And a one, and a two, and a three...

Charlie Bernstein hath seen the light. Yea, he did look out upon his audience at the Conceptual Poetry conference at the University of Arizona, and he didst speak of quietude. No fancy semantic bludgeoning of linguistic systems, no strange arrangements of punctuation, only the nobility of the poet who stands above it all, “only poets working in solitude and individually.” That alone what can produce “poems of enduring value.”

Right. No cultural ephemera for him. Just stanza after stanza of "a poetry without limits of time or place, a poetry of universal address and true to the timeless human spirit." Doesn’t this sound overly hygienic, like it was written in Star Trek font? But maybe not. After all, I once had a teacher at a poetry conference who advised me (and the rest of the workshop) that Wal-Mart was more relevant than Orpheus, and would thus outlive him. Big Blue is pretty badass.

But that’s all in the past now for Bernstein, as "official verse culture" (previously denigrated by him) represents “the best and the finest, the most profound and significant, the richest and most rewarding, poetry of our nation." (Now you’re thinking, "Hmm.. three double adjectives, and not so much as a blush to tint his superlatives.") Finally, Bernstein asserts (and this may be where he tips his hand) that "clearly written expository prose, with a delineated argument including a beginning, middle, and end, is the only guarantor of Rational Mind."

Whereupon we wake from this dream of cybernetic Emersonian overlords, and realize that this paragraph about paragraphs is, well, see the photo at the upper right.

“You! The one over there with the aesthetic! Yeah, you!”

Flarf has claimed its first (well, the first that I’ve heard of) victim. A Psych Professor at Dickinson was allegedly denied tenure because of his advocacy of Flarf. (The whole tone of the related incident puts me in mind of a few white-knuckled academics clutching shotguns on top of a barrier of Winnebagos while zombies approach, armed with the internet. Soon they too will be corroded by the virus of infinite data, and lurch around inside disassociative but weirdly intimately stanzas.)

But seriously, I’m sure that there’s more to this story, probably on both sides. In my experience, some of the intra- and inter-departmental politics makes the machinations of the Medicis look lazy and haphazard, and even more so when it comes to the Holy Grail of tenure. Said decision being stunningly vulnerable to “subjective” factors.

I know of a science professor who won teaching awards, did fantastic research, and was loved by his students. But he put his first graduate student through the program in two years, rather than hanging onto them with a death grip so as to squeeze all the possible free labor out of them over the course of three or four years. You know, like the department chair did. So no tenure for him.

Of course, that was about labor. This is about (allegedly) what kind of bar code you have on your brain.

Bah

So this is really depressing. Meditate too much on the, uh, surplus of creative writing graduates, and the scene become reminiscent of the proliferation of serfs in Europe before the Black Death. After reading Gessen’s incisive little exegesis, it’s tempting to see money as a sort of chalk outline around one’s writing career.

(For the living circumstances of poets, that is. Fiction writers can get their hands on actual financial remuneration—as opposed to payment “in kind” or other intangible rewards—though as Gessen points out in the article, it doesn’t necessarily make the ledger sheet a whole lot better when applied against writing a novel full-time for a few years.)

I’m not totally convinced that Gessen’s economic destinies (teaching, journalism, or odd jobs) for writers is really as Calvinistic as all that.

Granted, editing and a good deal of arts administration jobs really do fall under the category of subsistence level living, but I think that underestimates the job value of English majors who can handle rhetoric, write a decent memo, communicate with a high degree of verbal facility, handle and organize a heavy paper workload, and stare for long hours without blinking at documents, thanks to reading interminable and thickly forested texts. Corporations (and the Government, I might add, which is already quite gray and only going to get more so in the next 5 years) badly need just such folks. Maybe this is because I’m a poet, with, on the face of it, a time commitment to a finished piece that is less daunting than that of a fiction writer, but I don’t think so. I regularly eat up two hours a day with writing, and would be perfectly happy to eat up at least four more. Though I think Gessen is right in that having a full-time other career prohibits (or severely limits) a lot of the business of writing (i.e. correspondence, interviews, handling readings, applying for grants, sending out manuscripts for publication) and well as the secondary activities (writing reviews, essays, blogging, commenting on other manuscripts, working for literary magazines or sites).

