swoonrocket

2008-06-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Jena Osman and I wrote this by request for OEI, issue no. 37 & 38 that is just out. It is translated there. Here it is in English...

Chain started, like many magazines, with a combination of homage and discontent. We were both graduate students at the State University of New York at Buffalo. And we felt restless and uncomfortable with the journals that we read even as we respected them. Most of the journals that we read and respected felt aesthetically dynamic and yet at the same time we felt their map of this dynamism to be too small. Our restlessness was not that much an aesthetic restlessness. We wanted, like many of the journals around us, to continue to think about nonstandard forms and poetries; we wanted to continue to gather together and support work that was in the tradition of that optimistic moment of turn of the century modernism when language sputters and fractures in unusually beautiful and aesthetically fulfilling ways. But we wanted a wider and different map. A map that had more than just our friends on it. A map that had work that was happening in other languages on it. A map that transgressed the recognized borderlines of genre. This mainly felt important to us intellectually. Yet at the same time we are sure it was important to us in many other ways. We are sure it had some impact on our creative work but it would be hard for us to document that impact. We have been shaped so much by the reading that we did for the ten or so years we worked on Chain that to imagine our work without that conversation feels impossible.

Our first attempt to create a new map was to issue a chain letter. For the first issue, we asked a number of women editors to very simply talk about “Editing and Gender.” We wanted to learn from what other women were doing. And we wanted to think about our own editorial practice as an extension of what a number of amazing women editors had already done. Among the question we asked were “what obligations do you answer to as an editor?” and “How have issues in current feminist theory influenced your editorial practice?” and “How do you think women fit into the exchange economy of editorial practice? Is editing an issue of economy or an issue of aesthetics, or both?” Responses varied; some dismissed gender as important, others argued that it was crucial. We also solicited a number of women writers to write a poem and to pass it on to another woman writer they admired, who would then write a poem in response and pass it on…etc. The result was a series of associative chains. While we did come up with the lists of poets who started the chains, we didn’t give them any aesthetic guidelines. Our hope was that they would introduce us to all sorts of new writers. A few did. But mainly we remember feeling at the time that the chains tended to circulate among writers we already knew (we discuss this problem, as well as our initiating editorial ideas in the introduction to the first issue, which can be found here: http://www.chainarts.org/GenderandEditing/editorsnote.html ). So we went back to the drawing board.

The issues of Chain that followed were further attempts to chart an unknown course, to discover writers and artists not a part of the scene we already knew so well. And in order to reach beyond our own aesthetic comfort-zones, we organized each issue around a special topic—usually a formal constraint—with our goal being to include as wide a variety of responses to that topic as possible. Past special topics have included Documentary (issue 2), Hybrid Genres (3), Procedures (4), Different Languages (5), Letters (6), Memoir/Antimemoir (7), Comics (8), Dialogue (9), Translation (10), Public Forms (11), and Facts (12). In the call for work for the Dialogues issue we asked our contributors to help us broaden the conversation by asking them to send us dialogues where they talk to someone they haven’t talked to before; the stimulus that led to the chain letter format of issue 1 still spurred us on.

In terms of nuts and bolts, our editing process went something like this: We had several months of conversation, often via email, where we would try and figure out the topic for the next issue. During this stage we often argued before we reached a compromise. We remember these conversations as incredibly useful and educational. Once we settled on a topic, we often researched it. During this early stage we contacted various people we knew asking them for a list of people to solicit for work or people ; the lists that people sent us were invaluable and often shaped the issue. We published the call for work at the back of each previous issue and we also sent it around widely, at first by letter and later by email. We also directly solicited (i.e. begged) people whose work we felt was really important to have in the issue. If we were lucky enough to have gotten a grant for the issue we sometimes paid people to do some sort of project for us that they might not otherwise do. (For example, in the “dialogues” issue we solicited and financially supported six of the dialogues.) In December of each year, we would read all the material we had received. And then we would sit down together and discuss each work. We read and discussed everything that we got, whether we had solicited it or not. The actual editing of the journal usually involved both of us sitting down on the floor and putting work into various piles: There would be the pile for work that both of us wanted. And then there would be the pile that we weren’t sure about. And then there would be the pile for work that we disagreed about. This stack of work took the longest. These meetings often took days and were exhausting, but ultimately we would find a combination of works that opened up the selected topic in multiple directions. Once this was done, we sent out letters and then came up with a plan for typesetting the work. Each of our issues are arranged alphabetically according to the last name of the authors, because we found that this “chance” system would lead to the most interesting juxtapositions between the works. We weren’t interested in arranging them in a way that created an editorial narrative, that called attention to us as “assemblers.” Our presence was pretty much restricted to the writing of the introductions, which we did collaboratively. One of us would do the first draft. Then the other person would edit it. And we would go back and forth until we felt it was finished. The rule was that either of us could edit or cut the other ; neither of us owned our sentences. It is a way of writing that we still often do (we’ve written this piece the same way). It works for us. After all of these steps were completed, the issue would come out about five months later.

