A Puddicombe Poetry reading

Puddicombe Estate

We have not heard the music of the spheres,
The song of star to star, but there are sounds
More deep than human joy and human tears,
That Nature uses in her common rounds
                                  (Archibald Lampman)

I've usually hosted my poetry readings at the Erland Lee house in Stoney Creek, in the sturdy red plank two--tiered structure called a 'carriage house'. I chose this particular site not just for its historical importance but because the grounds have remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years: stretching out around you for miles is the same landscape that inspired the great Confederation poets—I think of poets Isabella Valancy Crawford, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, etc.—: the same gridwork of roads and orchards, same lush verdure of weed, grasses, & the forest wildlife that had called a distinctively Canadian pioneer poetics into being.

The Erland Lee, however, is no longer available, permanently closed because of funding cuts. I've chosen the Puddicombe Estates as my new site, a stately 208 year old family fruit farm and winery located just a few miles east in the town of Winona, in what's probably the most lush region of the Golden Horseshoe. Not quite as rustic-looking as the 'carriage house', & certainly without the spectacular mountain brow scenery and quiet seclusion of the Erland Lee household (perhaps the very things to inspire a poetry reading), Puddicombe looks like its more prosperous cousin. A first glance at the place tells you an old Saltfleet Township family farm's been turned into a pretty successful commercial venue for weddings, wine tasting events, & other community gatherings.

The Puddicombe Poetry reading will take place there on June 19th, and in the week or so since I've advertised the event I've already received about 12-13 confirmed readers. Some of them I will meet for the first time while others I have known only through blog correspondences:  there will be, of course, old friends I've read & written poetry with over the course of a decade now. It's regrettable that the outstanding individuals I've met online live too far away to attend: what a delight it would be to share the poetry podium with Ed Baker, Joseph Hutchison, William Michaelian & Vassilis Zambaras.

I consider myself a 'people's poet' in the tradition of Chris Faiers, James Deahl, Jeff Seffinga & Milt Acorn: and I believe the strongest poetic movements have always arisen primarily as a community of friends and supporters. I'm unabashedly a Canadian poet first, impassioned by this country's magnificent landscape & love of cultural diversity. It is to this uniquely rural-based Canadian poetics that I dedicate my readings.

If anyone reading this post happens to live in the Golden Horseshoe area of Ontario, and would like to attend the Puddicombe Poetry reading, please leave a reply here.

Joggers and bloggers: some pretty dry reflections with stick figures



The jogger



and I suppose
any part of us that can only be seen by others
is a dark part (Frank O'Hara)

A simple rhyme (that accidentally popped into my head) has lately given rise to some thoughts about the two things I can honestly say give me the most enjoyment: blogging and jogging, and of the two jogging's still the preferred activity since I've been at it almost my entire adult life. But, as we know, enjoyment has a dark underside. In fact, what could've have easily veered off into odious comparisons between two rather dissimilar things becomes a reflection on 'desire'. Two types of exertion, physical and mental, have actually unleashed a third mysterious autre chose that is anything but liberating but without which exertion of any type instantly ceases. It is, as poet Frank O'Hara sagaciously puts it, "a dark part". It's the dark, elusively real object we're always chasing after.

Desire is, precisely to that extent, the showy gimcrack part of ourselves that makes us visible to the world. Running & blogging are a kind of display with the potential to keep the goal hopelessly out of reach. How exactly can something we pursue for its own sake do that? Firstly, by giving relief only intermittently, for relief from the pain of confounding inactivity is illusory though inactivity isn't, and anything achieved in spurts & starts (as blogging & running are) has a marked propensity, Zeno-style, to continually divide into more parts of itself—the farther we go, the more distant the prospects of achieving success appear— til the agent is seen moving in a perpetual mist, broken-spirited, alone. Anything in the world that actually produces good without the usual tiring, dispiriting intermediaries would, of course, only bring the whole rescue machinery to a grinding half. As Edison Peña knew.

