Never Mind the Beasts

For outness is but the feeling of otherness (alterity) rendered intuitive, or alterity visually represented. –Coleridge.

Just purchased Tony Tost’s <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0807129658-0&quot;

>Invisible Bride last night.

I’m only a little ways in, but I am hooked and altered.

The alterity in Invisible Bride feels genuine.

What I mean is I got some serious head chills.

The whim feels spiritual in the best sense of the word.

Imagistic and easy going voice pleasures

with so much more underneath.

There’s something here.

I wish I didn’t have to teach today.

I want to curl up with Invisible Bride and D.J. Shadow.

to be continued . . .

In my Irish lit class I am teaching from the penguin book of contemp. poetry. The usual poets. I am bored.

So I logged onto the internet and played some poems in real audio of Lisa Jarnot and Wanda Coleman.

A little talk about tradition and innovation.

Students were shocked by Lisa Jarnot.

Who’s emp. wu? Whose neighborhood is this?

I said, yes, exactly. That’s it. Whose neighborhood is this?

One student said Lisa Jarnot better not quit her dayjob.

A telling product based comment.

Some students asked if Lisa Jarnot loved Dr. Suess.

I told them I am not sure. I told them to look up Getrude Stein.

(This is a general education class).

I wish I found Wild Honey Press before I put together this Irish lit. class.

Next time.

On Wed we are discussing Heaney but I’m going to broadcast a little Healy as well. A little daylight savings sex.

<a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney/lightenings.html&quot;

>Heaney

vs. <a href="http://www.wildhoneypress.com/BOOKS/DSSfull.htm&quot;

>Healy on St. Paddy’s day

I am tired sick of

“look at me/ I’m Irish/ I’m different/ we’ve all suffered terribly” (Peter Riley in the Chicago Review).

Rurual. Pastoral. Irish for the English.

A very narrow nationalism.

However, I have to admit Heaney was my first love.

I still find some pleasure in his language

but not his ends.

Gotta guest teach an undergrad beginning poetry workshop in half an hour.

Not sure what I’m going to say.

All the poems are very stale, boring, cliched.

Gotta talk about the difference between writing out your feelings in a journal and writing a poem.

Not that a combo of journal/blogging and other types of discourse can’t make a poem.

It’s more poetry=self expression than anything I suppose.

most of the students will be very young. Recent high school grads.

I don’t think a regular workshop will help them a lot.

Gotta interrogate more than negotiate.

I wish all workshops interrogated assumptions rather than treating the poem as object to perfect and clarify.

Diction is one of the main issues. The romantic.

Maybe I’ll ask them if a musician can blow us all away

if they only listen to songs by Elvis?

Or a photographer if they only look at photos

in the NY Times?

How did I actually believe

there was a seperation between the aesthetic and the political

just five years ago?

Not sure about TV on the Radio.

Some songs were quite interesting. My friends were not impressed.

One friend said, “Fishbone meets Grateful Dead.”

Another said, “a new and improved punkier version of Hootie and the Blowfish.

A third good friend said, “Gimmick. All gimmick.”

The gimmick comment stuck.

What distinguishes a gimmick? Innovation as gimmick versus innovation as honest?

Gimmick:

1. a piece of trickery or manipulation intended to achieve a result dishonestly

2. a piece of concealed information that, if known, would make an offer or opportunity less attractive

3. something such as a new technique or device that attracts attention or publicity

4. an ingenious device, mechanism, or ploy, especially one that works in a concealed way

My students would say if it’s deep, it’s not a gimmick.

A gimmick is all surface? Surface of “smart” with nothing underneath?

The period style is not a gimmick. Repeat, the period style is not a gimmick.

Everytime I think I am moving ahead of the curve I realize I’m two years behind. Or the curve is two years behind and the great ones have caught up to the present age.

I love Chicago Review. Just ordered a subscription. A great review of Randolph Healy’s work. Nothing like Heaney. A great essay by Michael Palmer on poetry and contingency. Now there’s two great poets. Healy and Palmer makes me feel and think all at the same time.

My head comes right off.

I am tired of smart for smart’s sake.

How about some emotional and intellectual honesty.

Going to see TV on the Radio tonight in Greensboro.

I don’t have their cd. Only heard “staring at the sun.” I’ve heard good things about them. Hope they put on a jolly good show.

Also going to see Leo/Pharmacists at GO! on Sunday.

Good week to rock.

Just ran across an ad in APR for the new and improved poetry magazine with Pound’s “make it new” a crazy photograph of an electrified woman, and a quote from August Kleinzahler about poetry magazine being wide awake with its new editor. The new issue has a bunch of poems by Bill Knot. The latest APR has poems from John Yau. Fence magazine. The Best American Poetry series. The insider outsiders are moving into the mainstream at a rapid pace.

Aaron McCollough

has a very thought provoking response to Ron’s poetry test.

The rapid response (myself included) to Ron’s poetry test seemed in part motivated by approval.

How smart can I sound so Ron will like me? Does Ron ever read my blog?

The Patchen poem Aaron looks at is a very interesting example.

I feel torn between wanting to find the little things that don’t jive with the current allowed positions and letting myself feel the lines Aaron singles out.

In short, I am afraid of letting down my guarde.

Patchen’s poem is not cynical enough. It’s too sure and satisfied. Satisfaction equals complacent. Complacent equals apolitical. And so on.

I feel torn constantly between choosing a position, a stance, and hunkering down or mixing it all up.

I don’t want to be wishy washy but I don’t want to narrow my experiences too much.

Transgressions moves into acceptable position(s) and the acceptable position(s) move into transgressions.

What if I secretly like Jack Gilbert with all his wisdom claims and quiet soft spoken image making?

Why don’t we all fess up to the poets we like who are not allowed into the current “scene(s)?”

