Griftopia 2

1. Imagine a poetry reading in a house that is being robbed.

2. Imagine a poetry reading in which the reader, the audience, and the people in the house are all being robbed and the reading continues.

3. Imagine this reading a number of times.

4. Imagine the reading beginning to take on the content of these surroundings.

5. Imagine the reading beginning to take on the form of these surroundings.

6. Imagine the reading beginning to move like a house.

7. Imagine that there is an interval in which the robber is going out to rob the house, and his own house is left empty.

8. Imagine poetry enters this house.

9. What, at this point, is a poem?

Griftopia

Best holiday reading so far: Matt Taibbi's Griftopia, a seething account of the financial industry and the "long con that is breaking America."



Taibbi, in addition to explaining the gritty details of credit default swaps and commodity futures speculation, does things like title his chapter on Alan Greenspan "The Biggest Asshole in the Universe," coming up with simple, angry, broadly engaging frames for how our economic system works. The lesson of Taibbi's frames is that as complex as these cons were to pull off, the story of them is in fact very simple: the American financial elite, with the help of government de- and re-regulators, has spent the last 25 years either a) exploiting everyday Americans at a high-stakes casino tilted ridiculously in their favor, or b) flat-out robbing us. The only hope left for our nation's economy, now, (with an eviscerated production and public sector) seems to be that these foxes and bullies will outfox and outbully the financial elite of other nations, and that some of that resultant wealth will trickle down to us.

If this sounds cynical, it's because it is. The American economy has built itself more and more entirely on what Taibbi describes as a kind of elaborate shell-game: with things going to shit long-term, who in the short-term can vacuum up what wealth is left? It's important to note, as Taibbi does, that this creates two real political parties: the Grifter class, and...everyone else. What's brilliant about the Tea Party, from the standpoint of this Grifter class, is that it diverts the potential consciousness of the non-grifters (us), turning substantive grievances against the economic elite (them) into moral grievances against a "cultural elite" ("liberals," urban social planners) and a cultural non-elite (poor minorities and immigrants).** This mobilizes the exploited against the even-more exploited—a classic and horrendously effective strategy of powerful groups throughout history.

What the Tea Party phenomenon (and the whole Democrats v. Republicans thing more generally) misses is that, ideologically, we're not playing on mid-twentieth century terrain anymore, where government regulation = socialism = Stalinism = Hitler (and, for that matter, Republicans = "small government"). By thinking in such anachronistic terms, the screen is set up behind which 21st-century-style domination and unfreedom can continue to take place. The end-game of Tea-Partyers and Republicans (and some Democrats) is not to institute "less" government, but to institute a government that, by selectively "not interfering" in certain sectors (while happily interfering in others), enables and empowers a new class of Dominators. This is the Grifter class, and it includes everyone from Dick Cheney to Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs) to Glenn Beck to Larry Summers to Sarah Palin to, yes, Barack Obama.


I look forward to seeing who, in the next cycle of political candidates (and spectacle-addicted media coverage), will offer a narrative as candid and forceful and clear as Taibbi's. Because the real we—the not-grifter-class; those without big vacuums—are really, really fucked. Our only hope is to build up viable resistance movements—electoral or otherwise.


On this note, here are three national organizations that are helping build the fight against the Grifter class. Join them. And provide links to others in the comment threads below.

http://demandprogress.org/mission

http://movetoamend.org/

http://other98.com/



**"Revolt of the Elites," in the most recent issue of n+1, illustrates the consequences of an attack on one of these elites (the cultural elite) and not the other.

Re-imagining poetry community, 2

Great review of Brian Kim Stefan's pamphlet Bank of America Online Banking: A Critical Evaluation in the new Sustainable Aircraft.

Bernie Sanders' Speech on the Bush-Obama Tax Cuts for the Wealthy

and thanks to him for an actual, old-fashioned filibuster.

Bill McKibben on the Cancun Climate Conference

Bill McKibben: Climate Talks So Weakened by U.S., Major Polluters that Walkout Could Be Good News for Planet

The Austerity Myth

Great video on why we should be spending more, not less, on public services at a time like this.

The Watson Institute presents Mark Blyth on Austerity from The Global Conversation on Vimeo.

(And, from the same source, a poem.)

Frank Rich

on this political season's elephant in the $$$ room.

David Korten on Economic Relocalization

Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.

7 Poets I Love

The fifth and final piece in my series on contemporary poetry in The Atlantic.

Part 4 (Eaarth Poetry)

Part 4 in my series on contemporary poetry in The Atlantic.

Swan Dive 3

I am and aim to be in middles of the storm;

when it comes and carries and takes me I will have been of you and with it;



together we will have been more and less affected by the floods.







I am so far away, from myself, now,



speaking as if I wasn't living!





While I live, it is a storm I aim to be; a middle.

Paradise blows through my teeth!



Rubbish barrels out of me,

Barrels and barrels of fossils go


into making me, and I am a living

consuming being,


being consumed.

Swan Dive 2

It is crucial that the angel of history can only see behind us.

Were it able to see now, fully


it would lose its instincts;


the wind would cease to feel on its wings.




Okay, stranger: the breeze has blown us together.







My childhood, now, spins away from me;



You and my childhood spin toward and away from me.





It is never not spinning; tho we tweet and tweet

(the birds themselves tweet! and I do know you)



and tweets themselves proceed from now to backwards, changing



our experience of reading (from up to down



to down to up)...



the breeze is blowing and piling everything up and up.

Swan Dive

Poems play with our expectations. That is why we read them: to get played.





One line subverts

another: a beach becomes

a log becomes

a kitchen. The poem

builds the kitchen. Swan dive.

