has clearly (& artfully) let the name of the poem (in almost every single case) sink into the many incongruities of life and writing always already there: and the result's a "bite-fevered perception" of what he sees and the more grotesque "distortion/creation/behind arachnoid language" that results (TICK TALK 60), perhaps a parody of a false communitarian world wide web community. Perhaps he's given a perfect illustration of Rancière's idea of the "intolerable image" in art: the obscenity that a rampant society of spectacle easily glosses over & passes for media & that poetry can convey through a slamming robotics-language:
    

 re memory branch
        memoir brain
          membrane

          skin hides
        distortion/creation
 behind arachnoid language
derma-disjoint communication

   bite-fevered perception
     immementos events
      dysremembered
        dismembered
         remembered
         unreversible

         irreversible
        spasmic clock
     thiefs wrinkled time
 leaving mutant replicants
continuators of remembrance (60)

The essential thing is then to underscore (or bold & capitalize) the poem as a false naming: specter of life & language collapsing altogether into a post 911 world of hyperreal epics and a rap-elegy reduced to a few staccato wisdom-hits. If not EUDYSIA, since the title's there been uncovered as a personal neologo artfully misaligned with the fact of "terrorism, pandemics, meltdowns" and rampant ecocide, then what: ARREX (7), legendary name for the city of Nimrod, or HOME itself (20), the place of a son's return to the absent Mother, where "he needed her to be around/to show him a life amidst death" (21), or perhaps the more exotic-sounding VERSA, ITALIA (35), a place of death too "where rat trenches/drag bodies into drowning pools"? Where is the poet-performer to turn? And a poet's restless search goes on, almost interminably, for all the unaffiliated heroes like O MEGAMAN, PYTHAGORAS or LENIN to fill in the void, names referring as much to historical personages as failed life-histories. Looking for utopia in the digital dystopia of today is a gesture as self-refuting as trying to key the name (of the poem, poet) to any one referent. As he strongly intimates in TRADE (70), poetry is the search for the absent parent:
   

knowing and distant
  unblinking and insensate
cadillac slinks mute tolerance
soft parade of skinny leather
  near-winter incongruous
   advertises windshields
     stiletto heels totter
       leggy expanses
  framed by car metal
eye-level glory silhouettes
  a neon-infected eatery

 window lowers invitation
 behind tinted moral void
  entered without words
  tires dispatch asphalt
  to urgent irrelevance
 straight-ahead silence
commandeers the interior
seals its unspoken contract

industrial-side-street familiarity
 comforts a midnight vacuum
 early fog jitters jaded glass
 dishing streetlight diffusion
 bucket-seat reality repeats
 beneath a voiceless zipper
 she kisses this month's rent
  works the new economy
  makes the rough tough

  father may never arrive

The poet's boldly exercised an anti-arts funding option (in my view) that's really the only way for it to act out its radical "eudysic" role. EUDYSIA,as a neologo for an impossible utopia, must also mean a rupture with the mainstream proprietors of any sense of good literature & with the means (primarily through the apparatus of state-funded art) of excluding Fringe styles. A system that strikes at the heart of Artbar and poetry performance must be radically dissociated from the text itself (as it certainly is here). And OmahaRisinG's text is  political in the way its condemns false spiritual-ideological underpinnings of authority (as in JUDICIUM DEI 36-37), the antidote to which is a Zarathustrian desire to "will my condition/to a perpetuity that can/respect/reflect a range meant/to encompass all degrees/latitudes and longitudes/of intersect" (DESIDERATE 39). In a world of "dyslocution" (after DYSLOCUTE 48), of language-reality "mischronicity" and the "spiritus noctis" (CITY BLUE 51) of postmodern life, there can be no place for the likes of Canada Council: the "dirty balm" of literacy by bureaucracy.

EUDYSIA is poetry published without "the financial assistance of Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council or any agency." But only secondarily. It's first and foremost the outline of the means of dislocating any poetics that relies on the supremacy of names (even EUDYSIA): for the titles in OmahaRisinG's text, and the poetries they call forth, whether read or performed, have been selected for their power to reveal the disastrous aversion of language alone to sacred places, meaningful personal relations & true people-based, participatory arts milieu. It's perhaps ultimately a case of language having to be (re-)absorbed into performance, the restless Homeric impulse to tell the story of struggle and defeat: as the poet affirms in ITE, a poem whose title translates literally into the imperative to "go out without/ waiting for an answer" (36).

A translation of two poems by Pierre Reverdy (from "The Roof of Slates")

SECRET

     La cloche vide
     Les oiseaux morts
Dans la maison où tout s'endort
     Neuf heures

La terre se tient immobile
        On dirait que quelqu'un soupire
Les arbres ont l'air de sourire
     L'eau tremble au bout de chaque feuille
        Un nuage traverse la nuit

Devant la porte un home chante

        La fenêtre s'ouvre sans bruit
-------

SECRET

     Hollow bell
     Dead birds
In a house where everything's asleep
     Nine o'clock

The earth holds still
        One says that someone's sighing
Trees appear to be smiling
     Water flickers at every leaf-tip
        A cloud drifts into night

Outside our door a man is singing

        A silent window opens
       


NOMADE

     La  porte qui ne s'ouvre pas
La main qui passe
                       Au loin un verre qui se casse
     La lampe fume
Les étincelles qui s'allument
              Le ciel est plus noir
                       Sur les toits

Quelques animaux
Sans leur ombre

                                              Un regard
                                   Un tache sombre
La maison où l'on n'entre pas
-----

NOMAD

     A door that never opens
A hand passing by
                 A far away shattering of glass
     A smoky lamp
Sparks lighting up
          The sky grows dark
                 Over the rooftops

Some animals stand about
Shadeless

                                                A glance
                                        A somber spot
An unapproachable house                                  

