PDX Writer Daily

... has been singlehandedly getting me through the poetically slow & sleepy Portland summer. Who is that Masked Man?

Dept. of Monday: Beijing Olympics edition

Marxism is an art form.

Guest Blogger: Undersea Ordnance Edition

A certain housemate's submarine obsession has crossed into the dark world of misslrey. Enter: the Shkval.

News from the Oracle at Delphi

Identity fed through context equals bruised Tater Tots.

Dept. of Continuous Peasantry

Chris Stroffolino is broadcasting himself from a continent I wish I had bigger on my globe.

Intrigued too by his “book of questions” response to this query in Jeffrey Side's The Argotist Online about pop music and poetry:

Q: Why do you think songs are more popular with people than poetry is?

A: Does most poetry want to be popular with people? Do most people who write poetry hope it will reach a mass audience? Do most poets like performing their poetry? Do they want to be on TV? Do they need to dress up and make themselves ‘a motley to the view?’ Are Shakespeare’s plays poetry? Is any particular Tom Waits song as popular as the image of Tom Waits? Is the media to blame for not giving poetry a chance? Is it a form of ‘market censorship’? Was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl really, as a recent anthology claimed, the poem that changed America? Are most songs really that popular? Or are they only sonic wallpaper for many these days? Are songs more popular in England than they are in America? Why are sports and “reality TV shows” more popular in America than either songs or poetry? Are these questions your readers would sincerely address (or try to answer)? If I put them to music, or made a book of nothing but such questions, could it be called art (and would that get in the way of people taking the questions as sincere?).

Then there's the political blogging on Barak Obama and the music biz.

Viva la Stroffolino.

Air Check

It’s tempting to compare Franklin Bruno’s substantive quick takes on recent work by Jan Clausen, Pattie McCarthy, and Matthea Harvey to the kind of condensed intelligence and fair-game questioning you get in pop music crit, but that’s sort of like pointing out Clark Coolidge is a jazz drummer when you talk about his verse. If column inches devoted to 'the pome' are disappearing, this may be a working model for air checks of the expanding now.

Dept. of Monday: August edition

Like summer threw a fistful of ducats, then left.

Warmly Received

I’ve been wanting to write about the trip to San Francisco, but the feelings that came up being back there are wrong for the tone of this blog. I thought about describing the old haunts I saw, most outside the City’s photo-ready heart and along the pastel phalanges, on the rickety wood fire escapes tucked behind the facades, but that seemed like a bid for insideriness, disease of the Bay refugee. I tried to write about the people I talked with, but since most of them were at events I was in, it sounded self-important, and I didn’t want to leave anyone out. I worked on some Proustian drivel about time collapsing and how much of my self is still there like stuck gum, but it was too Proustian-drivelly. So I didn’t write anything at all, and thought that'd be that, but now that seems wrong, too, like the trip never happened, or the years I was there.

Maybe the safest way to go, and in its way the truest, is a list of Books Received.* If this goes OK, maybe I’ll be able to say something later about Stas Feldman and Leonard Cohen singalongs, The New Talkies, and dirty noon martinis. Here goes:

BOOKS RECEIVED, SAN FRANCISCO/BERKELEY, JULY 10-13, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY, MAIN BRANCH
Cellini, Benvenuto The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Bull (Penguin, 1956)
Bought for $2 in the Book Bay to make change for MUNI. MUNI!

Peirce, Kathleen The Ardors (Ausable, 2004)
Discovered the outdoor Library Sale around the other side of the building and picked this up for a buck, then borrowed the poems’ names—“From the Shore,” “Fondle Pearls and They’re Quick to Fly,” “Linen Napkin”—for titles to my own poems during the reading that night. Sorry, Kathleen Peirce, whoever you are. Though you must sort of know when you name a book The Ardors and fill it with poems like “Time Shall Not Lose Our Passages” that you’re asking for someone to wobble the pedestal a little, no?

GREEN APPLE
Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (Penguin, 1966)
I’d rather just find this in Middle English and slog through, but then I’d miss the pipesmoky intro Penguins are famous for, this one by an English Catholic priest—yes, Virginia, there is a Clifton Wolters—who’s capable of lines like: “As she stands Julian is wrong. One can believe her to have erred from the best of motives.” Lost a little noon martini through the nose at that.

de Nerval, Gérard Aurélia, trans. Monique DiDonna (Green Integer, 2001)
Gift for my brother and his wife, who put me up that night, though tempted to keep for myself. Good brother.