A man in a hot tub

riding a motorcycle, holding

a bottle of Old Spice, reading.

The logic of the commercial



is a similar logic to many contemporary American poems today, such as this Heather Christle poem. Compare.



(Look at the Heather Christle poem. Now back to me. Now back to the Heather Christle poem.)



In this case, the Old Spice Man is a forest.

Objects (and setting) swirl and mutate around

it; meaningless and meaningful and intelligible; instinctive;

neural-pathway-forming (and diverting). What is

the core of the poem? Where does the poem stand?

What does it stand for? Where does it move? What about the advertisement?

Is the ad an ad for Old Spice or for masculinity?

Is it a joke on masculinity? Does it work?

Is it a poem?



Similarly, is Christle's poem a joke on culture, or on nature?

A joke on deforesters, or tree-huggers? On me? You?

Is it an advertisement? (Do you want new windows, reader?)

Or do you want to be clean? (I make phone calls for a candidate

who refuses corporate donations over the weekend,

and am advised not to refer to the other, leading candidate;

even a mention of his name increases his chances

of victory.) What are we putting in circulation?

What new pathways do we want to create?



Every poem, and advertisement

answers this, whether it wants to or not.



This seems to be a problem, for poetry.



Still, it can enter the battle in the middle of the fray

or build up new networks from the margins



or build up new networks from the margins of the middle of the fray.



Poetry can divert us from pathways,

change pathways to take us

onto other pathways. "Verse": meaning

the turn

at the end of the row

when plowing. (Might this agricultural remnant

signal a direction for our attention?) Link

to link to link.



Consider what I find

when googling "Old Spice Man" and "poetry".



This cannot help but send me spiraling into 200 other video responses

(are these poems?), not to mention Greg Oden's blog

(these?) and now I'm back to Kanye's tweets,

which certainly play with my expectations.



(Or have I lost you out there, and are you now already spiraling?)



1. There's a layer of... Entertainment... we are entertainers and this is only TV... not the War 9:25 AM Sep 4th via web
2. There's a layer of... hey Kanye said what I was thinking 9:23 AM Sep 4th via web
3. A year later where do we stand? 9:22 AM Sep 4th via web
4. WHO BENEFITED FOR REAL PEOPLE???!!!!!!!! 9:21 AM Sep 4th via web
5. Walk with me people... let's break this down for real now. I might get in trouble again lol? 9:20 AM Sep 4th via web
6. MTV? JAY LENO? BEYONCE? ALL FORMS OF MEDIA? TAYLOR? KANYE WEST? Who gained? Who lost? 9:19 AM Sep 4th via web
7. You've got the Media play... Who benefitted off of the moment? 9:16 AM Sep 4th via web



I do not expect this, from a celebrity!

(I expect a celebrity; that is why I go online and surf through junk

and poetry...) The amount, and directness

and style of the tweets is unexpected! Kanye West



is a poet?



He speaks truths. (Not truth to power,

but power away from untruth?)



Conclusion: our celebrities are our poets?

They have our attention and direct

or redirect it daily.



If there are poems, today, they are an advertisement, spoken by a celebrity, away from untruth. They are the rerouting

of power and of untruth; the plowing and replowing of pathways...

(Not row to row, but link to link to link...)




“Hello, ladies. Look at your poem, now back to me, now back at your poem, now back to me. Sadly, it isn’t me, but if it stopped sounding like a poem and switched to me, it could smell like it’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the poem your poem could smell like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your poem smells like South Africa. I’m on a horse.”



What cruel, twisted creek would our great moral writers of the past find us up!

(In their time, too, atrocity was all around them, and yet they wrote and wrote and wrote.)

What paddles would they have to give us?

What if it wasn't cruel?



I take my paddle from Kanye;

He manufactures paddles daily with his throat.

His fingers fiddle away at pathways;

I wish to be a jumbo paddle up his throat.



Workers fiddle away at pathways;

I am a culture worker whose hook is in my throat.



The great moral writers of the past might sense our situation;

they would be of our situation, utterly, and sense

how to correctly intervene

in time.





IX. A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin)



1. There's a layer of... Entertainment... we are entertainers and this is only TV... not the War 9:25 AM Sep 4th via web
2. There's a layer of... hey Kanye said what I was thinking 9:23 AM Sep 4th via web
3. A year later where do we stand? 9:22 AM Sep 4th via web
4. WHO BENEFITED FOR REAL PEOPLE???!!!!!!!! 9:21 AM Sep 4th via web







Should we use Old Spice Body Wash?


You tell me.



I can only see behind us.

Fast Poetry

Parallel to the piece on Flarf (part 3 of 5 in my series on contemporary poetry in The Atlantic), I'll be running some more speculative posts here on the blog this week, about what it means to write poetry in high-speed, meme (and capital) driven culture.

Swan Dive.

Post #2: Redefining Accessibility

What Makes a Poem Worth Reading? - Adam Roberts - Culture - The Atlantic

For Da Iowans — Thicke for Ag Secretary!!

Conventional vs. Organic: An Ag Secretary Race to Watch - Joe Fassler - Food - The Atlantic

51 Ways to Spark a Commons Revolution

from Yes! Magazine

+ Some Great Tools for the Classroom

The use of visual media here seems really, really useful here.

Links re: Accessibility in poetry

Getting a lot of great stuff sent my way through this Atlantic article—here's a few great links I just got sent (thanks to Kristin Esch down at The Poetry Foundation).

