Competence Snap (Johnson Edit)

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

Dept. of Forgotten Neologisms

“Cafetorium.” Forgot it sometime last century—thought it had ceded to “multi-purpose room”—but here it is back in my life. Welcome back, cafetorium.

Thought It Was Gold ...

So I guess it’s goodbye now it’s over
Nothing much changed we’re just older
But if I see you again back in detox
Put my remains in my snuff box.

The New Talkies this Friday, 9/11: San Francisco, de Young Museum

I’ll be in San Francisco this Friday, 9/11 to perform my neo-benshi piece for Paul Wegener’s German silent, “Der Golem.” Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney & Nicole McJamerson, and Andrew Choate will be up from L.A. to debut new pieces, along with local hero Jaime Cortez, who killed with his election-era Obama-ization of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” last year. If the Bay’s in your radius, hope you’ll come out. You can find some background on the movie, a troublesome gem, here, here, and here.

The De Young Poetry Series presents
An Evening of the New Talkies with ANDREW CHOATE, JEN HOFER, DOUGLAS KEARNEY and NICOLE McJAMERSON, RODNEY KOENEKE, & JAIME CORTEZ
de Young Museum, Koret Auditorium
Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco
7:00–8:30 p.m., $5 (no ticket for museum entry required)

In the past six years a new application of live poetic art has emerged in San Francisco and other cities. Neo-benshi is the art of re-narrating scenes to films with the sound muted. For this event, six poet-performers have written scripts to re-narrate scenes from well-known films. Without their original audio tracks, the images from the films are freed to reveal hidden meanings, which these writers draw to the surface or forge anew. Poets appearing tonight include Andrew Choate, Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney & Nicole McJamerson, Rodney Koeneke, and Jaime Cortez. Local filmmaker, curator, and writer Konrad Steiner introduces the program.

The Age of Incompetence 3

One of the things I like best about Kasey’s treatment of competence is his proposal of wit as a quality that vaults the poem over the walls of the ordinary while still acknowledging the virtues of the generic. Here’s Kasey’s initial formulation:

“If it were possible to state the relationship between competence and wit in terms of an equation, it might be something like wit = competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence. This automatically suggests that irony plays a part in wit. I am not just thinking of irony, however, in the flattened-out sense of sarcasm or “blank” pastiche (though these categories might also be applicable at times). I’m considering irony as a sensibility grounded in various manifestations of negativity, or radical dialectical awareness. Keats’s “negative capability” represents one partial apprehension of such awareness, but it is more or less limited to a context of aesthetic appreciation, and its potential for application in praxis is largely unexplored.”

Kasey’s particular conception of wit leans on O’Hara’s jokey equation of fashion and poetics in “Personism: A Manifesto,” which pokes serious fun at purely technical notions of poetic competence by comparing good poems to tight jeans:

“As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.”

O’Hara’s image is helpfully elastic; as Kasey points out, “the requisite tightness is always dependent upon the specific social instance, the tastes of one’s prospective bed partners, and other things that are ultimately up to the whims of fate and the poet’s intuition.” The jeans shift attention from the formal qualities of the poem to the essentially social relationship between reader and writer involved in any literary attraction. Still, to recognize the poem as “tight” you need some basic notion of fit. By Kasey’s reckoning, wit can be a way for the poet to benefit from the fact that the “technical apparatus” of the poem—which I take to mean its array of formal, syntactic, and metrical effects—“is both indispensable and ultimately unreliable.”

One remarkable example of “competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence” is Kasey’s own Sonnagram series. Produced from complex procedural scrambles of Shakespeare’s sonnets, they meet the rules of rhymed iambic pentameter with a varied and surprising syntax that reminds me how much juice there still is in old-fashioned, urn-like formal competence. While the poems are more than just competent, they rely for their effects on an atavistic idea of formal mastery and prosodic display which “competence” in its untroubled old-school sense was supposed to prepare you for, the way copying the masters used to prepare you to paint portraits. I’m guessing that poets of just about any stamp would recognize the Sonnagrams as competent, at the very least, on a “mechanical craft” level that we rarely acknowledge but still use in practice when we’re subjectively assessing for fit.

