Let's Go to the Bar

Grabbed a brief wedge of sun this weekend to work through a stack of TRY!s, David Brazil & Sara Larsen’s freewheeling collage of the now. Apropos of community, the March 29th issue has a witty call-and-response between Alli Warren and Suzanne Stein about where to go drink after 21 Grand readings in Oakland. There’s been a seismic shift from Luka’s to Mwa—“The Great Migration, (c. 2009)”—and they’re trying to make sense of the aftershocks. In the process, both manage to talk about the anxieties and limits of poetic communities while avoiding words like “poetic community,” the $3 fish taco of contemporary literary discourse.

Alli’s piece makes light of “the richness of the phenomena of the after-party universe” by dispassionately toting up the pros and cons of each space—décor, menu, bar service, yelp reviews. (The fried chicken, yelp says blithely, is “smack your momma good.”) I read it as a wry calling-out of the class equipment we use in making any kind of discrimination, between bars or poetic schools. “And apparently, like Luka’s, the place fills up with laborers come weekday clock-out”: Culture workers of the world, unite!*

Suzanne does what I think of as a uniquely Suzanne thing by training attention on the performative context until that becomes the text.** Here, the performance is the fraught ballet between conversations, predilections, diverse “social organisms” and the cavernous spaces that divide them. She has this bravura conceit of Mwa as a “giant digestive tract,” mouth, guts, intestines, asshole, etc., with the poets bunching mostly in the building’s throat, “that funnel of lubricity, inchoate gurgling, speech chakra, etc.” In the end, Suzanne wants the not so politically insignificant question of Luka v. Mwa decided “by audience vote every single time.” How else? How is it that artists, or any other group, settle their “X”s v. “Y”s?

In a funny and unpretentious way, both pieces take on what may be the central question of poetic community: What do poets behave like once the poetry’s switched off? And how does it differ from what anyone else does in social groups? Are the things it takes for poetry to change the world the same things it takes for poets to switch bars? That’s three questions, but whatever, hurray for metaphor and the chops to work it like Alli and Suzanne.

*Alli, if this is wrongheaded, please comment or email to tell me!
**Suzanne, you too!

Word of the Day from the Oracle at Delphi

kekmeikotes: “those whose labor is finished.”

(Apparently the Oracle reads Brandon Brown.)

A Hole That the Poetry Manages to Leak Through

For a long time now, seems like I’ve been looking for the poetic in all the wrong places: Zardoz, blog wars, movietelling, Amazon reviews—almost anywhere that doesn’t label itself as “experimental” or “poetry.” In response to Gabe’s question about Twitter poems, Drew Gardner left a comment that gives me a better handle on why:

“It can be hard to find poetry in places you’re supposed to find it, like poetry magazines. Because poetry is a thing that happens as the natural expression of an occasion and certain combinations of elements like hail in sunlight. Finding FRONTING and MANNERISM in the place you’re supposed to find poetry is a bummer, but the point is those are NON-POETIC bummers. So WHERE you’re looking for poetry when it doesn’t just OVERTAKE you on a DVD or on the sidewalk is a good question. You could look at the ELEMENTS at play that seem to be activating it, like maybe -- intelligibility / surprise, engagement with a living vernacular as an OCCASION, POETIC NON-BUMMER or POETIC BUMMER -- either way. SOMETHING / LIKE SOMEBODY’S LISTENING and CONSTRAINT (MANIFESTATION SHAPE) -- and yr INTO IT.

w/ Zardoz, free artistic license combines with an inadequate budget to make poetry -- the inadequate just means constraint and it turns out to be not at all inadequate, it turns out to be a hole that the poetry manages to leak through....”

If that’s not an up-to-the-tweet defense of poesy, sign me up as key grip on the Zardoz remake.

Best Loved Poems of the Oracle at Delphi

“Fish, oh Fish,
So little matters!”

Algernon Rock

“Rock lyrics should have noisy words. You get to have a lot of double talk and excessive alliteration, and that kind of aligned in my mind to later 19th century or early 20th century writing, before the crystal-clear Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams style. Browning and Swinburne and Kipling, those are the writers who are appropriate to steal from for rock lyrics because they’re big and noisy and vulgar in a certain way like rock music is supposed to be. That’s the costume rock music should be wearing.”

—Matthew Friedberger

Edward Fortyhands

How’d I manage to name a book Rules for Drinking Forties without knowing about Edward Fortyhands? I even used a line about it in the title poem (“Once the forties are empty, you can untape your hands”) without recognizing the reference. Thanks to those of you under forty who came out Saturday and clued the graybeard in.

