Jordan is happy today. And when he says, "our ugly NY/slam/beat performativity", I'm thinking, the worm has turned.

But the question of "surplus" is not resolved simply by positive attitude (though that is always appealing in itself).

My theory (for today) is that the surplus problem is resolved by a critical approach : ie., a new critical taste for perfection. By which I don't mean a license for more negative reviews, but rather a challenge to be careful & discriminating enough (and independent enough) to find the perfect.

(p.s. isn't that an old Zukofsky criterion? "the objectively perfect")

Jordan bespeaks about Mark Halliday's essay in recent Pleiades. My copy is at home, & I am at work, & I read it a couple weeks ago... but I'd say I was more convinced by Halliday's arguments than Jordan is.

Paraphraseable meaning doesn't have to be "earnest". In my view it adds depth to the ruffled surfaces. & it's part of communication. Unless the hegemonic post-argument of Cindy Fickle still stands (ie. poetry doesn't "mean", doesn't "communicate", doesn't "say", doesn't "point", doesn't "fill in the blank").

I see what my problem is in poetry - I've been reading Jordan's blog instead of his reviews.

I can be a little slow. I'm from Minnesota, if I haven't mentioned that yet.

Came home from Minnesota to find my copy of The Hat. Nice work, editors! Like the design. Like the hat.

Walking home from work last night, thinking of Jordan's comments on reading Raworth, did I have a minor epiphany, or just another wobble of opinion? But it did occur to me, that lambasting "langpo" for highlighting the signifier is a hopeless endeavor. Why? Because leaning on the signifier is so integral to all poetry; and, despite the wheedling mutilations of "Theory" which some "language poets" use to justify their mediocre verse, they, along with all poets, are just as wrapped up with, enamoured of, the youthful geste of the word-for-its-own-sake: the poet's most basic assertion of independence, which is to have fun with words, no matter how irrelevant & insignificant & socially-disengaged that activity may be, no matter what the consequences. So underlying their opportunist theorizing is a more basic & shared impulse toward (literary) freedom, liberation.

So that perhaps even the "highest", the most ambitious, profound, engaged, meaningful, relevant, knowing, great, etc., poetry is - at some hermetic & inaccessible level - grounded on fun - and if not, it rings tinny, ponderous, hypocritical, phony, etc.

*

Extra-nice & precise over at Hotel this morning. Still, I would say, there is a place for the "objective", for observation. All Proust's qualifiers & refinements (the inward experiential accuracy of impressionism) nevertheless require it. & without basic perception, the stylistic excesses fall just as bloatedly in the other direction.

Here's Jonathan on the aforementioned latin bit. (& he becomes reader # 8 of Stubborn Grew, the book that changed history (at least until the Johnson-Silliman Pact of 2004, outlined by that Walden guy) - thanks - & congratulations!).

I would never think of Robert Creeley in relation to that notion. Ars et celare artem makes me think, not so much of plainness & simplicity, as of a kind of crafty guile, combined with all sorts of indirections, including perhaps a surface moderation or transparency. But Jonathan's concept may be more accurate.

This gets me to Jordan's aside on "depth". I'll have to think a little more deeply about this. Somewhere in the book Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here a while back, there is something about archaic astronomy-astrology as the search for. . . man, now I can't think of the word! It's not consistency. . . it's not continuity. . . but it's like that. . . it's like a philosophical term for steady duration, a pattern which remains the same. . .

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it seems to me that hermeneutics or interpretation of art works often involves searching for the deep motive, the wellspring which connects all the dots, the answer to why an artist or writer chose this particular obscure symbol or image or emphasis.

The presence of such a motivating plot or plan is one signature of depth. You could also talk about an artwork's "emotional depth", but such is usually brought, paradoxically, to the surface (the crisis, the denouement). Depth of purpose, on the other hand, often remains hidden & disguised - and the reason for this is because there is the deepest emotional commitment to the deep-ocean argument which actually triggered the work in the first place.

& a very happy birthday to Jordan's Mom, too, here, at the last minute! I wrote a good entry about the beautiful article in this week's New Yorker by Peter Hessler, "Oracle Bones", which also (along with G. Packer's piece) concludes with Walt Whitman. Must have something to do with Lincoln's birthday.

but blogspot deleted it somehow, or maybe I did. anyway. read the Hessler piece, pozhalista! a raison d'etre for the NYkr.