• Matthew Zapruder points to how it should be a critic's responsibility to 'clarify a reading experience': "What is the purpose of literary criticism? Among other things, to guide the reader past his or her resistance." (www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=186047)
  

• Dan Chiasson recommends an accessible poet that "you could recommend to your cousin at a barbeque and, the next day, teach in a seminar for majors" (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=178562)
  

• June Jordan ruminates on the 'inaccessible' canon: "Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman." (www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=178489)
  

"The Righteous Skeptic's Guide to Reading Poetry"

Part 1 of a 5 part series I'm doing for The Atlantic on contemporary poetry.

Zizek on Democracy Now

"we, the leftists, we have no right to have this arrogant view that intolerant people [anti-immigrationists in Germany; Tea Party here] are horrible...we should ask the question how we enable it"

Questioning Audience in "New American Poets": A Public Space

In his intro to some "New American Poets" in Issue 11 of A Public Space, Stephen Burt asks, "When we ask how to connect a poem to an idea about poetry in general, we are also asking about an implied author, and about her implied audience. For whom, and to whom, does each poet write?"

It's good to hear Burt contextualizing his usually-perceptive questions about speaker with regard to audience. For about forty years now, poets and critics have built bodies of work on ideas about "speaker" (whether slippery or stable). It seems to me that this focus on speaker has overshadowed more urgent rhetorical issues, and that it has also run parallel to the overshadowing of the commons in practically every other arena (from the privatization of the amount of carbon in the sky to the privatization of the human genome). It makes sense that our (poems'; poets') civic antennae would be eroded in an era like this one; it makes sense, now, that we might want to rehabilitate them.

Burt begins with the seemingly solid fact that "good poems try to be as unlike one another as possible," and "We do not want poems to be wholly like one another—we take an interest in how they diverge—for the same reasons that we do not want our friends, our acquaintances, to be too much alike" (78). But what if this quest for "being-unlike" (rather than being-differently-with/within) mirrors all too perfectly the 'consumer choice' ideology of the 90's and 2000's? Are these poems offering, in fact, very similar choices, marketed (like brands) under the banner of individualistic difference?

In light of their "imagined audience," it seems to me that the representative poems are still, somehow, VERY akin to each other. Not wanting poems to be "wholly" like one another seems a world away from saying that "good poems try to be as unlike one another as possible." And like or unlike each other in what ways?

If the even "very good" poems in this selection produce difference at the levels Burt identifies—what fundamental sameness might be going unnoticed? (Not whether the poet eats toast or oatmeal or nasi goreng for breakfast, but whether the poem, for the reader, is toast, or oatmeal, or nasi goreng?)

What would great poems do?


*

Burt is absolutely right to suggest that, if the poem "works as an individual poem, it will at once prompt, and frustrate, the best answers we can give."

But what if the poem wants to work, not as an individual poem, but as part of a kind of commons?

In other words: what are the questions?

Works in Progress Festival 2010!

If you're in or near Iowa City, or interested, keep tabs on this year's WiP Festival here.

(I'll be doing something—not sure what—Saturday at 6pm, at PS1.)

Section 3: The Democratic Potential of Form

SECTION III
THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF FORM

(OR, LOVE AS THE CONCEPT THAT COLLAPSES THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE POETIC AND THE POLITICAL AND RISKS LIBERATING US ALL)











NOTE:


In this section, I will shift gears a bit in order to talk about Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's new book Commonwealth, in which they attempt to lay some of the theoretical foundations for a transition out of capitalism.

First and foremost, Hardt & Negri get play here because I find many of their formulations for politics wonderfully (if implicitly) analogous to poetics, and would like to explore these connections. Most exciting of all, perhaps, is their insistence on rehabbing the word "love" as a political concept. In their Spinozan formulation, love = joy (the increase of our capacity to think and act) + the recognition of an external cause. I am interested: how would this apply to poetry? And how might this help us reformulate a distinction between the poetic and the political?

Where Hardt and Negri are at their most interesting is in their desire to think through the actual "training grounds"-- the new institutions-- that would make up this transition out of capitalism. They do not want to simply overthrow the system, only to have it be replaced by another version of its own logic. Rather, they want to painstakingly create the conditions for new subjectivities, ones that would actually be able to constitute a true democracy. So how might poetry be -- or become -- such a training ground?

Much of the work in this section has been excised, or is not yet written. Think of these pages as stars, in a constellation, in a cloudy sky.














THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF FORM

What are the formal structures with the most democratic potential?
To me it seems like meter, under the rule of Tradition, as it is less recognizable (if not less feelable) by a general public, is a less potentially successful physical mode than those of rhyme and repetition, parallelism....though I am open to argument on this** & think it would be interesting for someone to think it through, using multiple case studies, talking to readers from a wide range of backgrounds, etc. But to me it is at least intuitively clear that it is not meter as such but rhythm that absorbs readers, and that rhythms formed in tension with meter in the English (capital T) Tradition are more absorbing to certain kinds of readers (and, for this very reason, risk excluding certain others). The "common heritage" of meter, as an apology for its democratic potential, strikes me as either naive or irresponsible (though potentially well-meaning).

Equally naive or irresponsible is a kind of poetry of the (academic) left that ignores its context, ignores its duty toward (possible joy of!!) engaging more diverse readerships. This seems to me to be an analogy to authoritarian leftism, in which there are certain gatekeepers who "keep language safe" from violations/violence, creating a very insular network of understanding and losing a true contextual sense of what "violence" actually means. Now, this may be well-intentioned, and I simply point out that, as an inheritor of a (aesthetic) leftist current in poetry (which I believe has contributed both constructively and destructively to the possibilities of a more just or caring language network), I wish to preserve the constructive and single out and leave behind that which obstructs flow; namely, that many of us in the academy too often accept the condition of a small, insular (usually "liberal" and well-educated, and often predominantly white) readership, and that we would do well to imagine and create other kinds of texts and other forms of textual situate-ion.