AT JOHN SAKKIS’S
Cross, Del Ray Ein frisches Trugbild: Ausgewahlte Gedichte, aus dem Amerikanischen von Peter Rehberg, with illustrations von Jessica McCloud (luxbooks. americana, 2008)
German never looked so good enough to eat. Del, I want an Ausgewahlte Gedichte. Can you ask for that for birthdays?

Larsen, Sara M. and Brazil, David Try! Issues #1 & #2, June/July 2008
Floating Bear sans underwear.

Stuart, Francis Black List, Section H (The Lilliput Press, 1995)
I accept David Brazil as my personal savior … from Fascists!

Warren, Alli and Nicoloff, Michael Bruised Dick (no publisher listed, 2008)
You can hear the poets read from this here, but you’ll miss the unsettling half Alli/half Michael cover photo that makes the case for their being twins separated by Greek comedy mishaps at birth.

Ward, Dana Goodnight Voice (House Press, 2008)

Stephanie’s already taken this down to the pith, so here just thanks to Michael Slosek for slipping me the goods.

Young Brandon You Better Ask Somebody (no publisher listed, 2008)
Kathleen Peirce, take note: “Half On A Baby,” “I Want to Play Catch With Bill Luoma,” “No Bombs Raining Down On Our Heads By Sextus Propertius.” And that’s just the first three.

PEGASUS, DOWNTOWN BERKELEY
After reflexively looking for Clay though I know he’s no longer there, I picked up in the land where cheap postwar paperbacks never died:

Everyman, and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A.C. Cawley (Dutton, 1959)

Kalidasa, Shakuntala and Other Writings, trans. Arthur W. Ryder (Dutton, 1959)

Restoration Plays, Introduction by Brice Harris (The Modern Library, 1953)

One Hundred Middle English Lyrics, ed. Robert D. Stevick (Bobbs-Merrill, 1964)
Myrie songen the monkes binne Ely
Whan Cnut Kyng rewe there-by:
Roweth, knightes, neer the lond
And here we thise monkes song.

*“Received” here can mean books I passed cash to a clerk for and "received" in return.

Dept. of Other PPL

Guess who just flipped a digit? (HINT: Not me.)

Happy "I was on stacker 2's and i loved them but i didn't really lose too much just because i am always up and down in weight and i didn't have that many anyways cause me and my friend split a bottle of 20 for 8 bucks but at gas stations in my town you can get a bottle of stacker 2's for 8 bucks but since i am a bag lady and i am in the southern part of Indiana they dont sell stacker 2's at gas station so praise the lord on this one i have a friend that works at gnc (lol) so he got me a bottle of stacker 3's that comes w/100 capsuls and he gave them to me for 10 bucks yah but they are regular 40 bucks here too damn much for me but i will start them tomorrow and kepp you informed!!" Day.

Politely Declined

I think I make up a little ground here though.

Does anyone else see a resemblance, aesthetically and just in general shamanistic awesomeness, between Ariel Pink and LRSN? (You’ll notice that Pink lists his genre on MySpace as “Melodramatic Popular Song.” Who that’s read it can forget LRSN’s classic “On Melodrama”?)

Pink is a fuzzy condensary of American garage pop, like LRSN contains the whole face-off between orality and the grapheme in even his casualest pieces.

Tinny Spark

I feel like a dick for liking this song.

The Anger Scale & Musee Mechanique

From the ashes of Traffic, Modern Americans has managed to procure the smoking review below that was meant to appear there. Thanks to Sharon Mesmer for letting me post it here.

The Anger Scale, Katie Degentesh, Combo Books, 2006
ISBN 0-9728880-2-0

Musee Mechanique, Rodney Koeneke, BlazeVOX [books], 2006
ISBN 0-9759228-0-7

Katie Degentesh and Rodney Koeneke have produced two expansive, generous collections of flarf. Does that seem like a strange, slightly oxymoronic thing to say about flarf, that naughty, “not okay” spawn of Google and the many generations of the New York School? Many things have been said about flarf, but one thing that’s been overlooked is the expansive “meta-mind” aspect of it: how, by constantly incorporating bits of the posted poems into the new poems, the content of each subsequent poem reflects the collective sensibility and contains the indelible stamp of its origin, no matter who wrote it—like Tin Pan Alley meets TAZ in Darwinian cyberspace. One of the pleasures of being a member of the flarf collective is observing with delight how the poems produced by the list members are constantly morphed by the poem-responses to them. Of course that kind of riffing on your friends’ poems can be (and has been) construed as exclusionary in-joking. But the generosity I mentioned resides in precisely what is included, what gets incorporated, which is just about everything. In The Anger Scale and Musee Mechanique, eloquent phrases culled from search engine results are allowed to stream into goofiness (also culled from search engine results) …

Things are good, good is sweet, sweet is gnarly, and gnarly has
the musty reek that reminds me of the cow fetuses
I had to dissect a couple of months ago

(Degentesh, “I See Things or Animals or People Around Me That Others Do Not See”)

I remembered a door that turns in upon the slothful,
I remember the slothful in bed. I remembered
Oprah’s trainer is Bob Greene. Then I remembered them
under my mattress.