Jordan then:

But I see that Henry is just differentiating in his private-public space between "talk" and "poetry." Well shut my mouth for renegade intrusive quibbling.

Please, dear Jordan, intruse all you like. You're about the only one of the boys, anyway, who acknowledges my existence, even, ghoul or no. I need you bloggers, badmouth as I be. Talk is good when it's good; so's poetry. So are the oysters in Galveston. & have a good week off too.

Jordan is readin' Wolfram von Eschenbach. It's the 4th of July. Shucks, I mean the 5th. Bada-boom-boom - them thar is three dropsa blood in the Schweissen Schnee.

Jordan blogues:

"Not for the righteous but for the sinners: a preacher on the A platform at 125 last Friday (Greek Good Friday) likened faith in God to the certainty when above the surface of the water that we will be able to breathe."

Baptism. Water & Fire. The Spanish name for the Mississippi River was Rio del Espiritu Santo. (In July, Bluejay at the nadir of the delta pulls Henry out of a well & puts a paper hat/boat on his head.)

Thank you, Jordan. Me & Ceravolo! I was reading him with joy in 1970. I too believe in the resurrection as imminent historical event : I just think it might feel like a good reading experience (say, Finnegans Wake or Pale Fire).

Jordan feeling feisty this morning.

I have the best of both worlds: make real arguments, experience eerie silence.

I see different critical talents, here & there in blogworld. Ability to characterize with precision & understanding, sometimes. Articulate. Not so partisan, clubbish; not so ready to spray cliches & beery nostrums from the political Bladder. Readers with real ears.

This split between mainstream & oppositional bugs me. Too many abstract counters, categories, pigeonholes. Seems to short-circuit synthetic energies necessary for solid critical perception; thus it stymies reception to some extent. Why not just fageddabaddit, & read the things on their own terms, & respond to them on your own terms, personally, as if you picked them up in a 2nd-hand bkstore in Tashkent.

So I create this imaginary St. Petersburg, where Gumilev & Akhmatova & Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva & Pasternak discover how to make past poetries their own (individual craft); speak about their traditions (education); engage in polemics while recognizing talent in the other's camp (culture). Russian ark.

& I can empathize with Mandelstam's notion that we write for an imaginary interlocutor from the future. (In fact I must say I sometimes I feel like a figment of his imagination in that sense.) Have I reduced a great Russian poet to the status of a reverse image of my own "professional" nonentity, by removing him from his proper context (his contemporary Russian audience)? So that he serves as sort of an icon/imaginary friend on the mantle for Everyman-Nobodypoet? That's part of it, I suppose. My context is this small city in Rhode Island, where I live & screw up & leave behind a sort of hodge-podge of inscriptions stored in the John Hay Library archives. When I'm underground over there in the 132 acres of North Main Cemetery, my poems will assume a different tincture, as the paper dries & the ink fades.

I want to write more topical report poems, up-to-the-minute Audenesque, & have them published in the New Yorker & in the paper of record in St. Petersburg, Florida.

& of course I could always read more poetry myself. . .

Jordan, you are right, of course.

The barons are still in charge.

Maybe the difference is that I think social justice through democracy is possible.

Maybe you think so, too.

I am tired of pessimism that is too close to complacency; of conspiracy theories that are just lazy thinking; of resentments based on ignorance; of self-righteousness rooted in abstract utopianism.

The cultural divide in this country might be addressed by means of some hopeful self-criticism, rather than by self-pity & despair. That is, coasters on the left might share the goal of social justice with "Middle America", if they look beyond their own bogeymen (rabid fundamentalists & scheming plutocrats).

No Jordan, you give ME an alternative analysis !

OK, democracy, this democracy, is nowhere near perfect.

So your alternative is to say : it doesn't matter, everyone will sink back into apathy anyway?

this is what I call cynicism. & your interpretation of it strikes me as standard left : the treadmill is created by repressive elites.

OK. it's not standard left. . .then what is it? If the alternative is not collective state control of the economy, what is your alternative?

how do you propose human beings live together? how should they establish government, if at all?

