The Newer Metaphysicals

A Series Of Tubes

2009-12-01T17:28:00.008Z

Top 10 Unexpected Search Terms That Brought Readers To The Newer Metaphysicals

1) "niedecker" + "abortion"
2) what does gazeboed mean
3) how to apply minimal cologne
4) baudrillard stated that the matrix misunderstands and distorts his work
5) how do you pronounce celan?
6) life under 30 harder than parents
7) synthesia detected a problem and must close
8) qu'est-ce que le bonheur
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10) smoking females cigarette to cigarette light-ups

Literary Terms Defined - Postmodernism

2009-12-01T17:11:00.003Z

Google Images Definitions # 185 - POSTMODERNISM

Literary Terms Defined - Modernism

2009-12-01T16:52:00.001Z

Google Images Definitions # 117 - MODERNISM

Literary Terms Defined - Genre

2009-12-01T16:46:00.001Z

Google Images Definitions # 168 - GENRE

Literary Terms Defined - Realism

2009-12-01T16:38:00.002Z

Google Images Definitions # 152 - REALISM

Literary Terms Defined - Romanticism

2009-12-01T16:25:00.002Z

Google Images Definitions # 143 - ROMANTICISM

1500 Phrases Rhyme With The Word "Night"

2009-11-21T14:05:00.006Z

Literary Terms Defined - War Poetry

2009-11-21T13:35:00.003Z

Google Images Definitions # 117 - WAR POETRY

Literary Terms Defined - School of Quietude

2009-11-21T13:22:00.006Z

Google Images Definitions #112 - SCHOOL OF QUIETUDE

Literary Terms Defined - Post-Avant

2009-11-21T13:06:00.009Z

Google Images Definition # 93 - Post-Avant

Literary Terms Defined - Sincerity

2009-11-21T12:59:00.006Z

Google Images Definition #62 - SINCERITY

Literary Terms Defined - Lyricism

2009-11-21T12:45:00.007Z

Google Images Definition #43 - LYRICISM

Reckoning

2009-07-31T02:11:00.004+01:00

For those waiting on correspondence etc., just bear with me. I have precisely three weeks to finish the PhD. Everything is behind. Time itself is altered. Peace to all while I set sail into the hurricane.

NEW! Ryan MacDonald In The Continental Review

2009-07-20T18:44:00.004+01:00

Delighted to be featuring these two stunningly beautiful pieces from Ryan MacDonald, commissioned by The Continental Review editor Jordan Stempleman.

Come into the eye of the storm . . .

Journey Towards The North

2009-07-19T12:47:00.002+01:00

Extraordinary times. I've just this week been appointed on a one-year contract to the comparative literature department at the University of Lille 3. I'm going to live in Lille. I will be leaving Paris. More on all of it when this work is over, and when I start to realize what it all means.

Will I Be Sued?

2009-07-11T14:38:00.003+01:00

Why does everyone threaten to sue people in the poetics community today? We'll see if I get sued for my piece beneath. I thought the satirical nature of the thing was utterly obvious.

Anyway of course Billy Collins didn't say that his own poetry is awful. Considering that I link to the original article, where you can read what Billy actually said in full, I thought it was clear.

Ah, I too remember free speech.

Feel free to comment though if you feel I should be sued.

Former laureate says country needs some better poets than him

2009-07-10T21:43:00.004+01:00

(Below is an entirely satirical I mean duh unedited transcript of a recent Billy Collins interview, which recently arrived at The Newer Metaphysicals' Paris bureau. We are unsure what happened during the copy-editing phase of the final version, which for interest may be viewed here, replete with its many typos).

LONE WOLF, Okla. — Billy Collins unwound the tangled wool from his half-knit Christmas stocking, unhitching it from the rusty gramophone in his library. He placed the gramophone next to a spiral notebook, then slowly wrapped the stocking around his head.

“I only have about 1 song on this thing,” he said, gesticulating towards the gramophone. "And I have to change the, what do you call it, memory-plate.” The lack of music isn’t that big of an issue though, Collins noted. "I just use it to tune out the noise", he said. Noise created by humans, that is, and what Collins simply refers to as "The Voices."

Billy Collins doesn't like "The Voices". For the next 30 minutes or so, the former laureate rocked back and forth, speaking of "Them", and droning on and on about the stark beauty of Oklahoma.

Yes, Billy Collins speaks poorly.

But he writes even worse.

“I was listening to Lady Gaga coming out here,” he said. “I’ve even learned a couple of her songs, but I would never play them in front of anyone. I hate people. They make noise. Also, nobody can really play Lady Gaga. She is too unique. I think trying to play that is a form of trespassing. BANG.”

And while trying to play Lady Gaga might seem like a violation, for Collins, writing poetry which evokes pantless one-pieces, rain, snow and household items, is his life’s work.