Although our editorial practice with Chain was an attempt to widen the map as much as we could, a number of limitations came into play: We eventually had full time jobs. We had limited language knowledge and thus limited contact with writers from various places outside the US. We also resisted the business side of publishing; subscription development, advertising, and distribution were things we knew we should work on, but we could never quite find the time or energy. Although we considered the quality of our content and production values to be high, our attitude towards the “business” of putting out a magazine was very DIY. For all these reasons, the map of Chain has never been as wide as we might like it. But we like to think of it as a start. During its twelve years of production, Chain has introduced us to writers and artists that have changed our thinking.

Right now, Chain is on a hiatus. We needed a break. But we are working on a related project we are calling ChainLinks. ChainLinks is a book series, modelled around the same idea of interdisciplinary conversation as the magazine. Our call is not for work this time but for editors. And we want editors who can bring together three or so people whose work is in different media together around a topic. The first three books in the ChainLinks series are Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Space (edited by Nicole Mauro and Marci Nelligan), Borders (edited by Audun Lindholm and Susanne Christensen), and Refuge/Refugee (edited by Jena Osman). They will be appearing in spring/summer 2008. More information can be found at www.chainarts.org.

2008-06-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

Latest obsession, found in pile of books in dbuuck's hallway: Cesar Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. Too much I adore to quote from it.

Also attempting to read the citations I have not yet read in the position statement for Kootenay School Positions conference.

Timothy Brennan and Kaya Ganguly's "Crude Wars". Here is that word "indeterminacy" again:

We are all implicated in these charges—all of us, from time to time, the deserving recipients of Benjamin’s condemnations—because the ideology of complexity has for too long been the aesthetic default position of cultural critics and theorists. Also, the unpacking of the semiotic density of discourse, including political discourse, performs an anthropological function in politically dangerous environments in the sense that pure value is accorded positions that let the theorist evade statements of clear opposition to the status quo and allow him or her to defer instead to the values of ambivalence and indeterminacy. p. 29

And enjoying the idea of "organizational imaginary" from this:

Without a critique of the market as such, without an organizational imaginary, without accepting responsibility for power, without actively seeking power on behalf of a different telos, there are no political solutions.Who are today’s radical philosophes—those who prepare the terrain, in thought, of confrontation with the state (as their counterparts so famously did in the seventeenth century)? p. 33

2008-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

talk for "An Ethnic Avant-Garde?" at Small Press Traffic Aggression conference.

panel description:
This panel will investigate the often volatile and contentious relationship between race and the idea of an “avant-garde,” however broadly or narrowly both terms are constructed. Can one speak of ethnic avant-gardes? How does race impact theoretical assumptions about linguistic structure? Panelists will have the opportunity to explore the contemporary relevance of the distinction, drawn by an earlier generation of critics and poets, between poetic projects organized under the sign of “identity” or “difference,” versus a “poetics of indeterminacy” informed by critiques of what Charles Bernstein once notoriously dubbed “the official cultural space of diversity.”
Panelists will select several “exhibits”—which might include individual poems, critical essays, interviews, films, visual art, music--which might serve to serve to spark further conversation.

notes for talk:
1.

I began by attempting to write a history on what the description of this panel calls “the contemporary distinction between poetic projects organized under the sign of identity or difference and ones organized under the sign of indeterminancy.” (I am going to shorthand this from now on as “The Distinction.”) My feeling is that The Distinction exists but it really shouldn’t. That it is more an oxymoronic mirage than actual. That The Distinction is often invoked as natural but is dependent upon ahistorical literary histories, the most pervasive being the idea that the concerns of avant garde modernism are mainly with formal innovation.

But before I get to there I want to begin by asserting that the avant garde of the turn of the twentieth century is an “ethnic avant garde.”

When I say the word avant garde I mean a group of literary works that are created around the turn of the twentieth century in Europe that allude and rewrite the conventions of the poetries of the various places that a number of the governments of Europe were colonizing. These conventions from the colonies are those of oral poetries—they are things like polyvocality, disjunction, repetition, unconventional syntax, and frequent lack of a narrative arc or beginning, middle, and end narratives. And they are what make avant garde modernism “strange.” And when I read the word “ethnic” in the title of this panel I am assuming “about ethnicity” and not “writers of color.” I’m also not going to distinguish much in this paper between the terms “race” and “ethnicity.”

These poetic conventions from the colonies both come to the attention of and feel culturally relevant to a small group of mainly but not exclusively Euro-American writers because of how nineteenth century imperialism boomeranged back into Europe. Basically, imperialism not only brought the empire to the colonies but the colonies brought themselves to the empire and thus a number of urban spaces in Europe went from being more or less monocultural to provocatively and extremely polycultural. Paris is the easy example here. When Stein was in Paris in 1911 writing in Tender Buttons “act as if there is no use in a centre,” 600,000 troops and 200,000 workers were brought into France from the colonies. European immigration to urban areas such as Paris was also very high at the time. In terms of how this impacted literature, this migration changed not only the range of languages that one might hear when one walked down the street—and as language is the stuff that literature is made out of this was a big change—but also those 800,000 people that arrived in France from the colonies had ties to other conceptions of the “literary,” had ties to vibrant oral traditions. And these traditions and their aesthetic gestures seeped into the literate work of avant garde modernism. They seeped in unevenly and troubled-ly but still they seeped.