At the same time, the poems continually call attention to the limits of mechanical craft as a measure for judging the poem. The Shakespearean sonnet—the litmus for the form in English—is employed as a pure formality, an impression the strict procedural rules of composition reinforce. There’s no pretense that the metrical requirements of the sonnet mirror something essential about the content poured inside. There’s no “turn” in the argument at the appropriate line; no evidence that function matches form. There’s little sense, which you get in some modern displays of formal finish, that the poems are trying to hide their prosodic chops under a veneer of colloquial speech. The Sonnagrams turn up the contrast between content and form until the idea that one might be a meaningful extension of the other blows apart. They’re witty in the way they insist on drawing the readers’ attention to the gap between their formidable technical accomplishment (“competence”) and their extravagantly ludicrous filling (“inadequacy of competence”). What Kasey says of the satirical eighteenth-century heroic couplet applies to his own series equally well: “every closing rhyme is an elegant deflation, a simultaneous celebration of fine-woven order and an unraveling of that order.”

One reason his post sticks with me, though, is that it’s not content to simply relinquish competence as an empty formal feature, chrome on the dying Edsel. Instead, Kasey’s notion of wit returns the poem to the world in ways that may slip past some of the resistances readers can build up to the business-as-usual nexus between politics and poetry. In the process of simultaneously creating and unraveling order, wit gives poetic form to what Kasey characterizes (in talking about Keats’s verse) as the “unbridgeable gap between verbal eloquence and lived experience.” Wit involves a recognition that competence—which requires an admission of the poem’s generic conventions—is always present in a made thing like a poem, but can never be adequate to the messy contradictions of lived experience. In taking on this tension as its subject, the poem can present something true about our social lives, whose generic features are so insistent yet so inadequate to describing any one of us in our sloppy, interconnected totality.

Kasey concedes that as the “formal background” for poems since modernism has “grown hazier and more disordered,” wit operates in a more diffuse and generalized way. It’s trickier now to draw a line between those places where the poem meets an agreed-upon standard of competence and those where it knowingly demonstrates an awareness of its limits. As we come to distrust the generic features of poetry, it’s harder to make the conflict between genre and the information that keeps sloshing over its sides mimic our alternately conventional and ludicrously excessive lives. Still, there’s something in the suggestion of wit as a measure of poetry that gets at the something I keep opening all those POD chapbooks for.

The Age of Incompetence 2

Last time, I wondered if poetic competence is a useless concept right now; if “a baseline level of craft viability,” as Kasey puts it in his original post, is no longer necessary or desirable to aim for in poetry. Competence might even be inimical to contemporary ideas of poetic excellence—having one, it would seem, means you can’t have the other. The “step beyond competence,” as Kasey points out, isn’t competence plus a little extra fairy dust. Instead, it jumps off the graduated scale of “good/better/best” that the O.K. poem implies and becomes something else entirely. “Thus,” writes Kasey,

if a merely competent verse exhibits certain qualities of rhythmic smoothness, controlled diction, and so forth, we would appear to be justified in thinking that the step beyond competence consists in some added quality or ability. This added factor, however, cannot simply be increased competence—hypercompetence, if you will—in metrics or any other mechanical aspect of craft; it must be something that introduces a new evaluative category. Any number of nebulous terms leap up for consideration: genius, feeling, heart, soul, brilliance, panache, pizzazz, oomph, etc.

Kasey’s characterization of competence starts with the poem’s metrical and formal features—he uses Victorian poetry as an example of an era when prosodic minimums for poems were more clear-cut—but quickly zips ahead to what he calls “middle-class white American confessional free verse in the 1970s,” with its negative definition of competence as something more like “avoidance of cliché.” His post implies that the confessional impulse still more or less ‘owns’ competence, given that today it’s “much easier to point out things one should not do in writing poetry than to say what one should do.” He considers an alternative, avant-garde standard of competence in various kinds of procedural writing, where meeting the rules one sets for oneself becomes its own kind of “craft viability.” This turns out, by his own account, to be a rigid and ultimately limited measure though, since it exists for just that single procedure—either thumbs up, you followed directions, or thumbs down, you didn’t—and since the procedures themselves (Fibonacci, mesostics, n+7, etc.) resist ideas of competence even more fiercely than their confessional free-verse counterparts do. You might even think of procedure in poetry as a broad-based attack on the whole idea of competence and the evaluative system it enforces. I’m guessing most “anti-poetries” are really “anti-competence” at heart; it’s craft standards they have in their cross-hairs more than poetry stretching back to Sappho or Ur.