Chosen as a member of the faculty of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, Collins has spent the past week boring to tears a select group of high school students with what the latter called his "old man stories". Last Friday, Collins spoke to the entire petrified group during a poetry reading at the Kerr Performing Arts Center, where his hour-long performance was greeted with continuous booing. Over three quarters of the crowd walked out, leaving only the comatose and the dead to be later awoken by the remaining security personnel.

“Coming here has been fascinating,” he said. “It’s sort of an ‘end-of-the-line’ experience for me. In that, I think this is the ‘end-of-the-line’ for my poetry."

Still, while Billy Collins found Quartz Mountain particularly suited to his often hilariously bad one-dimensional sentimental linear narrative poems, he’s less excited by the poetry the rest of the country has produced.

“One of the reasons people don’t read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets,” he said. “It’s not the public’s fault, except that they're usually much too noisy (I like taking naps). What I'm saying though is that there’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading, and mine is certainly at the forefront among them.”

It’s the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he would love one day to be a part of. “I suppose my poetry is so dreadful because I think poetry needs to be transparent. Of course I have no idea what 'transparent' in this context means, or in fact could ever mean. It just makes no sense. It's a meaningless term. Sometimes I just feel so inadequate. I'm sorry is it mealtime yet?”

Collins then speculated that perhaps his poems were so awful because he believes that poems should always say something about the state of the poet and his environment.

For Collins, that philosophy bubbled to the surface when he was asked, as poet laureate, to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“I’ve only been asked to write two poems in my life,” he said. “At first I didn’t want to. But, later, as I thought about it, it disturbed me that I didn’t feel I was up to the challenge. And I was right: I wasn't. I suppose I just panicked. Did you see that crap I turned out? I feel ashamed."

Collins did change his mind though. He said he took advantage of two literary devices — the form of a eulogy and the alphabet — to build his work. “I needed the eulogy and the alphabet, I needed those as a frame for the poem. But, as I said, it was just . . . awful.”

Later, Collins read his work to a joint session of Congress. “I remember the tears running down Senator Patrick Moynihan’s face. It was that bad. I never knew poetry could be so dreadful it would make politicians weep. It was an interesting way to see the country’s politicians.”

It was in moments like those, Collins said, that he understood the absolute lack of any power in his poems.

But even with his bizarre descent, Collins continues to write. "I just can't help it. 87 percent of the country's poets suck, and I suck more than all of them. But for me, the future is basically the next poem. It’s always been that way. It’s always been one poem at a time", he observed, gazing out with melancholy at the Oklahoma landscape.

"And they just keep on getting worse.”

BORN

2009-07-01T19:16:00.004+01:00

Ypolita Press

25 poems, pink pages, bound with pink thread, $5USD

the volta
verses * at its pitch
like your nose needs its fatalistic
noose ! hanging
past
lovers by the leavings
they have * left . . . it is as if in
protrusions some potency hid its pur
-loined pouts stolen * by shadows
in a triangular artistry
where the breath
fogs life *
anew
by mere geo-
metric * mimetic terms . . .
and all this is past some shivering :
it lies in the point * of waiting
still and still destructive
above the thing
to kiss

The New Thing: Towards A Cryptopoetics

2009-06-17T21:49:00.006+01:00

Contemporary poetics is apparently in the throes of The New Thing. Thank fuck for that, because it's been like 4 hours since The Newer Pleonasm, a movement I so totally loved.

Luckily though, The Newer Metaphysicals has obtained some rare images for its readers of other recently discovered poetic group-anomalies :

The Newer Pleonasm

Post-Periphrastics

Neoteric Redundancy

Beautiful . . .

So beautiful . . .

Anyway, the next time you catch a new poetic movement from the depths of some imaginary historiographical Niflheim, could you please just do the decent thing :

Throw the fucker back.

How Many Poets Are There?

2009-06-17T19:30:00.006+01:00

Over the last 12 years, I've been mapping a number of inductive statistical models which chart the growth of the world Poet-Population across a variety of contrasting demographics. This brief summary of my analysis is dedicated to Seth Abramson and Ron Silliman . . .

Research Outline

The term "Poet-Population" (PP) commonly refers to the total number of living poets on Earth at a given time. As of May 31, 2009, the Earth's Poet-Population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6,792,467,727. The world Poet-Population has been growing continuously since the first circulation of Petrarch's Canzoniere in the 1330s. There were short-term falls however at other times due to lack of inspiration, for example in the mid 18th century. The fastest rates of world Poet-Population growth (above 1.8%) were seen briefly during the 1950s (see Projectivism) then for a longer period during the 1960s and 1970s. This can be seen on the following graph :

According to Poet-Population projections, the Poet-Population will continue to grow until around 2050. The 2008 rate of growth has almost halved since its peak of 2.2% per year, which was reached in 1963. World Poet-Births have levelled off at about 137-million-per-year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s, and are expected to remain constant. However, Poet-Deaths are only around 56 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. Since births outnumber deaths, the Poet-Population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040.

