Twofer

So Elisa totally got to this first, and how could she not? It’s might fine literary gossip. Everyone loves to see those creative types behaving badly.

[Small interpolation: I had to read an epithalamion by Georges Perec in a wedding recently, and was so fatigued by all the French words that I inadvertently substituted “pointy-headed philosophers” for “pointy-hatted philosophers,” so I guess I’m no better than anyone else in this regard.]

But I’m totally going to hitch my wagon to this gravy train (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor), since I drafted this before Ms. Gabbert’s excellent post. As previously linked by her, on Exoskeleton, Johannes Göransson has posted a debriefing on what he learned at Iowa (via Lime Tree). It’s kind of funny and kind of depressing at the same time:

Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet"--as I am a... This means that they--like Jorie--used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning--as opposed to Marvin Bell's old-guard poetics of authenticity. [...] I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex; I said "but I like pornos."

[This reminded me of my introduction to grad school. The very first week I was there, I got a writing conference scholarship, which involved a reading. After I gave my reading, one of the third years in my program (whom I had never met before) came up to me and said, “Don’t you think it’s a little weird for you to be writing about a teenage girl?” A rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one.]

In my view, Göransson is extraordinarily open and even-handed in his “bullet points.” He names names and isn’t coy at all about the class politics--the least favorite and most uncomfortable subject even for most of the “revolutionaries” among us. But in the end, the conclusion he comes to is that whether or not he respected, liked, or despised his colleagues, people there thought about poetry all the time, and it was clear that they felt it was the most important thing. I would say that my graduate school experience was no less full of camps, palace coups, thefts, intrigues, betrayals, ideological attacks, and absurdities, but that this pervasive “pathological excitement” about verse made it all worth it.

I think writers would be comforted by the thought of a world in which poetry is a matter of dire public concern, and the question of whether or not Milton could have written Shakespeare’s plays is as scandalous as Lindsay Lohan’s choice of companions.
....

And now… because I’m not a total dittohead... some Whitman.

I confess that I’ve always had a hard time with his bellowing to the cheap seats, making sure that everybody knew who he was and that he was everybody. To quote Lynn Emanuel’s “Walt, I Salute You!”:

...inside, like you, I am in my hydroelectric mode.
The infinite and abstract current of my description
launches itself at the weakling grass. Walt, everything I see I am!

...Walt! You have me by the throat!
Everywhere I turn you rise up insurmountable and near.

He generally kind of makes me feel like a sock puppet, with his oratory and his wish to deposit many many podlings inside of us. I don’t think there’s ever been a more presumptuous use of the plural “I” in literature. Sure, his long lines and his train engine stamina for stanzas was and is impressive, and my undergrad poetry professor once spent half an hour demonstrating a brilliant metrical inversion in one of his lines, but I tend to bristle around poets who are anxious about community and solve this by appropriating every sentiment (or scrap of power) in sight.

That being said, I must admit that Richard Tayson’s piece in The Virginia Quarterly Review made me appreciate the kind of, er, speakerhood problems he was facing as a gay poet (NPR podcast here ).

I guess it never occurred to me to think of Whitman’s communal invocation/necromancy as a sort of cousin of camp. Instead of taking gender and distorting it by magnifying its traits, one could argue that Whitman’s mystical megaphone stole public speech in much the same manner. As Tayson points out, he did censor himself by muting less coy references to his love for men, but even the flourishes that remain can be viewed as a clever example of seizing the means of production, as it were, in order to insert one’s own emendations. And you’d have to go all the way in order to provide enough cover for one’s, uh, lyrical proclivities. Even constructing a towering messianic consciousness in verse wasn’t enough to protect him from the criticism, as Tayson points out:

His work was called “a mass of stupid filth” (New York Criterion, November 10, 1855); “indecent” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Atlantic Monthly, September 1890); “uncouth,” “grotesque,” and “reckless” (Charles A. Dana, Tribune 1894); “intolerable” and “disgusting” (critic Charles Eliot Norton, 1913); and “trashy, profane, and obscene” (J. P. Lesley, a geologist who apparently liked poetry). “It’s as if the beasts spoke,” Thoreau famously quipped. Emily Dickinson, also famously, indicated that though she’d never read his book and of course had never met him, she “was told he was disgraceful,” a phrase that would resonate with Willa Cather’s stance that Whitman was a “dirty old man.” Booksellers withdrew Whitman’s vanity-published 1855 Leaves from their stocks, and libraries, most famously Harvard, kept the book under lock and key, even unto Whitman’s death.