As the avant garde is so much about nineteenth century imperialism and so much about cultures hitting up against one another, it is also often about those categories of race and ethnicity that come into the existence as a result of that same nineteenth century imperialism. So my assertion here is that the avant garde is at its base an “ethnic avant garde,” or a literature that is about ethnicity. Race and ethnicity show up endlessly in the works of this period. So much so that if I had more time I would argue that the identity politics and their poetics of the last half of the twentieth century have to be considered as a continuation of this work even if those movements often see themselves as oppositional in intent and desire.

One brief example of the blatantly ethnic avant garde is Gertrude Stein’s work. Her work is full of racialized language. And much of the discussion around race and ethnicity in Stein’s work is focused on “Melanctha” from Three Lives, but it is worth remembering that the other two lives of Three Lives are also a lot about ethnic identity. More provocatively though are Stein’s less narrative works are full of racialized terms like “nigger” and “coon.”

I was taught to read Stein as a formal innovator. And I often glossed over these moments of racialized language such as this from Tender Buttons: “It was a time when in the acres in late there was a wheel that shot a burst of land and needless are niggers and a sample sample set of old eaten butterflies with spoons” (55). But I don’t think it was just formalism that had blinded me. I actually think what is going on with race and ethnicity in the avant garde is something hard to understand if one buys the terms of The Distinction. In other words, once we assume that when someone writes something that uses some sort of device that we might call by the term indeterminancy that this someone is not saying something about identity.

It was reading Laura Doyle’s reading of race in Stein’s work in “The Flat, the Round and Gertrude Stein: Race and the Shape of Modern(ist) History” that helped me figure out what exactly I was seeing with Stein’s use of racialized language. Doyle carefully reads Stein as a writer whose work directly addresses racial tropes and then manipulates them in various ways. She reads Stein as someone who both “critiques and colludes in the racial order of things” (268). Her reading of “Melanctha” assumes that Stein meant to say something about race, not that she was just mimicking the racial stereotypes of her time. As Doyle writes: “She regularly picked upon such overdetermined phrases and imitated the culture’s repetition of them so as to pound the meaning out of them and alert us to their inculcative power” (263). (As I write this memories of the Michael Magee poem discussion keep popping up.) But at the same time Doyle is not an apologist and she does not say that Stein’s use of racialized language was innocent. She points to how Stein keeps getting caught in racism because of her attempts to use race to provoke.

Stein’s work is just one obvious example of an ethnic avant garde. I like thinking about her work in this context because she is an avant garde whose work has been most defined by endless formalist readings which have, intentionally or not, divorced her work from cultural concerns with identity despite her fairly regular use of racialized (and gendered and sexual-ed and classed) language. But there are many other examples of writers who give almost obsessive attention in avant garde forms to race and ethnicity, from Claude McKay to Aime Cesaire to the Surrealists and the Dadaists; this list goes on and on. All these writers pound on these categories of race and ethnicity that came into existence with imperialism in different ways.

2.

From how we read avant garde modernism, we get the contemporary poetry that we deserve. And there emerges sometime around the late 70s or early 80s in North America, The Distinction. I think it is important to recognize this as at most a North American debate and not one as international as the avant garde was at the turn of the century.

The Distinction has a complicated existence. We in poetry land know it from Californians (which makes sense because a lot of what we know about identity politics we know from Californians). There is Ron Silliman’s now much discussed essay “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject.” I am sure you know this one, the one that argues that “women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’—have a manifest political need to have their stories told” (63). Timothy Yu in his article “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry,” an article that is in part about The Distinction and locates it in Silliman and Rae Armantrout’s “Why don't women do language-oriented writing?” But I find Armantrout’s piece so jokey and so commitment avoiding that I probably wouldn’t want to use it that way.

At first, I wanted to attempt a more detailed history of who calls The Distinction into existence but I realized it would take too much reading for the short amount of time that I had. However, as I worked on this I did notice that The Distinction kept popping up again and again. It shows up recently in the Grand Piano, in a moment when Ted Pearson talks about the Grand Piano reading series. Pearson puts it like this: “In writing communities formed around social movements, and informed by cultural nationalist or identity politics, it was widely assumed that writers could and should represent and ‘speak to’ the larger communities that sustained them—and for which a speech-based poetics affirmed and gave voice to a collective identity and validated the communicative utility of art. But for writing communities formed around discrepant literary practices and informed by aesthetic and political critiques of normative language, it was incumbent to interrogate, if not reject, the continued efficacy of speech-based writing, the paradigm of linguistic transparency, and expressive, much less utilitarian, notions of art.” (part 5, 58-59) And I also saw it recently in Barrett Watten’s article “The Turn to Language and the 1960s.”He puts it like this: “The textual politics of the Language school are commonly opposed to the expressivist poetics (Black Arts, Chicano, feminist, gay/lesbian) that emerged in the same decade, for good reason. With the former, the self-presence of the expressive subject is put under erasure, while for the latter the formal autonomy of modernist poetics is rejected as a politics” (139). Watten then goes on to say that he will in his essay attempt to locate a common ground that is also a chasm.