Parallaxis in Portland this Friday, 4/17

The year-in-the-making, Anna & Leo Daedalus-driven Parallaxis music and moving picture extravaganza happens this Friday in (post)Colonial Heights (really more of a small rise). Konrad Steiner of kino21 fame and a passel of other visiting filmmakers will be on hand to watch their work paired with 20th-century new music classics played live by Portland’s own fEARnoMUSIC. Totally worth not missing.

They Shoot Unicorn Structures

Nada Gordon left some characteristically wowing comments on my last blog entry about Barbara Guest and the pitfalls of poetic structure. The full quotation from Guest is this:

“The structure of the poem should create an embrasure inside of which language is seated in watchful docility, like the unicorn. Poems develop a terrible possessiveness toward their language because they admire the decoration of their structure.”

—Barbara Guest, “A Reason for Poetics” in Forces of Imagination

Nada writes:

There’s a fundamental problem with her thinking here.

The decoration is the structure. I don’t know how many times I have to say that.

Without decoration (think of flowers) everything would collapse and life, unpollinated, could not continue.

In the case of a poem, it’s not like there’s a skeleton the words as flesh adhere to. The words are the poem, therefore the words (in their arrangements) are the structure.

I responded (having initially quoted only the second sentence in Guest’s passage above):

Hi Nada,

I don’t know if the sentence preceding this one does more justice to her thought:

“The structure of the poem should create an embrasure inside of which language is seated in watchful docility, like the unicorn.”

Setting aside the prim “should,” I liked the Cloisters’-tapestries image of language seated unicorn-like inside the frail enclosure of the poem. The possibilities of language as a whole are there in potentia in any arrangement of words, seated in “watchful docility” behind the particular poem.

I guess Guest is shaking a finger at those poems that get too possessive of their language, thinking they’ve got the unicorn by dint of their well-wrought fence.

That’s still a diss on “decoration,” I suppose. But there’s the implication that the possessive poem isn’t able to appreciate its structure as decoration, mistaking it for something more substantial. Where in fact, language could pull up to full height and leap the fence at any time: it’s there not at the poem’s behest, but for mysterious reasons of its own.

That all sounds a little flutey now that I lift it out of Guest’s sentence, and it’s probably run off. Thanks for your comment—I should’ve have quoted the whole thing right from the start.

(What, btw, would a poem of “terrible possessiveness” look like? I feel like I know ‘em when I see ‘em—highly turned and crafted things polished to look like they’re not so crafted, or certain “book-length projects” rich in purpose but short on the pleasures of surprise—but wish I had specific examples.)

Nada answers:

Hi Rodney!

Does she mean “language in potentia,” I wonder? Because she does say, in the first sentence you quoted, “their language.” I don’t mean to quibble (although I am quibbling).

I woke up thinking about all this. Just because I “loathe structure” doesn’t mean, in fact, that a conceptual structure can’t exist “outside” of a poem, like a rhyme scheme or stanza pattern. I was too glib, I guess, in my dismissal of her binaristic notion.

And I also suppose that changing a word or two in a poem doesn’t, strictly speaking, make it a different poem, although that also is something one could quibble about, until one got all caught up in Wittgensteinian definitions of definition.

Still, I have this thing in me that wants that twain (material/structure) to meet: “IN a glass not air or water/ but glass itself” (from foriegnn bodie): in other words, a form is sustained, necessitated, defined, “held up,” by its material: no separation.

and maybe that’s why I want to say that the icing is the cake, too?

I’m not sure I’m making sense here, but then, I never am.

I can’t think of any examples of the “possessiveness” of a poem because the statement doesn’t quite ring true for me; not sure, too, whether she means the statement as a criticism (as you seem to interpret it) or an endearment.

I do like its pathetic fallacy very much, however, and want to substitute “women and men” for “poems”, “charms” for “language”, and “bodies” for “structure.” I’m always happy to think of a poem in terms of an odalisque basking in self-regard.

Always happy, too, to think of anything in terms of unicorns, although if I ever write a poem that evokes anything like “watchful docility,” could you just shoot me?

How do you read the passage: criticism or endearment? And does the notion of “poems of terrible possessiveness toward their language” ring true, as either praise or diss? Ideas/examples? Finally, here’s the Gordonized version of Guest:

“The bodies of women and men should create an embrasure inside of which charms are seated in watchful docility, like the unicorn. Women and men develop a terrible possessiveness toward their charms because they admire the decoration of their bodies.”