It is irresponsible to lump Jack Gilbert with Billy Collins as belonging to the school of quietude as much as it is to say Dean Young and Ron Silliman

belong to the school of language poets.

Neither position tells me anything. It only dismisses.

It is catch all, we’ve got an enemy and something to prove. We’ll lump you but don’t lump us.

I learned a few things from Ron’s test. But mostly I learned about power. Seeking approval. How to win friends and influence people.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I am immune to this. I want to be liked as much as the next person.

I picked up Joshua Clover’s Madonna anno domini.

I hope to grab a copy of Joshua Corey’s Selah in the near future.

It’s the c and the o.

I’ll have to take a taste test of Selah and Madonna anno domini.

Traded in some Pinsky, some Steve Orlen, some Don Delillo, some Stephen Dobyns, some Thomas Lux at The Bookshop in Chapel Hill.

In exchange I picked up:

Philip Whalen’s Decompressions

Gregory Corso’s Mindfield

Denise Levertov’s O Taste and See

Clark Coolidge’s Own Face

Josh Corey’s Madonna anno domini

I’m building here. Trade out old tastes for new.

I loved Shanna Compton’s

Down Spooky

“We the Blind Need Pushing” deserves many reads and many readers.

Much better than Sad Little Breathing Machine just out from Graywolf press.

I was fascinated by the responses on Ron Silliman’s blog to the poetry test.

The attempt to focus on the work of a writer is sometimes an attempt to increase the credability of the writer in question. Thereby increasing artistic capital.

Does Ann Carson’s short short bio increase her artistic capital? Does the mystery surrounding the identity of Thomas Pynchon increase his artistic capital?

Granted that’s only two examples. But maybe it will become the new trend.

Capitalism can suck, anything, big time.

It was really interesting to see how similar the poems sounded. My first response was to try and see all the poems as a sequence by one poet. I thought it was Ron Silliman at first, moving in a new direction.

Often, when I read lit. journals, I go straight to the poems written by females. Then, slowly, I go back and read the males. Why?

I would like to score a few points and say some of the great innovators are female. But it might be equally true that I find smart sexy.

So what about signature, voice, the stamp of originality.

First of all, the idea of voice (patriarchal etc.) is suspect. So let’s change it to stamp.

Is the stamp the small, tiny self that remains stable while all the other selves shift? If every self shifts, then forget the stamp. The stamp is a delusion.

But we can recognize the “masters.” They find themselves and work it. Except perhaps Jorie Graham; she keeps reinventing herself like Madonna. And yet, I think I can recognize a Jorie Graham poem just like I can recognize a Madonna song.

But that’s not fair.

Madonna= clothes, fashion, sex appeal, ahead or right in line with the period, a recognizable voice

Jorie Graham= sex appeal with extreme intelligence writing for/in the future.

When I read Jorie Graham, I imagine her in my mind.

I am not sick, perverted etc.

So the pleasure of following and recognizing the names of hip new poets and hip old mothers and fathers of the avant guarde doesn’t mean we are all shallow celebrity worshippers etc. Does it?

I want to be a smart fellow who knows his popular culture and can integrate it into sanctioned modes of discourse.

Is worshipping Julia Roberts and following all her movies no different (in motivation, not in quality) than worshipping and following all the poems of James Tate?

The cult of personality never seems to go away.

Which reminds me. I read Swarm by Jorie Graham a few years ago for a graduate poetry class. A lot of the students rarely read contemporary poetry and most enjoyed Jorie Graham.

That was after they read the dust jacket and saw her picture.

We question the gatekeepers and if what they are guarding is worth the entry fee. Can we get rid of the gatekeepers?

I’m suspicious of gatekeepers because I am often denied entry.

So often I hear it’s harder to make sense, speak clearly than speak/write cryptic. It’s the old text/reader/writer (Mr. Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle). Get rid of the writer and what does the shape become. A vertical line. Text to reader?

Intention is not always bad. It’s too easily dismissed. The point is to keep things fluid to begin and begin and begin and begin with/in/between mystery and clarity.

There’s a there there indeed. But the there shifts constantly and the reader must shift with it (as well as the writer). The there is not a location but consists of peddling wheres, many wheres. If anyone attempts to explain why one where is better than another where it is suspect (and must always continue shifting with the location that never exists except in it’s shifting).

Is shifting enough? I tend to feel like shifting and velocity are important but as an end in themselves? Action pack it, sure. Jackson Pollack it, sure.

Then again the where has shifted since Jackson. That’s the point. It’s not enough to enact the difficulty of language to mean. In not meaning it must also mean.

Don’t ask me how that happens.

I’m looking for mystery but not just any old mystery.

I tend to think audience is important. Sure, not to point of pandering. Or assuming to much. Or dismissing the possibility of creating an audience rather than fitting an audience that already exists (although I suppose the audience always already exists).

So, Mr. Aristotle won’t go away. Does his wee triangle apply to poetry as well as newspaper articles? Sure the texts are different, but the relationship between text, reader, writer are still important to consider, right?

Information overload. I don’t need one person, one canon.

Fourty critics need not agree, should not agree. Or if they agree they should not agree for the same reason(s). Difference in reviewing, not back slapping in the name of tenure, jolly good form, monkey back scratching.

How tired we all get.

Novelty never beats security.

Big slice to security, a sliver for novelty.

Alright, too much Nietzsche and Wittgenstein before coffee make me feel like making grand pronouncements. Who am I? I’m just a man typing on his keyboard trying to

BREAK out.

So far I’ve spent $50 from Mr. Bush’s tax return on small press poetry and indie music. I am very excited by

Wild Honey Press

Ordered:

Blackwards by Rosmarie Waldrop ($5.00 USD)

Daylight Saving Sex by Randolph Healy ($5.00 USD)

Shipping and Handling: $2.50 USD

Total: $12.50 USD

$12.50 for two books from the other Ireland. Yes. There is another Ireland. Ireland + America k-i-s-s-i-n-g

inatree.