Having another non-writing career requires a sort of continuous hallucination in oneself as a writer. You have to believe that you are in conversation with other writers far removed (or, most often, dead). On good days, you feel subversive. On bad days, irrelevant. (Or perhaps in a form of economic/cognitive drag.) Is this worse than checking your fellow English department committee colleagues to see if they have latched rings, Medici-style, or wondering when the circular firing squad might come to town in the name of doctrinal correctness? I guess it depends on how distanced you feel from the means of production, so to speak. (My biggest fear on leaving the academy was that I would pine for the 15 story library, but then I found a spectacularly good interlibrary loan system in a major metropolitan center, and that really cushioned the blow.) This past weekend, I went to the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and while it was awesome, I’d be lying if I didn’t walk out of there feeling a little despondent.

Blowback

VQR has gotten itself chastised, it seems, by the Net, for being a bit too frank about some visceral reactions to the slush pile. Make one tiny little joke about simians, and you end up having to apologize to... well, all of you.

The offending post has been removed, but you can see snippets of it in the comments here.

I think what we have here is a cultural failure to communicate. There’s the culture of the blog, which—like email—tends to reward immediacy and the cheapest forms of entertainment (i.e. glibness, snarkyness, confessionalism, even trolling). And there’s the culture of the literary magazine, which is more predominantly (and historically) Apollonian, genteel, the organizational equivalent of a tea cozy, where decisions and tastes are mutely orchestrated from behind the scrim of an editorial silence. Readers tend to come to literary magazines deliberately, whereas on the Net, one’s browsing interest (which may or may not touch the actual content of the work consumed) wars with the instant boredom and the latent velocity of any web consumer away from the page/blog/webzine.

VQR’s dispatches from the killing ground of the slush pile are no worse than anything I’ve heard of in editorial rooms, and after reading, I dunno, upwards of 100,000 poems in the service of various lit mags, there are several filters that drop into place over the years in order to make you not totally exhausted and self-loathing.

One of these filters is an instant amnesia that takes effect seconds after you finish a poem from the slush pile. (If indeed it is worthy of slush—good poems snag you, even if you’re in auto-mode, or the rest of the submission is abysmally bad. During my editorial career, I once selected a single poem (and put it first in the next issue) from an otherwise horrendous batch by a poet who seems to have never written anything else even remotely as good—and in fact has written some of the worst lines I’ve ever come across.) This way, you don’t take terrible poems home with you in your head.

Second, there’s... well several methods of emotional release. I have heard of editors reading especially dire poems aloud in a pirate voice (especially badly executed lyrical poems), of a wall of shame of the worst metaphors received, and in one case, the aerodynamic half-life test (meaning, the duration of time between opening a submission and flinging it across the room towards the recycling bin). Is this the apex of professionalism? No. It’s stress relief, and a way of convincing yourself that not all of the careerism, mediocrity, repetition, blandness, and misplaced optimism (and the fear of the aforementioned in one’s own writing) that is a constant note in all areas of the literary life does not, in the end, carry the day. The best editors I’ve known are those who can walk away from a few hours of reading submissions in thwarted hopes of finding something singular, and still be excited about writing themselves, rather than feeling dispirited and queasily afraid that a virulent form of verbal entropy has been gnawing at their brains from the inside.

I’m sure it’s the same in other subcultures, where one constantly questions the worth and relevance (not to mention the meager monetary rewards) of one’s activity, and the recurrent sensation of struggling for a small portion of an already small audience. Combine that with the headiness of the net (say, for instance, with Diagram’s claim of 160,000 monthly hits), and it’s not always pretty. But not out of the ordinary.

There needs to be an anonymous relationship with the submitter, for two reasons. First, because if you don’t have one, you enter into correspondences like this. And clearly someone’s professional, emotional, creative, and possibly sexual needs will not be met. Second, because the reader of literary magazines are going to encounter these poems anonymously, so the best way to model the suitability of the poem for an issue is to respond dispassionately (if not astringently) as an initial acid test. Despite common, underlying assumptions to the contrary, no one is forced to read poetry. Poetry has to make the case for itself, and to total strangers. This is what I try to remember when I sometimes receive puzzling comments on my 350-odd rejections. The editor or reader (who most likely is getting little or no financial recompense) may have just rejected hundreds of poems, and the last horrible one was about Crete, which my poems also references.