Secondly, pleasurable activities can also damn us from the start by valorizing the work & unleashing some notion of fame or recognition in our heads. Activity gives us too much time with our thoughts. But if the blogger or runner doesn't try to go beyond this half-baked idea that fame essentially is (for most of us), determined to be even a bit stodgy about it, life would still remain unbearable without the next mile, the next line. This twofold desire for relief & fame is the paradox of all activity. A painless jouissance is, as the great Lacan said, life's greatest disappointment. To drive us to the goal and yet make us divert our course at the same time is the engine of the run & the next line: again, the engine of illusion itself. It's the semi-tragedy of life where the experience of human action lives.


The blogger

 And what can be darker, indeed, than the illusion of tying the idea of the good to human activity in general. (That mundane activities only form the limit of my desire, & not something like sex or drink, has the potential to be slanderous if used with force against me!) At the risk of sounding obtuse, I'll have it out with moralists anytime over this intrinsic goodness of the run (or sentence or anything) as opposed to the truer indeterminacy of a notion clearly entangled in its own surroundings. Nietzsche is right: man is "the beast with red cheeks" who tires himself [sic] out trying to place a value on things. Whether in writing or running redness in the face is tantamount to the laughable robustness of the warrior-prince who rides proudly behind the last man.

Is the blogger or jogger, then, saner than his desire to be one? The concreteness of the act is no guarantee of its own intrinsic desirability. That in delineating the outlines of the source of desire thought almost runs away with itself is pretty obvious, isn't it? To see how hilariously robust the idea in motion really is, trying adding (even in imagination) some redness to the stick figures in this post, or even to give a sense of the comicality of effort. Or try adding earth tones to the blogger's squash-sized head, even as he posts his next reply.

The insanity of the avant-garde today: or why "Christian Bök gives great simulacra"

Art should hit, slap in the face, go straight through all interference, and not question. It should present itself as an object of desire, a tangible commodity, and not see itself as a prototype. It should be instantly ready for consumption. (Geert Lovink)

...works that we appreciate and would classify as avant-garde constitute negotiated and compromised artistic expressions that avoid extreme theoretical positions in favor of a self-conscious critical acknowledgment of the world of commercial technoscience. (Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello)

Is it the “necropastoral” minnesinger or the “flarf” honker who most succinctly fits the anti-humanism-contaminated-with-bestiality prong? Is it the power-accommodating conceptualist “typist” or the mock-geneticist encoder of bacterial DNA whom “we” ought crown with virtuous alienation’s unsign’d “writerly” hat, or bat? Is the post-takeover lockdown of “J2” the prime contemporary example of cynicism and “mimetic camouflage,” or is it the Poetry Foundation’s move to become a kind of literary Disney World?) (John Latta)

Silliman's recent reflections on Christian Bök’s Xenotext poetry experiment add to my suspicion that the repetitiveness of contemporary avant-garde creation is a type of clinical insanity that results (as Einstein famously quipped) from doing the same thing over & over and yet expecting a different result each time. Bök’s genetically modified poem is one case only of a fairly typical tendency in popular contemporary 'writing class' avant-gardism to imitate, appropriate or take directly from the labour & resources of outside disciplines. (I suspect the active participation of any bona fide biogeneticists in Xenotext may be attributable solely to a Canada Council grant). How else, in the case of Xenotext, do you expect to implant a lyrical poem into the genome of a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans and hope for an immortal poetry attributable to one person?

I don't, of course, really think Bök et al are clinically nuts any more than that a poem can be chemically reconfigured to tell its host genome to reproduce itself ad infinitum. But why does he talk this way, lost in a language of unmastered notions? (He's recently said in Silliman's blog that"I am now the first poet in literary history to have engineered a microbe to write poetry...")  Well, because he can and the conditions for an egregious poetry of spectacle are just right these days. Silliman in his post on Bök has sagaciously asked the one question that puts paid to the validity of any type of Xenotext project aimed at taking minimalism to its extremist form: how do we know? How do we know, in fact, whether it hasn't been done before, here or in distant galaxies? "Yet the very god-like scale," as Silliman says," that Bök proposes in the project seems to me to invoke the likelihood that this has, seriously, been done before elsewhere." Meant more as flattery than damaging criticism Silliman's comment does unearth the essential will-to-copy that's at the heart of contemporary avant-garde work. Internet researcher & academic Geert Lovink, however, doesn't mince his words, saying that "The will to subordinate to science is nothing more than a helpless adolescent gesture of powerlessness and victimhood."