Apart from formal and procedural features, I wonder how much subject matter underpins our contemporary sense of what counts as a “competent” poem. Are there certain topics important enough in their own right that even a generic handling of them is felt to be a good thing? Anti-war poems can use familiar formal strategies but still be valued as helpful to the cause. Poems that address questions of ethnic, class, or sexual identity can do so in familiar ways and still be seen as delivering worthwhile information. Political poems rarely shade further right than Democrat—a poem expressing Republican sentiments, whatever its formal features, would be likely to violate our unspoken sense of competence. A generic slam poem, if it deals with a generic slam topic, may not win any competitions, but can still get applause for its competent handling of the conventional delivery and subject matter of the form. (Slam, in fact, might be an instance of competence working in its old-school sense—you’ve got to achieve it first before you can hope to move on to the prizes.) In the “middle-class white American confessional” genre Kasey identifies, poems about how happy one is with one’s middle-class white American life have a harder time looking competent than ones about its shortcomings.

In nearly all these cases, the criteria for judgment aren’t strictly formal or procedural, but essentially social; we evaluate the poem according to our sense of how it relates to the world off the page. Which makes me wonder if competence in poetry—Kasey’s “material features … that differentiate a ‘competent’ poem … from an ‘incompetent’ one—has disappeared entirely into the current interest in poetry and politics. Why go to all that trouble evaluating a poem’s competence, and spelling out your standards for doing so, when what you’re really evaluating is contemporary life, and the poem’s ability to reflect or intervene within it? It could be that politics has replaced competence as a valid poetic concern. Or maybe the intense interest in the intersection of politics and poetry is the old wrangle over competence waged by other means. Poets who don’t lose much sleep over questions of formal or technical mastery may be anxious to show off a kind of political competence in their poems, demonstrating a basic familiarity with the range of attitudes, values, and sentiments that fit our present notions of positions appropriate to poetry. Each literary period has its characteristic poetic subjects, and its corresponding taboos. Competence in the poetry of any era may involve a minimum facility in recognizing the right poetic subjects and handling them in the conventional ways. Given the huge diversity of styles, formal approaches, and poetic filiations right now, it may be this shared sense of affective or political competence that binds together poetry as a genre most effectively.

If that’s true, I’m curious about the political valence a “competent” poem might carry. Does it suggest political complacency—an inert, unreflective upholding of the status quo? Or is it used to screen out poems whose extra-poetical values we dislike? The teapot tempest around Frederick Seidel relies partly on a case for poetic competence, understood in the “mechanical craft” sense Kasey’s post explores. The “horrific” nature of his subject matter is supposed to rub against the formal accomplishment of his rhymes or technique or whatever to produce an exciting frisson. But Seidel’s also pitched as a throwback to an earlier poetic era, a wild man outside the trammels of fashion, so dusting off competence to talk about his verse might be part of the antique effect.

Maybe the real role of competence in poetry right now is to disappear entirely behind other evaluative metrics. One appeal of poetry as a genre in our rapidly professionalizing world is that it defies any common standard of competence. Even the MFA doesn’t pretend to do basic “quality control” in the way a CPA or a JD or a Ph.D. does. We’ve got subjects, sentiments, traditions, institutions, procedures, politics, filiations, contests, career paths, degree programs, and publishing houses. But do we have anything like competence? And is it a good thing that we don’t?

The Age of Incompetence

Nathan Austin unearthed an antique post of Kasey Mohammad’s on poetic competence recently, proving that yes, Virginia, people do read blog archives. And apparently think about them sometimes, too. Nathan’s article connects Kasey’s suggestion of wit as a contemporary measure of poetic excellence to Arthur Danto’s ideas on the state of art after the Brillo Box, Komar and Melamid’s post-Soviet paint-by-poll numbers kitsch, and Sianne Ngai’s poetics of disgust, which he reads as “the preface to an alternative measure of competence, a new test of poetry, the substance of which has not yet been written.”