Perhaps it wasn’t the most professional thing for VQR to post what should stay secret inter-office cultural communiqués, but then again, how often do you encounter “professional” and “blog” in the same sentence? As a form, it tends to be, well, informal. The only “safe” form of institutional writing is a press release, and you’re not going to get a readership for your blog if all you post is essentially advertising (especially when, with the proliferation of blogs, one’s allergy to official communications and disguised solicitations only grows). In my experience, VQR’s flavor of snark is not a tremendous departure (if at all) from a great deal of editorial culture (and I’m not speaking here for Ploughshares, merely as a private consumer).

Shotgun

Frank Bidart thinks lyric poets (deployers of “verbal filigree”) are drunk.

Walt Whitman was a cult leader, sort of. He kissed Oscar Wilde, but also received lascivious attentions of another kind.

You, yes you, are awash with diatoms.

Why do less and less people give a damn about literature? Maybe because the critics have demanded that any cultural artifact be evaluated politically rather than aesthetically.

Scholarship means never having to admit that an aardvark isn’t a medium-sized inflatable banana.

Sometimes, I write my name on my underpants.

Bees Do It

More stuff on the uh... quantum nature of the written word. (Previously discussed here and here). That grand grey majesty, Wallace Stegner, stands accused of plagiarizing Mary Hallock Foote, an early 20th century a magazine writer and illustrator. Stegner taught her stories while at Stanford and included her in anthologies, before deciding that page-long passages of her unpublished memoir were just too irresistible. So he jacked them for Angle of Repose.

It seems like we’ve reached a critical mass where there should be some micro-department of Plagiarism Studies. And there are noises in that directions, some serious, some less so. I mean, it’s got everything! Music, martial arts, you name it. Helen Keller was terrified of it. That’s why she wrote an autobiography. (Good news for those of us who are content producers, though: the courts have ruled that you cannot plagiarize yourself. Mostly.)

In grad school, I took a great course by Helen Sword on “Hauntology” (an expansive metaphor that encompasses literal haunting within texts, the author haunting linked texts of his/hers, and books haunted by other authors.) Check out her book, Ghostwriting Modernism, here. Of course with all of its ambiguities, plagiarism is a form of haunting (obscured intentions, chronological uncertainty, doubtful presences, etc.)

First word, most expensive word

Missed this the first time around: Ian Daly’s great piece on Aram Saroyan’s deployment of what he termed “The Most Expensive Word in History,” a poem that reads, in its entirety, thus:


                                                  lighght


Saroyan published it in the Chicago Review in 1966 and a year later, George Plimpton put in The American Literary Anthology, which entitled the poem to a $750 check from the NEA. Also outrage from U.S. Representative William Scherle and, as always, the redoubtable Jesse Helms. The NEA (full history here) had to send the deputy chairperson before Congress to explain the poem. I imagine he did a better job than Plimpton, who answered one Congressman by saying, “You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway.” I love you, George, but have ya heard of audience there, pal?

[Lighght called to mind Kenneth Patchen’s more elaborate (but not by much) “The Murder Of Two Men By A Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves,” which consists of the word “Wait” randomly repeated 14 times, followed by a “NOW.” There is a sound recording with Patchen backed by the Chamber Jazz Sextet (Patchen also got to read with Mingus and had a play scored by John Cage, that lucky devil).]

All of this makes me very happy. That one word--and not even an obscene one--could make a lot of money and a lot of controversy seems a testament to the fact that poetry (even in miniature amounts) invokes some kind of quantum syntax.

Draw, ya varmint!

I was reading Science and Steepleflower by Forrest Gander yesterday (who, by the way, has a podcast), and was enjoying the extravagance of the diction immensely. In fact, I can’t remember the last book of poetry I’ve read that gave me such pleasure in confoundatory language. This led me to an unprovable thought about the avant-garde: the more specific the language becomes, the more radical the poem becomes. To whit:

agaric
agnostoid
anguilliform
arborescing
aseptic
breccia
canthi
cartouche
cereus
chert
clades
consubstantial
dehiscing
enharmonic
ferruginous
fillip
flexural
galena
glabella
grum
isomorphic
lapilli
lithofacies
lour
matutinal
Merthiolate
Ordovician
orthogonal
penetralia
phreatomagnetic
plagioclase
polyhedrons
pygidium
quintral
raptus
rutilant
scoriaceous
selvage
Silurian
spiracles
spirea
sthenic
stoup
synoptic
tephra
topos
ungulate
volant