(Koeneke, “I Remember”)

. . . beautiful images become silly, then get beautiful again …

If it’s all in your life, you can create
a whole kermess of distinctions
or a single phrase that, centuries hence, will be remembered
as a shorthand for a kind of beauty
dominated by McCartney’s overbusy basswork.

The vowels of the text
form a short but very important obbligato
in the wheezy symphony of what you are …

(Koeneke, “Obligate Nose Breather”)

Come hither purposely
with typhus vapors
And I will spit in
the piano room

(Degentesh, “Someone Has Been Trying to Poison Me”)

… and Internet lingo meets “the poetic”:

And even though I haven’t won a game yet (!!!)
the breath of life is vivid and arresting.

(Degentesh, “I Do Not Tire Quickly”)

emo? hard core rock? punk rock? post-punk? grunge?
In the neighborhood of make-believe the big oak tree.

(Koeneke, “X the Owl”)

Degentesh inhabits the overarching organizational conceit as well as the linguistic minutiae of her work with a careful attention to—heck, I’ll go out on a limb and say love of—the quotidian: the everyday selves that emerge from her poems are shifting amalgams of familiar personae. And they “speak” via the organizational conceit: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, an assessment consisting of 566 true/false questions designed to help identify personal, social, and behavioral problems in psychiatric patients. Degentesh describes how she employed the inventory to Google-sculpt the poems in the “About This Book” section:

“Once I had access to all the questions, I began to use them to write the poems themselves by feeding phrases … into internet search engines and piecing the poems together from the results pages.”

The poem titles are statements from the inventory. Thus the arbitrary and magpie-ish flarf system (which makes fun of verity) is reined in by the use of another arbitrary system, the MMPI (which passes itself off as verity) and suggests that readers graft the question “what defines ‘mental health’?” onto “what defines ‘poem’?” Both sets of questions are unanswerable if not looked at through the prism of history. But since flarf delimits history by its use of Google-sculpting, a constant “now” speaks that is both funny under examination and critical of itself. The poem, “I Do Not Tire Quickly,” starts off the collection (Degentesh’s debut, by the way) with a surprising statement: “Even if your heart is messy, I will clean it up.” It’s a tender impossibility, for what is a messy heart? And how can it be “cleaned”? And who is the person who believes it can be done? The word “heart” appears in this book at least six times, and I don’t think that’s a fluke: the personae that Degentesh channels—those amalgams of search engine personalities—are always a little vulnerable, and the poet throws that vulnerability into vivid relief by her choices regarding the lines that buttress (or, perhaps, leap off of) that quality:

I have not had sex, etc.
I have been experiencing some darkness in my soul

(“My Soul Sometimes Leaves My Body”)

When I’m near someone missing an arm or leg
I feel weighted down by clothes,
the faithful, and celebrities

(“I Feel Uneasy Indoors”)

This “I” changes a lot–sometimes it’s robust, linear, at other times fragile, intuitive. The personae come across like disembodied voices–the new ghosts in the machine.

The machine is never far from either of these poet’s methods, of course. In Koeneke’s “Afterword” (where he discusses his involvement with flarf and its compositional methods—just as Degentesh does, in part, in hers), he says, “It’s not the machines that are shocking, but the use we keep putting them to.”

What’s shocking is the generous uses we’re putting them to: we’re more connected to each other, and to strangers, than ever. Koeneke speculates that this “connectivity” in its various guises is our ghost dance for the post-9/11 era, “a time when one kind of America dropped away and another, more unhinged one emerged.” Musee Mechanique begins with a quote from Hart Crane: “For unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees …” The computer has become an outside-the-body-brain, and we are undecided as to whether that’s a good thing or not. But Musee furnishes possibilities to consider: the opening salvo, “Use Dips to Initiate,” sets up—as the first poem of The Anger Scale did—an interesting (im)possibility robustly passed off as verity:

Whisker was first used
in the air-sparging tube
to regulate transient voltage dips
for the whole modular village

hordes of unshorn unicorns
served as insecticides …

That a whisker could be used for anything, or that hordes of unshorn unicorns could serve as anything, actually seems possible for a second, and then your thoughts run parallel to the poem itself:

that tape shall be used in every threaded fitting.
that Cheese dip appears at the Welcoming Committees.
that Outfall from dips and lead-off ditches be fed
to native plants …

There’s a damn good chance that cheese dip does appear at welcoming committees, and that’s the funny “duh!” moment that runs through poems like this one and “Sky Hook”:

sky hook? It’s a thing that attaches
to the sky.