So if meter-- as well as a kind of insular fetishizing (and consumption) of "difference" prevalent among the academic left-- represent insufficient forms of formal democratic tendencies, then what is our constructive formal innovation for the new century? What are the forms that will invent a new possibility for subjectivities, create subjectivities who would then be more capable of constituting democracy?
I think this is the major question for our generation to think (and do) through, by writing and by talking to one another and through the poetry communities we form. But I will suggest two possibilities, each of which I hope will contribute toward an eventual reconfiguration of our sense of form as such.

1. Collaborative work
2. Children's poetry

I think I have talked some about the former, and would like, actually, to focus here on the latter, as it may seem the more surprising, out-of-left-field (no pun intended) option of the two.

What is so potentially transformative about children's poetry? Well, for one, I think it links back up with this question of form very nicely. If you can think of one defining feature of the children's poem (or story, for that matter) it is its extreme formalism. Take a look at Shel Silverstein, or the limerick! Or the deliberate pace of a picture book.

Almost all children's work takes on forms that are at once immediately-able-to-be-apprehended and allow for "adult" fluctuations (inventiveness) from within. And they place yet another limit on themselves, in terms of vocabulary, and presumption--- if something exceeds a child's capability to conceptually process, it must be articulated in such a way to be intuitively accessible to the child on other levels. This is the wonderful dimension of good children's literature: it connects with the child and exceeds the child's understanding simultaneously. We could say this about good poems in general: they must both connect with us and exceed our understanding.
This seems to me an exciting form (and it is not a "form," such as meter or "sestina," but a category of form---- which is contextual----a contextual constraint placed on formal constraints----- the employment of specific and multiple formal constraints under immense contextual pressure).

Such a poem would be able to connect with the adult and child (and teen / college undergraduate!), and absorb and challenge their understanding simultaneously. It would draw its readers into new ways of thinking and perceiving in language, into new relationships with each other (ah, Harry Potter & Twilight! such potential!), and into new configurations of themselves, training them for a democracy of the future...

(This seems to me to be a totally respectable poetry to write, especially in times of political urgency!)







BIOPOLITICS AND/OR REFORM(AL)ISM

For H&N's clarification of Foucault's notion of biopolitics (the ability of bodies to resist from within biopower (bodies "under the influence" of—controlled and constituted by—the state/multi-national corporation)), we can analogize a poetry that resists ideological formations of language (both its own and that of the associate language network it triggers/exists within) through insisting on the power of bodies. How does this happen, in a poem? One way I think of immediately is music: rhythm in the breath and the chest; sound in the mouth

which may be one reason to remain skeptical of -- tho not reactionary to -- a poetry that foregrounds the visual at the expense of music. This "at the expense of" is huge----because there is no reason music needs to be lost, and it in no way has to be opposed to the visual.

Similarly, we would have to rethink our notions of the visual as non-bodily. Because bodies of words/text are felt visually, as well -- in the eye but also in the viscera of the reader--- as well as constituting the "bodily" dimension of language on the page (as opposed to heard--- which only happens when text passes into the auditory realm).

Poetry, then, has the potential to exist bodily in each realm. There is no reason our resistance from within form cannot be both visually bodily (when on the page) and auditorially bodily (a potential inscripted into the page, as well, but also channeled during readings and performance).

But I do think it is important to ask: of these realms, which is more neglected today? Which is privileged? And does poetry has an obligation to its own neglected realms? (And to resist privilege---

The other way I see biopolitics being relevant is through H&N's reformulation of identity politics as a politics of singularity. The end goal, here, is not to reaffirm but abolish identity as a category. At the same time, H&N are also careful to recognize that identity remains an important mobilizing tool for oppressed groups. A poetry that is biopolitical, then, would have to steer through and out of identity rather than around it. [If H&N urge us, eventually, to become "monsters"--singularities without identity--- poems seem like a pretty great ground for monster-testing!]

But more important, in a biopolitical respect, than any zany formulations I come up with here is the simple statement that poetry is not apart from, but participates in and can help change, structures of power that subordinate some bodies to others on the basis of the racism, classism, sexism, etc.

To participate in this change through poetry is not an oppressive constraint on language (as some poets might fear), but rather a fertile, joyful one!



















TOWARD AN ALTERNATE CONCEPTION OF "FORM"

"We have frequently printed the word Democracy....It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history remains to be enacted."
(Whitman, Democratic Vistas)

When I say “the democratic potential of form,” I am also pointing to the democratic potential for form itself as a concept. What if "form" were liberated from its purely textual formulation, and extended to mean the shape language takes (and the shape language makes) within larger bodies of discourse (itself) and subjectivities (person-bodies). A poem, as such, would be any imaginative (loving) intervention/reconfiguration within this social-linguistic body.

Deleuze: " If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.... Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move."

What if Whitman's famous quote became inverted-----and we had to write democracy before it could, in fact, become?

"Democracy... remains to be enacted, because it has yet to be written."

Adorno: "Language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien to the subject but as the subject's own voice"

Perhaps we are still waiting to speak








BIOFORMALISM

Thinking form without context (what I'll call "unsituated form") preserves the opposition between the poetic/aesthetic and the social/political. What I am suggesting is not a subordination of poetic activity to the political (or vice versa), but rather a reconfiguration of our notion of "form" so as to situate poems within language-social matrices, and think their imaginative interventions (insurrections?) from within this as the exact degree to which they are "poetic"---or rather, the degree to which they love. Love, here, in the Spinozian sense-- as joy (the increase in our ability to think and act), externally oriented-- supplants "the poetic" and "the political" as the category of primary interest.