I am sure this particular strain of performativity was etched in carbonite in my medulla oblongata when I watched that scene from Say Anything where Lloyd flips through Diane’s dictionary and notices that she had highlighted multiple words on every page), but it actually started much much earlier, when I read a series that gave me these to chew on:

adjure
affrays
ambit
anadem
anele
apothegm
arete
aumbrie
auto-da-fe
badinage
bayamo
bedizened
caducity
chancrous
charlock
chatoyant
chlamys
chrism
clinquant
condign
contumely
coquelicot
corybantic
deflagration
demnify
destrier
desuetude
devoir
donjon
eidolon
epitonic
etiolate
febrifuge
febrile
feoffment
formication
fuligin
fulvous
gelid
hebetude
imbricated
impercipient
inanition
ineleuctable
innominate
irenic
jacinth
jannissary
jerrid
lacustrine
littoral
lorn
macerate
malison
mephitic
oriflamme
orisons
paresis
parethesia
percipience
plinth
propiquinity
quirt
refulgent
relict
roborant
sackbut
sapid
sark
scend
sedulously
sequacious
spandrels
spavined
spilth
steerhorn
stertorius
stillatory
suasion
surquedry
tabidly
tarn
telic
tenebrous
thetic
theurgy
thurible
travertine
treacher
unassoiled
vambrace
virga
viscid
vitiated
vizards
vlei

Crazy, right? I honestly can’t think of another author who has so thoroughly slapped around my sense of linguistic self-possession. It’s an author whom some people think that J.K. Rowling has stolen from, yet also one who views Faulkner, James, and Conrad as major influences (and let me tell you how unlikely I thought those four would ever end up in a sentence together). Why, Stephen R. Donaldson, of course. The author of the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, starring the titular leper anti-hero in a fantastical land. I’ve read other fantasy series, but not one that so systematically assaulted common diction. (Reading the series is arduous for other reasons, mostly because the protagonists suffer so intensely for hundreds of pages at a time with relentlessly insistent descriptions of their anguish. Yet this results in plots that deliver an immense amount of catharsis, which seems to take the reader by surprise somehow.)

I don’t know what this says about genre and literariness exactly, though really it does make me intensely curious as to what his process is--how many of you have actually heard someone say any of the preceding words out loud?--and, to a lesser extent, just what sort of editor they gave him. (My undergrad fiction professor used to say that every word you choose over another loses you a reader, and Donaldson clearly has nerves of steel in that regard.) So I’ve been wondering if there are other authors out there working in the margins or in marginalized genres (in the eyes of the literary world) who seem to have an obscure but unmistakable linguistic agenda.

Titular

Don’t you sometimes wish you could just write titles? Like being one of those people who get to coin color names or company names. Now, in conjunction with the Bulwer-Lytton Award for the worst fiction, we also have The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. Here’s the shortlist:

I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
How to Write a How to Write Book
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
Cheese Problems Solved
If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs
People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

My personal favorite is Cheese Problems Solved. It just suggests an urgency that you normally don’t find around enzymes and whey. Trying to come up with poem titles usually seems like the last thing one does, like assigning names in fiction (for important but frustrating characters previously referred to in muttered undertones as “Sir Badinage,” or “Bastard #5”). You’d think with the potential abundance of... er... virtual rewards of the internet that there would be more fringe-y contests.

“It’s fully operational...”

As long as we’re in lingering in professional dystopia, it seems appropriate to consider once again that yearly pilgrimage to AWP, wherein we shall tender our scrip. When you think about it, the world of poetry could arguably be compared to one big company store. All profit, effort, and professional reciprocity sort of stay within the compound, as it were. It’s a profoundly closed system.

[This might not seem so surprising when viewed in the light of a line from David Bosworth’s “The Cult of the Adolescent”: “Imagine the consequences for a readership bequeathed a generation of authors who believe that ‘language only refers to itself...’”]

Of course, unlike past corporate megaliths, aside from a tiny trickle, our product doesn’t actually flow into the outside world. Oh, and we don’t get machine-gunned in the dead of night. So that’s a plus.

[In case there’s any doubt, this is not meant to be a serious metaphor, as even teaching 5/5 at East Jesus State College--while potentially wildly incompatible with a happy and carefree writing life and the performance of extracurricular higher cognitive functions--is clearly not on par with Third World suffering and Banana Republic atrocities.]