John B. Lee's LET LIGHT TRY ALL THE DOORS read as a politics of poetry

But this "I" that accompanies the poem and that is produced in echo with its act is also the subjectivity of a traveller who passes through a certain territory, makes words coincide with things, utterances with visions, and implicates in this travel some relationship with the "we" of the community. (Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing)

I would purchase the rains of remember
I would purchase the stars of recall
and what to preserve in a poem
but the drenching of darkness with light (John B. Lee, "Being Human")

Poetry can't afford to be too fanciful when it's borne on the wings of the travelling poet, and it's usually a safe bet that (as the Rancière epigraph shows) a lot of interesting grey area is to come between the poet's imagination and the realities of  unfamiliar language, terrain & native customs. Poetry becomes a type of mediation. Any "I' that encounters difference in foreign places, trying to scribe properly the "relationship with the "we" of the community", is bound to be political. The poet is not immune to it. Misreading foreign places can be as pernicious as bad translation of their chief literary figures, and the poet must avoid both. Travel that results in writing is at best a problematical engagement with a potential source of inspiration of which language can give (if it's careless) only a superficially sympathetic account & image. Bad travel can make for bad poetry.

I read the work of one of Canada's most celebrated poets as a primer on travel-poetry in an active critical sense of a politics of both viewing and writing.Taking my cue from Rancière's The Flesh of Words, I see here in Lee a type of poetry that accounts for a genuineness in encounter with the Other. Do politics and poetry seem too antithetical here? Do we even need to use 'political' at all? Fortunately, yes. Lee wants to comment, naturally, on underlying structures of injustice as well as celebrating cultural diversities in a book of poems in which he's "walked the throngy labyrinths/of sellers' stalls/and tourist shops/in Seoul and Burgundy, Leon/and home " (8), but to do that he must draw a line beyond which the Westerner can't proceed and remain unintrusive & respectful at the same time. As Lee says in "Echo's revenge", "and thus there is a threshold in myself/I cannot cross/but once and once alone"(9) Lee cannot compromise that vital twofold sense of his work as a physical dwelling and potential storehouse of poetic impressions, not if he's to write a genuine travel lyric that is both a chronicle of life-events in distant lands and vision for global justice.

Lyric subjectivity and its horizon of community are established only at the price of a critical effort that separates the "wandering" of the poetic "I" from the poetic utopia of politics. The newness of the aesthetic community is also that of a dividing line that is maintained, always fit for transgression, between the universality of the aesthetic community and the archipolitical objectification of the link."(19)

Rancière refers (in his discussion of the wandering poet image in Wordsworth's Prelude), to the initial migration & impression-gathering of the poet through distant places as a "politics of the sensory", " a general aesthetic that expresses the laws of feeling, the conveyance of sensation in general." (19) In other words, feelings generated through an initial "wandering", always at first disparate and scattered, and attuned particularly to issues of social justice, cannot become a poetry without disclosing a democratizing (or perhaps 'globalized') impulse. It's in this sense a concern for the preservation of the integrity of that encounter through language (however that need to preserve is expressed, whether through poetry, translation or social activism ) that the poetry in Lee's book, and all poetry based on a primary poet-as-wanderer motif, is political. I'd like to consider to what extent Lee's poetry survives its own political impulses.

John B. Lee is a translator and traveller, and so the legitimacy of LET LIGHT TRY ALL THE DOORS as a politics of poetry established in travel has already been assured (to my mind) by his and Manuel de Jesús Velázquez León's bilingual Sweet Cuba anthology of Cuban poets from 1608 to 1958, one inspired and framed by the literary-nationalist figure of José Martí. The poet's heart is certainly in the right place.To travel (for the poet), going from Burgundy to Seoul to Bangkok, is to pay homage to language & the most diligent and sensitive uses to which it's been put in a national literature. Lee cannot be accused of bad viewing wherever he goes since he's already, in his poetic practice, met a vital prerequisite to good viewing through a preliminary work that honors a sanctity of language & Cuban poetic tradition rooted to place. Cuba and Martí become "archipolitical" influences in Lee's wandering poetics, both socialist impetus and muse, and this active principle of viewing and writing would not have come about without the primary labors of translation:

...the presence of José Martí at this stage of Cuban poetry transcended his role as a reformist and modernizer. That is why his poetry sets up the internal structure of this compilation and becomes that moment in which all the tones sketched during the protracted configuration of the national poetic consciousness take shape in a coherent and harmonic voice. As it happened socially and politically, in the poetic field Marti's voice was also prophetic of much of what was to come." (Foreword to Sweet Cuba, xvi)

But is translation in the sense of the "configuration of the national poetic consciousness" a suitable analogue for the way Lee wishes to translate travel experiences into original poetry? Though the "peripatetic" poet-wanderer motif, again, is established in the very opening of "Echo's revenge", it's only unevenly effective as a poetic principle, good where only single easily graspable objects are concerned but problematic in larger cultural domains. As one who cannot be unconcerned with customs & rituals, & with language as a record of  human history, he must see the difficulties in offering a topographical poetry to which he's necessarily a stranger. And to make strangeness palatable to Westerners is to deal in delicately precise shadings & a radically readjusted way of seeing for which Lee's not always prepared. In short, Lee's handled the shadings & interesting  nuances of fragments masterfully: it's the jump to cultural 'narratives' of the type we see in "Sex with a Second Woman", "Bad Men Come" & "Ghosts in the Mud" (particularly after "and thus beginneth the lesson") that is problematical. It's the politics of the piece running away with itself.