Different regions have different rates of Poet-Population growth. According to our statistical mapping, the growth in the Poet-Population of different regions from 2000 to 2005 was:

237.771 million in Asia

92.293 million in Africa

38.052 million in Latin America

16.241 million in Northern America

1.955 million in Oceania

-3.264 million in Europe

383.047 million in the whole world

In the 20th century, the world saw the biggest increase in its Poet-Population in human history due to a range of factors including grants, word processors, and the formation of poets into tightly cohesive groups. In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the world's Poet-Population was growing at the rate of 1.14% (or about 75 million poets) per year, down from a peak of 88 million per year in 1989. In the last few centuries, the number of poets living on Earth has increased many times over. By the year 2000, there were 10 times as many poets on Earth as there were 300 years ago. According to data from the CIA's 2005–2006 World Factbooks, the world Poet-Population increased by 203,800 every day. The CIA Factbook increased this to 211,090 poets every day in 2007, and again to 220,980 poets every day in 2009.

Statistical Models

Hoerner (1975) proposed the following formula for calculating the world Poet-Population :

where

N is current number of poets
T is the current year
C = 2·10¹¹
T₀ = 2025

The formula indicates hyperbolic growth of the Poet-Population.

According to Kapitza (1997), the Poet-Population grew between 67000 b.c. and 1965, and the world Poet-Population growth formula is:

where

N is current Poet-Population
T is the current year
C = (1.86±0.01)·10¹¹
T₀ = 2007±1
$τ$ = 42±1

The transition from hyperbolic growth of the Poet-Population to slower rates of growth is called demographic poetic transition.

Summary and Predictions

Globally, the Poet-Population growth rate has been steadily declining from its peak of 2.19% in 1963, but growth remains high in Latin America, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In some countries there is negative Poet-Population growth (i.e. net decrease in the Poet-Population over time), especially in Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. Within the next decade, Japan and some countries in Western Europe are also expected to encounter negative Poet-Population growth.

The United Nations states that Poet-Population growth is rapidly declining, and is expected to peak at 9.2 billion in 2050.

Narrativity Is Part Of The Futility Of Language

2009-06-13T20:39:00.005+01:00

I just spent half an hour giggling at work by The Postmodern Text Generator. I read a good ten of its enlightening essays, ranging in topics from Spinoza to the future of Libertarianism. My favourite phrases for this session were the following, which I intend on using to other people this week and attributing them to their "authors" with unswerving confidence:

- “Sexual identity", Marx claimed, "is the rubicon of language."
- The characteristic theme of la Fournier’s analysis of predialectic rationalism is not deappropriation, but postdeappropriation.
- If one examines the textual paradigm of context, one is faced with a choice: either reject postcapitalist theory or conclude that context is a product of communication.

Then of course the most wonderful thing about The Postmodern Text Generator are those occasions it produces a sentence which you attempt for 5 minutes to try to "understand". You feel there is something there. This must be a semanteme. My favourite of this category during this session being :

“Narrativity is part of the futility of language,” says Lacan.

- Um, hey Robot-Academic.
- Greetings . . . MANNING.
- Listen RA, I'm just going down to the bar with Greg and co. for a few hours, do you think you could finish that section on Pessoa in the techne chapter and then just tidy up that stuff on Perelman and The New Rhetoric? That'd be great.
- Analytic or Continental.
- Err, let's go with Analytic today. But could you put in some equations, you know like Badiou.
- Confirmed.
- Sweet. Oh and could you go easy on the sollipsistic paradoxes this time: we're not playing Žižuku. BYE!

Why It Is Harder Being Young Today Than It Ever Used To Be

2009-06-11T20:56:00.004+01:00

You know it's true.

Following several conversation with close friends, was moved to write this after having read Matt Cozart's note of a few days ago:

I'm so fucking angry right now, or whenever I think about career stuff. Why are there never any articles that DON'T assume you've already had years of experience in a high level professional job? Why can't there be articles that tell people like me what to do? People with no skills or experience or even a slight sense of what the hell they want to do with their life??? I just don't know what to do anymore. It would be one thing if I knew what I wanted to do but simply couldn't find a job. That wouldn't be as bad. My problem is that I have never seriously considered any particular career in anything, and now I feel completely lost and defeated. How did I end up this way? I'm a college graduate, I've always done what I'm told, I don't get into trouble. I've done everything right!!!! And I still can't seem to figure out how to be an "adult", which seems to come completely naturally to everyone else. What is going on?????