Everything about the avant-garde (or post-avant) has been done before: Silliman's right. Contemporary 'futurists', 'fluxists' or crude Schwitters imitators bank on the illusion of originality: again Silliman, "Christian Bök gives great simulacra." He pretty much reiterates the quintessential showmanship quality of the author of Eunoia in his Monday, May 09 blog post. Constraint-based work like this is a "pseudo-event" in the sense first espoused by Daniel J. Boorstin: the same cookie-cutter mould repeatedly pressed on fresh dough. The first avant-gardists (Schwitters, Arp, Ball, Tzara, etc), on the other hand, were to a man a fringe presence, living in very trying socio-economic conditions, even imprisoned or otherwise openly reviled for their work. The Russian avant-gardists are an even better case in point. A far cry from the current fashionable 'academic' playground radical poetries have become where Dr.Bök can hold his writing students hostage to his ideas & books. A far cry from the neon sign art that even the author of the Alphabet, perhaps realizing that the young don't read thick books anymore, has recently dabbled in.

Ron Silliman at the Text Festival in Bury

There's nothing at stake anymore for the contemporary experimentalist, neither resources nor reputation nor even the very materials of life: and work that always resorts, in the end, to wholesale mimicry & appropriation even disrespects its forebears. But, as I've said, the conditions for art by imitation are optimal, and have a lot to do with the forces of globalization. In fact, the fashionable 'otherness' of traditional avant-gardism has been expropriated by global capital, making the notion itself obsolete. Even Silliman's acknowledges the outdatedness of the notion of the avant-garde, opting for something that takes it beyond the indebtedness to past models in which it's mired. His recent neon art, Bök's poem in a genome & Geof Huth's 'pwoermd' as art forms have all been ironically expropriated by a global capital dynamics as hungry as post-avants for garish display & marketability. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their celebrated Empire, "it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value or a practice that is 'outside'" (385). And one of the outsiders devoured by the totality of global capitalism is, of course, the avant-garde.

And so what about the claim (or suspicion) that contemporary experimentalists—and the names for what they do are legion: mash up, conceptual, slam, flarf, fluxus, codework, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, text, appropriation, cleave, etc.—are insane? Well, it's more a ruse than anything else & as far as posturing goes, it's a pretty lame one. Again, it's insane to think Christian Bök is the "first poet in literary history to have engineered a microbe to write poetry". (Of course, the claim's not even factually true: biogeneticist Craig Venter has already performed a similar type of genome trick when he "inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe.") But the pseudo-scientism of a writing class instructor has been permanently assimilated to a new unitary dictatorship of capital & its global networks so that the avant-gardists have nowhere to go but backwards. And so the crazy repetitiveness. Moving forward in the traditional sense only makes the merger with capitalism more secure. The avant-garde is in crisis mode. Bök's Xenotext is probably the best example there is of how science,the subjectivities of art and language experimentation have all turned into so many garish displays of a cultural consumerism that academia promotes and government bureaucracies fund. Of how predictably mainstream they've all have become.

If the avant-garde is in crisis, do I have an alternative vision of artistic work with the potential to be foreward-looking again & significantly alter the conditions of life itself? Yes. I've lately rethought poetry, and its cultural signifiers, even going so far as to equate the avant-garde with social-political activism of the Muhammad Bouazizi type. In other words, I'm beginning to see poetry (the act of'making') in a purely material way as activity affecting the commons and every aspect of life in a globalized world. I reserve the avant-garde for activity that sometimes must amount to acts of self-immolation or imprisonment or execution by fascist firing squads. A radical form of "self-valorization" never amounting to theory alone and silly academic games. An other- rather than ego-centric Art. I've become virulently anti-avant in the Sillimanesque sense, tired of the academicization of something that ought to mean 'life-and-death' to us. Now, of course, in comfortable North America the very ideal of poetry I'm suggesting is almost inconceivable. And that's precisely the problem.