The latest dustup about the legitimacy/relevance/absurdity of AWP makes for amusing reading. Does anyone really believe that the conference is the Death Star of creative writing? Of course, there seems to be (understandably) a lot of bad feeling around it due to recent events. [Upon hearing that the conference was sold out, I entertained myself by trying to follow the metaphor through to the end. It’s not like there are only 5,000 poetry widgets, or widget booths. The notion of an author’s content “running out” is kind of a neat idea.]

I find myself neither a partisan nor an advocate, but as one who goes and finds writers behaving exactly like other conventioneers (though without the red fezzes or tiny cars): getting drunk, hooking up, schmoozing out of habit, reflex, or sheer performativity, but mostly talking shop. Despite the sentiment above, an excuse to talk shop for three solid days without the overt sense of violating social norms of conversation is pretty cool, even if by the end I begin to wish I was an accountant.

[Though the ability of the creative writing subculture to comment on itself is perhaps unsurpassed by other subcultures, unless you make the leap to cults (who tend to somewhat uncritical.) I suppose this is a form of honesty.]

And there’s all sorts of accidental bonuses, such the time I went to see one of my favorite authors on a panel. As another panelist was holding forth, said author slowly lowered her head until she was face down on the table. I couldn’t tell if it was despair, exhaustion, or reverie, but I enjoyed the gesture nonetheless.

Good Gray Prose

Y’ever wake up some days and feel absolutely indicted? Christina Nehring wants you to know that you are what’s wrong with the American essay, specifically the Best American Essay series. You with your venti latte and your second-hand car and your precocious college years. Simply put, the contemporary American essay has made a virtue of being boring. Anecdote recollected under sedation. She makes the case that the cautious, ruminative voice that passes for literary meditation is a sensibility that is all-too safely circumscribed, middle-aged, and middle-class. That is to say, pathologically averse to transgression. (In fairness, I should point out that Nehring also thinks that readers are part of the problem, or represent a problem in themselves, though others disagree.) While there are plenty of essays that are clearly made by and consumed by someone who devoutly wishes to be part of the leisure class (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), there are other pieces out there I could name from Best American Essays which are a little less languid. And while I think we should all dial down the polite recollection in personal essays, saying the American essay is moribund because some of its practitioners skew toward the anesthetized, is like saying Maya Angelou cancels out C.D. Wright.

The Triggering Town

What follows great tragedy? Policy of course. Virginia Tech has comes up with a litmus test for disturbing writing:

Are the characters’ thoughts as well as actions violent or threatening?

Do characters think about or question their violent actions?

If one set of characters demonstrates no self-awareness or moral consciousness, are other characters aware of or disturbed by what has taken place?

In other words, does the text reveal the presence of a literary sensibility mediating and making judgments about the characters’ thoughts and actions, or does it suggest unmediated venting of rage and anger?

What this really speaks to is point of view: the author’s psychic distance from his or her speaker, and how that distance is betrayed or communicated. Obviously, the negotiation of this contract is much more explicit in fiction than in poetry (if for no other reason than the sheer amplitude of text available--the longer you go on, the more chances you have to reveal authorial attitude toward the weaknesses and biases displayed in the characters). In one sense, you could look on every story as a trial, wherein the characters are cross-examined for their likeability, moral fiber, and entertainment value. (Where’s Kafka when you really need him?) Most modern fiction has to take the moral equivalent of aesthetic stands (as opposed to post-modern fiction, where the reverse occurs). Poetry is dodgier. (In fact, how often does one hear of poetry triggering the same kind of scrutiny and alarm?) Perhaps because it is often much less representational and there is a lack of surprise when it comes to a poetic narrator serving as a stand-in for the author (coupled with a much weaker imperative to conclude whether or not the author is trying to advance a view about or desired outcome in the world). Alternately, there is less expectation in poetry that cathartic expression of transgressive sentiments will lead to transgressive acts (the poem being in itself being commonly thought of as a speaking “act” rather than blueprint to be acted out, which is a fancy way of saying many people think fiction writers make more meticulous and motivated planners than poets). Is there really a divide in poetry and fiction when it comes to these issues, or do such “triggering” texts possess the same inherent quality?