My two countries of many.

I don’t have to choose just one. I don’t have to essentialize or stilt myself into an Irish poet.

What a great time to be alive. Beckett and Joyce continue. . .

Mini vacation to Chapel Hill yesterday. Art musuem at UNC then The bookshop. Found about 16 books I wanted. Ended up getting:

A Paradise of Poets by Jerome Rothenberg

Voice Over by Elaine Equi

Lit by Ron Silliman

The Happy Birthday of Death by Gregory Corso (with a nice little fold out poem)

really digging Vert

How not to stop changing.

Now the question is whether to get a selected HD or The Beat Reader from the used book store with my credit?

Hm…

Rainy and sticky with lots of birds right now.

I slept well. Watched American Splendor. I need to find some underground comics. I haven’t read comics since I was a little in Ireland. Loved Ajax.

Traded Bob Hicok for the revised and enlarged selected Robert Duncan edited by robert j. bertholf.

Play at hand:

1) Sleeping with the dictionary by Harryette Mullen

2) Steal Way By C.D. Wright

3) revised and enlarged by Robert Duncan

sleep with the dictionary, steal away, revise and enlarge.

Ted Leo is coming next sunday at cat’s cradle in Chapel Hill.

I am going to see tv on the radio on thursday in Greensboro.

Music week ahead.

The trivial can be more than trivial. high/low. basketball, fixin, elbow grease, washing, drying, suds and dusting.

FRAGMENTS WAITING FOR REARRANGEMENT:

poetry= low p in high fi

free play without sponge

then with sponge.

hoke, poke,

turn around.

Serious thick bricks and lamb chops.

I pay my debts to the gents of delayed hunger.

I was born on the founding of the LDS/Mormon church.

I was supposed to be a Mormon prophet (so said the Patriarch).

My life is not a swan song.

in the world and

of the world.

Sum

merge

sub

mit

sub

vert

sum

mary.

Returning Bob Hicok. He bored me after six poems.

Per the suggestion of Aaron McCollough, I am going to order



Shanna Compton’s Down Spooky.

Liked the audio of “We the blind need pushing.”

Picked up Sleeping with the Dictionary. I am very excited.

Got a serious roll. Sacked the headmaster for a monkey.

Post Date: Fri Mar 05, 09:23:53 AM

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Wondering about the head/intellect. It’s all up there, but is it useful to pretend the ‘ole heart is something else?

(All of a sudden I feel like that main character from Sex and the City typing on her mac).

Playground tactics. Original tactics not like the rabbit in a hat trick.

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reread Tony Tost’s Disarm the settlers at Typo and thinking about programs. My cousin visitied from Ireland two summers ago and found it really strange we kept introducing people as: this is so and so, he’s from the program. Which reminds of: the church. The church says. . .

As if everyone belonged to the said speaker’s church.

I also read some Adorno and felt guilty about watching the t.v. show Angel. But is popular culture just straight evil across the board? I don’t feel less political. Vote vampire etc.

I find some pleasure in Bob Hicok. I find myself wanting to stick to the gun but unable. I have too many likes that divide.

I like the idea of the one from the many rather than the many from the one (whose blog did I read?) So many voices knocking about knocking me off. How can I choose just one? They are all so compelling.

So I want interest. I get tired of the little dictator self telling my other selves how to act talk walk.

I am not the driver of the chariot. I am the wild horses.

I remember Bruce Beasley telling me about the relationship between making it new and reading wide and deep. He said take a little Heaney add a little Palmer and Tate, a dab of Lorca and O’ Hara and what do you get? Something damn new.

So again how to distinguish the new for the sake of new from the new as genuine new? I want to wake up. Recreate the world.

Recreation gets such a bad name in the puritanical capitalist work till you die state of responsible drones.

Must we take ourselves so seriously. Who or what self is the dictator of other selves? Let them dance I say. Let them bloody well dance! And I don’t mean the waltz or foxtrot. Those days are gone.

I thought I was rural. Because all the good Irish poets are rural. Mr. Heaney et all. But Mr. Heaney isn’t et all. I loved Heaney (first love) but I am tired of his voice. My mind is the buzz and bootstomp of the city. I am not pastoral I am not pastoral. But I can still love the birds.

I am really digging Berstein’s “Artifice of Absorption.” I read parts of it a while back, but I wasn’t ready.

Berstein says/writes: “Antiabsorptive does not necessarily mean nonentertaining . . . readers can be expected to enjoy a device that ruptures the commodification of reading insofar as this fulfills their desire for such a work.”

I am wondering about absorption and antiabsorption in terms of Bob Hicok and Dean Young. Both are said to straddle the line between official verse culture and avant (although Hicok may just be official verse culture). I can absorb almost all of Bob Hicok and I am entertained. Dean Young has a lot of antiabsorption and it’s entertaining. Bob Hicok has many of the characteristics of official verse culture: a lot of poems about his father, epiphanies at the end of the poem etc.

I enjoy the NY school poets because they make me uncomfortable but they are also highly entertaining. I also enjoy Lisa Jarnot and Matthew Rohrer for the same reason. It’s the use of images in both cases. It’s such a tricky thing, the balance of absorption and antiabsorption.

So many books of contemp poetry resist commodification but may also explode in the night sky without much consequence. Just the latest newest coolest to celebrate the latest newest coolest. Which in the end taps into the whole capitalist insistence on pseudo novelty (not much difference).

The genuine difference versus the ingenuine difference. The difference in good faith versus the difference in bad faith. Surely, thus, not all difference resists commodification, absorption. Antiabsorptive techniques for absorptive ends implies the techniques of the antiabsorptive must shift and recreate a lot, especially to keep up with the armies.

