He Is Carles

Train in Vain

“And as we all know art
is simply the leavings
of the entrained verb of is …”

Lanny Quarles, comment on Nada’s blog

Dept. of Me, Too 2

I
use imperial
measurements
for flan

Busride with the Oracle at Delphi

Fingernails on chalkboard is the music of community.

Plus, Oracular Message (OM) for Paul:
“No, your dad was not Lil Wayne.”

Dept. of Me, Too

“i over tip cab drivers because i can't do the math under pressure.”

Herta So Good

Does anyone know how Romanians inside Romania are reacting to Herta Müller winning the Nobel Prize? They’ve been waiting years for their turn, grooming their own set of Romanian-language contenders, and end up with their first Nobel in Lit from a German-language author who’s lived in Berlin for nearly a quarter century. Putting aside the quality of her work and considering just the politics, Sweden might be seen as getting a “two-for-one” with a writer like Müller, German and Romanian, showing sympathy for a (now nearly vanished) minority community while staying safely within the EU’s cultural comfort zone. The German-speaking minority in the Banat has a complex history in Romania as oppressors and oppressed—mostly, since the Soviet occupation at the end of WW II, tragically oppressed—and it sounds like Müller explores that legacy in scrupulous detail. Her resistance under Ceausescu also looks uncompromising and brave in a time and place where shady accommodation was more the norm. I’m glad for the chance to discover her work, which I hadn’t known about before the award. Just wondering if this is seen in Romania as a triumph, or another example of Romanians getting the short end of the European stick. Or are they too busy with their government collapsing last week to even care? (Banat’s now second most famous German pictured above.)

The Now It Was

“We’ll try to found ourselves, desperately, in the present, but no instrument at our disposal is suitable for the job in anything but a phantasmatic capacity. It’s a structural weakness in our Gattungswesen that we can batten on phantasms for ages and ages. Say writing, for instance: the ghost in advance.”

—David Brazil

Greenstreet & Russo Read in Portland this Friday, 10/16

The English Department at Portland State brings Kate Greenstreet and Linda Russo to town this Friday, 10/16. Go English Department at Portland State.

Friday, October 17, 6 PM
KATE GREENSTREET & LINDA RUSSO
Portland State University, Neuberger Hall 407 (English Dept. Conference Room)

Ahsahta Press published Kate Greenstreet’s first book, case sensitive, in 2006. Her second, The Last 4 Things, came out with Ahsahta last month. This is why I hurt you, a recent chapbook, is available from Lame House Press. New work is forthcoming in jubilat, Court Green, Hotel Amerika, Practice, Saltgrass, and MAKE.

Linda Russo is the author of MIRTH (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999), and her poems appear in recent issues of Bird Dog and Fence. She wrote the preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). A graduate of the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, she teaches creative writing at Washington State University in Pullman.

Weinerssance

Maria Damon on Hannah Weiner and on Juliana Spahr on Hannah Weiner in the new Kaurab; Stan Apps on Weiner and on Spahr on Weiner at the upcoming &NOW Conference in Buffalo.

Stupid Poet Tricks

How to know your own ‘C’ when you’re also its column of air.

This Glittering Tour de Force

I’m sure this is wrong. Why is it also so moving?

“The creativity of Egyptian civilization seemed, in the end, strangely to miscarry. Colossal resources of labour were massed under the direction of outstanding civil servants, but only to set up the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality was employed, but to make grave-goods. A highly literate elite utilizing a complex and subtle language and possessing, in papyrus, a material of unsurpassed convenience, deployed them copiously in texts and inscriptions, but left to humanity no great philosophical or religious idea. It is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness, at the heart of this glittering tour de force. Only its sheer staying-power remains amazing.”

—J.M. Roberts, A Short History of the World

Dept. of Monday

Days when you wish the world would compress to the size of that theater the Beatles keep trying to escape from in A Hard Day’s Night.

Tangent Reading this Friday, 10/2

A gaggle of poets land on Portland this weekend to participate in the Econvergence conference; 14 of them read Friday at 9:30 PM for Tangent. Just mosey over from Noam to the SEA Change Gallery on Everett. Details below.

Tangent presents
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 at 9:30 PM
ECONVERGENCE READING with: JULES BOYKOFF, JAKE BUFFY, DAVID BUUCK, ALLISON COBB, ALICIA COHEN, JEN COLEMAN, CA CONRAD, ROB HALPERN, DAN RAPHAEL, KAIA SAND, FRANK SHERLOCK, JOHNATHAN SKINNER, AARON VIDAVER & DAVID WOLACH
SEA Change Gallery, 625 NW Everett St., Gallery #110, Portland, OR

Attention Span 2009

My up at Steve Evans’s Attention Span 2009.

Wild Orchids

Robert Dewhurst sent a copy this week of Wild Orchids, the new annual he and Sean Reynolds edit out of SUNY Buffalo. Each issue solicits contemporary poets’ responses to a single author—Herman Melville for the debut, Hannah Weiner on deck for next year. This gives the issue more cohesion than you get in the usual contemporary literary journal, even creates a sense of exchange—if not quite a conversation, maybe a gam—between writers who ply the same thematic field.