Again, Lee's "Echo's Revenge" is an exquisitely elegant statement of the paradigmatic encounter of language with travel that the poet fails to apply consistently throughout the whole work.

ii

last week
I was in France
this week, in Seoul
I've lived
the peripatetic summer
of a flibbedegibbet dragonfly
above a water flash
my life become
the shadow flutter
of a mortal thing
going "briefly briefly"
as I beat the ragged membrane of my wet wings("Echo's revenge" 4)

One sees that even in language as lyrically brilliant as this human agency, the "I' of "I beat the ragged membrance of my wet wings",  won't assert the primacy of poetic language for long. The temptation is to think here of the Benjaminian flâneur who samples cultural artifacts as he strolls, and expect not poetry but cultural criticism. It is language alone on its own terms, and a more heightened Parnassian view of the poet as weaver of delicate figural threads & tones, that is needed. Language cannot be just a repository of exchangeable cultural signifiers. It can only be the poet's own openness to the melancholic weave of light-effects everywhere unravelling into shadows that counts here as good viewing & writing: a pixiesh inner sense that removes the "I" from travel to marvel at a place's silent ethos  from which the poet-wander has been sadly excluded—"rucks of shadowed space"(3)—and sees Seoul here as a gallery not so much of things as the power of words to convey them imagistically, in a multisensual play of almost objectless impressions, in a "politics of the sensory" that can be "inhaled/like childbreath to a candlewish"(4).

there is a gallery I've seen in Seoul
within that current city
at a recent hour
wherein a sculptor sharing my name
has hung a pool of ice-blue cloth
come waterfalling
from a broken branch
it gathered gravity
then flung a spill across a patch of floor
like silence
in a photographic stream
it honoured
lingering and limned
with coolness-lovely folds
and rucks of shadowed space
too pale to contemplate
it held itself inhaled
like childbreath to a candlewish ("Echo's revenge" 2-3)

It's a necessary requirement that Lee very effectively meets but does not sustain. Since the foreigner really can't share in its material conditions, he adopts a creative distance in which to "imagine then with such a seeing blindness/all an unseen inner world you hold/against the tip of memory" ("Echo's Revenge 1). Here the poet's an Echo-figure rather than a strictly Western recorder of cultural history, trying to make progression into the work move along lines of a new aesthetics of travel that must be engaged and respectful at the same time: a case of being both there and not-there. A collection of "loosened stays" (5) & the poet's desire to bring forth a "myth/of unrequited calls". (4)

The book's first poem is its best because it's more a language of creativity than a tangible chronology, and one that handles things wistfully as only the poet "once and once alone"  should. What is established is a seeing conjoined to feeling: and what is seen primarily (just fragmented pieces of a human history to which John B. Lee's a stranger) can be translated into a melancholic shadow-play. This is the work's greatest figurative strength. Lee's clearly disavowed any connections to a rationalist (Cartesian) tradition of thinking restricted only to representations rather than the multiform, ephemeral edges the poet seems to prefer. In "What I Think" he says "if I were only a head/I'd want a philosopher's palm/to be fond of my mind/as child of a peach" (14), replacing a richer synesthesia for a straightforward sensory apparatus. Objects  are metonyms for a History that can only recorded at its most elusive borders, & the poet, condemned to seeing only distant "autumns...fastened there" (10), has to make up for language deficit by searching out artful substitutes in a new minimalist impression-gathering presented as foreign words & objects. A language of fragments to serve as conduits to an impermeable cultural whole such as in the following:

we pace a single square
of urban wilds
alive with light
we stand in fear of strangeness
we manage
to say dam-sa-ham-ni-da
as if we were grateful for everything
we say thank you
like the poor, like the mad
like the sorrowfully addicted
like the war-wounded
like the legless, the abandoned
the orphaned, the hopelessly homeless
the drunk-by-noon loser
the derelict, the exiled
the refugee, like Tarzan

and we ruffle the pages
of our little sleeping dictionary
like a lousy-feathered bird

and we say
the words ("Sleeping Dictionary" 15-16)

Lee's poetry at times looks like an archaeological dig and language a sieve for sifting through dirt to what's worth preserving. Among the symbolic pieces of an unapproachable past—poetic artifacts he writes into his travel poetry—are " a single helmet rusted/with a fatal hole" (6), "garden pots" (6), "rag of tin" (7), and even "coins and stones" (8) at market stalls.But it's here that a vital threshold is very likely to appear, and one Lee (as he's admitted) shouldn't have crossed: it's here, in other words, that the work is beginning to look too crassly political. Larger cultural wholes are a problem for vision trained on  things: they are like stolen temple stones that  he turns "over palm-upward in my hand" (17), lovely lyrical artifacts in themselves but not easily assimilable to ingrained habits of feeling . Even preparations for a son's wedding are an occasion for cultural dissymmetry and disharmony, because the ceremony can only be measured in terms of awkward fitting & a display of wasted fabric("Handsome in Hanboks" 11-12), an effect Lee may not have intended: because marriage in a foreign land cannot be properly abstracted from its constitutive ritual elements and made to look like part of a home wedding video:

the elderly seamstress
throwing her short arms wide
embraces my wife
about her bosoms from behind
taking her measurements
for the pink silk wedding garment
she is making for the marriage of our son
and his beautiful bride-to-be
and she is laughing like busy shop bells
at the ample endowment of western women
for she herself is small-breasted
as a girl
and as for me
she must leap up
like a child after apples (11)

 And a language that tries to remove itself from cultural difference, whatever the occasion & place, is doomed to turn eventually into nationalist sentimentality. As it does.