Let the invasion be recontextualized. It’s not out there it’s in here.

innovation, difference, and process become part of the machine of capitalism. The new, innovative food processor from GE etc.

How can the new get over its specialness?

I picked up Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics at the used book store and Insomnia Diary by Bob Hicok.

I’ve only read four pages of Bernstein and it’s really got me thinking again. I read quite a bit of “language poetry” in grad school, as well as a lot of theory, but then I left it all behind. Gave away all my theory books, small chapbooks, and hemp hat. Even tossed all of my Evergreen Reviews. (ah regret).

Now I feel like I can enter that world again.

For example:

I do not like Las Vegas even if it is a perfect post modern (mordem, boredom) playground.

I do not believe in the leveling. Nice idea, but. . .

I think I think that the historical Greeks are different than the Greeks who stand outside Caesar’s Palace. But I suppose either way I cannot know the historical Greeks, I can only imagine them. So how is my imagining of the historical Greek different than the man dressed up as a Greek outside Caesar’s Palace? How are the character’s in the Surreal Life different than all the character’s they played on t.v. long long ago? What is our responsibility to the real as multiple and not a closed system that only refers to itself (Yes, Mr. B etc.)?

Alright so I did the eliptical machine and now oxygen is flowing to my brain and all those wee things from Grad. school crept back into my head.

Western Washington (My MA experience) was all about theory and consisted of an historical survey of poetry with a lot emphasis on the outsiders both in and out (via Bruce Beasley). There was a lot of backstabing, fighting, and pyschological instability among the grad students and faculty. Only a few faculty smiled. It made theory look miserable, and for a time I was miserable. I had little time to write. Huge comps. Lot’s of intense classes. “Poetry” was not the emphasis. The critical was much more important than the creative. Our footsteps down the hall was a political statement indicating our camp/theory/political affiliation. I longed to just spend a lot of time writing and not feeling guilty. There’s was a lot of guilt flinging around. A very temporary reversal of the typical hierarchies.

UNCG (my MFA experience) was about craft and a history of poetry excluding most of the outsiders. It was about having a lot of time to write and think about writing without a lot of strenuous classes. It was about a very intense visiting writers program. A really solid community. People smiled daily and drank on porches. I wrote a lot.

And now these experiences wrestle with each other. I thought my MA was worthless. Now I feel like it was important. The romantic and the absurd battle for supremacy ( a blurb from Bob Hicok’s Insomnia Diary).

The local indep. music store (gate city noise) sent out an emergency email. They could go under in less than a month. So a big group of writers spent money on good music.

I picked up:

The Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin)

Ted Leo/Pharmacists (The Tyranny of Distance)

Califone (Heron King BLVES)

The Wrens (Meadowlands)

Also burned a copy of The Clientele. Good stuff.

I wish we had an independent bookstore in Greensboro. ABE is good, but I like to feel before I buy sometimes.

I returned Tony Hoagland’s newest book (narcisism and me) and Charles Simic’s Walking the Black Cat (since I already have two selected books of Simic) to Barnes and Nobles. In exchange I picked up C.D. Wright’s “Steal Away”

I read Deepstep Come Shining a while back and enjoyed it. I hope I enjoy Wright’s selected.

I like what C.D. Wright says in an interview about scenes, groups, etc. She says she learned from the various happenings and scenes in San Fran. but she didn’t let that dictate or limit her influences and allegiances.

She says, ” I just never liked anyone telling me what to do or what to like. Or ‘versa vice.’ If the poetries I like cancel one other out at the polls, so be it. I’ll vote as many times as I please. I don’t think that drops me off in some dead zone.”

Yes. I am feeling more and more in-line with this out-of-line thinking.

Reading a Frank Bidart interview from Chicago Review (fall 2001). He talks about how irony can be a kind of “sophicated armored writing.” Bidart says, “I like extreme art. So much middle of the road art is simply boring . . . sophisticated armored writing feels very middle of the road to me. Aping the manners of the cutting edge in the twenties and thirties.”

I sometimes get bothered with irony. At the end of the day I also want extreme poetry. Extreme poetry that’s earned. Not cheapened by either the conventions of avant guarde poetics or “mainstream” poetics.

So I love Roethke and Michael Palmer. To me, despite being classified as “Mainstream” and “avant guarde,” they both write extreme poetry.

Means and ends are never just means and ends. The ends justify nothing. The means justify nothing.

Take my head off as sister Emily would say.

Is honest searching for difference different than sinister specialness. When does specialness become sinister. Is it possible for extreme individualism to screw up a society?

Maybe what I mean is beside the point rather than the point.

(Ha. I’m clever. I’m special. I’m unique. I’m me. etc.)

I worry about difference daily. And community. I think about community a lot. I want to belong and not belong.

Alright. Onto sillyness. Tricky deep poetic silliness in the name of specialness (there’s deep meaning here. Poetry is deep. That’s what my students say).

A lot of “well-respected” visiting poets have shook their all-knowing heads at the young poets full of caustic irony and sillyness.

“How can we know when we are saying something if we don’t believe in saying anything?”

In other words where’s the fire baby?

I believe. Many others believe. Get some new reading

strategies.

I say enough is never enough.

Excess+palace=wisdow

and so on.

How can we know our victories?

I hear a lot of complaints about the Iowa poets (I have participated sometimes) from the 1970’s. A kind of McPoem (ala Mr. Hall) narrative, easily digested etc. Now Iowa is on the other side. Mostly avant guarde inspired/influenced poetry. Iowa has power. Iowa is bringing the avant strategies into the mainstream. Are those of us who didn’t attend Iowa on their shirttails?

