I like Jim Behrle. I've said that before, in many places. He organized the first reading I've had in many a year. He's wrong about various things, but then, so am I. I did give a few readings before he was born (this is fact, not hyperbole), & edited some magazines before he was born (TALISMAN - & not that NJ rag), & won some awards, before he was born (all 3 they offered at Brown U. - in 1971). I have organized some readings for other people - for Keith Waldrop, & Ange Mlinko (his heroine), & the guy who edits The Poker, he's so cool, I forget his name at the moment, & various other poets. & I have been invited to read by people other than Jim, occasionally (once every decade or so). & I published various people, & edited their books, & did anthologies, & stuff.

But I don't care if Jim gets his facts wrong, I really don't. Jim hates & despises po-biz almost as much as I do. God forbid, maybe he was influenced by my sour grapes! Poor guy. The clown's laugh, the sufferer's grimace, all the same.

The trouble is, satire & mockery are so dependent on the things they mock. It's a co-dependency situation. Jim's a trawler on the bottomland of Verse World. Dante & Pound & tons of turgid theologians wrote about the problem - "words about words", "poesie der poesie", po-biz about po-biz...

after a while the laughs seem febrile & hollow, because everybody's gone home & the clown takes off his smile mask & the bass player has no girlfriend & blah blah blah...

Verse World is a very layered & phony world, even more bizarre & fishy than Hollywood - & that's saying a lot!!!! All those career minded people, striving for academic credentials & tenure & all that business. Like the people in Canterbury Tales, really. People.

Meanwhile we have no safety net in this country. We have no public speech to speak of, not from poets anyway. This is because the symbolistes & the New York Fish and the Langpo Fish and the SF Fish and the Olson Fish are too busy schooling about, semi-gleefully, in their patterns of yesteryear...

& Jim understands this!! That's why I like him. But satire will only go so far in the echo chamber of words about words, in the sub of sub-subcultures of sub-sub-librarians.

Poetry is the spark that ignites those words and your reality.

Too bad if your reality is... just more words.

I had the nerve to post a mild criticism of "flarf", and to posit a distinction between flarf and poetry, on a poetry blog. Jim Behrle, a would-be defender of flarf, took it upon himself to do so by insulting me personally, several times over.

I know I'm not supposed to take Jim Behrle's mannerisms seriously - "all in fun", etc. But I'm taking his attacks seriously, anyway. I think Jim needs to find some new routines.

When someone intentionally blurs the distinction between criticism and personal insult, it means there's some kind of agenda at work. When someone intentionally blurs the distinction between a person, on the one hand, and their creative work offered to the public, on the other, then there's an agenda in play there, too - maybe the same one.

In my view there's a necessary, a substantial distance between the person and the work of art, which has its origin in the process of making poems or art works : a process which involves some kinds of self-surrender, and work, and openness to learning and chance and many other things.

We all share this, whether we're readers or students or makers - and it should be a free activity. And I don't think the freedom of poetry is understood or advanced by people who consider poetry as some means an end.

I'm not bragging or being "holier than thou", as Jim Behrle says, when I emphasize this. My outlook is just a consequence of my own experience of the creative process. I feel a conflict between literary and extra-literary phenomena.

So, when I criticize flarf, for example, and Jim Behrle responds with personal insults - in order, in his view, I suppose, to defend his friends and fellow flarfers - then the feeling I get is that he's not so much defending flarf as defending the social self-interests of his group. Because if he disagreed with my criticisms, he could address my criticisms; however, his first impulse is to jump to the defense of his friends.

Jim Behrle himself loves to satirize the social phenomena of po-biz, in its many spheres : but he also tries to have it both ways. He's got his own social sphere to defend, while attacking others. In this he participates in the same in-group phenomena, the same utilitarian literary politicking, the same self-serving po-biz, that he likes to mock.

This is the po-biz world which, on all its levels, seems like a sideline or a distraction from the basic contract between 1) the poet and the poem, and 2) the poet and the reading public. It's the world of the middle-men and -women, of talk and gossip and jabber and amateur theatrics.

I had a nice vacation in the Shenandoah National Forest. Crossed paths with a bear. It's kind of depressing to come back to this po-biz world of ours.

Jim Behrle's good with slander & insults. He's a little Boston bully-boy.

It's mostly about ego, I guess. I'm not sure where the poetry part comes in.

I don't like bullies. I'm ashamed of the times I've engaged in it myself!

& I don't like crowd phenomena posing as poetry scenes. There are so many distractions from the real thing out there.

What a nice guy Jim Behrle is. He wakes up every morning and thinks, "who can I put down today?"

& what a nice group of friends he has, the gleeful crowd who cheer him on. It reminds me so much of the cliques in junior high. & what great people they were, too. Though most of them grew out of those cliques, eventually. Poets get a break, though - they're so charmingly childike, aren't they.

Too bad about Wordsworth Bks in Cambridge, & Jim Behrle's job. Hope he lands something new & better even.

Does that make me the last reader in the Avengers series, after this guy? If so, how ironic - the effete neo-classical Samsonite brings down the roof. (But I'm sure there will be more Behrle productions.)

I have to get Sarah at the train station in a few minutes, a bit rushed here. But feeling warm & happy about Cambridge reading yesterday, courtesy of the mysterious Jim Behrle. Happy to meet Allen Bramhall & Beth, and hear him read his [afraid to use conventional adjective] poetry, which I enjoyed a great deal.