Transferring onto distant cities whole cultural artifacts from the poet's own childhood experiences (through a genealogy of  Canadian landscape poetry) is Lee's way to remedy this narrative defect. The poem "What I Think" stands as a solitary, almost caesural, moment in which poet pauses to make a sentimental display of his own childhood "orchard shadows" (14), "plastic helmet" (14), "toque": where poet-father frames his Korean experiences in a Canadian sensibility that's as out of place here as the ceremonial fitting of groom's father in "shining blue embroidered fabric".

what a little soldier I became
that Christmas my parents bought me
the plastic helmet
what a porkpie cool
what a toque
what a wet-wool balaclava
flavoured by cold
tasting like sucked mittens
and cold closets thinned by moths(14)

The result is an unnecessary duplication of poetic energies: expended once in purely imagistic terms for individuals and then again as a desperate search for familiar paradigms (like a Canadian childhood Christmas ) in which to locate & interiorize essentially foreign "laws of feeling". As if Lee were thinking of reverting to the layout of a safer, more disengaged type of poetry. If he'd followed his original impulses more closely, conveying (as delicately & skilfully as he does) the sense alone of the "blindfolded child in a game/of touch the trinket", dealing in delicate trinkets alone, the narrative could have avoided its disastrous fall into the later touristy preoccupation with illicit sex ("Sex with a Second Woman") and childhood prostitution ( "Bad Men Come"), or even the more awkward reportage of  tsunamis. The "touch the trinket" game has been trivialized to the point of comparing the terrifying experience of being swept away in tsunami tidal floods to tired Canadian folklore: "the bridegroom washed from the rocks/at Peggy's Cove".("Ghosts in the Mud" 31)

With the exception of "Thai Boxer", where individual "arms in the dark" (25), "gloves and foot wraps" (25) and "smoke light" (25) come the closest to a pure form of movement we'll ever find, several of the post-"Echo's Revenge" pieces seem to have failed as a work of  mediation: a structure of engagement with the "we" of community anywhere in the world that makes a poetry political. To act as recorder only of cultural shocks & metonyms of lost narratives— "to run my finger/on a rag of tin//or build back a broken nation/death by death" (7)—would have acted wonderfully as a demonstration of poetic truth but didn't. That purity of the fragment, marvelously conveyed in verses like "[a gallery in Seoul] held itself inhaled/like childbreath to a candlewish" (3) passed too joyously into cultural design, language, globalization, and issues of social justice, and lost itself in the exchange.

Ron Silliman and the diminishment of free speech

I don't think anything could've prepared me for what I saw in Silliman's Saturday, July 31, 2010 post: the chief American spokesperson for post-avant poetry, writer, critic and blogger whose roots go back to what was probably the most turbulent, anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic era in American literary history, & perhaps one of the few today to have significantly lived the Allen anthology, San Francisco renaissance and  Black Mountain movements (or certainly ingested enough of them to form his own equally vital "New Sentence" credo), rightfully enjoying his place as heir to Duncan, Spicer, Creeley: Ron Silliman, the name with which an extremely influential Language Poetry's become virtually synonymous today & whose blog is among the most respected and widely followed for both the quality of his posts and the lively debate that oftentimes center round them, is declaring, astonishingly enough, (and even at the end of a post in which he chronicles a forty-five year history of anti-avant garde literature & its sometimes hostile reactions from the public) that he will turn the "comments stream off altogether" at his own blog and hand-pick only a few of the more intelligently-and discretely-written comments (he'll receive by email only) to appear there from time to time.

 Ron Silliman has, in a word, opted for Internet censorship, radically curtailing the reader's right to offer intelligent, constructive criticism because of some anti- Massey comments at his blog that have dampened the spirits of this young poet and even been the cause of self-righteous indignation by blogger Jessica Smith. See her own anti-Silliman rant there. Apparently the more obnoxious comments of some Silliman readers (to be easily discarded, after all) have made the influential experimentalist poet a little queasy: a little down in the mouth, perhaps, about the virtues of freedom of speech in general. Instead of decrying the mistreatment of the younger poets, Silliman might have given them the benefit of some older-poet wisdom, & suggested ways for them to cope with the unavoidable hostile criticisms the particularly sensitive may have to endure. He's chosen to block the channels of open expression in the hope of patching up some potential bad feelings.This sort of coddling and sheltering gesture may have also, of course, made the Masseys out there feel a little embarrassed, a little patronized.

I can scarcely believe it & cannot help the feelings of condemnation. Did not America's greatest public intellectual Noam Chomsky write the introduction to a book written by a Holocaust-denier, Robert Faurisson, though Chomsky finds the man's viewpoint an abhorrent one, and says so? I sometimes wonder if Silliman's poetry doesn't come with a politics of its own. His may be the usual suspect "liberal-tolerant" reaction to tough criticism (or to even competing poetries) we find these days in blog discussions, the position of those who ludicrously want to both set poetic agendas for bold experimentalism of their own and yet decide on the terms of its own proper reception by the public it's bound to incite: to be both post avant and Emily Post. Only so much and no more to be heard from us. He condemns criticism that aims at putting down poets (as if it's never been done before) and yet doesn't see the uninintentional effect his censorship may have on those same poets who send him work precisely in order to get the exposure their work will most assuredly get there.


Here is the entire rationale in Silliman's own words.

I don’t mind debate, even vigorous debate, over fundamental issues. But it does seem clear to me that some people make a point of verbally attacking writers I praise on this blog simply because I’ve praised them. Reading that responses to a positive review on my blog seriously discouraged Jessica Smith about poetry & writing is as depressing a consequence as I can imagine. I want to apologize to her for not doing a better job policing the comments stream, and I want to apologize to Joseph Massey more recently for the same. And to Barbara Jane Reyes and any other poets who feel they may have been unfairly treated in the comments stream.

I have of course read some comments that suggest that poets who feel bruised by such behavior need not to be so fragile. But I think everyone has every right to feel exactly what they feel, and that participating in poetry doesn’t have to mean submitting oneself to hazing by yahoos

Recognizing this leaves me with few options. I could shut up, although I actually don’t think that’s the goal of most of the comment harpies. I think I give them a venue that their own blogs may not, and that this is really what much of this is about. I could reject a lot more comments than I do, not simply those that characterize someone as a “Jewette” or “French cunt.”¹ Which is one more bit of labor for which I don’t have the time or energy. Or I could turn off the comments stream altogether, which is the option I’m taking.