Tony Tost pondered period style briefly on his blog a while back. Not sure how to define the period. But like the last 60 or so years, Iowa might be at the center. An example: I heard a lot of the criticism against APR for publishing the period style coming out of Iowa (in the 70’s and 80’s especially). Now APR is publishing a different kind of poetry. “Risky.” But it’s still the kind of poetry coming out of Iowa.

Originality. How can we know we are not just plugging in to the period surge? Is it ok to plug into the period surge (with a little of our own juice to boot).

Again, the new for the sake of the new seems empty without connecting it something greater (since the new is quickly old and new for the sake of new smacks of art for art’s sake).

What is the value of innovation? Mindfulness. A new way of seeing the world. Waking up. Uncovering how language creates the world and recreating.

One voice. Under god.

Multivoices under language.

Language is god.

Wondering and worrying audience. The creation of audience versus the packaging of poetry for an audience. Writing for other poets versus writing for?????

Sometimes non-readers of poetry (close friends) say they feel unintelligent because they don’t get process oriented poetry. I don’t want anyone to feel stupid and unworthy, including myself.

I am driven to process (non-neat, anti) but I don’t want to feel elitist.

This is the old question of difficulty, I know.

Is re-education, re-conditioning neccesary rather than pandering to audience (or some notion of audience)?

I am ok with not getting everything. I like not getting everything. Is not getting everything ever a hoax?

Can a hoax ever be a good thing?

Lorca’s “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion”

Reading a little Lorca in Jubilat #7 today.

Lorca: “no one should say this is clear, because poetry is obscure. And no one should say this is obscure, because poetry is clear. . . we need to have forgotten poetry completely before it call fall naked into our arms.”

I suppose that’s what I search for in poetry (both writing and reading). I am most excited when I forget what poetry is and go on a hunt with letters, words, images, music etc. I also want my poetry hot (“what poetry cannot bear is indifference” as Lorca says).

Lorca says “not creation” but “discovery.”

What is the difference between creation and discovery? Art as closed field (objects) versus art as open field (subjects).

Lorca:

“The imagination is a spirtual apparatus. . . [it] merely discovers things already created, it does not invent, and whenever it does so it is defeated by the beauty of reality.”

Lorca’s mechanics of poetic imagination:

“a concentration, a leap, a flight, hunting for imagery, return with the treasure, and a classification and selection of what has been brought back.”

Selection for me is reordering of images and information. I suppose classification is along the same lines. Write drunk/revise sober etc.

How not to cripple the imagination in the act of classification and selection? Classification and selection is where the prestige lies. (best this and that plus some niche for the market. “Best South Norwegian Folk Poetry by Women under 29.” )

So, how can we resteer classification and selection beyond a product ideology?

Risk anniilation.

Give up on immortality.

Agree to that little thing called death.

Lorca: “One cannot imagine what does not exist.”

Does exist take into account the existence of the imagination. A flying pig is imagined but does not exist? Or because I can imagine it it must therefore exist since I cannot imagine what does not exist? Or is flying pig a poetic atmosphere rather than a poetic fact?

According to Lorca, imagination is bound to reality. Reality grounds the imagination, not the other way around.

Lorca: “”science is a thousand times more lyrical than any theogony.”

According to Lorca, visible reality consists of the facts of the world and the human body.

According to Lorca, if we want to “understand the morse alphabet spoken by the heart of the sleeping girl” we will always fail.

Imagination is a golden poverty, but inspiration is different than imagination.

Lorca: “imagination creates a poetic atmosphere, and inspiration invents the poetic fact.”

Which comes first the poetic atmosphere or the poetic fact?

Atmosphere then fact.

Fact then atmosphere.

American Poetry acccording to a few hundred students at UNCG:

Most students in four different classes had friends who wrote poetry and read at coffee shops. Quite a few thought a poet was polite, agreeable. A nice dinner guest. Only a few thought of a poet as crazy and dangerous (we were discussing the Irish bard and Yeats Hanrahan). Most thought American poets are all songwriters/rappers.

Audience was a big harping during my four years of grad school. My mentor Bruce Beasley was not concerned about a huge audience. A small intense audience is better than millions of adoring fans who only see the surface? Even if that intense audience consists mostly of other poets?

I am happy with an audience. Should I be uncomfortable with an audience mostly of peers?

Not sure. But I’ve got to sneeze.

It’s got to be true it’s got to be true:

the writing itself is central.

Audience, recognition second.

My cat has a feather and treats it like a baby.

Sometimes I want to rip the alphabet a new one. Sometimes the alpha scares me more than the omega.

Sometimes the alphabet makes me want to hide my hat in the broom closet.

Tired of cleaning up after the alphabet.

A mess here. A mess there. Everywhere a mess mess.

Is there life after the alphabet?

is there life after chocolate?

What is the relationship between retire and tire?

For and between also interest me.

If I am between Irish nationalism and cosmopolitanism what am I for?

or (as the small stirs indicate almost to the point of a dead horse)

If I am between

language as multivocal, flux filled, slidding, anxiety ridden

and

language as steady, horn in the hand, ding ding ding, lightbulb

what I am for?

If I am unsure what I am for then

can I be sure what I am against?

What if what I am against is also

what I am for?

I am between, against, and for at all times and at all places.

Never hot, cold, or lukewarm. All three at once.

O.k.

It is time to retire for the evening with my stuffy head so you sleep medicine.

Paz is on my brain. Paz can stay on my brain.

Swimming underwater today with head cold.

I’ve been thinking a lot about period styles (conversational narrative etc.)

Sebastian Matthews came last week and read some poems and part of the memoir. Did not enjoy it. William Matthews is ok, but not very interesting. I am not sure why (other than recognition, status as son of etc.) a memoir that restates all the old conventions of artist as fucked up, unconventional etc. So what? maybe I’m not being fair since I didn’t read the whole memoir, but the parts Sebastian read were boring as hell.

So do we ignore the worry of being swept up by a period style and just write from gut. instinct. diverse readings across time and space etc. ?