Re-reading Kasey’s post reminded me how quickly discussions of “competent” shade into notions of “excellent.” The qualities I keep wanting to ascribe to competent poems—a various diction, surprising turns and torques of syntax, supple use of prosodic effects like alliteration and assonance, awareness of the poem’s generic lineage as signaled by allusion or appropriation or spacing, a knowing relationship to language not normally considered poetic (ads, overheard bus chatter, tweets, you name it), an embrace of humor and its wicked sibling, wit—really belong to the exceptional, the ones that pop out from the herd of the ‘just O.K.’ I can’t think of a poem I’d disqualify from its status as poem for missing any, or even all, of these features.

But that’s what’s tricky about competence—it’s not supposed to decide what is or isn’t a poem, which sets it off to the sidelines of the main action since Modernism. The competent poem is meant to hold down the craft fort, not define the frontiers of “poemness.” In our current poetic culture, where pressing frontiers in all directions is at a premium, an excellent poem and an execrable one share more in common with one another than they do with the competent middle. Both are more “poetic” in the sense that they call attention to—and cast doubt upon—the features that set poetry apart from our 3.4 zillion other varieties of language use. By contrast, a competent poem can never really be “poetic” in that sense—it’s too busy filling in the generic blanks required to achieve its status as “poem.” Copping to a competent poem means disqualifying yourself from having written a poem so outstandingly bad or good that it adds to our sense of what poetry might be.

If competence as a poetic value has fallen on hard times, it’s because we have so little need right now for generic poems of any kind, just as we’ve lost our need for prosody (or do people somewhere still wrangle over prosody?). You might even say that poets themselves in our particular moment show a diminished interest in poetry as a genre; that is, as a set of conventions recognized and presumably admired by its audience, even when it’s being tweaked. Genre films and genre fiction—like genre rock (though rock, too, has trouble owning up to the generic)—win passion and rabid affection from their fans. The rote and familiar are virtues, even requirements, and artists who don’t deliver a car crash or two get raked over fanboy coals. The creator is more trustee than genius, and too much originality betrays the shared commitment to the form.

I can’t think of an example of genre poetry that locks producer and consumer in a similar embrace. You might argue that the poems of a Mary Oliver or Billy Collins owe their popularity to their generic features, but I’m not sure their fans experience the work that way—that is, in the way a fan of Tarantino might appreciate the twist he gives to kung-fu, heist, grindhouse, or WW II flicks. Fans of those films could probably identify fairly quickly and lovingly a half-dozen elements expected from each of those genres. Part of Tarantino’s success stems from his insight that a really, really bad instance of the genre and a really good one both equally affirm the same generic conventions. If you love WW II films, as a genre, you’ll love the great ones and the awful ones—the awful, in fact, can become a precondition for greatness. Is there a comparable phenomenon in poetry? Ashbery’s mined the awful in verse in a way similar to Tarantino, knowingly deploying the most exhausted clichés until the bad stuff comes out as great. But neither one trades much in competence—their value scale runs from execrable to great, or execrable as great, without much indulgence for the so-so in-between.

A competent poem, on the other hand, disappears inside the genre instead of tugging at its edges. Its use of the conventions isn’t awkward enough to spark any awareness of them as conventions, and not remarkable enough to expand our idea of how much life the clichés can still hold. When competent poetry’s popular, it’s not so much because the audience appreciates the poet’s skill in handling the genre’s rules, but because the generic conventions the poem affirms (often those of an older poetic epoch) are mistaken for timeless truths: the clichéd becomes the “time-tested” or “universal.” If it’s boring or familiar, it’s because the boring and familiar are signs that what you’re getting is free of the temporary stain of the present.

Which makes it even harder for poets to cop to competence. The word implies an acceptance of conventions that aren’t supposed to be conventions at all, but yawps from the changeless heart of humankind. In a culture where genre is regarded as a kind of radio static between the poem and its transmission of affect, it’s become easier—more authentic, even—to defend a poem as “innovative” or “original” or genre-busting or whatever than to praise its command of the genre’s requirements. In poetry terms, “competent” has become the strength that dare not speak its name.