Decorative Structures

“Poems develop a terrible possessiveness toward their language because they admire the decoration of their structure.”

—Barbara Guest, “A Reason for Poetics”

Fisher & Koeneke read in Portland this Sat., 4/11

That’s Alameda, CA’s finest, Dan Fisher, at left, fortifying himself for his first ever trip to Portland this Saturday to read poems for Smorg. Dan, who clearly knows his way around a dram, may not need any Rules for Drinking Forties, but they’ll be on offer all the same, since this is their Portland launch. Please don’t let this man drink alone (again).

Smorg presents
SAT., APRIL 11, 7:30 PM
RODNEY KOENEKE & DAN FISHER
The Waypost, 3120 N. Williams Ave.

DAN FISHER lives on the island in the East Bay. An island that has 4 bridges and a tunnel. He makes poems and some of them have appeared in Bay Poetics, Viz, Work, Cricket Online Review, Lament, and some other places too. He also makes collages under the name Fish Fishtofferson. He works for Upward Bound at Mills College in Oakland. He's never been to Portland.

RODNEY KOENEKE blogs here.

Guess This Guest

Do I have this right? Barbara Guest marries Stephen Guest, a former lover of H.D.’s*, whose father gets made a Labour lord, Baron Haden-Guest, a title now held by Christopher Guest. From “The Türler Losses” to Nigel Tufnel via a Moravian Modernist and the British House of Lords—how flarfy is that?

*“During the early days of Kenwin and H.D.’s later retreat to London, there was an affair changing into a tender relationship.” (Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. And Her World, p. 204.)

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frieda Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, New Mexico, 1940s

Love this pic.

Troubadour Ruses

“Those poetical conventions were essentially stage conventions. Yet for all their artificial character, they harmonized as a whole, if not in detail, with the spirit of the social circles they were designed to entertain. If the poetic passion was in large part fictitious, its seductive intention was real enough. Both men and women liked to let themselves be deceived by the fictions which at times deceive our critics and historians. Fantasy was invited to effectuate itself in actual life.”

—Robert Briffault, The Troubadours

Rules for Reading Rules

Stan Apps reviews my Rules for Drinking Forties at Freewill Applicator (“Socialize the profits, privatize the risk”).

He joins the snazzy Brandon Brown, who made Rules a Talking Point last month over at HI.

Cy Press publisher Dana Ward has bundled the chapbook with Anselm Berrigan’s Have a Good One; you can get both together for $15 here while supplies last.

Stan calls out the striking design, typical of the thought and work Dana and Brandon Goacher put into all the Cy Press productions:

“There are only 200 copies of this lovely new book, which has a simple black-and-white ruled cover and a gorgeously complex title page in which hundreds of tiny icons have taken up residence in the words of the title and the author's name. The charming design is another little triumph for Cy Press.”

Lit Crime

The process of writing the last post, and thinking over Konrad’s responses to it, helped me to get clearer on what it is that has me looking for something other than formal innovation right now as a measure of the new. It’s just this: I don’t think change can come to poetry from within poetry, no matter how formally innovative or “anti-literary” its lineage. Poetry I think is kind of like the Eternals in Zardoz, waiting for Sean Connery to come and break the protective bubble so they can finally age and breathe. It’s ugly out there, but it’s also alive.

Amazone

I wonder if the real innovative action in poetry today isn’t so much in form, but in format: the blog, the listserv, Goodreads, the Amazon review. The way poets relate to each other through these templates, and the new expectations of response they create—less delivered faster, criticism morphed into “content” or “feedback”—may be transforming the idea of the literary more powerfully than anything that’s actually said on them.

Which is one of the reasons I’m such a big fan of Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews, which turn the possibilities of the format into a funhouse of multiple subjectivities. Each review promises access to a whole person that the template can’t possibly deliver; you get a glimpse of an “I” assembled by the products it describes, but who dreams of reading all 2,131 casually diverse reviews to put together the self behind them?

In Killian’s hands, the assumptions at the bottom of the Amazon template seem to mimic the assumptions of the financial system as a whole. The value of each review stems from the reader’s sense of a real “Kevin Killian” somewhere in back of them, but the template makes it almost impossible to assess the author who (under)writes them all. You can’t evaluate Amazon Reviewer #75 in the way you evaluate the author of a conventional novel or book of poems over the course of his or her career, though the writing in Kevin’s reviews is every bit as literary. The existence of the writing subject as a consistent bundle of interests and discriminations is kind of taken on faith, with stars, rankings, and “Helpful Votes” as its derivatives.