This, I hope, deepens Adorno's conception of poetry as counter-ideology, in that it recognizes how "counter-ideology" has become a recognizable mode of poetry today, and thus risks being absorbed right back into ideology. Poetry should resist its current familiar self, and not be "counter-ideological" but, borrowing again from Hardt & Negri, alter-ideological. That is, it should not simply unmask the ideological but find ways to actually reinvent it---i.e. create language-sites which have a pull that is even more absorptive than ideology , in which diverse subjectivities can actually become-different (rather than simply have their position of knowing dissent confirmed).
This is, probably, the hardest thing ever.

And that's why as poets we need to be bodies of love---or, in other words (to come full circle), healthy.

Love is imagination moving structures. For that to happen-- for poems, bodily, to empower us (as singularities and as "institutions" in H&N's sense)--- the new poem will have to recognize---wake up to---more and more, its situated dimension----how, and who, it engages as readers. The good news is that this does not mean losing any of the intelligence and nuance we have invested in traditional conceptions of form. It will be, rather, an increase in intelligence--- an emotional intelligence, newly rising. This emotional intelligence begins in our lives, in our everyday practices with one another, and, most of all, in our bodies. We also create it through the bodies of our texts. This is an immense responsibility--but an immense joy, too! Because, even if we fail to remember it, poetic practice is in proximity to love.
Remember?

This is the most trivial essay you have ever read.














"...it was just impossible at that time to imagine that anything would come out of it. And that was wrong, a lot came out of it--not out of what I did, but out of what lots and lots of people were doing all over the country. A lot came out of it. So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope" was much too pessimistic..." (Chomsky, 181)






















o people people that I know
I sniff your footprints in the snow
sometimes you're buried like a rag
or carried like consumer tag

I'm part of that, I'm like a dad!
of world of world the falling snow
but purer still, the infidel
who loves and loves to overthrow

the tiny dogs within my heart
who teach and ruff! and make small art
you've got a helluva a leash, mister
to bind and bound, and take part


























If you go on further and turn your body about, no place is left where you are not the master. But even so, tell me, how will you go on further from the top of a hundred-foot pole? Eh?
















[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]

Interlude

INTERLUDE

HOW TO NAVIGATE THE REALM OF NOT UNDERSTANDING; OR, JOY


























A joyful poetry is able to do all things. It can get almost anybody to read it, cause it's got that much (& that kind) of energy.

It doesn't have to be shallow. In fact, it can't be. Joy is deep --- it comes from there. (A kind of duende.)

Joy motivates people to read. When it goes somewhere terrifying, it can take you. You trust it.

(No one trusts the person who is shouting as if the world is ending, even (& especially) when it is.)

So you shout as if it is just beginning. You make it begin. (Where do you get this kind of energy? How does it happen?)

Like when you're in a room and someone's being negative and wouldn't it be so much more interesting (and difficult) to imagine a way out.

(Esp. cause all the absurd stuff is there.)

I find this emotional intelligence rare & the true brilliance of any time. I see it often in poems, but sometimes I see other kinds of "intelligence" that seem to me pretty dumb.

We don't bend down enough.

What a poet who can see everything clearly & still keep afloat & moving quick, without sacrificing depth!

For the language and for the approaching language and for those approaching the approaching language | and for the place in which it is read
and for the places, esp., in which it won't be






[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]

Section 2: Engage! (Poetry and Power)

SECTION II
ENGAGE!

(POETRY AND POWER)















"I mean, I do something basically less important-- it is, in fact....it's extremely important for people with power not to let anybody understand this, to make them think there are big leaders around who somehow get things going, and then what everybody else has to do is follow them. That's one of the ways of demeaning people, and degrading them, and making them passive. I don't know how to overcome this exactly, but it's really something people ought to work on." (Chomsky, 321-322)



one of the principal | big big | tasks of a poet today, as I see it | is to not demean people
now | there are many ways of not demeaning | of "activating" | and I think one way that the contemporary poetry community succeeds very well is on a purely textual level | i.e. there are many really interesting texts that are just fundamentally concerned with activating language | keeping it from closing down. This is a huge kind of activity
but then the question becomes | how can we more often (& deeply) pair this with a willingness to engage with (be engaging to!) different readerships | i.e. what if this kind of language-activation was more broadly and multiply situated | now | this is a problem of community as much as it is one of text | but as writers & readers & people | in the poetry community | we can approach the problem from all angles
and I think people are (rightly) afraid of writing something absorbing precisely because it would risk making its readers passive | and here's a sort of big paradox we run into | which is how can something be absorbing | i.e. completely grab the reader | and also make them active
I think it's an easy opposition to re-enforce | which is exactly what's happened | i.e. I'll either write dense complicated language that forces its reader to be active | or I'll give in and write something "entertaining" or (worse) "reductive" | but there are ways of becoming absorbed in the process of disruption (c.f. Bernstein, Artifice of Absorption). Now that's exactly what we're looking for
but I think we're in a different time now, and more is actually possible. Because I think poets are pretty absorbed in a particular rhetorical form of absorption in disruption right now, and there is quite a large counter-mainstream that I think has its foundations in exactly that procedure--- quite a few sub camps and styles, as well as all sorts of stuff that doesn't fit at all -- but what's missing, I think, is a really compelling call to write in a way that's more widely (and multiply) legibly complex ---- to ---- carefully, joyously, interestingly --- expand and rethink poetry audience & place within the community ---- and that requires a different kind of focus on these terms "absorption" & "disruption"

we might call this "disrupting (self)absorption in disruption by being absorbingly disruptive"
!!
or just -- engaging



"Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you're helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it's the wave that matters" (324, Chomsky)




there are all kinds of possibilities that poetry simply all-the-time has its blinders on to
and it moves sluggishly (who can see that quickly????)
through what-it-is, to what else it could be...

all of us have to contend with that from within our own body of work
lest we become cliches of ourselves
it sounds easy
but it's of course immensely difficult (as you know!)
because as we try to carve out these spaces within language that DO feel new and true
we grasp what is new and true about them
and de-activate it (by immediately trying to replicate our success)

this is just completely how power works
and so poetic language provides a crucial analog for political work
in terms of how to keep power from consolidating

& what the specific obstacles are to that
which is the point
they're always specific
they're rotational
even now they get away
(take back over)

okay?
"that is just completely how power works"

so at the moment of the poem giving up power
(Spicer)

it gets it back but as the power of a wave rather than the rider





"Or take a look at the intellectual left, the people who ought to be involved in the kinds of things we're doing here. If you look at the academic left, say, it's mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed post-modernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people involved in it--but it's really good for careers and that sort of thing. That again pulls a ton of energy into activities which have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they're very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with." (Chomsky, 328)







making something strange
& legible

legibly strange


rather than elaborately cloaked and "interesting"

"your interesting friend isn't interesting"


complex thinking and feeling in simple strange language

:

language strange and complex and simple




easily apprehensible / felt
difficultly thought

unknown





"Incidentally, I should say that my own political writing is often denounced from both the left and the right for being non-theoretical--and that's completely correct. But it's exactly as theoretical as anyone else's, I just don't call it "theoretical," I call it "trivial"--which is in fact what it is. I mean, it's not that some of these people whose stuff is considered "deep theory" and so on don't have some interesting things to say. Often they have very interesting things to say. But it's nothing you couldn't say at the level of a high school student, or that a high school student couldn't figure out if they had the time and support and a little bit of training.
I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren't transparent--because the fact of the matter is that in most areas of life, we just don't understand anything very much." (Chomsky, 229)




Be very skeptical of my poetry.








[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]

Section 1: Health (A Lecture)

Sekiso Osho asked, "How can you proceed on further from the top of a hundred-foot pole?" Another eminent teacher of old said, "You, who sit on the top of a hundred-foot pole, although you have entered the Way you are not yet genuine. Proceed on from the top of the pole, and you will show your whole body in the ten directions."






































"Consider yourself addressing an audience with considerable knowledge of poetry, both practice and theory, both contemporary and historical."
(University of Iowa MFA Exam prompt, 2009)


"Its social substance is precisely what is spontaneous in it, what does not simply follow from the existing conditions at the time..."
(Theodor Adorno, On Lyric Poetry and Society)


"They will be buried by laughter."
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth)




































I will be addressing an audience with considerable knowledge.

As a member of this audience, I know that we can often have a difficult time seeing the unknown.

(And if the unknown is, in this case, an audience without considerable knowledge?)



































SECTION I


HEALTH

a lecture



























1

You see there are a few things we need to talk about | but what I am going to start with here | is local poetry | because as of now local poetry is looked down on | when I think | it should be the opposite

how does poetry work | in today’s institutions you may ask | one publishes a book of poetry or two and that qualifies you | for certain occupations in which you are encouraged to write more poetry | all of this poetry | is available more or less widely | and your name can be increasingly known | and this helps you be a “successful poet” | now

if you are an “unsuccessful poet” | or just a person | you write but maybe | only those immediately around you | say in your community | hear it | you are not successful | maybe | because you are speaking to non-poets | other people around you | local concerns | things in your town | I don’t know | but you do not write for national contests etc.

what might we value | about this devalued brand
how might it | be important
because it can’t be important just by virtue of being "lesser" | (in quality) | (whose) | but rather | where is the good work that goes unwritten | that is yet to be written | might this be an important kind of work | how might it be important

for one it might resist certain habits of address | or non-address | "rhetorical aphasia" | of the so-called mainstream | or streams | that is | it might address itself differently | which could be useful | if we consider address | a useful issue | I for one | am sometimes bored with the concerns | of the poetry community | not that they aren’t | interesting | but that, sometimes | they don’t have enough limits to make them exciting | sustainably | in terms | of health

what is health | this is a good question | this is the second thing I want to talk about | what is health | and what does it mean | for poets | right now I think for many people it means | being unhealthy | which I think makes for “good poems” | but maybe | unhealthy poems | what do we want | a poem to do



a local healthy poetry | would not assume it is more important | than you | its appeal would be generous | first and foremost | this would be cool | and interesting

how does one be generous | in a poem | what do you have to give | why do we want that | from a poem | for a poem

perhaps we are thinking of the poem’s health here





















2

this leads us somewhere interesting | that is | it leads us | out of the poem | or should i say | further in | the poem | is also led out of itself | why | is it healthy for the poem to be led out of itself | and what does being let out of itself | mean

for one | it would mean changing | this talk would have to maybe at a certain point | stop looking as it now does | and sounding as it now does | and it would have to change in terms of its sound and tone i guess | and this would hold some readers’ interest | but maybe not others' | i.e. people who like poems | may like this game of change | people who get frustrated with poems | may not | but it could also change in such a way as to grab both | now | the question remains | or actually grows stronger | how does the poem change | in a way that is healthy | the second point

is related to this | “being let out of itself“ | i.e. into the world | i.e. | how does a poem do that

this may be a question | of where the poem comes from | or how it is situated
this is an old question, too, I think | but let’s ask it | differently

what can a poem do | today | in our world

what is it doing

right now i believe | as one who writes poems | it exists as a kind of checkpoint it is a living checkpoint | in language | through which some pass | and gain power | some of this power | is social | though it happens in language | it is very powerful this power

