Nothing Personal, 2

A certain type of ambitious twentieth-centry poet I saw, writhing, quivering, in whose throat was lodged the heavy black snake of subjectivity.

As muffled retching goes, some of John Berryman's "Dream Songs" still seem melodious. Mostly, though, I'm stuck with horror, hatred, loathing, pity, and so on.

Even to my teenage ear, his refrain of "Delmore" thudded flat, the wake an excuse to make a crying jag a chore; not nearly as believable a gesture as Bellow's snatch from the dead man's drawers. What's it say about isolation when a melancholy traditionalist can't even pull off an elegy?

I read this interview, with its literally monologic annotation — "Delusion.... Delusion...." — and its pathetic disavowal of "Henry". (As the poet sang, "There's a man who looks like me, and talks like me, and acts like me. But that's where the similarities end.") And I see homophobia in the Greek sense of "homo".

And there cries out of me the admonishment: "Swallow! Swallow!"

Nothing Personal, 3

Around 1960, Robert Lowell and James Wright switched to publishing free verse. In hindsight, I take these "raw" breakthroughs / breakdowns as resigned admission that the sole craft their readers sincerely cared for was the craft of self-fashioning — in this case, crafting the role of sour overbearing alcoholic old bastards. And they called their act: "The Aristocrats!"

I prefer their later stuff myself, if "prefer" is the word. Consider Lowell's clunker couplet:

Or this top-of-the-line 1959 stanza from Wright:

And compare the conclusion of "Ars Poetica" in '73:

Play to your strengths, you know? The first is a naked hairy bald fat guy demonstrating solo Twister on a stage. The last is a clothed bald guy muttering to himself on a barstool. Much more dignified.

My favorite cussing's by Alice Notley, though:

It sounds better.

Now, I'm not going to pretend anything about metrical analysis, assonance, all that stuff. It's a difference in tonal quality, all right, but tonal as in "Don't you dast take that tone with me, missy." Missy Notley takes surer tones. She knows who she's talking to.

Nothing Personal, 4

No particular technique or taste associates T. S. Eliot with post-1940 conservative American poetry. Only agreement on what poetry is, practically speaking, for:

What a silly complaint. Hamlet was a loser. We're supposed to feel sorry for you because you're not Hamlet? Who the hell would want to be Hamlet?

Answer: No one. But lots of us would want to act Hamlet. What rankles is not being John Barrymore on Tour, nor being meant to be.

Eliot's legacy: a nation of Malvolios performing air soliloquies in front of their mirror.

Whenas, opening up the cast, the best of the New York School were willing to play Sir Andrew, Feste, or Sir Toby Belch.

Consider their collaborations and plagiarisms, and imagine the scandal if Jarrell had ripped off a stanza of Lowell, or Sexton of Plath. In a democratized revival of manuscript culture and sprezzatura, these were social acts.

Try to reach directly from the alienated individual to the vasty universal and you're apt to sprain something. Instead, poets could escape solipsism by embracing and populating insularity. The lyric "I" presented a formal problem whose formal resolution wasn't so much supported by coterie as it expressed the music of the thing itself — or, as Lytle Shaw put it, The Poetics of Coterie. 1

By that I don't mean to imply that all of O'Hara's or Mayer's best work, or any of Ashbery's or Guest's, is "occasional verse" in the traditional sense. Remember: This is New York. Is a momentous event upon us? Only with every little breath I take.

I've acted perfectly dreadful, true, but why should I pretend to be so upset and expect you to be interested? I've acted perfectly dreadful at lots of parties.

Sure, it's an emergency; that doesn't mean it's serious.

Because (as the poet sang) every time you chase me down the street with a knife, it's a real special occasion.

Nothing Personal, 4a

John Rastell reminds me that alienation and appropriation are near-synonyms:

Alienation, is as much to say, as to make a thing an other mans, to alter or put the possession of lande or other thinge from one man to another.

- An Exposition of Certaine Difficult and Obscure Wordes and Termes
of the Lawes of this Realme, 1579

Alice Notley reminds herself of one occasion and me of another.

(This is the middle stanza of five. I wish I felt comfortable quoting them all. They're nicely linked, and the end of the last one would strengthen the illusion that I know what I'm talking about. But the collection is readily available, and she's fucking lazy unskilled and deserves your money.)

Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man early.

Renew in the Repress

In 1998, the Village Voice published "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction" by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem and I exchanged email on the subject, and he later edited that portion of our correspondence for publication.