You can still write to me – the address is in the left-hand column – and once in rare while I might republish a note if it seems worthwhile, but I will ask your permission first. If you respond to something here in your own blog, I may well link it to in one of my weekly roundups – I’ve been doing that for years. But I’ve also ignored a lot if I thought they were just being stupid or name calling. That seems like a good thing to continue. And so I shall.

I'd like to offer a set of more specific comments by way of reaction to this incredible diminishment of free speech online:

(a) Silliman may be kowtowing to a younger readership than he's been accustomed to (namely, the no-nonsense, seasoned appraisals by his older readers), hoping for a kind of legacy-building in this self-demeaning way. After all, there are tens of thousands of them publishing, marketing and recreating themselves everywhere, and creative writing programs (& academic book markets) have never been more plentiful;

(b) I'd like to ask,What's happened to the "problematic relationship" to mainstream cultural expression of which tough honest criticism is a necessary part? Of course, I'm not referring to overtly sexist, racist and homophobic comments but to well articulated criticism based on a reasonable level of expertise and interest. Since when did the avant-garde/post avant care what anyone thought about their work anyways? I'd also recommend (to both Silliman & his sensitive young poets) that they read "In Praise of Tough Criticism" by Jeffrey R. DiLeo  (an article I discovered a little while ago at David Kosub's "Speaking of Poems" blog), making the transition from academic writing to poetry on their own. DiLeo's concluding comments are particularly appropriate here;

We need to grow thicker critical skin. Why? Because critical behavior that always results in a chorus of affirmation is nothing more than conformity; because allowing views to persist that need to be challenged is nothing less than critical mediocrity; and because failure to tell our colleagues what we truly think about their work is simple dishonesty. A reshaped critical culture will help build a more robust, honest, and transparent academy

(c) we may have here a classic example of the autre temps, autres moeurs principle, and by that I mean the depressing way in which erstwhile risk-taking 'radical'-poets (poetries) have become mainstream, almost to the point of becoming academically elitist or (what's worse!) slavishly bourgeois, even afraid to hurt the public's feelings. Americans Silliman and Bernstein and Canada's Frank Davey and Michael Ondaatje come to mind ;

(d) poetry is a "zero-game" (after Žižek), at best: against every literary novelty or acclaim there will always arise an equally strong exertion of force (in the form of disapprobation and unkind criticism) to render the work a type of creative nullity that no amount of literary correctness or defense can fix. Writers live in a black hole that's condemned to be endlessly filled in: for every positive there's bound to be a negative, and on it goes. Trying to right the supposed wrongs of unkind criticism by cutting off the means of making criticisms of any type is an illusion. I wonder 'what' Silliman (who's made it his business to tear down the idols all his life) is hoping to fix by banishing real free speech from his blog. The inconsistency between temperament and practice is astonishing. And I'm sorry to say this glaring discrepancy has caused me to see the man & his poetries a little differently now; and

(e) why does Silliman gives us the Ezra Pound picture at the head of  his fateful Saturday, July 31, 2010 post, Pound the madman, anti-Semite & fascist sympathizer, polygamist and most ruthless iconoclast of them all? Would he have been able to take some bruising from this critic?  America's most respected post-avant can't see the devastating irony in the fact that Pound lived in the black hole that is Poetry, and he apparently can't.

The poetry of John Martone: & some reflections on community

you can see
the broken stones

around this garden
from outer space (from braincase)

        

          you're just
          an or

ganelle

golgi
body

mito
chon
drion

mr
no name (from ksana)

I have lately spent much time in my blog on the minimalist & visual poetries of American poets, even though 'Word-Dreamer' was created to address primarily Canadian issues in contemporary poetry. Am I losing focus?  Have I lost the terminus ad quem? The literary scene at home does get my attention but (sigh) only sporadically, & only when I'm not distracted by what's appeared to me to be a much more vibrant, culturally significant American discussion. I've found most Canadian bloggers to be standoffish, territorial & generally unreceptive to tough discussion of their works and viewpoints: sometimes willing to exchange ideas on criticism, provincial disparities and arts funding but mostly interested (I find) in promoting a dominant Canadian status quo. And I've sometimes reflected here on the reasons why.

How different things are stateside! The American poets I've met espouse an openness to ideas and intellectual fair-mindedness, a generosity and unstinting commitment to literary work I find admirable. How do I know? To begin with, I sometimes get copies of inventive & imaginative work, always generously given, and with no other end in view than to share & create a literary community of poet-friends. Ed Baker and Geof Huth are two such contributors to this growing transborder friendship. And  now from poet John Martone comes a collection of haiku and minimalist poetry in the form of ksana (published in Jim Kacian's Red Moon Press in 2009) and other "small books and ephemera" which I will look at shortly.

To judge, and appreciate, the quality of work one must then belong to a community, or be prepared to espouse a version of one. And John Martone recently has done that. Poet, publisher and conceptual artist, he's given to a grateful reader interesting entryways into a world, a buddhistic cosmos actually and insightful intersections with Vedic cosmology, language & minimalist sensibility. Here are also artisanal productions (in the spirit of Cid Corman & Ed Baker) attuned to tradition and mindful of the conditions of creativity itself: never daring to conceptualize fake divides between language & poetry—the two always seen as working at cross purposes these days—and make a monstrosity of vital poetic matter. Here's also work that's respectful of real readers who are capable of building their own bridges to distant authors and styles.