But please keep in mind that this is not by any means an argument limited to California poets. Even among the California poets of the last half of the twentieth century, it gets denied and complicated. Silliman’s original statement, for instance, has been much discussed and countered by Leslie Scalapino and others, and then later even by Silliman himself.

I should also confess that I have myself bought into and perpetuated The Distinction. This talk is not intended as accusation.

My guess—although it would take more work for me to figure out the extent of this—is that The Distinction gets chanted into existence not just by various poets but also, perhaps mainly, by the academy. But when I say the academy, I do not necessarily mean scholarship. There has been a lot of critical writing that denies the existence of The Distinction either through direct discussion of it or through example. Among these works are Henry Gates’s Signifying Monkey, bell hooks’s article “Postmodern Blackness,” Trinh Minh-ha’s Woman Native Other, Nate Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement, more recently Fred Moten’s In the Break.

Somehow though The Distinction still manages to define endless hiring descriptions and syllabi. The way literature is taught in the academy is relentlessly haunted by categorization. Early literatures tend to be sorted by century and nation. And then contemporary literatures in the US are institutionalized by ethnicity and race. But this answer feels a bit too pat. And I’m tempted to argue that The Distinction is not an intellectual argument but rather something more complicated, something that to really understand it I would have to delve deep into where the psyche of the academy and then the psyche of a poetry scene that often feels as if it leaves only two choices open to its participants—to be in the academy or to not be in the academy—meet. It is messy there and to be honest I’m a little scared to go there. Perhaps Cynthia Sailors could be a guide.

If I were to attempt to understand the various forces that create The Distinction, I might also begin pondering some of the contradictions of the late 70s. On the one hand, the 70s set the scene for the period of high globalization that was to come in the 80s and 90s. The 70s are the years of OPEC and the rise of the global corporation. Federal Express, Nike, and Microsoft are all founded in the 70s. At the same time, the number of immigrants living in the United States was, compared to current numbers, fairly low: around 9.6 million (by 2000 that number is 28.4 million.) And as a percentage of the U.S. population, immigrants were 4.7 percent in 1970 (it is around 10.4 percent by 2000). The US was, thus, both unusually expansionist and much less international than today. I think it is not a coincidence thus that there is a growing attention within the US at this time to US defined identity categories. This is not a dismissal of identity politics which were hugely reformatory. It is rather an attempt to understand why the poetries on both sides of The Distinction are anti-national and yet neither are international. And still yet also, they often see themselves as oppositional to one another.

3.

Where does this leave me? My general feeling is that The Distinction is a problem. That it is somewhat damaging in how it presents a sanitized version of literary influence and dialogue, one that often myopically takes the easy path and lets geographic or social/friendship groupings define literary history at the expense of more webby and tentacled thinking. It sells the really complicated engagements of all sorts of writing with culture short and thus makes all of us slightly stupid when we turn to that important and large question about the sort of work that poetry might be able to do right now.

There is that line that Sarah Silverman uses to defend her work, that it isn’t racist, it is about racism, a line built on a false understanding that one can’t be both. Or that one isn't always inescapably both. What is interesting about the avant garde is that this both seems unavoidable. And it is with the possibility of that both that it might make sense to begin with when we read a phrase like “needless are niggers,” when we consider the pounding. And I’d probably say the same thing about The Distinction.

2008-05-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Rita Wong, Forage. It has handwriting in it!

2008-04-13T17:24:00.001-07:00

Rereading Glissant's Poetics of Relation for billionth time this year. Oh genre!: "The promotion of languages is the first axiom of this ethnotechnique. And we know that, in the area of understanding, poetry--watch out for it!--has always been the consummate ethnotechnique. The defense of languages can come through poetry (also)." p. 108

2008-04-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

Sporadic reading. No notation. Too much job induced reading. Too little time.

Today...
East Slope, Su Shi, translated by Jeffrey Yang.
the Straits, Kristin Palm.

Sometime in the past few months...
I've had the Grand Piano, part 5, on my desk for months. Seem to have noted each time the single initial letter and then a line was used instead of the first name. Wondering also about what is true and not about this from Steve Benson, "Today's young white-collar poets seem to know something I did not." p. 76.

Yesterday...
Pulled out Erin Moure's O Cidadan for a footnote for an article I am working on and fell in love with it again.

Day before yesterday...
Good essay: "On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture" in David Graeber's Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. "Cops hate puppets. Activists are puzzled as to why." An anthropologically influenced essay that is somewhat on the conventions of protest.

2008-01-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

Kristin Prevallet, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time. "I have come to compose a fragmented system of believing. I call this poetry." p. 45.