Translating O'Hara: oh, what fun it is

Translating Frank O'Hara's "Choses Passagères" convinces me the great New York poet wrote French the way I read it: with a good dictionary by his side, trusting more to literal word-for-word exchanges than to a fluent speaker's familiarity with idiom & then relying on a poet's instinct for literary discovery. It seems that if the French appears quirky it wasn't something he intended for its own sake: he wrote here with a view to shaping out a product that only an aesthetic voluptuary like Frank O'Hara could've desired. But the poem may have been also a kind of intentional linguistic ruse.

The poem seems strongly to challenge the translator to make French idiomatic phrases, of which there are plenty, resonate with poetic meanings & eventually crystallize into 'the poem'. O'Hara is said to have written "Choses Passagères" by flipping randomly through Cassell's French-English dictionary, almost Mac Low-style, and forming a purposely aberrant piece collected from random samplings of French idiom. As the title suggests, like "things in passing". He's condemned the reader to steer a treacherous course between the literal & figurative, letting the real poem somehow appear in the evanescence of interpretation. In other words, no two translations of O'Hara's poem can be exactly alike.

I will, however, offer a version of the poem that won't chase after random meanings, and purposely treat the lines as if they were meant to construct a whole poem: as if what we had was a French translation of an O'Hara poem that was first written in English. And to do this properly it'll be necessary to treat almost every verse line as a literal entity whose rough edges (such as in the use of anguille ) may need to be pared down to something like the tenor of O'Hara's overall writing style. I offer a variation on "the poetic is stranger than fiction" motif.

I'd like to thank Magda Viehover, friend & colleague, for her assistance in tackling some of the tougher phrasing in O'Hara's poem.
____________

J'écorche l'anguille par la queue, peut-être un noeud
     d'anguille, ou il y a anguille sous roche,
je ne fais que toucher barres.
Chapeaux bas! mais, il n'y avait pas un seul chapeau,
et moi; j'avais beaucoup travaillé dans le temps.
J'avais souffert un grand échec, mystérieusement.
Qui se sent galeux se gratte!

Hébergement? je suis à la hauteur d'une île, c'est du
     hasard, et je ne suis pas une haridelle,
plein d'impudicité, non, non, j'imprime un mouvement
     à une machine,
la semaine des quatre jeudis, du temps que la reine
     Berthe filait.

J'aime partout les kinkajous.
Hier soir, j'étais un labadens; maintenant? je suis
     un lavabo.
Je mange les morilles moresques, quelle suffisance!
Je suis un homme qui se noie, montant un cheval à nu, et
     mon ciel est courvert de nuances.
Est-ce que j'ai un bel organe, hein? je fais ses orges
     très bien, pourquoi pas?

Ce fruit est du poison tout pur, c'est la pure vérité,
     et pourquoi pas?
ça ne nous rajeunit pas! La rouille ronge le fer,
     c'est un souvenir soviétique.
La trébuchage, le tric-trac, vous vous trompez! dites
     voir turlututu chapeau pointu!
Ce drap est d'un bon user,
pour trouver l'usurpateur utérin. Oui, mais, je suis seul.
Par monts et par vaux, le valet de bourreau vient,
c'est un wattman vulcanien, et j'ai peur.
Il pleut. Je mange un xiphias.
Il n'y gagnera rein, je suis une yole, un you you, moi.
Tu es un homme zélateur, donc? Mon ange, tu as un oeil
     qui dit zut à l'autre.
__________________________

I'll skin the thing alive, perhaps to its very tip—
     there's something in the wind.
Here I go again!
Good job, man! but without anyone in my sights
& just me who've worked my ass off
and suffered much, odd as it sounds.
If you're a dog, you'll itch like one!