The Lovejoy Columns

The Peaches and Bats 4 launch party in Portland on Thursday flexed poetry’s ancient muscle as an aide to Mnemosyne. Jesse Morse used sonnet-length anagrams built from the letters in “Eric Chavez” to restore his favorite Oakland ‘A’ from the limbo of the injured list to the Elysium of obsessive fan recall, with the caveat I guess that sports heroes are always just magnified analogues for us. Sam Lohmann evoked broken New Year’s resolutions and landscapes that incessantly negotiate their own disappearance with representation until sky gets remembered as the “gap between smears.” Phoebe Wayne read part of a longer poem made by collaging quotations from articles about Tom E. Stefopoulos, Portland’s small-scale Simon Rodia, who spent his off-hours as watchman in the city’s Northwest rail yards chalking Diogenes and other Greek-like figures onto the columns of the Lovejoy Ramp, which used to thrust Lovejoy Street up over the trains till it was pulled down, in 1999, to make way for the ritzy Pearl. Collage seemed like the perfect technique to make sense of a city continually displacing and replacing its past, so that nothing exactly disappears—all stays somewhere in the akashic cache—but resurfaces in surprising ways, far from its home context. Like blog posts about poetry readings.

Birth of the Uncool

Thinking lately of the life-preserving traits of Joe Pachinko, mail room chief at the last office I worked in. Publisher of Lenore Kandel, author of books with names like The Urinals of Hell and The Incredibly Stoopit Adventures of Granpa Stuped, dispenser of drinks at work events where drinks get dispensed, daily shop floor reminder that soylent green is people. Here’s Joe on video in Oakland last year, & reviewed in the East Bay Express. If they ever invent that Trumball Stickney Poetry Award he used to imagine, hope they set one aside for Joe.

Elevator Redux

Great post on the SFMOMA blog about the 15-year-old subject in Robert Frank’s 1955 Elevator—Miami Beach photograph. Kerouac closed his intro to Frank’s book, The Americans, with a remark on this picture:

“And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?”

It’s Sharon Collins, Pac Heights, SF, but no one knew till she saw the picture in the paper this year and rang the museum. You can see a reconstruction of the shot in 2009—as poignant in its way—here (scroll down a little. I could swear that’s Lauren Shufran at the far right).

Synchronicity (BB Edition)

Brandon Brown, who teamed up with Alli Warren to give one of the best readings I’ve seen this year in Portland, has some great new poems in The Brooklyn Rail. It’s one of those cases of knowing and very much liking what someone’s been up to for a long time, then watching the roof bounce up a couple feet. Alex Burford’s spot-on post about all things Brandon steered me there; I found it just after getting home from Powell’s on Hawthorne, where Eileen Myles is talking to the woman in front of me in line about “BBQ” and “Brandon Brown.” Turns out she’s talking with Nicole Georges, who knew Brandon in his punk/zine KC days. Brandon, future Talking Point: kick down some DEE DEE’S KIDS!

Works and Days

Managed to see read in a single week Eric Baus, Graham Foust, Crag Hill, Lauren Levin, Eileen Myles, Douglas Rothschild, and Jared Stanley. Dug and Crag addressed a BBQ from the Cobb/Coleman victory balcony, tossing down late Creeley and Theogony like the revolution’s confetti. Lauren and Jared stunned a happy hour bar crowd into submission using only great shoes and a mike. Graham and Eric brought out the youth like I rarely see them for poetry here, which sparked the distressing reflection that youth is no longer a category of identity for me so much as a remote and exotic presence, like tropical fish passing and re-passing in a tank. Eileen sort of flipped the tank over and got Iceland to sing on top.

Learned too that Crag Hill joined the English faculty this year at WSU in Pullman, WA along with Linda Russo (who was down to see Norma Cole in Portland last week) and Christopher Arigo, a fellow Pavement Saw author. So if you see a spate of young Eigner- and Kyger-hopped poets coming out of Pullman soon, you’ll know why. It happened in Ashland—why not Pullman, too?