A fine thing today to see Allen had been reading my poems in Stone (written 30 yrs ago) & liking something he read.

About the photo : it was taken on Houston St, in my high school friend Chris Kraemer's loft looking over at the World Trade Center, in 1975. Chris was a promising photographer in NY, who made a living as a builder (he is an archetypal Finn from MN, whose dad ran a hardware store there). He knew some bigshot artists at the time, Vito Acconci, Susan Acolella(? - don't know who I'm talking about). Also a whacky Russian sculptor named Ernst Niesvestny. When Stone was published, Chris arranged a little party at his studio someplace in Williamsburg. I remember sitting on a huge wooden crucifix sculpture he had laid out on the floor, being toasted with vodka. The title Stone, of course, was an imitation of Mandelstam's first book, Kamen ("Stone") - an acronym of akme ("acmeism"). So this party felt appropriate. Chris married a New Zealand clothing designer so she could get a green card, & they ended up staying together & having kids. He lives out in the Bay Area now. That's his typewriter & cot (I use a Sears Constellation myself). I was living with them for a few months in NY, helping Chris on interior painting jobs etc, before going over to London to try to take Mick Taylor's place in the Rolling Stones.


(p.s. Monday morning : through Denny Moers, a former student of Robert Creeley & studio assistant to Aaron Siskind, I was able to get an actual Siskind photo for the cover of Stone - some sections of Inca wall in Cuzco. The Inca/stone/Mandelstam/Vallejo configuration shows up 25 yrs later in the penultimate sections of Forth of July. Yesterday was the traditional anniversary, by the way, not only of the death of John the Baptist, but of the execution of Atahualpa, the last Inca ruler.)

I will be reading so-called poetry with Allen Bramhall at Wordsworth Bookstore, in Cambridge (Harvard Sq.) this Saturday, Aug. 28th, 5 pm. Courtesy of Jim Behrle. Admission is free. Omission? That will be $5. So see you there!

Why is Jim Behrle badmouthing Kent Johnson so much? I don't get it. I looked at Kent's Abu Graibh piece. It's standard political satire, it does what satire's supposed to do: it gets you down into the ugliness & makes you squirm. The last paragraph simply zeroes in on its probable readership (poets) & makes them identify/empathize/squirm too. He emailed me to ask what I thought of it, & I said the weakness of it is it seems aimed narrowly at the in-house poet audience, & that it should include more "emails" from all walks of life.

Behrle's take-off on Kent's last paragraph doesn't rise to the level of political satire, it just makes fun of somebody by harping on their supposed weaknesses.

Now I suppose the Behrle campaign will be mounted against me. I don't know all the "history" gossip or rumor behind Behrle's animus toward Kent, it's none of my business. As I recall, & my memory can be fuzzy, he's mad at me because he didn't like the way I was talking back to David Hess some time years ago (& he didn't like me calling him "Jimby", which I don't call him any more). But that's all water under the bridge. I'm blocked for some reason from his comment box (at his blog), so I won't be able to respond, when the torrent comes. I really don't care anymore about all this piss-ant poet "biz".

Everyone should lay off the badmouthing & recognize they have personality disorders which are not cured by aggression & petty sniping. That includes me, that includes you, Behrle.

[p.s. I see Kent has responded to the Behrle piece over at the Hotel today. Whenever I go to "Hotel Point" I think of some big windy light-filled drafty comfortable mostly vacant old hotel on some point in Lake Michigan. & then I think of the hotel in the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge.]

Mr. James Behrle writes (outlining his view of Joan Houlihan's approach):

A poem *must* mean something, something that can be consumed. Like a Big Mac. A poem must be something that can be discussed in a circle, taken apart and put back together. A poem is something that can be taught and understood. There is no rigor to push language, to test sounds, to create dissonance, to make it new.

Knowledge has been identified with food since at least the Genesis story of the Tree of Knowledge.

But food means more than gobbling down protein & vitamins for "survival". The nourishment is often indistinguishable from the pleasure. What I understand Houlihan to be referring to, in her critique, is the pleasure of Pound's logopeia, the "dance of the intellect among words".

Now Mr. Behrle may be correct in saying that the poetry of his "we" often involves no simple transfer of meaning, in fact it may involve a rejection of "meaning" in this sense altogether, and still remain poetry. But it would be too bad if the rigor of his "we" style of consumption denies the pleasures of meaning altogether. Houlihan's quotes from various auto-pilot playfully ambi-meaningless experimental taste-defying word-gumbos simply underlines her argument that certain pleasures of ordered meaning are missing there.

Stubborn Grew (2000) is situated - thematically, stylistically - in between, or in the midst of, The Bridge, Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, Ulysses/Finnegans Wake, Moby Dick, Maximus, "A". & draws them to its own end. But the supposed avant-garde has shown no interest. Jim Behrle writes, Poetry is : ignoring Henry Gould. The builders builded better than they knew.

Tim mischaracterizes what I said. There was nothing in there about triumphant barbarians, nor was my issue with "dominance" of a literary market or scene. I've never argued in favor of choosing the accessible mainstream over the avant-garde (Tim's reductive comments only more evidence of this boring binary at work).

Meanwhile, Jimby the Famous Monkey reinforces the chimp theory of socio-poetry. David Hess disses old ape Henry. Henry swats him down. Dave goes off to sulk in the jungle. Jimby yells boo.