Nowhere to stay? I'm fit to reign on my solitary isle,
     surprisingly, and I'm no nag,
no sleazy old nag! and nor am I made of movable parts
     no way! I'm no paragon

I love sleek,yellow-haired critters.
Last night a friend but now I'm just a sleazy ol'
     shit.
I gnaw on exotic things til I'm satisfied.
I drown in misery while riding horseback in the nude,
      & my prospects are grey
Am I as good as anyone else? Damn right! Why
    can't I take care of myself, too?

And the truth can be a poison, that's for sure!
     And why not?
Can't live in the past either!
Hardships harry the poor heart (as the Russian
     saying goes)
Come on, no pompous ass in a pointy hat can tell
     you anything you don't already know!
Under fine cloth the cankers fester.
     Yes, but I'm still alone
Up hill and down dale, death's messenger goes,
a fiery streetcar driver, & I'm afraid.
    It's raining. I dine on swordfish.
I won't kill myself working, nothing but skiffs & dinghies
     for me.
So you're a Zealot, then? My dear, you've got
a good eye for sticking it to others!

Poetry in praise of Elizabeth May & Canada's Green Party

I'm so happy Canada has a sitting member whose constituency is Eaarth itself (after Bill McKibben). I've been inspired to write some poetry in praise of Elizabeth May who has been elected our first Green Member of Parliament.

"Green" is the first.
__________________

GREEN

With an utterly cutting-edge type of green, the
leaf
is green and light as yr soul, and is poked
right
between the teeth. And once ground into mush
it’s
as easy for moles to chew it as mess for more.
Green!

And offshore winds blow seed, or the light-stemmed
weed,
spread-spreading them both, and as they do
so
both careening go like angels around the bay
And
the jaggy leaf, shoved by Time along the floor, its
leaf

body turn-turning into the rain, now looks like
a shore’s
mealy, lumpy grey-jacketed type of mold. And
after
the ground’s been dried & the ants have died,
both
leaves and ants will turn to sorrow, like a barn’s
sickly

floor, the sickly yellow sorrow found in an
                                                   autumn barn
But
for now a pre-Autumn green and the leaf in
                                                          the wind,
drift
together somehow and turn into sickle groves,
& shores,
and fields of moles who chew the light-stemmed weed.
Dreams!

Rudolph Ming

I was never more inspired to write poetry than when I'd just viewed (in fact, as I was viewing) a wonderful documentary film on a 12-year old Latvian boy, Rudolph Ming, who's precociously obsessed with making films of horror and death & whose own demonaical representations get shown at a final church-opening ceremony. I can't possibly have hoped to capture in verse anything like the essence of this troubled boy gifted with his own personal anguish and nor could I, stupidly hoping for some originality, have written anything like a complete poem without using materials & dialogue from the film. Rudolph somehow saw to that.
__________________________

Why a hole in the sand, Rudolph, covered over, nettles-full,
  a patina to lure the foot
or make the hole look not too unseemly? But dig one
  to hide the black in

& imagine them falling, as the apple-eater rocks in his tree can,
  image of a pensive boy, or
at even his piano as he slaps a sheet over & the notes whir
                                                                    ( angry as he is!)

Without too much reel it's even made, sharp to his fingers'-ends,
  christ-skewered, & no Sandra or sonata in it—
just the child's and "so much horrible emotion" as the priest
                                                                                     laments
  and a "room so bloody", too

But where's the fun? or love? "I don't like love" in a paper-roll film
   for a church-opening, most of all,
& some sectioned tap "to draw the film in", an oil text, & the script read
   in a woodlot silently

to look actually for a logo in "Book of Judges", Angel, barren wife
  et al. or in his hammock among gooseberry
inspired to add in vineyards where lions tear the kid, or flail like
                                                                                     bee swarms
  No birth here but a Riddle

No need for musick, just row of sinful dirty linen with 'Shimshon &
  Delilah a possible title, etched in,
& pyrotechnics, "real fireworks" instead of bonfires on the beach,
  He hammock-lies, dreaming

wondering what the film is, when he's not interrupted with potato-
  pealing, jar-filling Oh! young brechtian,
impatient of crayon-drafts & soundless table & who tears the paper
  off the demon's back

or digs a hole to put the nettle-screen in (this time), in the compost
  young fire-breather!
"Wasting such a beauty" as all this, does God need film-making
                                                                             as badly as this?
  Film's no scripture but script

read to the people: "no, Shimshon and nightmares only", a real case,
  a real death
oh! brechtian boy fingering the keys, always glossy, cool—
  Film's like viral spread into the lungs

with "blood at the mouth" Angels never look like one to Rudolph,
  & to "participate in threats"
is the way to film the bible for the Lord uses his mind as a weapon
  (No relief, please!)