Well, duh! And it’s utilitarian, too …

Marines shimmy up it. Sky Hook Structure
establishes “snakiness,” provides shade—protection—
from aerial predators.

Many of Koeneke’s poems explore the issues of utility and correctness in a world besotted with possibilities:

thing is cute for the first 5 minutes, then
starts to wear thin—dummy comes to life,
takes over carnival. How do you set things right?

(“Evil Dummy”)

Kitty Goes Postal—
wants pizza.
Kitty has hat & cape and looks
like a magician …

Then the pizza guy [not the cute
pizza guy, worse luck]
comes to the door and says, “Peace, Kitty!”

(“Pizza Kitty”)

One aspect of Musee that works its way stealthily to the surface is the skillful—oh, okay, I’ll say it: poetic!—manipulation of phrases. In “Let Arch Rot,” there’s incredible riffing on the words “let” “arch” “rot” (and also, at the end of the poem, on “drop/droop”)”

Stems which do not branch, but arch,
posts that droop and rot, sagged forward,
cracked: the body falls. Springs now

hang that much lower. One drop
to make arch floral, thought:
then day drooped.

That kind of music wends its way through a flarf fable, too:

a grackle and a sparrow
(the grackle is a creature
of the night, the sparrow of the day)
both in song, a song of night and sorrow
with this important difference:

the sparrow trills for vespers;
the grackle he sings for his life.

(“The Grackle and the Sparrow”)

Whereas Degentesh’s personae were filtered through an “I,” Koeneke’s flow through a “My,” especially in the section called “My Service on Parnassus.” “My Cream” discloses the troublesome vagaries of the poet’s existence within the ghost dance:

Beauty yields to grunting: girl/boy harmonies,
fecal toms, worried strings …

Spring offers its business solutions
to that vacant e-kiosk, me: Blake’s Zoas,
Yeats’s gyres, Pound’s dollars, my cream.

“My Cream” is a special kind of sonnet: the idea behind lines 13 and 14, the usual final envoy of the form, are laid bare, and then something else gets added:

In sonnets, this line should act as a pivot: if sweet,
will gently curdle, if dark add creamy tincture
to grunts of private grief

But, happily, it doesn’t end there, but goes on with images of chimps in the gloaming, and ends with the unafraid-to-be-lovely “O stars … ”

In both these collections, the language and methods of poetry are constantly redefined, refined and expanded. And in that expansiveness, there’s room for everyone.

SHARON MESMER is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. Her two recent poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books) and The Virgin Formica. Her blog is http://virginformica.blogspot.com/.

Guest Blogger Returns

Writing & Parenting

New website designs are springing up like bridge tolls around the Bay, first Small Press Traffic’s, then venerable navigator that is SPD. One victim of the improved onlinism is SPT’s paper journal, Traffic, which just went the way of all print and decided to stay trees. The double issue, 3/4 (doubles always mean danger), would have held between an original “Boykoff” cover Sharon Mesmer’s review of The Anger Scale and Musee Mechanique, along with a forum on Writing & Parenting. Paul Hoover’s already posted his contribution; mine was this:

The most obvious thing to say about writing and parenting is that once you’re a parent, you don’t have time to write. Being a parent is a miraculous exercise in the obvious, the tedious, and the banal: all the things you don’t want your writing to be. I have a new affection for the obvious since we had Auden. My life’s flattened to the contours of a toddler’s world, it’s more dependent on small variations in a limited scale, more Stanzas in Meditation than The Cantos.

I don’t fight that so much anymore, as a writer; I’m closer to being at peace with the extra-literary, or anti-literary, nature of parenting. It’s hard to push the experience of having kids into language without falling into sentiment and commonplace, a problem with trying to put anything into language—that artifice for holding experience in common, flattening it into the names we exchange—but in writing about parenting the problem looms larger, because the pre-made shapes for pouring the experience into are so insistent, well-worn, and policed. The most obvious thing to say about writing and parenting is that whatever you say about parenting in writing is obvious.