Again cross pollination as impure versus cross pollination as possibility. Take a little Paz mix it with a little Simic, Lorca, O’ Hara, Kinnell, memory, your experience of and with language, and what do you get? Something new?

Does novelty carry a negative (i.e. fad)? I’m constantly searching for new experiences (of language, of music) does that make me blow with the wind and thus inauthentic, ungrounded? I’m bored easily, but many poets from previous centuries interest and astound me. Novelty. New. fad. period style.

The worry of period style is the worry of authenticity or the worry of immortality. Can only the authentic be immortal?

Alright, I am throwing things around very loosely and my philosophy background is screaming at me: define your terms.

Art and life do not divide in any way for me. I am searching, always searching and that searching for authenticity exists in my attempts at life and my attempts at art.

Being a tad sick makes me contemplate my mortality.

I will only write out of neccessity (as the cliche goes).

Time for a wrap (no cheese).

I am looking at:

a nice color plate of Dali’s Night and Day Clothes

and listening to:

Bonnie Prince Billy’s “wolf among wolves.”

The combination is moving me.

juxtapositions that buzz.

Snow on the ground. Cold fingers. I don’t have to teach today because of the ice. Cuddle up to Dali, Bonnie prince billy, an issue of Lit (Spring ’01 with Richard Siken), and Word open and ready to revise.

Worked with Dan Albergotti last night on revising some poems for Story South. He has an amazing eye. And I mean amazing. Good poet as well.

here we go here we go here we gooo o (my football chant).

Isolation makes me happy. No cars on the street. So peaceful.

Summer depresses me. Everything so open. I can hide easier in winter.

Gotta read Yeats “The Twisting of the Rope” and prepare a lesson plan for it. A little Celtic Twilight lecture perhaps.

Listening to Czech music. Jaromir Hohavica and Kapela.

I am wondering about poetry and performance after listening to Craig Arnold the other day. I like poetry read well, or well read poetry, but sometimes the over dramatic puts me off. I don’t like things too quiet though. Maybe it all depends on the poet and their poetry. Maybe some poetry is better for performance while other poetry is meant to be savored. Rich, dense poetry for example. John Latta’s reading allowed me to pay attention to the rich language. If he “acted” it, I think a lot would have been lost.

Ah, this czech music isn’t very good. I’m switching to Flaming Lips.

I suppose performance needs to be defined. Is a silent reading to oneself a performance? In other words is all reading a performance even if silent? (the voice in our heads is a performance).

Somehow we need to distinguish between reading and performing poetry. If reading is always performing then we have no way to distinguish between performance art and a nice little academic poetry reading. And there is a difference. If performance is no longer applicable then lets invent another term.

It’s about semantics. The Semantic island lacks a king. Or maybe there’s always a silent king. So, we have to vocalize the semantic king. Bring him to light. (is the semantic king always male?)

Time for Yeats (and I think he acts his poetry. The lake isle and all).

cheers.

The Boy with the Arab Strap

Sleep the clock around kicks in the joy. A cup of coffee. re-reading Palmer’s At Passages. He is so amazing.

Going to hear Craig Arnold read at 2pm today. Haven’t read any of his poems before. He’s one of those Yale winners.

Daddy long legs. Useless jaws. Sometimes I wonder when the poor buggers jaws will start working (via evolution). I don’t want to be the first one to get the bite though.

Ate meat (red) for the first time in a while at the bar last night. I’ve been worrying the swiss cheese brain via mad cow for a while. But it could take 6 years (or 10 or 15 everyone has different info) for it to manifest.

I love Morning Star Farms though. The bacon isn’t so good. But the sausage and all the burgers. Yum.

Working on an opening poem for a second manuscript. making it a tad long. Palmer and Grossman are having a way with me.

Boy with the arab strap is working for me this morning.

Been thinking of ways I don’t want to go:

1) Foaming at the mouth

2) With a priest hovering over me

3)Tubes and a breathing machine

4) Unaware (i.e. out of my mind)

5) gun shot to head

6) hanging

7) gutting

8) electric jolts

9) Decap (via accident or otherwise)

10) clamps to the head

11) black and decker drill to the knees then temples

Cold hands in this room. My study room is always cold. No heating vents. Gotta get me some holy gloves.

Thin SASE in the mail yesterday. Thought: another rejection. But it was an acceptance from Conduit.

happy evening.

happy morning.

So the mac version of blogger is different. Not a split window. Maybe nicer.

Watched Lost in Translation last night. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The inaudible whisper near the end. Most of the movie uses gestures more than conversation. Emotion is lost in translation from movie to audience.

Which came first, the emotion/experience or the language?

Experience births language, then language births experience, then experience births language etc. (or no then. It’s all happening at once)

Language used to create reality versus language used to describe reality.

The encounter with nothingness. Is it over yet?

It’s only begun.

Neck Popping feels good in the morning after a night of gorging on brick oven pizza, Guinness, Genache, coffee.

Watched In America last night. Felt quite familiar. I came to America at the age of 12 from N. Ireland. It was 1985. Breakdancing was big.

My preconception of America was built around movies (of course). Esp. E.T. There’s a scene where they eat Pizza Hut pizza. I wanted Pizza Hut.

Instead we landed in Las Vegas in July and headed to a K-Mart for our first American hamburger. My Dad purchased plastic cowboy boots for the whole family. He laid insulation.

Then mormondom, strange underwear, and disowning of my accent.

What is an accent? Assimilation, melting pot. The ideology of a melting pot. Not sure what I think yet. My first instinct is against it. The idea of homogeneous etc.

Difference etc.

But then Irish, Italian, Ukrainian neighborhoods? Separate communities to maintain the integrity of a culture? I admit, I often wish we landed in NY or Boston instead of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is the ultimate big pot of commodified cultures.