 As I've said, I've recently received a gift of poetry from John Martone: one main recently published text ksana, with a collection of smaller works, variously named & designed. The title ksana, Sanskrit for extreme swiftness (as in the time it takes a "Chinese blade" to pass through a single silk thread), is a declaration of origins and poetic style. The grateful reader ponders on work that's felt to be, in one sense, as congenial as "pebble in palm" ( ksana 13) or, in another, as majestic as "cliff in hand" (14). It's remarkable that there's no more nor less in the pebble than in the cliff:  both are poetic objects given equally in a moment of  brilliant intuitiveness, energy-bearing and as highly charged as a charm or amulet. As Martone himself describes the poetic object, in an online article entitled "The NEOLITHIC (re)turn in poetry",

A Poem is first of all an amulet, an OBJECT bearing energy (c.f. the objectivist poem as object and Olson's poem as "at every point a high-energy discharge"). The poem is first of all a charm, relic, medicine, compass, key. See, too, the ORACLE BONES of Shang dynasty China, scapulamancy as practiced even today by arctic peoples, and Marija Gimbutas’ The Living Goddesses. We are not talking about the poem sitting on a page like a jewel in a ring but the two inseparable, Eshleman’s THE ONE ART given its place. In this context, to “reproduce” (i.e. publish) a poem widely is to pass on as little of it as the “reproduction” of a painting or sculpture. We would speak instead of instances of a poem – think of the poet as writing down the poem again and again.

To read  is to engage always in a playful shifting between 'abodes' (topoi) that don't ever clash: rather they complement each other, providing always for that quick clean cut to the poem's center. Yes, a poem's center and the closure of poetic space where things offer portals to shared insight. How marvelously the boy is indistinguishable from his gloves in the absence of illusory earthly dimensions (like real gloves), trees from an alphabet, room from diorama & lichens and stones from the house:

                           a boy
                           snow in
                           his gloves

                                                                   these fallen trees
                                                                   an alphabet


      his room yes
      shoebox
      diorama



                                                                   acorn caps
                                                                   lichen stems
                                                                   fossil stones—
                                                                   houseful soon
                                                                   then no wall

Far from not seeing the same things and writing wildly disparate visions, the reader senses that one mind's at work always, & that viewing is participatory and even joyful, and that the poet has consciously adapted skill to vision. One equal vision in which Martone, never the cavalier theorist of difference & diffidence, the namer of schools, lets language work co-materially with poetic objects & sometimes the form of expression itself. Whether it be a new moon, a slitted sheet folded into a tiny 2.5" by 3.5" six-page booklet or a book itself a bookmark, a book converted to booklet; or the equally small pocket-size texts bye now, geometry & [Crassula ovata], each bound with delicate handmade papier-mâché covers, artifacts to be held reverentially in the hands—whatever the materials or form of expression, it's poetry designed to bring readers together into community and tradition. Never exilic and dispersed as are the fragments of contemporary poetry, Martone's pieces offer shareable secrets (as poet says, "you're part of this secret", ksana 48) & instruct by direct showing:

keeping a jade plant
all winter
that's my secret ([Crassula ovata])

blue sky
the first
pet (bye now)

log—
hollow

long time
now

down
to this

empty
skin ( geometry)

Verses also appear to be models suitable for imitation,with  place names and circumstances serving as significant literary occasions. The haiku tradition is being reverenced and legitimized as a viable contemporary art form: as who couldn't see the student's homage to Basso in, "green tree-frog/in bathroom sink/my dream" (ksana 63). Poetry offered as a kind of  instruction to the uninitiated such as to "make  yr/bowl/of clay//& have no metal" (from ksana, 47), or sketch the buddha in "one/syca/more's//highest/limbs" (ksana 47)  And expecting to find Martone stick close to form wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation since the reader also notes the presence throughout of  kireji (the break in verse that leads to insight) and kigo (the presence of obligatory season, plant, & animal names), structural principles that in a master's hand result in sharp seasonal & landscape vignettes that can stun the attentive into pure mindfulness:

fall's turned
    wild mint spikes
        white (ksana 37)

this lichen's a snowflake (ksana 45)

winter firefly-
  chip of
    yellow glass (ksana 57)

white bead
youll be
june bug ( from a shambles)

my wool
watch cop

on an
empty

flower
pot
    spring! (from braincase)

just let year's first mosquito take me (ksana 72)

it's spring all muddy w you turtle (ksana 72)

But formal conditions, too firmly locked in classical genre, won't ever restrict the poet's view here : everywhere the rhythms seem to jump into motion like the "spring's first water strider's drifting" (ksana 72) & "pea-/tenril-/sense" (ksana 187), or suddenly halt along riversides at a makeshift camp ground as in "riverside/you could camp/there's a bedframe" (ksana 73) Or consider the somber end-stop of arrested movement in death: particularly the "roly/poly//[that]rolls from dead//turtle's head portal" (ksana 73) Words and objects don't drift apart nor do rhythms, offered up in sound & meter, fail to gauge the course (or cycles) of natural events: none of the studied detachment (as in post-avant poetries)  from real lives & histories. "try hearing gods in a roadside ditch" (ksana 198).

As a contemporary poet Martone also explores the textuality of the page. In ksana the poet uses space creatively, interweaving verticals & horizontals that point towards interesting thematic cross links, as well as hyphenated and abbreviated constructions, & even the odd Chinese character:

                                                                     brick wall
                                                                            out of the wind
                                        red-                                     weeping cherry

                                        buds

                                        make

                                        a                                    7 pair
                                                                              dutchman's
                                        pur                                 breeches

                                        ple                                 on
                                                                              their
                                        mist
                                                                              flag
                                                                              pole (ksana 81)

algae
  cd be
      bullfrong (ksana 82)

jack in his pulpit
    by #3
          stepping stone (ksana 83)

shell, attentive to the integrity of page space, displays a kind of principle of repetition in which 'peony' sometimes begins, sometimes ends a verse: the effect is that of a cascading waterfall with plant caught somewhere in its clear basin (See also ksana 129, 136, 158, 178 & 199):

peonies—
                 already
                             too late

peony
                a huge eye
                               opens

...

more ants
                than petals
                                  peony

a habilis
              cranium
                                 peony

braincase is another work that displays an interesting economy of space, empty pages randomly alternating with full, and a full page sometimes comprising of only a single line. As the largest of the works it's surprisingly also the sparsest in terms of a word-to-page ratio. So the traditionalist can also be experimentalist: the two never seem at loggerheads for the reader engaged in the "pleasures of the text".