IQ’s Icky Thump

Much like infertility rates and the proliferation of electronic social utilities, IQ seems to be rising every day: 3 points per decade. This only points out that the space of an administered IQ test is just as much a text as any other bound artifact. (For random fun, take the IQ test here for prospective NFL draft picks.) James Flynn, a New Zealand scientist, has painstakingly written up the way IQ tests are yet another brute meme unknowingly snarled in a web of cultural matrices. Or, as he puts it: “If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents.” Yup, I loves me a good concrete referent. Often’s the time, I wished I had one close at hand to while the night hours away.

Malcom Gladwell cites the following as an example of just how fusty old Western cartesianists blunder on in search of the data most pleasing to their ears:

“The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way.”

It strikes me how much a poem is an experiment in taxonomy. The way a poem eats an object, subsuming it into a lyric (or pickling it in irony) seems quite similar to the pairings of the Kpelle. What is wisteria for? Miscarriages. Dusk is for alcohol, and ammonia for fever dreams. The nouns that you bring together in a poem reveal your sense of “rightness,” and how psychic necessity solves the world in a synaptic flash.

Blood in the water

Yes, Mailer is dead. I’d honestly like to know if there’s anyone out there who’s read it all. (I haven’t. I read The Armies of Night, The Executioner’s Song, Cannibals and Christians, and what I could stand of Ancient Evenings.) Frankly, there was a lot of it, and if his oeuvre ever happened to topple over and trap you beneath it, you would be trapped there a long time. My dad once observed that you could tell you were reading a book by someone who had been married six times and was carrying a lot of alimony, because why would you use one sentence when you could use five? (Ancient Evenings was a particular offender in this regard. I appreciate Egyptian symbology as much as the next person, but the man wrote the textual equivalent of more jump cuts than MTV uses. Tom Robbins has a species of the same affliction. Rather than come up with a vivd metaphor and weight its effects, and modulate the intensity of your prose, both Robbins and Mailer will/would bully you with seven metaphors.) Which is not to say that Mailer (or Robbins) is without talent. I still think Armies of Night is a great book, and lord knows Creative Nonfiction would not be the same without his star in the firmament. But the one thing that I took away from the essays in Cannibals and Christians (other than the staggering amount of self-indulgence it takes to interview oneself) is that he was a man who was deeply, profoundly worried about whether or not other writers were better/more famous/got laid more than him. And unlike the rest of us who try to strangle such serpents in their crib, Mailer felt free to slag his contemporaries whenever possible and in whatever venue, on what I must assume is the theory that anyone who read them was someone who wasn’t reading him. I found this zero-sum outlook quite unattractive. I’m sure that it made him legions of enemies, and for someone who made a career out of dismissing the importance of others (like Bukowski, he seemed always ready to point out how difficult it was for him to write and why no one else should attempt it), I can’t say I’m surprised that everyone has their spray-can out, ready to deface the memorial he consciously built for himself. I never read someone else who so casually and transparently tried to hamstring his closest competitors. And, as always, the threat of physical violence (ala William Buckley’s clenched jaw mutterings) was never far away. This is not to say that Mailer deserves venomous eulogies, just that they haven’t materialized out of the blue. My complaint is that the obits that I have read really haven’t talked about him as an innovator of creative non-fiction, but instead focused on his PR machine.

Keep your eye on the red queen...

Literary theory and psychology have a hot new hybrid: Impostor Studies. It seems perfectly natural to me that feelings of academic fraud should be formalized, as a great many of the people I know in academia seem to suffer from it. It’s the mental equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome for the knowledge worker. Or perhaps antibodies against overweening cognitive arrogance, the kind of prompted Larry Summers--when he was merely the chief economist of the World Bank and not the President of Harvard--to say, “I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.” (This was his explanation of why the U.S. should export toxic wastes to Third World countries.) On the other end of the spectrum, you have Buster Keaton flirting with this impulse when he claimed he really didn’t feel qualified to comment on his own work. In one sense, post-modernism is Imposter Theory writ large. If one entertains primal doubts about the legitimacy of one’s own speakerhood, then it is a natural (and arguably ethical act) to export it to all speakers, if for nothing else than to keep everyone honest. Mind you, this might be a fundamentally more compelling argument if power did not accrue to the one performing the destabilizing critique.