What indeed, dear Matt, is going on . . . I'm sure I may get comments from people saying, more or less, "Man, you should have seen how we lived in Brooklyn in the 70s (slash 40s slash 80s)!" So I'll state in advance: I really don't care for this kind of comment. It's irrelevant to my general hypothesis, namely that the fetishistic "professionalization" of Western society means that we are forced to choose very early our "path", and the fact that this is then set in stone as a deterministic element of individuals' identities almost entirely precludes any free and considered choice of what one may indeed "want to do". I cannot tell you the number of times for instance that I've heard, over the last several years, this exchange:

- It's just too late for me now to be an architect/doctor/chef/artist. . .

- Oh, how old are you?

- 28.

- I see.

The whole "career mobility" line, specific to our contemporary Weltanschauung, is a sham. (Note, for instance, how the "Sauder Career Success Cycle" is hilariously just one big hermetically sealed self-perpetuating self-referential loop leading nowhere . . .)

See Matt, you should be able to walk into a plethora of fulfilling positions. Why is it so difficult?

This is why:

1. The ridiculous need in our society for an endlessly self-perpetuating number of degrees, certificates, diplomas, qualifications, CV references, to obtain the most junior position, anywhere, in any field. "Education" has turned pornographic. Not everyone needs to attend a university, and above all, not everyone should feel they have the obligation to do this in order to "get ahead". What happened to respect for people who had primarily technical knowledge, acquired over a short period of time, and then perfected over a practical duration? If this is respected, then individuals are also respected according not to what they "have done", but what they may do or are capable of doing. Respect for what individuals are inherently capable of doing, through their intrinsic capacities, has been buried under this infatuation for mythical epistemic accreditation. There is techne. Not all is episteme.

2. The massive extension in time now required to even enter into adult working life. 7 year med degrees, 7 year law degrees, 7 year grad programs. My undergraduate professors, who completed their studies in the sixties, used to talk of how they went into good-paying, full-time jobs after having obtained their Masters degrees.

Their Masters degrees.

Are we clear?

This means, in many cases, that today, young people under 30, if they're working at the same time, can spend upwards of 10 years in shitty, part-time poorly-paid scraping together enough shit to live on lives. (Oh and by the way, education used to free . . .) Of course, you're indeed a very lucky S.O.B (my case) if your parents are in a position to help you out financially and socially over this "formative" period. For many, or perhaps the majority, this is of course not possible.

I was reflecting on all this the other day, and was shocked to realize that, if I'm not mistaken, my parents were in the process of building their first house together when they were my age.

Currently, nothing seems further from the realms of the possible for me, and for the majority of other young people I know.

I am thus preparing myself, for the next two months, to put on minimal cologne and pack an extra pair of pantyhose (see below).

This is why it is harder being young today than it ever used to be. But feel free to berate. The Newer Metaphysicals is always up for a good inter-generational flame-war . . .

Minimal Cologne (Or How to Dress for Job Interviews)

2009-06-11T19:46:00.000+01:00

Flawless Pantyhose (Or How to Dress for Job Interviews)

2009-06-11T19:42:00.004+01:00

The Following Critics Have Taste

2009-06-06T22:21:00.010+01:00

I've been neglectful of late in getting around to listing those fine aesthetes who have recently demonstrated that they have taste. So . . .

The decidedly perspicacious Grady Harp finds Novaless "breathtakingly beautiful" in the new Oranges & Sardines, and observes that :

Reading Nicholas Manning’s symphonic Novaless once is not enough: reading each cluster of words, each line – once – is not enough. It is only when the reader steps into his nebulous space of intellectual and spiritual possibilities that the beauty of this single poem/story/thought/need/joy/pain can be embraced for the magical work that it is. This is the Medawar world of the poetscientist and the philosopher-scientist, but more important - this is the world of a creative artist exploring the possibilities from the peak of the mountaintop.

Yeah people, get up onto the mountain !

Grady Harp has taste.

Meanwhile, the obviously intelligent Tim Wright reviews Novaless in Cordite and observes that :

Asterisks are the most obvious typographical anomaly, buttonholed between words rather than the more conventional placement between sections of a poem to mark an extended pause. These stars seem to register a kind of aporia, or to gesture towards a range of feeling beyond the limitations of the alphabet. (Nabokov in ‘Time and Ebb’: “and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk leading to an undiscoverable footnote”). A move like this might not work for many reasons, or if it did the possibility would be that overuse would render the symbol decorative, an empty material effect. But after reading three or four poems in this book, I began to get the hang of these stars and to see how they become part of, and extend, the grammar and music of the poems. I read these marks at different times as breaths, as pauses which bring my attention to – energise – the gap between two words, or, as a kind of expostulation on mute. The asterisks also suggest that the poems – or Manning’s head – are in the stars. The poems are definitely more cosmic than earthy.

Yes, I will perhaps never choose the earth over the cosmos.

Tim Wright has taste.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this self-promotion clean from my hand? No, this my hand will etc.

I feel dirty.