some of the power | is negative | that is | it undoes the power of language | and invests it in something else | it deposes language | now | the fact of this | is very cool | but something that also passes | back into the first kind of power almost instantly | woooooooo

what to do about that | is i think | the question i am asking

and i think it really has to do with audience | with address | with where this is headed | this is something i think that certain bodies of philosophy and poetry have dealt with | pretty insufficiently | or rather | new forms have not yet found their way into power | also | because it’s a tough thing | i.e. how would that look to have true negative power in power | i think this is also | a question people have been asking | trying to do | only to fail and have it slip straight back | there are many | many people i like reading | people who are directly invested in this idea and maybe pay less attention
to their situate-ion

generally | still | i do think the dream | for me | maybe for you i don’t know | i am suggesting this | is that i could write a kind of poetry | that my high school students could be equally (tho differently) moved by | enjoy | feel empowered by

perhaps the negative power | the real negative power | negative power that can take power | whatever | let’s just have some of the non-poets | non power holders involved | speaking | reading | included | and there are many who are invested in this too | only | they're not here | i.e. this is a power organism | designed to infiltrate | itself | you see | who would reasonably | be interested in this | except those seeking power | ok | so here we are | there is this other idea

that power is not “bad” | that good folks need to take it | i think there is much truth to this | i distrust it | but i also trust it in a certain way | the problem is of course “good” | i think | children are good

are we to write for children?

























3

a healthy poem | does not care how good it sounds
but loves | when it sounds good

similarly | i teach better | when i forget the dumb stuff | i just did | but remember | if i just sounded good | my students like that | a poem likes

when it is healthy | it likes to move | poems like exercise | they like being vulnerable | they like being said | some people

are afraid to say their poems | as if the poem will get angry at them | as if they could say it “wrong” | this is | of course | what you always do | i.e. fuck up | you are always fucking up | your poems | but then you are there and can bend everything back and then something has just happened

I was telling someone the other night that I like high school students | because they have developed their bullshit detector for other people | quite well | but they have not yet | fully developed it for themselves | so as an instructor | one can point out their bullshit quite easily | the occasions often present themselves | and the students like that | because you are doing their favorite thing | their new favorite thing | you can even turn bullshit calling | on yourself | which is quite impressive to them | that everyone is full of shit | even their teacher | so doing something wrong | is always instructive







[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]

New Series of Posts

About a year ago, as a 2nd-year student in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop MFA program, I was required to write a 10-15 page essay articulating my "poetics."


I think that this might be a good forum in which to post my response. If it were today, I might formulate some things differently (or more specifically), but the early sketching out of the problematic/desires I find myself writing into is there (I'll try to update/footnote/extend some things in the comments section). The whole exercise is maybe interestingly symptomatic, too, of what it means to write and exist ambivalently (/amorously) within the particular institution of the Iowa Writers' Workshop; I imagine that this is both usefully representative and divergent from the experience of students in other MFA programs, poets writing in the contemporary US, and others' within the Iowa program itself—so I'd welcome all those other perspectives into the fold. That said, my approach was to try to imagine ways out of the ideology of contemporary American poetry, as I experienced it. What was deemed impossible, within its borders? Wasn't that, in some respect, exactly what we wanted to be trying to do?


The essay comes in three sections, with an appendix (and an intermission!), but there are natural breaks—I'll try to post it so you can have a sense for the pacing.








[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]

Direct Action in the Climate Movement

A Call for Direct Action in the Climate Movement from Bill McKibben of 350.org, Becky Tarbotton of the Rainforest Action Network, and Phil Radford of Greenpeace USA

+ Lady Gaga performing out against Don't Ask Don't Tell.

=

Lady Gaga Direct Action for the Climate Movement (supported by large, dispersed networks of coordinated local action)?


What could she/we do?

What's the state of American poetry?

Clayton Eshelman, Annie Finch, Ron Silliman, and Danielle Pafunda weigh in in the first installment of a multi-installment feature on Huffington Post.

And some stuff about The Cloud Corporation, which just came through Iowa City, here.

Rule The Air

Because the ground doesn't give up its yards without a fight.

That is, until you rewrite the playbook,

change how you see the game, and realize

that when you rule the air, anything is possible.




Rule The Air.

Why the victory of the Tea Party extremists (backed by Big Oil) over the slightly less extreme GOP establishment (also backed by Big Oil)

is good for progressives, but bad for climate and clean energy.

Food

Vandana Shiva on Monsanto

Appropriating Ethics...

And an interesting debate here on the ethics of appropriation.

Inversion

"Poetry is not politically efficacious in countries where it is not valued as a cultural necessity by the general populace." --Jennifer Moxley

Poets are not poetically efficacious when they do not value their country's general populace, and do not take them as a necessity other cultures than their own.

Creative Commons

Interesting debate on commons licensing happening here.

David Segal for Congress!

David Segal has proved himself far and away the most exciting candidate in my homestate's Democratic primary (Rhode Island).

Nobody's Puppet from Nobody's Puppet on Vimeo.

Follow the comment thread at dailykos, and read David's statement, here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/8/7/15351/08590?new=true

And learn more about how to get involved with the campaign here:

http://votesegal.com/

Rethinking Poetics

Went to a day (Friday) of the Rethinking Poetics conference.


Highlights:

1. Rodrigo Toscano / Alan Golding's (tongue in cheek?) suggestion for a "report back from our industries." More useful to share experiences from within our positions as neoliberal-subject-people than rationalizing anxious circles through aesthetics around the scraps of privilege ($$ & social/intellectual capital) that are left?