Recently, after noticing a couple of academic sites which pointed to the Voice cut of the essay, I asked Jonathan for permission to post our sequel online, and he's graciously agreed. (To use his exact words, "Get it shackled at the ankles to the Voice piece if you can!")

Readers of the world: Mistakes Were Made.

[On a more strictly personal note, those emails from September 1998 also mention my decision to withdraw from fiction workshops, my lack of interest in becoming a reviewer, and my desire to "produce fewer promises and more (if un-genre-publishably weirder) writing instead. Still mulling over what that might mean...."]

The cultural hegemony which brought you Like Water for Chocolate and Kolya proudly presents

From a place you've never heard of...
with people you'll never meet...
comes a story you've heard before.

A story...
of forbidden passion...
between attractive actors...
fully-clothed on a table top.

A story...
of three children...
and Grandpa...
dancing...
and laughing or crying or quietly smiling or with their incomprehensible gibberish drowned out by music...
in a land of peace...
and landscaping...
in the shadow of broken glassware...
and of the secret that will forever change their lives...
forever.

Implausible Deniability

It's an odd thing about science fiction, given its world-diverging goals, that so many of its professionals have difficulty coming to terms with the existence of usages, tastes, and experiences other than the ones they find most familiar.

Then again professional analyzers of the beautiful and profound are often mean motherfuckers, and computer programmers, slavish go-betweens swatted down by both masters, are often strikingly arrogant, and professional Christians are often bloodthirsty and intolerant, and professional iconoclasts dish clichés, so maybe it's just an odd thing about professions.

Or not odd. We want our lives to sound difficult and be made easy.

That's why most sf ages as badly as most of the mild epiphanies of mainstream fiction and poetry: they all lower the cost of supermundanity by cutting corners on the real.

Buyer's Remorse

I took an early lunch, and ate in a bit of a rush because I planned to stop at a second restaurant for a second lunch before returning to work. The hostess tallied: "Fancy roll, home roll, house wine, saba, franchini —" She looked up at me and asked "Sleeping pill?" I said "Huh? No. No, thank you." Then I paid, walked out the door, and woke. It was 2:47 AM.

Putting Art on a Pedestal

"I am the gateway to another world," (said I, looking in the mirror) "I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity," (Jeez, new pimples)
Joanna Russ, The Female Man

One reason I react against Adorno's cultural classifications and (brow at midpoint) against talk about the Great Works and (lower still) against complaints about sell-outs and so forth is they remind me so much of that fine old Virgin / Whore dichotomy. Either the artifact's holy, pure, and life-affirming or it's greedy, depraved, and besmirched. (Either it's holy, pure, and life-denying or it's depraved, besmirched, and with a heart of gold.) Such a stark choice embroils both audience and artist in frustrated contradiction and leaves out any recognition of the mere and fully human.

I can't deny it: the humans stretched and broken across those high idealized bars can take on fascinating shapes and say fascinating things. My tastes may not be that far from Adorno's; speaking strictly proportionately, I probably do like more "canonical" or "avant-garde" art than "commercial" art. But polite aesthetes, like polite male heterosexuals, should bear in mind the costs and contexts of their preferences.

Two Raves

1. Low-end reviewer: "Eyes closed, eyes open, what I see's exactly the same. Come to me, my soulmate!"
2. High-end reviewer: "Attaining disappointment took heroic effort."

Hick Jacket

Speaking of raving, Renfrew Q. Hobblewort continues his friendly takeover of the Dovetonsils Industry:

Found this on the back of a bookjacket at the local used bookstore — at first I mistook it for newsprint — unfortunately the rest of the jacket and the book were missing. I think the book title was The Very Highly Abridged Anselm Dovetonsils Reader, edited by Will Shortz — in any event this seems to have been reprinted in altered form in last week's Sunday NYT's magazine section:

"Praise for Anselm Dovetonsils' poetry:

'Truth in its Monday clothes.' - Joseph Roux

'An echo asking a shadow to dance, but the shadow is busy and gives the echo a rain check.' - Carl Sandburg

'The defecation of reality.' - Edith Sitwell

'An act.' - Pablo Neruda

'Doing, not being.' - E. E. Cummings

'Like fish.' - Osbert Sitwell "

The last one reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's famous tribute to the oeuvre of Dovetonsils pèrecy: "It feels, like, gay."

Variations on a Theme in B Flat Minor

Then there's "style", best defined as that characteristic stink we're unable to cover up or scrub away.

Writers "find their voice" by painfully working though and being forced to discard all the voices they're incapable of. Sometimes the attempt's a little tardier than usual and the embarrassment's a little more public. And so Exiles and Pomes Penyeach and the Bollingen Eugene Onegin read as juvenilia.