I, for my part, am in favor of Business; I'm in favor of Government; I'm in favor of Popular Sovereignty & the rule of enlightened public opinion (note the word enlightened); I'm in favor of protecting property rights as a cushion against tyranny, but not as an absolute right trumping the common good.

call it boring, OK. But your pessimism & cynicism have political consequences too. You run down the way things are, but when challenged, you get "bored".

All right I am done for today.

C'mon Jordan, I'm responding to what you said. & you were responding to me. When I said, in the context of talking about democracy, popular sovereignty, that I was interested in how Iraqis would judge the overthrow of Saddam,
you responded that they would feel like most people, falling back into treadmill of apathy (but maybe less of a treadmill than here in the US, because there "there isn't as much at stake to keep them controlled".)

I said that was too cynical, an example of jaundiced left thinking, which can't distinguish between government systems (or perhaps has an interest in blurring such distinctions). Yes, the left wants you to think that it's all capitalist repression & conspiracy coercion, because they have an interest in attacking private property as a right of the individual (see Papal encyclicals); the logical outcome is statism ala Stalin, Saddam's idol.

That's the "Jordan" I was responding to.

There's a treadmill. It's called life. But if it's across cultures, then the U.S. didn't create it.

Are you saying, Jordan, that because there's a general happiness/unhappiness curve, there's no difference between systems of government? I'd rather not live in North Korea right now, thanks. I'll take South.

The jaundiced left goes back to the Cold War. & to the Great Depression before that. Maybe we need to go back to the Progressive Era. Go visit Hull House in Chicago, & take heart.

re: the treadmill : you are too cynical, Jordan. there is a difference between a free society & a tyranny. this seems like the essence of what the jaundiced left does not comprehend.

No Jordan, I don't think democracy is a shell game for elites. We see what we want to see, & what strikes me now is just how much the left wants to see "bad".

As for democracy in this situation, I will be very interested to see how the majority of the Iraqi people feel about the overthrow of Saddam in a year or so.

Nor is domestic & global policy a completely seamless web of conspiracy, no matter how much this war is convenient for Bush, no matter how much I hate Bush domestic policy. This war was a gamble. Bush's "show your cards" remark was exactly appropriate to the current situation. US, Europe, Saddam, Middle East, Al Qaeda - all are being forced to show their hand. & this is a good thing in my opinion.

In the long span of time, US domination will be seen as a historical blip. The tragedy is the death of innocents, innocent civilians, innocent soldiers, anonymous small blips inside a horror. They will loom larger in the hearts of their families than any passing historico-political phenomena. But I hold Saddam accountable for this war. This war is the grand finale of his choices throughout his political career, beginning with the murder of his associates & relatives. & I believe that the political atmosphere after it's over will be far better for the Iraqi people - even if it begins with much bitterness toward the US.

Jordan. . . I guess it's not the dream part that bothers me, it's the Dismantle. As I contemplate the dust storm of poetry list & blog political talk, I see mostly sterile, self-righteous, ignorant condemnations, by people who don't recognize or understand the values that sustain our own culture. It's a closed spiral of capitalism, globalism, militarism, Americanism, according to them : and they themselves are the flip side of the Rush Limbaugh US-right-or-wrong spouters. Both apply a utopian perfectionism in order to sit in judgement - one says America is always right, the other America is always wrong. It's a kind of rigid thinking. Unable to comprehend that politics is the art of the possible, and that we have to also look at societies laterally, comparatively, not just from a vertical superior position.

I'm part of a study group at my church. We're looking at Papal encyclicals on social life over the last 100 yrs or so. There are several consistent principles or themes over time, centering around the inherent dignity of the human being. Some of the economic principles struck me : such as the idea that labor & capital need each other, and need to find common ground; also the idea that the right to own property is a basic right & a social good, though it is a right that is qualified by the common good and by the responsibilities of stewardship. These are deep & pervasive global ideas, which the superficial anti-capitalist conspiracy mentality cannot understand.

Most of the so-called conscientious protest I read on the poetry sites strikes me as mental ignorance & complacency. It's a kind of glorying in marginality, and the irony is that those who spend their hours & years in fussy ressentiment, rather than doing something useful for themselves or their world, are the most parochial types of all.

"Time as the permission to have an imagination."

There you go, Jordan !

re-write Ezra: "Make it Time."