Papers, Please

Just finished the title poem from Noelle Kocot’s exhilarating Poem for the End of the Time, which definitely breaks a lot of rules. As exhortation goes, it’s up there. Direct address targets NYC, America, various religious personages, God, etc, and the solid blocks of anaphora can break your kneecaps. Yet excesses aside, it’s great to read something that’s unabashedly transgressive, not titillating and edgy in an oblique, noodly sort of way (both in terms of sly content and form), but straight up. On the minimalist end, it seems like Cavafy with his brazen directness and simplicity is flanked by Alan Dugan’s cranky exhibitionism. On the high end, Anne Carson’s torqued annotations are matched with C.D. Wright’s cascade of particulate nouns. Kocot seems to raise the ceiling a little higher (at least in terms of rule-breaking). I’m aware that one’s awareness of what constitutes transgression against poetic practice is totally conditioned by resentment of one’s own limitations (and habits, which may or may not include the consumption of 5 books of poetry a week and 5 bottles of wine), but it’s great to encounter a poem has an air of the gauntlet. Anyone out there have their favorite scoundrels, verse-wise?

Thinking It Through

Back in grad school, my fabulous instructor’s stipend meant I got to live in a basement room right on the campus for $200.00, utilities included. Of course, I kept the windows closed for two years, due to the fact that sizable wolf spiders would congregate on the inside of the screens if they were open. The shower had rough rock walls and the drain was a hole in the concrete floor. The steps down to my room were very steep (being right underneath another set of stairs), and one day, when it had been raining outside, I leaned back in my customary way as I went down, and my feet went out from underneath me. I remember my head hitting the back of the stairs and I wound up sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, as the cleaning lady stared at me curiously. She asked if I was alright, I said something garbled, and then I apparently passed out, and fell back, hitting my head again on the concrete floor, and had a small seizure. Later there was an ambulance and x-rays and an EEG, and nothing appeared to be amiss, but my physician did pause at one point, and say something sympathetic (but not comforting) about the ramifications of head injuries for “knowledge workers” like ourselves. This I found to be the scariest part of the whole incident, though there appear to have been no after-effects nor any damage. (I couldn’t multiply more than two digit numbers in my head before, and I still can’t.) So heart attacks don’t nearly frighten me as much as strokes and the like.

So I have to say that I wasn’t sure how to react to Diane Ackerman’s introduction to her husband Paul West’s piece about suffering brain damage and the resultant aphasia.

The first section, “Fleet,” has some of the recursive daffiness of poetry (“One way of trying extra hard is to imagine one dimension of the universe coated in either black velvet or a blue that no one has reported outside the province of Baffinland”), and one senses a lot of syntactical navigation through neural back alleys throughout (“It was a matter of looking always on the bright side, until you were looking no longer; in this way, unless you were singularly unfortunate, you always had something to admire.”). Cerebral trauma has been on my mind recently, having just watched Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s, The Lookout, a modest thriller about a brain-damaged ex-hockey star and a bank heist, and I am still haunted by Floyd Skloot’s essay. “Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain” (published in Best American Essays 2000), and its painstaking reproduction of the mental gymnastics involved in just cooking something.

Apparently, there is a Crippled Poetics, as well as debate about whether “autism poetry” is being co-opted by non-autistic poets. Of course, one of the possible side effects of identifying the functionality of the mechanisms of language with poetic/personal identity is the disabling of critique, though in West’s case, any linguistic functionality itself is a vindication of the brain and its plasticity. Yet, as always, when it comes to the page, all bets are off. As a medium, printed matter has its own laws of physics, and while there are wormholes between form and content, signifier and signified, ultimately a text only has recourse to its own First Principles.