Cocaine

Jeremy Prynne’s reading of “Cocaine” makes Wieners’s poem sound like the tradition it’s so anxious to get into. In Wieners’s reading, it’s anxiety that drives the situation—the anxiety to be a poem overlaps with the desire to hold an unloving lover. The poet might get the one—a “real” poem—but never the other: poetry as compensatory cocaine.

Prynne reads like the dealer whispering yes you can have your coke and eat it, too. It’s like listening to that animating tension of American lit—to out-English the English—played in reverse for secret messages. Thanks to Steve Evans for bringing them together.

Sortes Virgilianae (Puppets of Sentiment)

Opening library books at random as a means of work avoidance pulls up little opals like this:

“If we should laugh at and insult the memory of the Puppet, we should be laughing at the fall that we have brought about in ourselves, laughing at the Beliefs and Images we have broken.”

—E. Gordon Craig, 1912

Jessica Grace Wing

Thinking this weekend of Jessica Wing, who wore spidery shawls against the hot campus sun, covered “Groove Is in the Heart” outside the grooveless grad dorms, and died of colon cancer five days before her 32nd birthday, in 2003. The cancer part I learned about only after the Internet, where now there’s a Wikipedia page, an official site, and a New York Times review of “Lost,” the Hansel and Gretel musical she completed a month before she died. This post is a breadcrumb trail.

avin a larf

Lesley and I are on a lethal late-summer cocktail of U.K. comedies—Saxondale, Yes, Minister, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, even a little (forgive me) Father Ted—which is maybe why I stood to attention at this (best if read in interior voice of Alan Partridge):

“Humor is therefore not a rhetorical leavening of one’s message. It is the best evidence of the door to the source being left wide open.”

On the same tack, good to see student of Britain Johnny Clay and his band, The Dimes, traipsing about as redcoats in St. Cupcake.

Sustained Decay

Got to see Andy Vogt’s installation in the back of Adobe Books earlier this month; I like how Eric Heiman connects it to San Francisco’s recent history today on the SFMOMA blog:

“Since the economic boom of the late 1990s, the architectural landscape of San Francisco has changed dramatically. Never have so many high-priced residential buildings sprouted up to fill the foggy sky, and this current recession has only temporarily slowed the gutting renovations of many existing homes. Just the existence of Vogt’s work with recovered wood lath, a construction material of a bygone age, is a comment on a city in motion, a metropolis evolving into a new landscape that nurtures some while expelling others. “Sustained Decay” can be seen two ways: as a requiem for the back rooms of old bookstores that may soon disappear, and a dream that art will always counter—if quietly, secretly—the forces that work to smooth off the rough edges of the city.”

Weekend Readings

Attractive run of readings in Portland this weekend, Thursday through Sunday, to round out an exceptionally active August. I’ll be at three of the four, but haven’t yet figured out the fourth. People keep mentioning how much poetry activity has picked up here over the last few years. It’d be interesting to put together a list of the poets who’ve moved or returned here, new series launched, and the increase in writers passing through town to read since, say, 2003 or ‘04. Of course other poets moved away in that time, and not all series stick around for long; sometimes what looks like growth is just churn. Still, consensus seems to be that things are waxing. The crowd that turned out to see Norma Cole read with Lindsay Hill at Spare Room on Thursday is about as good a non-university audience as you’ll get outside of New York or San Francisco (and even there you have off nights). I wonder if the audiences this weekend will be the same core spreading itself across readings, or a new swatch of the recently arrived. On the menu:

Thursday, August 13 JARED STANLEY & LAUREN LEVIN 6 PM, Valentine’s, 232 SW Ankeny

Friday, August 14 SCOTT INGUITO & JARED STANLEY 6 PM, Pushdot Studio, 1021 SE Caruthers

Saturday, August 15 CRAG HILL & DOUGLAS ROTHSCHILD 3 PM, 213 SE 26th Ave., Spare Room

Sunday, August 16 ERIC BAUS & GRAHAM FOUST 7:30 PM, Concordia Coffee House, 2909 NE Alberta, Spare Room

Then on Thursday:

Thursday, August 20 EILEEN MYLES 7:30 PM, Powell’s on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.