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]