Taking it back

I once attended a workshop with the fabulous Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of Body Betrayer and The Book of Accident, both of which dominate that particular shelf in my bookcase, where she off-handedly referred to Kenneth Patchen as an archetypal adolescent literary love. Much like Thomas Wolfe, Patchen was another angry young lyricist who had to tell things the way they really were, and risk caricature, bombast, and imagery for its own sake. So at 19, I adored them both, even if Wolfe’s character portraits did tend to acquire the exaggerated demeanor of an Al Hirshfeld sketch, and Patchen’s enraged direct addresses to the reader made me uncomfortable. But they were in a way, a playbill for how a young writer could work on style and imagery and dialogue without selling out, as it were, to The Machine, The Combine, The Authority, or what-have-you, since both of them would rather spit in your eye than admit some philosophical ambiguity or ambivalence in moral literature. They would have hated each immediately, I think. (Wolfe was a Romantic and Patchen was angry but hip. Funnily enough, though, they sometimes fell prey to poor impulse control, textually: Wolfe could shamelessly descend straight into de-facto poetry, as in the pivotal graveyard scene in Look Homeward Angel, much as Patchen does in The Journal of Albion Moonlight.) I suppose we all have our adolescent standard bearers that we avoid revisiting later on in order to protect our experiences of them, and the energy and the authority that they lent to us then, in spite of the flaws that would most likely be quite in evidence now. Still, in order to amuse myself, I often think of the social equivalent of literary steel cage matches (ala Philip Levine’s poem about Hart Crane meeting Lorca). Is this the academic version of celebrity gossip? There are worse vices.

Snip

Another one of the great divides that seems to come between poets and fiction writers is the issue of revision, which sometimes amounts to a dirty secret for poets. As my fiction professor used to say, everything held up Dylan Thomas as the spontaneous child of Pan, out of whom poetry just flowed. Yet when he died, they found over 200 drafts of “Fern Hill.” Still, it's rare to have a poet's editor or literary executor slice a page or a stanza out of an unpublished long poem (of which--let's face it--there must be many) and publishes it as a stand-alone piece, while Ralph Ellison and Ernest Hemingway have suffered the analogous effect. Similarly, no poet generates the same amount of controversy over whether or not their editor was largely responsible for their distinctive style (ala Raymond Carver’s minimalist “dirty realism”, or for the shape--or the manageability generated by 60,000 or 250,000 less words--of their novels (ala Thomas Wolfe). When I was editing Indiana Review, we would once in a great while ask for revisions of submitted poems (if the edits were distinct and severable, such as transposing or cutting stanzas or sentences), but almost never asking for newly generated content to fix old content. Generally, I’m in the habit of revising 50% to 85% of any given poem (aside from abandoned first drafts, of course), though this practice has often been met with bewilderment and astonishment from other poets, as if I had confessed to using a Ouija Board to guide my revisions. I’ve been asked twice for revisions of submitted poems (both times to the greater good of the poem), but I wonder how many poets get asked for revision in general, or if there are any great war stories out there. Anyone have any thoughts?

Unlawful Casual Knowledge

There is no guilt like the professional guilt of the writer who makes an incisive remark on a text that remains unopened by said writer, as Bayard deconstructs. He even has a taxonomy:

“livres inconnus” (books one is unfamiliar with)
“livres parcourus” (books glanced at)
“livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books one has heard discussed)
“les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books one has read but forgotten)

All in all, this covers a huge swath of my cranial space. They’re kind of like evil imaginary friends, the tomes whom you have pretended to have digested. They whisper to you at parties, and track mud all over the floor of your gestalt, saying, “That remark would have been so much funnier if you actually read about the seizure in Chapter 12” and “Of course, I made fun of the motif you said I revered in the epilogue to Crepuscular Tuscany, but you wouldn’t know that, would you?” So what should be as important and primal to a writer as the cave paintings in Lascaux are to an artist end up being mere graffiti: “Call Hester for a brazenly good time.”

Here are my heavies:

Moby Dick
War and Peace
Ulysses
Underworld
The Magic Mountain
Remembrance of Things Past
Gravity’s Rainbow (started 4 times)
Madame Bovary
Brothers Karamazov
Anna Karenina
Native Son
Their Eyes were Watching God
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
As I Lay Dying
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Hopscotch
The Tin Drum
The Sorrows of Youth Werther
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dead Souls
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Brave New World
The Rainbow
The Man in the High Castle
A Farewell to Arms
Tropic of Cancer
Bonfire of the Vanities
Catch 22

And let’s be honest. Wikipedia is not making things any easier. There goes 60% of the conversation of literature majors, whom I notice tend to specialize in off-hand remarks. I suppose that the printing press caused all sorts of resentment also (“I paid an extravagant sum of money for this book and your damned pamphlet cost you a shilling!”). Blogging too, of course. I have this mental image of a publisher’s nightmare, where they look up from compositing type and fearfully ask the blogger lurking in the shadows what his name is. From the darkness comes the sepulchral reply, “OMG! Legion! For we are many.”