2008-01-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

Can't stop being oxytocinated by Lydia Davis's "What You Learn About the Baby" in Varieties of Disturbance. "You are lying on the bed nursing him, but you are not holding on to him with your arms or hands and he is not holding on to you. He is connected to you by a single nipple." p. 119

And completely different, also Eileen Myles piece "Rene" in latest issue of Shiny. Makes me nostalgic for NY I never knew. "The houses are open and all you need is about three of you to go everywhere and make these gauzy invisible strings between people. It just makes sense that so many of us had time during the day and would stand in one another's kitchen. Smoking and talking and watching our faces change in the light." p. 41

2008-01-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

From Barrett Watten's section in Grand Piano 4: "I associate the act of writing with the sound of doves in the neighborhood, at about eleven o'clock in the morning under a high fog, or late at night. The mournful sound of the dove indicates that writing is a matter of long duration that it will take a long time before we get anywhere with it." p. 64-65.

Also Kit Robinson on Oakland Mail Center. Rae Armantrout on writing in Rubio's. Ted Pearson on typing the "day's words" on index cards and taping them to the front of bus as he does his shift. Lyn Hejinian on the news, or what else was going on.

2007-12-27T11:22:00.001-08:00

Tan Lin, ambience is a novel with a logo. One of many chapbooks that I've ordered recently via paypal and been very super glad I did. Beautiful pink color.

"For reasons unknown to me but are probably transparent, I was hired, along with four others, by the Port Authority of Marin County in late October of 1984 to set up a camera surveillance system that would clock in every event on a 384-acre port terminal."

It goes on and then this phrase: "the movement of everything."

Or this phrase "the Ecology of Midwest Corduroy":

"In my family, the collection of memories might be labeled: 'How I Was an American' Or: 'Making Americans (the Future)' Such a work would aspire, though such a work is rarely ever written and that is good of course, to a condition of transitory structures, lounge architecture, and books with photos in them. I guess it should look like a slide show. Or maybe a PowerPoint production. I think the work should probably be called 'The Ecology of Midwest Corduroy' because while everyone at school was wearing denim my parents believed I should war corduroy that after a few washings looked like faded gold Christmas bulbs and that reminded everyone, or so I thought, that I was dressed awkwardly as if every day was a holiday because I was different."

Rachel Zolf, Shoot and Weep. forthcoming. Heard also at New Yipes few weeks ago.

first draft...
Rachel Zolf has realized that one of poetry's potentials is to delve into perilous issues and dwell there, exploring the complications. Shoot and Weep does not leave us with any easy answers of what is to be done about the conflicts between Palestine and Israel. But it does insist that we think about it and that we hold several different points of view at the front of our brain as we do this thinking.

2007-12-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

M. Nevin Smith Native Treasures: Gardening with the Plants of California. Chapters on the big showy natives. Really nice language in the part of each chapter called "Common Features." Chapter titles pun: "Toyon on My Mind," etc. Spent day thinking about currants and gooseberries. Ribes sanguineum. Also bigberry manzanita.

2007-12-05T09:42:00.001-08:00

Dreamed I was reading Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract and in the dream it was about Marx and genre and media were popping up in the book as I read it and I was finally understanding in the dream how Marx was connected to the other things I was working on. (The power of books theme keeps showing up in my dreams; I am desperate for reading lately and missing it badly.) Then Souls of the Labadie Tract came in the mail a few days later. It isn't about Marx but about Jonathan Edwards (I am rereading Capital, or maybe trying to read all of it for first time; have memory of reading it as u/g but not sure how much of it, so I think my dream was about essay I am attempting to work on). But these phrases from Labadie Tract held some of the dream power to me: "an inexorable order only chance creates" (p. 14); "I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots" (p. 16); "No steady progress of saints into grace saying Peace Peace when there is no peace. Walking is hard labor. Match any twenty-six letters to sounds of birds and squirrels in his mouth. Whatsoever God has provided to clothe him represents Christ in cross cultural clash conscious phonemic cacophony. Because the providence of God is a wheel within wheels, he cannot afford to dishonor any typological item with stark vernaculra. Here is print border warfare in situ." (p.17)

2007-11-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

Michael Amnasan, Liar. The stuff on work and anxiety is amazing. Really amazing. Wish it wasn't so easily juxtaposed with the stuff about women.

2007-10-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

Judith Larner Lowry, Gardening with a Wild Heart: Restoring California's Native Landscapes at Home. "I had hoped to rewire unused pathways in the brain, connections having to do with setting out looking, with matching the image in the brain to what was hanging from bushes, drooping from trees, swaying with grasses in the wind." p. 145 Also good description of fights in the local Bolinas newspaper about eucalyptus. Recommends, among other titles, two I have not read: Gertrude Atherton's The Californians and Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Squatters.

Nora Harlow and Kristin Jakob, Wild Lillies, Irises, and Grasses. There are cool season and warm season growers among grasses.