It always pleases me to find an extra facet of subversion hidden here and there in poems and writers.

A primer on K

So we have a new overlord. Who is outsider-y. (August Kleinzahler sneering at the New York literary establishment across the river springs to mind.)

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Kay Ryan, who apparently often finds loved ones pinned under cars, and who is so refined, disciplined, and original that she must inevitably be self-taught. (If I listen hard, I can hear thousands of creative writing teachers wincing together, knowing that their job just got a lot harder.)

John Gallaher has a fairly even-handed summary of the argument for and against here. I confess that I thought she was a Victorian writer before today (never having read her and barely having registered the changing of the guard). Clearly, I am less than a reliable source.

How do we feel about accessibility and apparent modesty? As to her feelings about the great textual watering hole of AWP... well, Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.

By the way, I specifically used the overlord metaphor in the first sentence so I could gratuitously throw in a link to the Zombie Threat Level. Just a little lagniappe for ya.

Fie Again

With all of last Thursday’s furor about whether or not “grad student” is a professionally dismissive term, and whether one literary camp gets to beat up the another camp (about which I will only say that taxonomy tends to serve the critic rather than the text under consideration), perhaps it is instructive to think about accountability. Neal Stephenson has a nimble breakdown of same in this Slashdot interview (scroll down to the second question), where he makes a few salient points:

The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.

Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example. And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."

Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters, for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases there is a kind of accountability at work.

A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics.

There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics, musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are performed by symphony orchestras, for example.

Later on, he says lots of great stuff, including a comment that Beowulf was “created at the behest of lots and lots of intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn.”

[Side note: Wikipedia says Frisians are among the blondest people in the world. Notable Frisians: Mata Hari, Lenny Dykstra, and Jane Fonda.]

Stephenson also recounts an illustrative little anecdote where he realizes that the reason why someone at a literary festival had not heard of him was because he was famous. (“Famous” is clearly the wrong word to apply to most literary writers. William Gibson’s “magnificently obscure” [originally used to describe a desirous anonymity on the internet] seems more appropriate.) He uses this as a jumping-off point for a split between Dante writers (literary writers attached to institutions) and Beowulf writers (writers who earn a living solely by sales of their books, usually novels), and the critical firewall that has sprung up between them for the reasons described above.

This split was very quickly articulated for me in my very first undergrad lit class, where someone started off the first session by making fun of Frank Herbert’s Dune. To which I say “Fie upon them.” Full stop.

Young Guns

You know how there’s that scene where Flan talks about Matisse and artistic process in Six Degrees of Separation? (Has there ever been a sillier main character name in an ostensibly serious movie? For literature, I think Neal Stephenson has it locked up with Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash, followed by slew of Thomas Pynchon characters). The one where he talks about how kids could be artistic geniuses with paint, as long as someone knew when to take the painting away from them? (Clearly seen by the makers of My Kid could Paint That.) Well, that sprung to mind when I stumbled across John Gallaher’s post of an original poem (with assist) by his first-grade daughter:


        The Snow Falls
        by Natalie Gallaher


         The cars are talking about snow
         in the other room.

         We all come down to this moment
         with snow.

         The snow is talking too.

         I wish for snow
         inside my head.

         The snow looks like shining glazing
         of glass.

         The trees have no leaves
         all afternoon.

         I am cold.

         The winters are wise
         in the future.

I love the first, second, and last stanza especially. Sometimes style isn’t so much content as knowing where to stop. I wonder if this counts as a treatment? Or if the way a child sees the world is a treatment, so to speak, of reality. (Insert interpolation previously discussed here.) Certain things are left out, elided, transposed, or juxtaposed, and therefore stylized enough so as to be unrecognizable. While we’re on the subject, check out Wave Books’s erasures machine. Up with strangely arranged minimalism!

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?