Translation, as a form defined by loss of voice, would seem to be in a glum spot.

Luckily for juvenilia and translations, some people find the sound of awkwardness charming in its own right: waddling, or even sinking, seems straighter than the high-flown.

Flaming while Rome fiddles

The hardest and most important lesson I learned early in online life was to walk away from a fight after I'd had my say. It's the interpersonal equivalent of "Just pay the five dollars, George."

Or maybe of "I been thrown outa sweller joints than this." No need to scrawl toilet stalls with the Troll of Sorrow so long as Mr. Waggish or Dr. Lukin remain willing to call me on BS. To use the elegant formula which first crystallized at age nineteen, "Why am I standing here arguing with this shmuck about Dhalgren when I could be back at college getting laid?"

Oh, I remain thin-skinned, quick-tempered, and gullible, and so I can still forget that lesson when anxious and exhausted, just like I might forget to use a knife and fork when I'm very hungry, except scarfing hurts less in the aftermath; yes, even if a cayenned finger wanders to my eye it pains me less. There's less collateral damage, for one thing.

As for needing to set the record straight, the record's advice is unambiguous: Forget it. If history teaches us anything, it's that historians will treat us like dirt. A subject who attempts to stage-manage his reputation is handled with special contempt by biographers. (Who then mail scathing corrections to the biography's bad reviews.) Stopping first is not an admission of defeat: it's an admission of maturity.

Nothing Personal, 5

What does it mean to talk about a poet's "voice"? Or to praise a poet's contribution or opposition to "diction"? Something about a poem in a particular context, context and poem held as a unit.... It's an intuition of vocabulary and aim, stops and breaks, approach and territory. It's what good parody flushes out of its home digs and into the open.

Whatever it is, what I wrote earlier didn't quite get it. Personality per se isn't the issue and depersonalization isn't the goal — "depersonalizing"'s just another formula for sounding like a poet. Personality is undiscardable: it's not in our hands to discard, being a matter of how a subject is perceived. Posing or not, once the camera snaps, I'm captured in a pose. With all the will in the world, ideas seep into our things.

No, Marcel Duchamp wasn't trying to escape marcelduchampitude. What he disliked was not himself, but a certain rhetoric of self-presentation which leads to a certain social relation....

For example, to comments which read like a pro-anorexia support group's. Honestly pursued self-indulgence is a rare thing; what usually goes under that name is a desperate fraud of self- and peer-flattery. Jack Spicer's and Frank O'Hara's flatness — "I am a real poet" — opens up that window lets the bad air out.

Not that window openers necessarily benefit directly. Unhealthy as their verses sound to me, Duncan, Ginsberg, Berryman, and Lowell all outlived O'Hara and Spicer. A fresh expression of acerbic alcoholism is nicer than a stale one, but that doesn't make it safe to operate heavy machinery: you're still alone in a room with a hangover. The mostly-sober Objectivists were unusual in being able to take the matter of the contemporary lyric past how someone fucked you over, how you fucked someone else over, or how fucked up you are.

Which may in itself be enough to justify associating them with Language Poetry.

Nothing Personal : Interlude

From Carve Her Name with Pride :

For Teddy Adorno and Sylvia Plath

Nothing Personal, 6

Pop music makes a horrifically misleading comparison point. English song and poetry in English have diverged too much since Campion's day, and as much as I love the lyrics of Chuck Berry, Lord Melody, Smokey Robinson, Tom Verlaine, the Coup, Mos Def, and Slug, none would fit a little magazine or chapbook.

A closer demotic relative of contemporary lyric is stand-up comedy, with its definitional dictions, its canonical revolutionaries, and its School of Quietude.... They're different forms with different capabilities, but there are examples from both who'd fit either.

Nothing Personal, 7

It's not true that only poets read poetry. It is true that keeping up with poetry comes close to a full time job, like keeping up with international cinema or popular music or genre fiction.

Job markets vary by geography — even avocational job markets. Taking similar land routes, I and Joshua Corey traced similar reading histories, and the ten years between us made comparatively little difference. Although a quirk of publishing history had led to Zukofsky being stocked by the Chillecothe, Missouri, library, and although the Black Mountain lost-leaders were widely available, there was no collected Niedecker or Spicer in my youth, and what I could find in Philadelphia and NYC led me, like Corey, to posit a post-1940 decline into the poetics of lithium. (Things are better in Brooklyn now.)