Recently, I’ve discovered a new dimension to the Amazon review: as a forum for global political sniping. American scholar Clinton B. Seely drew fire for his A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das, 1899-1954, from “A Customer” who accused him of being “an Occidental explorer…taking Bengali to Bengal” and for writing about Das, “a Fundamentalist Bengali Hindu Cultural Nationalist with secular pretentions, as most of his fellow Bengal Hindus are.” “A Customer”[2] then replied “on behalf of decent Bengalis, East, West, North or South,” extending “our heartfelt thanks to Professor Seely for his interest, compassion and love for Bengal and Bengali culture, and the fine work he and other ‘Occidentals’ are doing to rediscover different exemplars of that culture through a variety of outlets.” “A Customer”[3] then riposted with a blast at “the illegitimate Anglo-American Hindu love affair whose illegitimate literary off-spring is the inquiry of an Occidental in the Bengali Hindu’s Kama Sutra,” backed up by “A Customer”[4], who complains that “such Bengali-Hindu literary taste only reminds the people of Babington Macaulay’s Intellectual-Poison-Tree carried along by the Bengali Hindus all the way from Calcutta, India to Dallas, Texas.” Reviewer “R Endow” then takes things home with a swipe at Bengali-speaking Muslims: “You things are things of the past. Wake up and smell the reality.”

I’m less impressed with the exchange than with the occasion provided for it by Amazon’s craven marketing tool. The jostle of anonymous voices boxed within the format of a simple 5-star customer rating template is more instructive for me than a lot of what I read in contemporary U.S. poetry right now, with its focus on lineage, formal innovation, and guild consensus. I guess what I value in these reviews is increasingly what I look for in poetry: the feeling the machine is doing something it was never designed for, like one of those cartoon contraptions that threaten to blow because someone stuck a carrot in the nozzle where a widget should have been. I like innovative widgets, but I like the bulge in the pressurizer better. For better or (probably) worse, it looks to me more like the world outside our poetry.

Spring Fever

Look! It’s spring on Nada’s blog. That time of year when Santayana blooms on iPhones. And the “i” becomes a beautiful handheld sound emitting device.

Wieden + Kennedy Sucks Eggs (For Free)

If you come to this blog for “Poetry” or “Poetics,” please indulge a short rant about “Portland,” or at least the small corner of it represented yesterday by advertising juggernaut Wieden + Kennedy. If you don’t know Wieden + Kennedy (I didn’t till I moved here), it’s an ad agency, one of the half dozen or so big employers in a city that could badly use more.

This weekend, they decided to mark the seven-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan & Iraq with 24 continuous hours of mostly classical music at their Pearl District “atrium.” If you don’t know the Pearl, it’s sort of Portland’s attempt to look like a set for a TV show about working in a large U.S. metropolis.

As a political statement, the event ran about as deep as a Gandhi quote on a Starbucks cup. But as a civic gesture, it seemed good-natured enough at a time when Oregon’s unemployment rate tops 10%. We could use a little free anything right now, and Portland’s classical scene, with its yen for experiment and crossover, is a strong one worth supporting.

When we turned up a little after 5 PM on Sunday, we found about fifty people milling around the foyer, no musicians in sight. One of the persons working the event immediately offered us a giant-sized poster showing all the concerts W+K had lined up for the public for free, every hour on the hour, 7 PM Saturday to 7 PM Sunday. He explained, though, that this particular public standing in the office foyer couldn’t attend this particular hour—it was seated at capacity, and we’d have to wait till 6 to find out if enough people would leave to make room for us.

There was no announcement about seating capacity in either of the weeklies that carried news of the event, or on the event website, or printed on the posters. No suggestion that the concerts were first-come, first-serve, or that one should plan to arrive early because seating was limited. You might think that W+K got caught with its pants down, surprised by the size of the crowds that turned out. But I counted at least four on-duty staff, telling us where to line up and smoothly managing the overflow. Since I was there with a child, I couldn’t afford to wait 50 minutes in line with no guarantee of a seat at 6. So we left.

Normally this would be a minor annoyance. But with things as they are in Portland right now, with the mayor under criminal investigation, the 12-lane ungreen freeway bridge over the Columbia approved, and Major League Soccer coming to town on mostly public money at the call of Henry Merritt Paulson III, 35-year-old millionaire son of W.’s former Treasury Secretary, the W+K “free but not for everyone actually here” stunt symbolically galls. How much of what Portland promises—free, green, grassroots, or growing—does it really deliver? What’s the truth behind the ads?