Benjamin Friedlander’s account of readerly disorientation in Melville’s Clarel, a neglected epic of faith, conversion, and stony materialism in the Holy Land, stuck with me in particular, especially this remarkable encapsulation of the 19th-century crisis of faith:

“In Clarel, what restores awe to the world of stone—at least in theory—is faith. Not just faith in God’s existence, but faith in the reality of sacred history as a whole. For if the stories of the Bible are not literal truth, what would distinguish them from the tempting lies of fiction? And if they were instead a figurative truth, what would make them preferable to the literal truths of human history or science?”

Stacy Szymaszek—whose reading in Portland this summer the week Hyperglossia came out I keep meaning to post about—describes the coming together of a Great Lakes writing scene in part through Melville’s watery sense of geography, where exchange is more occasional and rhizomic, maybe more gift-like, than it is in the buzz of a sexy urban hub. Kim L. Evans, Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Donald E. Pease, Mark Von Schlegell, and Chris Sylvester also have essays and inventive formal investigations sparked by different aspects of Melville’s work.

The piece that seemed to maximize the fun of the theme-based form was “Transpositions of ‘A Utilitarian View of The Monitor’s Fight,’” where the editors invited three poets—Joyelle McSweeney, Courtney Pfahl, and Jennifer Scappettone—“to mark, write, scribble and draw” around Melville’s weird ode to the U.S.S. Monitor, the first ironclad warship and subject of a thousand grade school dioramas. A year ago I tried to get into Melville’s Civil War verse, but quickly aborted. His poem on The Monitor stood out, though, for its recognition that a new kind of war needs a new kind of meter, “more ponderous than nimble,” stripped of pomp and charged with “plain mechanic power,” like the modern ships busy divesting war of its glory and confining it to its proper sphere, “among the trades and artisans” with their bland “calculations of caloric.” Melville may have been among the first to see what professionalization would bring to the mythic process of killing, and to understand what that should mean for modern poetry, where poets, like warriors, “are now but operatives” in anonymous systems more awesome than themselves. It’s a strange, self-defeating sort of poem, parading its own awkwardness as a mimetic necessity for commemorating the ambiguous virtues of the modern.

Each poet rises to the challenge differently; McSweeney with what struck me as a Gurlesque conjunction of “heels and bikini,” “manicures” and “fetlocks” pushed up against Pennzoil, trade shows, pistons, and Gulf rigs to ironize late-capitalist martial display; Pfahl with a lacuna-rich erasure of Melville’s original poem; Scappettone with a similar razor-to-paper collage made from the original poem, framed with a comment connecting Melville to Walter Benjamin and the “Interiors measurelessly strange” of Piranesi. It’s good to see Melville’s Monitor afloat like this; I hope the series keeps moving. Submissions for the Hannah Weiner issue are due by December 15; you can order an issue at WORCHIDS_at_gmail_dot_com.

Rethinking Summer

Mark Wallace thinks again about his summer reads, Rules for Drinking Forties in the mix.

The New Talkies, de Young Museum, San Francisco 9/11/09

• Friday passes procured at secret entrance.
• “Sound check.”
• Interns snaking poets past replica of Tutankhamun’s royal chair.
• Picking up phrase “deep rake” to describe altitude of museum theater.
• Wondering if “deep rake” will fill.
• Wondering will any poets fill deep rake on SPT’s cross-town opening night.
• Free sandwiches, free potato salad, free fruit salad, free wine in backstage “hospitality tent.”
• Jaime Cortez practicing “The Fifth Element” in dressing room, mirror missing only that ‘Norma Desmond’ circumference of lights.
• Interns snaking poets from hospitality past jazz back to rake.
• Deep rake miraculously filled.
• Paul Hoover and Konrad Steiner launching intros and history gracefully up into crowd.
• Performing to darkness with audience somewhere inside it.
• Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson “discovering” D.W. Griffiths’s lost last movie, a white fantasy about black urban rioting, in the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment from “Fantasia.”
• Nicole doing parodic square “film critic” voice, primly detaching technical and aesthetic advances from baldly racist content.
• Jen Hofer turning the “silent service” into metaphor for invisible weapons of mass inhalation via apocalyptic ‘50s thriller “On the Beach.”
• Andrew Choate equating words to food, and calling out gourmandizing tendencies endemic to both, with “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.”
• Jaime Cortez resurrecting Michael Jackson from the high fashion retro-futurism of “The Fifth Element.”
• Friends and poets and friends of poets climbing down rake to say hi. Vielen Dank to Maxine Chernoff, Kelly Holt, Scott Inguito, Lauren Levin, Rachel Loden, Dana Teen Lomax, Ronald Palmer, and Mac McGinnis, to all who came that I didn’t get to meet, and to “MRM” at Unruly Idiom for the great write-up.
• Clown car derby exiting after-hours parking lot.
• “Park Chow.”
• Glen Park mezcal.
• Fade to black.

Competence Snap (Johnson Edit)

“Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it.”