2007-10-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

Most mesmerized by "A Collective Letter to the Women's Movement, July 24, 1973" in the collection of communiques from the Weather Underground in Sing a Battle Song. Also the part of the Jeff Jones introduction where he talks about how the environmental movement was not part of the Weather Underground: "From where we stood in 1970, the environmental movement was bourgeois, irrelevant, and white, a distraction from the more real and urgent tasks at hand: ending the war in Vietnam and fighting racism. But we were appalled at the US military's use of the defoliant Agent Orange (dioxin) in Vietnam and came to understand how it poisoned not only the Vietnamese but also American GI's who were fighting in the contaminated areas. We did not see the centrality of the environmental consequences of rapacious American imperialism, or the potential of the environmental movement, even as it was growing--like the women's and queer liberation movements--out of the oppositional 1960s." (p. 48-49). The "A Collective Letter to the Women's Movement" also has confession in it: "We keep examining the reinterpreting the period 1969-1970 both because it was so decisive in each of our lives and because it is our image at that time which is stamped on people's memories. We have reread all our old leaflets and articles about women recently, some of it stands, some doesn't. Three years ago, we denied the legitimacy of white women's demands. Although we had been assaulted, underpaid, brainwashed, aborted, raped like women everywhere, we--and the left as a whole--did not recognize that women's demands for power over their own lives is fundamental to any revolution we would care to make." (p. 200). Something about the ability to rethink into new dogmatisms that is moving?

Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. Michael Azerrad. Very big nostalgia trip. Although don't remember it as a series of oedipal moments. And don't remember the sense of rules within that had to be rebelled against.

Laura Moriarty An Air Force. Somewhat a memoir. I tell everyone who comes over this weekend that they have to read it.

And also that my new favorite poet right now today at this one moment is Aime Cesaire. For the word "hoo"--"I cry Hoo to you!"; for !--they are throughout!; for invocation--"O my earth!"; for hyphens that gather:"a-wounded-open-hand." All these examples from "A Salute to the Third World / for Leopold Sedar Senghor." Rereading also "Notebook of a Return to a Native Land" which is long time favorite. All from the U of Kalifornia P Collected.

One blurb every other month or so:
Since his first book in 1999, Truong Tran has been skillfully walking a delicate tightrope between the lyrical and innovative. His work is distinctive for how attentive it is to the politics of language and yet how skillfully he wields richness and beauty. Four Letter Words continues this investigation as it delves into the many ways one is shaped as a writer, as a human being.

2007-09-10T13:17:00.001-07:00

Susan Briante's Pioneers in the Study of Motion belongs on a yet to be created list of new border crossing works. Border here is Mexico/US. Also belongs on list of books about place.

Chris Nealon's essay on Jennifer Moxley finally out in Critical Inquiry. "The Poetic Case." Summer 2007 Volume 33 Number 4. This link, alas, requires institutional access or subscription.

2007-09-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

Carter Ratcliff's Arrivederci Modernismo. From the note at the end:

Until I was five, I lived on a street with tall elm trees. One spring, I noticed that the tips of their branches were covered with velvety, purplish flowers. It occurred to me that these odd-looking blossoms were in some way a language. I didn't think they were making remarks, saying things that could have been translated into English. Rather, they were conveying something about themselves, something more than their startling appearance. This wasn't about form and color. It was more about meaning. To anyone who was paying attention, the elm blossoms were saying what they were, what it was like to be them. Or so I felt. I already understood that people and animals do that with the way they look. Now, I realized, plants do it too. Making themselves visible, they made themselves known. They let me know how it feels to be whatever they happened to be. When I was much older I realized that a concept can do the same. Concepts, too, have feelings.

And then...

...now I wanted to address something major: modernism, which was wracked in those days by all sorts of unmanageable feelings. Brainy and gorgeous, modernism was difficult to ignore but impossible to live with. That is why my poem on the subject had to be a poem of farewell.

2007-09-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

Interested in thinking more about... "Promissory Notes" in Japser Bernes Starsdown and also Rachel Zolf's Human Resources (book came with one page interview that is interesting press piece by Coach House). Keep thinking some "new" emphasis is showing up in various forms in various places lately that feels like a reworking of essay/juxtaposition/fact/document, maybe reworking of social realist poetry, although those into social realist poetry are unlikely to be swayed (doubt I will see this work in Cary Nelson anthology anytime soon). Not sure how to talk about it yet. But Zolf and Bernes has it. And seeing something related in several more conceptual readings Suzanne Stein did, the SPT one and the Pegasus one. And also Stephanie Young's recent New Yipes reading. And, and, and... Might want to talk about it as whatever it is that is going on in Watten's Bad History, a book I am slightly obsessed with.

2007-09-03T17:15:00.000-07:00

Two books about poets in the Lower East Side. Both the poets are queer. Both have sexuality issues, although different ones. Both are about masculinity. Both about poet as outsider, although in different ways. Not sure what is going on with women in these books. No women poets show up. And the women who do show up aren't really fully there. Or maybe that is not right term. There is some way that in these male poetry spaces, women end up being tossed around weirdly.