When I moved to Cambridge, Mass., I lost access to international cinema but gained access to WordsWorth Books and the Grolier. (I also gained a three-hour daily commute, and I also lost my lover and my mind.) At one of those shops, I bought Sal Salasin's first book because it reminded me of Ed Bluestone in the National Lampoon. And I bought Bloomsday by Jackson Mac Low because it was Bloomsday. And then I bought Sulfur 24 because Jackson Mac Low was in it.

I can't find that issue — must've lent it to someone and never gotten it back. The web tells me it included one of my favorite Ron Padgett poems, and something by the incomparable David Bromige. But what struck hardest was a long excerpt from Ron Silliman's Toner.

"It spoke to me."

Diction is about shared assumptions, and diction varies because what's "universal" varies. For example, pace Berryman and Hacker, not all of us have had the universal experience of sleeping with our students. So it's possible that you just need to have been a commuter to really get Silliman's poetry. But I got it, and got it bad: here was someone who'd experienced this previously unsung, astonishingly stupid side of life, and found redemptive lyric possibilities in its suspended-yet-mobile state of consciousness. A suspension so extended that it became epic: Kinda-Ron kinda-Endures.

One Age of Huts later, I walked away with the ugly mossy block of In the American Tree. I wouldn't say it changed my life — I haven't led that sort of life — but it certainly changed my buying habits.

What the anthologized pieces shared was an absence of recognizable names (other than the dedicatee, Larry Eigner) and anything resembling well-established subjective lyric stances. The range of alternatives seemed even wider than what Donald Allen had come up with. And yet Silliman didn't present himself as an outside arbiter or professional event organizer; apparently this range belonged to something he thought of as one group, his own.

The nearest thing to a new norm here was parataxis, which seemed to account for many of the precursors paid tribute in the essays at the back of the book: Ashbery (although not Allen's Ashbery), Stein, Spicer.... Still, there wasn't a "standard Language Poet poem" as far as I could see — at least not among the ones I liked. Lyn Hejinian's My Life and Bob Perelman's a.k.a. were both beautiful little books of paratactic prose paragraphs, but you couldn't mistake Hejinian's VistaVision montages of Northern California for Perelman's grim resignation to "cleverness", young Beckett pressed into an old Beckett role:

He heard the music and stood up. Played at appropriate speed, incurable motion out the window. The names are maintained to prevent the accumulations of self-esteem from crashing too harmlessly into private abysses. As if hearing were a perfection of air perpetrated among rivals, sets of teeth, synonyms, sentence structure, ruptured blood vessels. He held on, in advance. Night fell, and I lived through that, too, expressing the expressible in terms of the expressed. On good terms with neighbors, dependable, daily, there, smiles, and is currently writing and reading this sentence.

Susan Howe suffered megalomania of the archive in a way I found much more congenial than Charles Olson's: high on dust mites and the glare of wide margins, the texture of the paper, the impress of the type, a whited-out thought balloon of ^imminent _immanent insight tugging gently at our scalps....

And sure, lots of us have words appearing on our foreheads, but Hannah Weiner was the first to accurately transcribe them.

Depersonalized? No, just respecified: new specs in front of the eyes, less heavily tinted, and, in some cases, less smudged.

I moved to San Francisco in 1991, when Small Press Distribution and Small Press Traffic both had storefronts, and my binging intensified. Like Corey, I learned to browse bookshelves by publisher name. Some of Silliman's also-rans were as good as he'd implied: Rosemarie Waldrop, Robert Glück (who turned out to be a very different sort of writer indeed), Beverley Dahlen, Alice "Notely", Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Some of the included gained importance: speaking of Campion, Stephen Ratcliffe's spaces in the light said to be where one / comes from is subvocalized MDMA. Some seemed to drop out: Stephen Rodefer's Four Lectures were primo, and his Villon translation was a pungent pinch of Spiceresquerie, but then what happened?

Most were uneven. There was such a thing as The Charles Bernstein Poem, and I didn't think much of it, but just often enough he'd come up with something unexpected like "Artifice of Absorption" or "I and The", and even The Charles Bernstein Poems had their place. On the other hand, Susan Howe, always worth reading, was worth surprisingly less in dowdy paperbacks than in her ^expansive _expensive smaller press editions. Silliman's Tjanting played to his weaknesses, despite the conceptual catchiness of its form.

But they continued to be more uneven sometimes than others, and they led other places, like Jackson Mac Low had, and so the binging goes.

Here ends my happy consumer conversion narrative. "Or like stout whosits when with eagle eyes," "Nirvana made me a better student," "I can't believe it's not butter," and so on.

Happily, I wasn't a participant.

Next: I finally get back to where I was more than a year ago!