Why Billy Collins is so popular: or why I like Bill Knott



Bill Knott

I was recently struck by a blog post by Bill Knott entitled "can she bake a cherry pie" that initially left me shaking my head: wondering how post-avant theory & practice (or any poetics) could be so curtly dismissed, & in language that doesn't pretend to be critical at all. Just outright invective in a glaringly large font, hardly fifteen lines long, directed against the critics of Billy Collins everywhere who (as the owner of Bill Knott's prose re poetry blog contends) can't reconcile the popularity of a single poet with their own "poeticspeak", try as they might. And tried they have.

Knott's blog post seems to speak uncomfortably to people like me who really can't seem to account for anything like public taste either. If the best and brightest post-avants out there (presumably the likes of Silliman, Bernstein, Watten, Armantrout et. al.), "armed with their grad degrees in poetics, in post-posty theory", can't really tell the good from the bad, then we're really left with two options: to damn poetry theory or the reading public. And of the two I'm going to damn least the reading public. Of theory & theorists he's pretty explicit & I'm inclined to agree with him for the most part:

Avant-hicks: I used to call them avanthacks, hacks, but hicks is I think more appropriate for these impoverished pockets so cut off from the rest of the world, saved in their isolation, incestuous, bristling, mad

"Incestuous, bristling, mad", indeed. Any poetry that's written to the specifications of theory can't help look lop-sided & a touch "mad": mad as anything that, as Einstein once quipped, does the same thing over & over and yet hopes for a different result. And why should cultural productions be exempt from this characterization? With Language theory you just get more Language poetry, whatever the practitioner, materials or artistic temperament, and if you expect anything interestingly different to arise, well, you must be a tad nuts. Even erudite commentators like Curtis Faville get hopelessly entangled in the insane circularity of a poetry that's slavishly tied to theory: as is seen in his recent discussion of Michael Palmer.

In fact, I might argue for a sort of poetic psychosis to account for the complete disconnect between reality & art, even going so far as to suggest (as I did in the case of Barrett Watten's Plasma ) the Language poem loses itself completely in theory, cast into the form of a literary changeling easily (& eerily) reproducible by mechanical means (such as a Google translator). And what does this mechanical reproducibility envisage if not a poetry that's been turned into a beast without a heart or a deleuzian "body without organs, or even a “natural language processing chatterbot” named ALICE to which Christian Bök recently posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris.

Does anyone expect a fashionable poetry interchangeable with translators, eviscerated literary tropes & chatterbots to be embraced by a reading public? Can ALICE really bake a cherry pie? After all, Knott had rather be asked, as he already has, to contribute to a Billy Collins poetry anthology than to one edited by more fashionable literary theorists.  Explaining the salient differences between them, he says in a Monday, April 4, 2011 post

Collins transcends the in-house standards of PoBiz, which most other anthologists are required to obey: he can include a pariah in his anthol and not suffer reprisals, whereas the other compilers fearful for their careers must exclude blacklisted writers like me or face negative consequences in their professional currency.

Billy Collins (if I read Knott aright) seems to have become the fearful Other of contemporary poetics, and with good reason. Like Frost, Sandburg & Crane before him, he commands an almost instant readership in his own lifetime & looks as if there isn't a single critical blemish to be found on him. At least that's the appearance & it's enough to make the "PoBiz" crowd a little flustered. The Language poets have only bought time for themselves by exporting their views into areas where Billy Collins will always be read with more enjoyment than Ron Silliman.