Richard Hell's Godlike. Retelling of Rimbaud and Verlaine. With Ted Berrigan thrown in. It has actual poetry in it. Which I love. (As the characters write poetry, we get to read it!) Pregnant wife shows up briefly. She is tossed aside for more exciting relationship with young boy. Some good moments of grandiose faith in poetry: "Those who deliver the new poetry make it possible for the world to go on....[New poetry shows us God: how things are.] The poets aren't supposed to be beautiful or sane. Shaggy, itchy, preoccupied, mal-educateds. It's a dirty and stressful and anti-social calling." (85) My favorite moment, this question: "What about the poetry from other planets?" (113)

Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections. This one all about the loner poet. I like how it gets at how little poetry matters. (Although it misses the community part of poetry--which Hell's book gets--because the main character is so alienated.) The character enters a poetry contest, which he wins. Later he learns that only about seven or so people apply each year. The character writes more formal poetry but he loses the same poetry contest, he reapplies years later, to poet who knows some people at the Buffalo poetics program who has written a book that resembles Grenier's Sentences. He is queer but marries a crazy woman he meets on the street. She kills herself in his apartment the night they marry. A nice touch is how the poet is an adjunct and barely surviving. Lots of talk about how little money he has and he is interested in poetry contests because they let him go to the movies, etc. I enjoyed the most moments like this exchange between editor and the main poet character... Editor says: "What Michael's [poet who knows someone at the Poetics Program] text does is turn me into a writer, a real writer, who puts together lines as beautiful as Hart Crane's, as witty as Clark Coolidge's, as knowing as Joanne Kyger's, as passionate as Ricky Porchine's." Then: "Who, Arnold wondered, was Ricky Porchine? He was not too clear on Clark Coolidge, either, though at least he knew there was such a poet." (108)

2007-09-03T17:14:00.000-07:00

Those still confused about why poetry might fracture and splinter and stutter can find an answer in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. In Zong! she delves into the trauma of the plantation economy and allows her language to be shaped by the conflicts between telling and not telling, between naming and not naming that define the horrifying story of the slave ship Zong. This book is exceptional and uniquely moving.

Or abandoning stupid blurb language... Lots of moves and gestures in this that I want to think about with others. A poem for teaching? I'm fascinated with its political word spew. Also interesting moments with naming and listing. Across bottom of the poems--which are phrases spread out over page--are names. (As I understand, but could be wrong, those massacred were never named.) I have had the Baucom book on Zong on shelf for last six months but have not yet read it.

2007-09-03T17:06:00.000-07:00

Mesmerized by various thymes on cover of the Romantic Herb Garden by Caroline Holmes. Very English. My mother bought it for me. And at same time, Western Landscaping. Edited by Kathleen Norris Brenzel. Read both while feeding Sasha. Made notes on eryngium and canna.

2007-07-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

one blurb every other month or so...

Among the things that procedural writing can do is create something that suddenly glitters with a meaning that would have been impossible, or at least difficult, to realize without the distortion of the procedure. Ara Shirinyan’s Handsome Fish Offices with its mashing up of the language of office supply products and tropical fish glitters as such. While office supply products and tropical fish might at first thought seem to have nothing to do with one another, once side by side they reveal the interconnections between global acquisitions, multinational capital, and environmental destruction.

2007-07-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Somewhat frantically reading because I keep losing books or end up unable to move and so need a book in each room of the house. In front bedroom, Samuel Delaney's Dark Reflections; in office next to rocking chair, Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home; Lester Rowntree's Hardy Californians: a Woman's Life with Native Plants, the latest issue of Cabinet; in back bedroom, Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground; downstairs on couch, Joanne Kyger's About Now; downstairs next to chair, Sing A Battle Song: the Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974; on kitchen table current issues of Sunset and Dwell, etc.

From a few weeks ago...

Patrick Durgan's Imitation Poems feels very different from other work of his I have read. At moments almost New York School:
"Yes, but perhaps
this is the moon I stand on, and not my planet.
Is there anything to drink? Who am I speaking
with? Can I come home? Will you have me as I am?
How am I? How are you? Who built the ship? Is it
improper to ask?" You're procrastinating, now. So kiss me.

Ann Rower's If You're a Girl. Enjoying the more NYie memoir ones. Some of the experimental fiction ones aren't for me. Found this amusing because of Peter Gizzi's Artificial Heart: "I wonder if they'll have theories about left heart and right heart, like they do about the brain. I remember when they had to replace the left side of Barney Clarke's artificial heart. I found out that during the surgery he made them play Ravel's Bolero. I also found out it is the left side of the heart that does all the serious pumping. Now wonder they had to replace it. 'Artificial heart': good title" (p.70).

2007-07-21T10:45:00.001-07:00

forthcoming Poetry Project Newsletter review:

Heriberto Yépez, a Tijuana writer and Gestalt psychotherapist who has been showing up in the US scene a lot during the last few years, writes so as to push buttons. I remember hearing him read a few years ago at a small liberal arts college. He read a piece that had a man fucking a pregnant woman and the fetus, his son, giving the man a blow job as he did it. I remember squirming as I listened with feminist anxiety to Yépez read this. At the end of the story, it became clear that the man is George Bush and the fetus is George W. Bush and I had that ah ha moment where I realized that my desire for gender decorum had me protecting all sorts of imperial male lineages. Or another story: at UCSC a few years ago Yépez gave a paper in which he claimed “I am Bush” and then, moving from “I” to “we,” he said “Bush is our way to hide we are Bush” (this talk is posted at mexperimental.blogspot.com). If these examples are not enough to prove his provocations, then check out his video “Voice Exchange Rates” (available on youtube) where he has a cartoon image of Gertrude Stein with a swastika carved into her forehead Charles Manson style asking “why do Americans rule the world?”