Is culture always a commodity?

Lots of lights in Las Vegas.

It’s called The Strip!

Strip indeed.

Moses and the wine part two.

Or Jesus, the camel, and the death of fatherhood.

If wavering is to stray then the narrow road requires flexible horses

to get through the eye of the needle.

If home is an interior then not home is . . .

What a strange, profound, bewildering wilderness

We invented off-hand wavering to wake up in an orchard of fermented fruit.

Abstractness in poetry an end in itself? Abstract grounded is the “common” Williams wisdom. What makes a good abstract poem (Barbara Guest) versus bad abstract poem (teenage angst poem)?

All my wonder and awe nailed down in a narrative easy going poem is dishonest.

All my awe and wonder exploded into abstract tidbits sometimes feels dishonest.

So, the tidbits of narrative or dramatic situation help me to dig further intellectually and emotionally. Or emotionally intellectually. Emotion and intellect at war since the wee Greeks invented reasoning etc.

Here comes the sun.

Gotta get ready to teach George Moore’s “Homesickness.”

I am almost always homesick.

Some Fragments soon to be made whole

At the thumbshow my lover parades like a peacock.

The minions are swept off their feet.

Ash in the throat.

Clean wind is the cosolation of my future.

My lot behind twelve million clomping hooves.

It behooves you to bereave with bandits.

Glaciers recommended their services but brisk tails called me to distance.

The rigid arm pushes.

My lover a QB in a no-hurry huddle.

Poor Green Bay. 4th and 1 and they punted. Bad call.

First class for Irish lit yesterday. Most of the students are marketing majors. At least half of the students said they have never finished reading a whole book. None of them had heard of critical reading. I explained writing in margins or on a piece of paper. Engaging in conversation with the text etc.

Existentialism in a few hours. Gonna start off with American Beauty to get things rolling. The students responded well to that movie last semester. They had a hard time with The Seventh Seal (b&w and subtitles).

Contamination of the “mainstream” with the “avant guarde.” Purity makes me shiver. Not everything is misappropriation. Most of the mongrols I’ve met are well aware of the theory informing avant guarde poetics.

Down and dirty. Ready for a shower.

Not sure what’s in the mix today.

It seems “indie” music informs a lot of the “younger” poets. Noticed a trend at Amherst. People with an MFA in poetry who also play in an indie band.

I am heavily influenced by indie music (indie is a large category. Not sure what defines it. Magnet magazine helps).

Neutral Milk astounds me. As does Built to Spill and sometimes Modest Mouse.

Like Death Cab for Cutie.

Love Iron and Wine!!!!

cheers.

Consciousness without reason? If consciousness requires reason, then before the Greeks invented reason, no one was conscious? (William Barrett’s argument in Irrational Man)

I am struggling to understand and define the illogical in language. Is language inherently logical?

Language and magic. Language before deconstruction. However, language is always already there. So to think of the prelinguistic is impossible. We cannot think of the prelinguistic without thinking of it first in terms of language. Things exist outside of language. Poet searches for language to describe the inhuman(defined as outside of language) but cannot. All poetry is thus about failure (which is almost a cliche now). How can the inhuman know anything about the human and vice versa? Where does the word inhuman come from? The desire for outside the self which never fully exists? Why the desire for outside? Does it help us in a biological/evolutionary sense? Perhaps the desire for outside (and the beginning of language which is the beginning of both art and religion) is the desire to alleviate the pain of death. So death instills the desire to create.

The immortal artist. Who doesn’t secretly desire it?

So many talk about being satisfied with rejection. To let the work be its own reward. It’s a comforting lie. Yes, the work is a great reward. Maybe the greatest. But why share? To make better work. And thus by making better work you make a better person? Not always. Maybe not most of the time if history is a guide. Why then “better” work. Why does quality matter? The ego at the center of it all. I live. I die. In between I create something to outlive me (child of flesh or child of words or both).

So, if the artist molests a child or marries their young daughter, do you stop listening, viewing or reading their work?

Thriller is a good. Woody Allen makes some very moving films. Larkin moves me.

So, we know we know. Art doesn’t make anyone a better person.

So, what does it do? Express failure. The only way to really express the failure of the human to understand the inhuman.

So, some great new books for christmas:

Allen Grossman, The Long Classroom and How to Do Things with Tears

and Of the Great House

Joyelle McSweeney, The Red Bird

Barbara Guest, The Location of Things, Archaics, The Open Skies

Best American 2002 (curious. Got it for $2)

Edward Dorn, Gunslinger

Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows

Aleksandar Ristovic, Devil’s Lunch

Oni Buchanan, What Animal

Eleni Sikelianos, Earliest Worlds

Matthew Zapruder, American Linden

Finished Paz, Grossman’s The Great House, Guest, Ristovic, Buchanan, and Zapruder. Got to get in some good reading before I start teaching next week.

“We live between the productive violence of representation as poetry and the destructive violence of representation as history” (Grossman, “Orpheus/Philomela”)

Grossman idea is keep history as representation and poetry as representation apart. The poetic principle must not enter the actual world. The regulative difference between image and fact. Shakespeare’s Titus shows what happens when the two different types of violence are not kept seperate.

I am not sure I fully understand Grossman’s argument yet. What about historical poetry? Poetry that tries to represent the historical? I am not sure what a fact is? Is history a fundamentally different type of representation than poetry because it’s tries to move in the direction of fact/objectivity whereas poetry moves in the direction of subjectivity? I realize the objective has problems (at least in the humanities. Analytical philosophy and the sciences still try for it), but there has to be a difference between moving toward objectivity and never reaching it and moving toward subjectivity and never reaching it.

I guess the violence of history is kept in check by the violence of artistic representation (the Aristotelian purge idea)?

This Grossman guy kicks some serious ass. I am grateful to Tony Tost for recommeding his work!