The node section of ksana, for example, is a particularly artful adaptation of Vedic classicism to a  'node' concept that's used in Internet discourse to mean information seen as points of interconnection among computer networks: in other words, here Martone's meshed, to great effect, "nodes of indra's net" with a more contemporary feel for the discreteness or ambiguities, perhaps, of the human condition itself. A god of cosmology, of the elements and battle who also provides terms of reference for cosmic tensions and life processes in postmodern life:  "yes  youre/an/attic/room/astro/naut" (134), "10/fallen/trees//&/you/were first" (135) and "sparrows all of us in our winter padding" (137). A wonderful interchange of classical and contemporary sensibilities that never tries to pass itself off as just pure experimentalism.

 In general, Martone's is a poetry aesthetically pleasing to the eye and suited to the reading mind's own call for alternating lexical and syntactical patterns Even Sanskrit and English verses can be vertically aligned on the page (as in ksana 92) and remain (as all of his poetry is) focused on shared vision. "my garden buddha  hasnt moved all winter" (ksana 163) Since the poet's put the power of verse back into the  garden buddha", the reader recognizes all the elements of that central trope ("place"), such as the accompanying "spreading ashes" "gloves", and "arching back" (163-64), as poetic processes intimately gathered in a single haiku-like effect. I'd venture to say almost every piece in ksana is a reestablishment of the assimilation of life-processes to a unified dharmic insight: and Martone the poet a buddha-figure who writes always "under the name of an ordinary fool".

Turkey buzzards, jade plant, shells, moons, refracted light & perhaps even the "book itself" are not just titles & metaphors in the poetry of John Martone—they're things to engage the attentive mind. And what's moved Martone to extend to me (as Baker & Huth have done before) the gift of poetry is the same thing that's moved the poet himself to write: a sense of the importance of community & of language's necessity to free things from the illusoriness of limitations, artifactual & linguistic mainly. And for that I'm extremely grateful.

"Who Dat" by J.Cole (uncensored version): and Homeric tradition in rap

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable -
And therefore the fittest for renunciation
                                ( T.S.Eliot, "The Dry Salvages)

I've always believed rap was Homeric, and not just by design: it seems as attuned to life's rhythms (I'd prefer to say 'arhythmics'), tensions and playful incongruities as anything you'll get in the Iliad. I've only looked at a few rap songs but the few I have, (& judging as well by the almost unanimous acceptance of hip hop music among the young), have led me to believe that rap means to be a true contemporary poetry. Yes, rap as the true heir to classical oral-based narrative: with Tupac Shakur perhaps its greatest poet-figure. He was the rhapsode of his age: the poet performer in a songmaking tradition that goes all the way back to antiquity. (The poet laureate of Edmonton, Alberta is hip hop artist Roland Pemberton, (a.k.a. Cadence Weapon.  I'm surprised there aren't more.) I wish someone would look seriously at the idea of Homeric code in contemporary hip hop music. I think the ancient Greek ideal of thumos (meaning "passion", "spiritedness" or an "innate drive for recognition") would be serviceable here.

J.Cole's "Who Dat", despite the skillful  choreography & theatre, song and setting, looks as if it stumbles through every imaginable inner-city nightmare, every stereotype of race and politics. This is its design. Though offering disparate (ludicrously incongruous) parts there is a whole story that emerges:  integration out of the seemingly disintegrating structures.The rap he's inherited from Tupac and early hip hop upholds a recognizable pattern of  tradition through variety: and the young artist is faithful to that lineage. The songer-performer is the unaccommodated rapster (a type of culture hero), who wanders listlessly into and out of his own narrative, following the same abandoned tracks; and the message, conveyed in the usual language, (Fayetteville) "southside" landscapes & violent backdrops of crowds & exploding cars, is really a weave of all the many incongruous (purposely misplaced) mini 'epics' along the way. It's his own unique take on the rap standard.

Lyrics, hands & gestures jab & strike at the heart of enforced 'codes' of middle-class life: urban, media and educational. Abandoned loading docks, strips of dirty forests and impressionable youth glued to multimeda foreground J.Cole's rap, and not the other way around.The video enforces the ludicrousness of the unenforceable—assimilation of inner-city youth in general, & gang youth in particular, to mainstream life— through a series of always very plausible images of "the breakage" in mainstream America: which is rap's true standard. He sets his rhythms, message and landscape against the norm (standard English, high school ethos and role-modelling) For lock-step conformity he gives meandering lyrics (parody of peripatetics), with cheer leaders, high school bands and growing mobs. Fires set here are not bonfires on the beach:  mostly self-igniting, fueled by exploding cars & the gas spills under the rapper's feet. They're signs to remember a story & landscape by: pyrotechnics in the service of a mnemotechnics.

Interestingly enough,  the online Urban Dictionary gives the expression "Who dat" as a derogatory reference to the once unpopularity of the New Orleans Saints football team: "Who dat said dey gonna beat dem saints. "Who dat" (ebonics for "Who is that?" ) is used here in J.Cole's video as perhaps a similar interrogation of fake tradition (even ebonics-based), or even a substitute inner-city history from which the rest of America's been excluded. Realities of gang culture, & the conditions that underlie them, cannot be separated from their representations in rap: to try to separate them (even in discussion) would be as absurd as the mainstream images of pom- poms, marching bands & role-modelling actually seen in J.Cole's video.

Did the young rap artist J.Cole purposefully foresee (and work into his video) the strange dialectics of the arhythmics of art & life: remixing the standard  violence of visuals & signs, haunting sonorousness of music, to form his variation on the rapper "thug life" tradition? I doubt he consciously did though he's aware (I'm sure) of the essential drama of dance, youth and  fires in any true contemporary poetry, one that clearly derives from Homeric epic and story-telling.