The Bush as fetus reading really pointed out to me how distinctive Yépez’s work is. It manages to hide provocatively conceptual, decorum defying work behind the mask of conventional and well written realist fiction. His work often appears at first to be one thing (an off color story about fucking) and then he turns it into something else (a pointed story about political lineage). Reading his work I frequently realize that he has got me; he has played with my politesse and made a joke of it.

Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers, Yépez’s first single author book in English (he has oodles in Spanish), is similarly provocative. In terms of genre, it is probably a short novel. It mainly has three characters: two twin brothers and a woman. And the story starts in Tijuana with an attempt by one of the twins and the woman to pickup a failed romance. But really, not much beyond conversation and self-reflection happens in the book and there is much talk about drugs (is the brother using or not?), sex and sexuality, jealousy, and parental abandonment. As the book proceeds, the frame keeps shifting and the narrative is interjected with things like writing exercises, something that might be authorial commentary (“This story I’m reading now was written for a reading.”), and Michael Palmer, Don De Lillo, and Reinaldo Arenas quotes. The novel comments frequently on how it is written in English.

But it isn’t just that Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers is mainly a novel, it also seems to be a romance. But an exploded romance. It starts, as the romance usually does, with the couple meeting up again. And like many romances, which often feature lovers from opposite sides of border disputes, their union is used as a way to talk about relations between nations. At moments the couple represents the north and the south. At other moments it is the US and Iraq: “In every couple there’s a United States and there’s an Iraq. ‘United States’ is the so-called-victimizer. The master that ejects violence. The psy-ops, the war-words, the troops he sends (The Kids!). And then—on the other side—the so-called-victim. The so called poor-little-you. The one that doesn’t deserve the treatment you’re getting, your bad-bad luck, the you-know-who. ‘Iraq.’”

But because Yépez is primarily a provocateur, not a reconcileur, the romance plot keeps going astray and mutating into something that suggests there are no easy and conventional answers to the political questions of today. The woman, in addition to being a former girlfriend of one of the twins, is also part of a threesome in Toluca. The twins, at moments are twin brothers and at other moments the narrative voice suggests that they are an invention of the writer: “I felt like I was two different men, and I started to call that situation <>.” At other moments it is suggested that the whole story, threesomes and all, has been fabricated by one of the twins so he might “have something else in life.” Or the twins really are twins and they, similar to father and son Bush, have sex in the womb and outside it also. In other words, Yépez refuses to restablish the couple, to end with the conventional marriages of the romance.

It might be stretching things a little to read Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers as a romance. So perhaps another way to think of this book is as an equivalent to the “I am Bush” statement. I remember a friend angrily claiming that he was not Bush, that he had not started the war and neither had Yépez, after Yépez’s talk. But Yépez’s point was more subtle and multiple. It suggested that involvement in the oil wars extends beyond individuals and nations. It rejected lefty narratives of US exceptionalism (the sort of assumption that the US is so exceptional that it does horrible things all on its own; that other nations have no involvement) and first world passive guilt. It pointed to the ties between the US and Mexican government, the complicity of US and Mexican citizens. It rejected the idea that anyone could be innocent of anything. Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers does similar work as it suggests that our personal romantic relationships carry wars in them. (This is a diversion but it is also striking how this book does not fit easily into US definitions of “border literature”; yes, Yépez, like many writers of the border, moves between Spanish and English but the book is fascinatingly devoid of “local” markers and descriptions, ethnic exceptionalism, nationalism, etc.)

Although part of me wants to keep returning to the romance genre because the book does end with a collapsing and exploding couple of sorts for Yépez ends with 9-11 and the twin towers: “The two planes not only announced the end of an era, but they also showed what was happening inside our lives. I read 9-11 as the crumbling of two people together, as the failure to stay next to each other, standing. And one tower was Emily, and I was the other tower, the first to fall. And then one tower was my brother and the other tower was me, and we both were destroyed by the world. And one tower was my father, and he became dust, and other tower, my mother, and she became a scream. And the two towers were love.”

2007-07-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

from Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist:

The open world!...The scent of fresh-mown hay is in my nostrils; green fields and forests stretch before me; sweetly ripples the mountain spring. Up to the mountain crest, to the breezes and the sunshine, where the storm breaks in its wild fury upon my uncovered head. Welcome the rain and the wind that sweep the foul prison dust off my heart, and blow life and strength into my being! Tremblingly rapturous is the thought of freedom. Out in the woods, away from the stench of the cannibal world I shall wander, nor lift my foot from soil or sod. Close to the breath of Nature I will press my parched lips, on her bosom I will pass my days, drinking sustenance and strength from the universal mother. And there, in liberty and independence, in the vision of the mountain peaks, I shall voice the cry of the social orphans, of the buried and the disinherited and visualize to the living the yearning, menacing Face of Pain. (p. 487-488)