I wish I had more time to delve into these new books. Gotta start re-reading Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha for the Irish Lit. class I am teaching spring semester. Gotta also prepare a lecture to introduce existentialism to the freshman.

Dream 1: Stuck in a village in the middle of the desert. The village resembles the salt lake city shopping village. White church in the hills. The village is full of prisoners and I am one of them. I ask around and no one knows how we got here. The guards do not know how they got here. I ask if we can escape and the guard says there’s nowhere to go, it’s all desert. Except the church with the glowing white cross. “The church could be nothing or it could be a sanctuary,” the guard said. The guard told me we were all going to the lagoon and we would be swallowed by a giant blue snake. The choice was between the giant blue snake or the church with the white cross. All of us decided to stay in the village and face the blue snake.

Purchased an old imac (233, 160mb ram). I hope it works well when it arrives. Tired of laptops. Pulled in by the marketing/design of the old imacs. The macs are artistic outsiders. Form and content not seperate for the mac (for pc it’s all content, form is secondary). So very ugly mass produced pc’s. So as a writer I buy an imac because imac markets to the ousider status of my status as outsider outsider poet.

On what level does the marketing strategies of the avant guarde persuade/convince young poets into their discourse communities? What are the marketing strategies of the avant guarde? Perpetual youth. Revolution. Change.

Still stuck on language. Language is stuck to me. What percentage of my brain processes images versus actually sound language? Do I see images more or hear words more? Is it possible for anything prelinguistic to be called thinking. Images without rhetoric. Can too much non-authorial intention crash the reader/writer contract? (yes, this could be market place language. But contract does not mean cash in this case).

I think maybe i’m finally done with my 1st manuscript (although it is more like a third book manuscript). Not sure. Never sure.

Can anything prelinguistic be called thinking? Can too much non-authorial intention crash the reader/writer contract? How much is too much? How much is too little?

If everything is a text, what isn’t a text? If everything is political what isn’t political? Is the political a continium? Is a text a continium? Are some texts more political than other texts or is it just a matter of different types/modes of the political. Are some texts more textual than other texts?

Why do artists drink? Is drinking marketed to the artist? I drink;therefore I am (this, that, or the other). Is drinking the drive of the mystic. The root of the artist is the spiritual (however defined). To drink to get inside or outside?

Dreamt about the word incredible last night. For some reason the in would not realign with the credible. perhaps it has something to do with reading Mr. Paz for two hours before falling asleep. The silent motor of my little word engine that could.

cheers. Happy new year. Welcome 2003. I will soon be part of the outsider community of mac users (therefore more artistic). It’s all about color. The artist as individual.

Went to a used bookstore today. I can’t seem to stay away. Almost always overwhelmed by boring poetry section. Then again in the last few weeks I did pick up:

Nice to See You (Homage to Ted Berrigan) $2

The Dada Market (anthology) $4

Routine Distortions (Kenward Elmslie) $5

Mercurochrome (Wanda Coleman) $5

Charles Simic (Selected Poems) $6

Numen (Cole Swenson) $3

The shepherd, The Hunter (selected poems of Tomaz Salamun)

So, I guess sometimes a good find happens.

I read so much theory for my MA comps I find it hard to pick up a theory book now. Don’t know if it will pass. Didn’t read any theory for two years while finishing my MFA. Got a lot more writing done. A lot more. Maybe it’s internalized.

Someone’s blog (sorry after a while blogs run together) mentioned the good fumes from decaying langauge poetry. Are we also enjoying the good fumes of surrealism and DADA poetry? Or, (i.e. the Fence debate a while back) are we misappropriating? Decontextualizing etc.

I am teaching a class in Irish literature in the spring. I keep looking for other poets from my homeland who are not elegiac etc. Surrealist Irish poet? I do enjoy Matthew Sweeney.

A lot of Irish love Billy Collins. That’s the latest innovation. Easy going poetry and confessional poetry (Rita Ann Higgins). Salmon poetry is so stuck in the past. So much Romantic nature poetry. Irish poetry is stuck. Poetry Ireland Review only publishes the poetry of limited perception. Quiet voices. The weight of tradition. The weight of history.

Paul Muldoon may be an exception and Randoph Healey, Joyce (honey press etc.)

Implied narrative. Everything has an implied narrative. That’s what I hear. Some narratives are more implied than others. How do implied narratives within lyric poetry work differently than linear, straightforward narratives. Subjectivity?

The energy of image. Image is static. Does not move much outside the poem. How to light up images, make them move. Rhetoric, a tad. Or perhaps moving image into metaphor. Details into figuration. But slippery pile-ups of images meant to resist the intelligence sometimes “work” and sometimes seem not to “work.” “work” can’t be all relative, although much of it certainly must be. Maybe dramatic situation (implied narrative) can aid the slippery pile up images meant to resist the intelligence. Maybe narrative in a straight way is one tiny slice of reality and the backlash against it is a freeing of another reality seriously neglected.

“That’s silly. ”

“Too easy.”

That’s what I hear from many people who read Nice Hat Thanks or some Fence poets. First, who says it’s easy. Second, if it’s easy what does that have to do with whether or not it’s good. Good, not best, good is different than best. Best never exists, only good. I hear defenders of clarity ringing and they say clarity is a reaction against political doublespeak. Stephen Dunn and Billy Collins are clear cutting the language.

Language, language, language.

Who said if ain’t a pleasure it ain’t a poem?

“Images are not ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves.”

(Robert Hass).

A t.v. show called “Jim’ll Fix It.” Boys and girls wrote letters to Jim explaining their fantasies like drinking a fresh bottle of milk while riding upside down in a roller coaster. Other winners included eating forty different kinds of cheese at a factory in the midlands and singing with the whales in the Baltic Sea.

We always want to break out.