2. Joshua Clover's insistence that we stave off endless nuance and keep antagonisms alive, and fresh.

3. Jena Osman's provisional term "echolocation."


Thinking a lot about MOBILIZING as an alternate term to either "antagonism" or the kumbaya-like "coming together" (preserve the antagonism, but orient it better, tactically?).



Wish I had been there for the ecology panel. Would've loved to hear Andrew Schelling talk about bioregionalism, in particular.

Manureism (or, some manure): A Response

I wrote this directly after I returned from AWP, in response to (and following the form of) Vanessa Place's piece at the Flarf v. Conceptualism panel. I do not know what Manureism is, but sometimes I think I see it places.



flarf is a cake fart.
conceptualism is shit.
what is manure?


TOWARD A COMMUNITY GARDEN
(through, not against, conceptualisms)

1. Conceptualism asks what is poetry.
1. Manureism asks where is poetry.
2. Conceptualism is allegorical. It is about things other than poetry itself.
2. http://gardennotesforrelocalisation.blogspot.com/
3. Conceptualism courts jest, but is not the king's dog.
3. Manure is a wolf dressed up in jester clothing. It cares for sheep.
4. Conceptualism is composed.
4. Manure is composted.
5. Conceptualism employs a variety of techniques that compromise and complicate the question of excess text, of unreadability, of extra-textual narrativity, of the need for and love of categories and the acategorical, of the false and adored divide between praxis and other praxis, addition and subtraction, theory and things with two types of teeth.
5. Manureism employs a variety of techniques that compromise and complicate the question of excess text, of unreadability, of extra-textual narrativity, of the need for and love of categories and the acategorical, of the false and adored divide between praxis and other praxis, addition and subtraction, theory and things with two types of teeth.
6. Conceptualism is sexy. The penis is a dildo.
6. Manureism = cross-pollination.
7. Conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery.
7. Manure is your neighbor (who might annoy you, but, is still there).
8. Conceptualism wants.
8. Manureism eats.
9. Legit.
9. Trying things out.
10. Conceptualism has no answers, but is, instead, interrogative. Through the deployment of multiple strategies that serve to destabilize text (extant or made) via reframed reiterations and multiple sites of rhetorical deployment, conceptualism is neo-Kantian, epistemologically concerned with the ongoing sobject and the instantiation of radical evil, in other words, the affirmative will to evil that manifests the fact of will itself. In other words, the instantiation of that which is consciously contra-textual in the sense of all that has made text make contextual sense, the rendering immaterial of every materiality of poetry. The contra-text being the new con-text, con-, as I have pointed out elsewhere, in the sense of being a cunt. Conceptualism is, as the term indicates, primarily a cortical engagement.
10. "Manureism seems like it would have to involve a certain degree of experimentation, like: will this straw insulate or smother this chard? But within a frame, right? Its desire is to nourish, explicitly. If it fails, or if it poisons, which is likely, or if it trips the sensitive intaker out, those are unexpected consequences of a fairly composed experiment. But conceptualism is of course wide open. Wait--is it? Does not having answers indicate openness?"
(Primarily a physical engagement.)
11. Conceptualism is Lacan in a mirror, the discourse of the slave.
11. Manureism is shit on a stick.
12. Conceptualism is Lacanian in the sense of desire by way of the Law by way of the petit objet a. As such. La donne
12. Manureism doesn't need you to have read Lacan. Probably.
13. Flarf plays Cuzin while playing it off, it speaks to people in people-voice okay, it’s the first to suggest titty beer bong hits and butterscotch Jell-O shots, it wants to stay up late and bitch bitch bitch, it might bleed out but nothing’s permanently stained, it surfs like point break without leaving a wake, it goes Louey-Louey and blows O.C. pretty, it would like you to like it, really?, it wants to be kinda Dada but it’s not that fucking desperate, wants to play it black but mostly lays trick pussy.
13. Conceptualism repeats the above.
14. In this sense, conceptualism is a fart.
14. Manure is poop.
15. Ron Silliman does not like conceptualism.
15. Dale Smith likes manure.
16. The best conceptualism is failure.
16. The best manure is neither virtuostic nor failure, though it may be both.
17. Poetry looks like conceptualism.
17. Poetry smells.


Q&A
18. Conceptualism and flarf evade the question of world (/community) peace and global (/local) justice (as ill-formed as it can be). Their stance is too often flatly ironic (sarcasm); a disguised form of earnestness (look at me mom, I get it).
18. Manureism does not evade the question, but engages with it at the level of artifice (linguistic, social, political). Manureism is deep irony: not what else does this mean (pointing to context), but what else might this do? (activating context)


Manureism cannot pass around conceptualism, and may have to go through it.

The two may also work alongside one another, performing different work.

In this sense manureism represents a possibility for love, in poetry.





April 22nd, 2010







*note: Many of the individual writers and work under the terms "flarf" and "conceptualism" might also be "shitty."

Many might be if they were situated differently.

How to sort out waste from waste; the plastic bottle from the apple core (from the banana peel)?

two words / thirteen ways of laughing at a white bird

two words / thirteen ways of laughing at a white bird from Adam Roberts on Vimeo.

Brenda Hillman - Bookworm on KCRW

Brenda Hillman - Bookworm on KCRW

UC Protests

Schwarzenegger Seeks Shift From Prisons to Schools

“Those protests on the U.C. campuses were the tipping point,” the governor’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, said in an interview after the speech. “Our university system is going to get the support it deserves.”

It's good to see that large, sustained, strategic protests can make an impact through and for our university systems. Let's see other states keep this model rolling! (And California actually follow through with its pledges...)

a quick summary

The Real Top Ten Stories of the Decade