Dancing at Auschwitz: reflections on art's "intolerable image"

My reading of philosopher & art theorist Jacques Rancière lately has suggested some new inroads into poetry, some aspects of his post-critical thought on contemporary art seeming even to dovetail nicely with an examination of the minimalist ("pwoermd) poetry of Geof Huth. But it's done more than that. I've just read  Rancière's "The Intolerable Image" chapter of his The Emancipated Spectator, where he brilliantly critiques artistic representations of the most horrible realities imaginable, looking specifically at Oliviero Toscani's posters of anorexic models and Martha Rosler's 60s Vietnam War photographs,  the media depictions of Auschwitz, the Rwandan & Cambodian genocides, and  Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning "vulture stalking a dying child". He questions whether the intolerability of the image can form part of critical art, one where montage, collage and détournement techniques are understood as artistic channels for social & political critique. Do these venerable critical art forms run aground here?                                       

He wonders, in particular, if content of this kind can be separated from image, the former normally regarded as the true reality behind the image and the impetus for protest against the injustices & inhumanities that graphic representations disclose. Environmental activists oftentimes exploit the social activist potential of imagery. Rancière's own view is that the gap between picture and content's been closed: far from stirring the indignant viewer to action (or to thoughts of it), the image as picture, painting or poem reveals a tension at the heart of viewing itself. And if the question of the nature of the artistic representation in general leads to that of the nature of the intolerable in particular, the lines between spectator and object seem to have been blurred beyond recognition. It's not clear what Carter's image of a dying girl in Sudan can be: a political (a "call to arms") or its own unique thing as art, something to be passively viewed & registered aesthetically. Rancière refers to this inner-tension in art as "the dialectic inherent in the political montage of images." A discussion too complex to pursue here.

                                              Kevin Carter's "vulture stalking child"

My reading of Rancière also happened lately to have coincided with what I consider to be another example of  "intolerability of the image": namely, a recent YouTube video of an eighty-nine year old holocaust survivor Adolek Kohn who's seen dancing with his family to disco music (the song "I Will Survive") at the Auschwitz site where he was himself interned. Here's a video compilation of disco music & damce staged against boxcars, entrances and crematoria. The image certainly looks grotesquely inconsonant with reality (the Shoah). It counter-poses (a favorite verb of Rancière's) to the image of unimaginable suffering that of dance and joyful celebration of life. As he says, "We came from the ashes and now we dance."

Auschwitz is emblematic of this "inner tension" in art. But the viewer asks how the video can be articulated as art and even dared to be displayed to the public while, at the same time, feeling its appeal as one form of contemporary expression, almost on a par with any other. It's troubling that here "image" (joyful celebration) and "content" (mass extermination) can't mercifully collapse in on themselves, and strike the video out of our artistic consciousness.The fact that they can't, of course, is deeply problematical. Declaring the image itself to be unrepresentable in this way is to run the risk of adopting a too 'uncritical' position in regards to art in general. It's as though the intolerable content (anorexic model, vulture stalking dying girl, holocaust survivor dancing at Auschwitz) were something to be suspended in critical space, just one type of 'image' (of viewing) among a whole array of others.

 Kohn's daughter Jane Korman, the producer of the video, said her purpose was to "make some artwork that would waken people and make them think again about this past". She could have cited Roberto Benigni's portrayal in movie La Vita Bella or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah as similar types of artwork. Originally displayed in an Australian art gallery, her image of the intolerable is now offered as a legacy to a YouTube and MuchMusic generation who've been normally too "numbed", "desensitized" to the Holocaust event. Korman gives a more appealing  inverted 'image' of the hopelessness and despair that's been historically associated with Auschwitz: the unimaginable softened (more delicately aestheticized) for the young as song & dance. Otherwise "who would bring their grandchildren here?" asks Kohn.

Without holocaust survivor himself present, the dance video would be rightly condemned as a form of Holocaust-denial or -denigration and yet a very uncomfortable sort of acquiescence in the suitability of artistic form, promoted by a holocaust survivor himself, can be the effect of seeing Korman's video. What should be a clash of irreconcilable opposites in artwork doesn't here necessarily result in a single efficacious point of unbearable horror (perhaps the same that had led to criticism of Carter's picture & the photographer's own suicide). The viewer can choose to view it dispassionately, considering its artistic merits alone. And not condemn it as a lie only. Interestingly enough, the presence of  Kohn and family (as contrary to the claims of the Anti-Defamation League) is sufficient condition for viewing the video as "artwork" & a type of memorial in its own right. But has artistic expression been given a de jure pass on moral condemnation?  Does the inner tension of the image (the troubling dialectic between really two competing images of the horror of extermination) trump the fear that the video may dehistoricize the Shoah?

What Rancière would say to the Kohn video is, I think, what he's already said in regard to Lanzmann's Shoah, a lengthy passage worth quoting in full:

Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent-something that speech does just as much as photography [videography]. The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. It is not a mere reproduction of what is out there in front of the photographer or the filmmaker. It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn. And the voice is not the manifestation of the invisible, opposed to the visible form of the image. It is itself caught up in a process of image construction. It is the voice of a body that transforms one sensible event into another, by striving to make us 'see' what it has seen, to make us see what it tells us." (93-94)

Kohn's YouTube video leaves us with a silent tension between the visible horror of mass extermination and the unspoken  horror of art's ability to turn just about anything, however intolerable its image, into artistic expression: unspoken, or invisible, or unrepresentable because to say it would be too unpardonable an offense against human decency. There's this other 'image' lying within the horror of content (shoving aside the thing itself) that is a troubling nexus of competing ways of seeing the stalking vulture, anorexic model & dancing Holocaust victim. A troubling 'something' that's perhaps the product of a hypermediated age.