Once you’re a parent, you don’t have time to write. Every writer I’ve talked to who’s a parent says the same thing. Parents always say the same things: parenthood is an exercise in the obvious. There’s a narrow range of delights and concerns the role imposes, which is one reason it’s so annoying to be around one if you’re not one. There are writers who aren’t parents who say they have no time to write, too; writers, like parents, live in a circumscribed zone of pleasures and glooms which also makes them annoying to be around if you’re not one. The huge number of manuals on parenting and on creative writing suggests that there’s money to be made in soothing the makers of children and texts with the obvious: parents are as anxious to know their problems are “normal” as writers facing a “dry spell” are.

If parenthood itself is a dry spell, which it’s been so far for me, that’s a different order of problem, or two different problems pushed together and compounded. The problem of writing and the problem of parenting. Time considered as a writer: the stuff I always needed more of—to waste, to socialize, to bore myself with all the excuses there are for not writing. Time considered as a parent: the stuff I never have enough to give, to Auden, to writing, to relationships outside the tight boundaries of the family. The time I used to burn, find, spend, or steal for writing was always mine. Now it’s held in common: what I take for myself, for my writing, is time taken away from someone else. The things I used to do for inspiration now seem selfish, what used to be dedication—to a community, a tradition, an experiment in conducting a life in poetry—can feel like irresponsibility. Considered strictly as a writer, being a father so far has been disastrous. Considering a writer strictly as one who writes, being a parent is being a disaster.

As a writer, I’ve never enjoyed being a technician of the discourse, even to critique it. What I wanted was invention, imagination, originality: the countertop appliances of the soul. As a parent, I’ve learned more about what it means to be, or to want to be, common. To hold concerns in common with other parents that have nothing to do with being a writer; to know that the most powerful and unique thing that’s likely ever to happen to me is among the most common happenings in the world. Parenting is absolutely unique for everyone in approximately the same way. I don’t want anything wildly different for Auden than anyone else who loves their kid does. I want him to be a normal, happy child, I want him protected and loved. I admire originality in poetry, but I can’t picture clearly what it would mean to be an “original” parent. Being a parent is an exercise in always having something in common.

When I do start writing again, really writing, it won’t be the same I that writes. I don’t belong to myself, or to my writing, in the way that I did before. I don’t have the same relationship to time, or the old worshipful feeling about writing. I think having a kid has done for me what many writers describe poetry as doing for them: it’s taken me out of the word and into the world, but a world scrambled and reassembled for having its presence—Auden’s—within it.

What will Auden think of this when he’s old enough to read it? I’ve never loved any living thing so much; I cry (but don’t write) with ease when I consider it. But what parent wouldn’t say the same thing?

—Rodney Koeneke
February 2, 2007

Yippee

Various Positions

I’ll be in San Francisco this weekend, July 11th and 12th, for the two poetry-plus events below. Would love to see you there.

FRIDAY, JULY 11, 7 PM
RODNEY KOENEKE & STAS FELDMAN
Both Both Reading Series
Pierce Street, Lower Haight, San Francisco
(check site for location details)

If you’re here, you know me; STAS FELDMAN sings in Conspiracy of Beards, San Francisco’s a capella Leonard Cohen cover choir. I know he’ll be versing, I hope he’ll be singing (accordion, at minimum). Sakkis will be back from Greece with retsina.

SATURDAY, JULY 12, 8 PM
THE NEW TALKIES: LIVE FILM NARRATION 2008
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia @ 21st St., San Francisco

The bill features these writer/performers, taking on clips from the following movies:

Jaime Cortez: "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" (1967)
Cynthia Sailers: "The Passion of Anna" (1969)
David Larsen: "Logan's Run" (1976)
Douglas & Nicole Kearney: "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984)
Rodney Koeneke: "Mary Poppins" (1964)
Clive Worsley: "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972)
Charles Schulz & Erika Staiti: "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)

Going Public

New blog crush: Al Filreis.

Orono Mac Low

“... mere social encounter can't be legibly called polity until it envisions its future as a socius.”

Patrick Durgin's Orono paper on Jackson Mac Low got criminally cut short by a lax Chair, but this insight from it came home with me like a souvenir pen. Is it too late to print up T-shirts?

Here endeth the Orono chatter. Steve Evans had the presence of mind to park all the blog links here. Between that and the ThoughtMesh, there's still a lot of conference to catch if you couldn't teleport in.