I have been following & mixing it up a little with some of the blog-discussions about FLARF (Ron Silliman has linked to most of it). I have to admit, I like the word "flarf" - sort of a synthesis of fluff, laugh, and a dog barking...
My Theory on Flarf is that it is essentially a kind of Clowning - a primitive form of Comedy... its "serious" critical apologia are just another shtick in the program - Allamistakeo, as EA Poe put it... & those who take them seriously fall into a "serious" trap...
They are the Fellinis of contemporary American poetry (without Fellini's wistful sweet big-hearted so-Italian nostalgia - essence of Clown, purified to Super-Clown-Saint)...
So let's take this thought-experiment a little further : Flarf has become the dominant-hegemonic-canonical form of Contemporary Poetry! Whole Collegiate programs are devoted to studying & celebrating its Heros & Heroines... deeply-considered doctoral theses are defended & even written...
Paradoxically, Gabriel Gudding emerges as the Flarfiste's Flarfiste, since his critical pronunciamentos are both more deadpan-serious & funny than the flarfistas themselves...
Kent Johnson is celebrated as one of the Original Sad Clowns... his plangent personae & rumbustious challenges to the Establishment are recognized at last as nonpareil "bigfoot shuffles"...
Even minor poet Henry Gould gets his due in Flarf Kingdom! As the air-filled Shelley-balloon of Lilliputia - he of the enormous endless epic HENRIAD - there in his own private tiny Rhode Island...
Grad students excavate & debate fine points of the Flarf Renaissance of Dramatic Poetry, rooted as it is in a fundamentally Dionysian attitude - play, play play! -'s the thing...
They will deliberate over the Flarferrians Oedipal relationship with their Father, John Ashbery - since his status as "original Flarfist" is a contradiction in terms (Official or "Tectonic" Flarfism categorically denies the existence of "originality")... this crux or dilemma hits hard, especially on the NY-School-derived Flarffers, such as Jordan Davis, Drew Gardner, Gov. John Connolly, JFK, "Toenails" Lantucci, Nada Gordon, Gordon Nado - who love-hate Ashbery, since their own literary identity derives from a non-identity with Ashbery, who's own non-identity generated the non-identical techniques of Flarf, so that an escape from suffocating identity leads to an identity which circles back to a suffocating non-identity which sounds very familiar... - so where's Berrigan when we need him? Back in Rhode Island, no doubt.
Showing posts with label Jordan Davis2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jordan Davis2. Show all posts
1.29.2009
7.28.2005
Jordan sez: "I wonder (I'm always wondering, call it a character flaw) whether Ron's p-A/SoQ distinction isn't at bottom about prosody and diction."
I think it's about trying to define what is especially "American" in poetry in English (& implicitly identifying what is "American" with what is lively, contemporary, etc. in English poetry worldwide - a globalization-effect).
It's agonistic/dialectical - defining what is by comparison with what, supposedly is not (SoQ is not really American, except as some kind of effete remnant of colonial imitation, or ersatz product of a stodgy, artificial pecking-order/system).
Such pigeonholes are convenient for making snap judgements. But I think they continually bump up against uncategorizable examples.
Trying to examine some of the distinctive qualities of modern & contemporary American poetry could be a very interesting project, an aspect of some kind of larger project of cultural self-awareness & reflection (where have we come from? how does this surface in our writing today?). However, it would be better to try to ground such in a more disinterested framework of literary values. In Ron's framework, there is already a body of progressive/oppositional/approved poetry, and the effort involves matching & absorbing ever more & new examples & products to the existing model of value. It's a kind of collective self-promotion. The binary/agonistic/sports model facilitates this process of self-congratulation : there's always a negative shadow which sets off our shining lights.
By contrast, what I mean by a "disinterested framework of values" would involve comparisons and investigations of contemporary work within a much broader field : ie. world literature.
I think it's about trying to define what is especially "American" in poetry in English (& implicitly identifying what is "American" with what is lively, contemporary, etc. in English poetry worldwide - a globalization-effect).
It's agonistic/dialectical - defining what is by comparison with what, supposedly is not (SoQ is not really American, except as some kind of effete remnant of colonial imitation, or ersatz product of a stodgy, artificial pecking-order/system).
Such pigeonholes are convenient for making snap judgements. But I think they continually bump up against uncategorizable examples.
Trying to examine some of the distinctive qualities of modern & contemporary American poetry could be a very interesting project, an aspect of some kind of larger project of cultural self-awareness & reflection (where have we come from? how does this surface in our writing today?). However, it would be better to try to ground such in a more disinterested framework of literary values. In Ron's framework, there is already a body of progressive/oppositional/approved poetry, and the effort involves matching & absorbing ever more & new examples & products to the existing model of value. It's a kind of collective self-promotion. The binary/agonistic/sports model facilitates this process of self-congratulation : there's always a negative shadow which sets off our shining lights.
By contrast, what I mean by a "disinterested framework of values" would involve comparisons and investigations of contemporary work within a much broader field : ie. world literature.
6.01.2005
"profane illumination" -
that's sorta "Under Ben Bulben", right?
that's sorta "Under Ben Bulben", right?
Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.
12.21.2004
Jordan plays the acoustic Double Hyperbole:
"Poetic production (Supply) is in pretty good shape. I would say we're likely to start seeing more and more heart-stoppingly good work, especially as the country slides further into venality and barbarism."
The equanimous golden mean is somewheres in between?
"Poetic production (Supply) is in pretty good shape. I would say we're likely to start seeing more and more heart-stoppingly good work, especially as the country slides further into venality and barbarism."
The equanimous golden mean is somewheres in between?
11.23.2004
I think I understand the "non-difficulty" role of poetry as Jordan outlines. I wouldn't want to be a gatekeeper, oh no, not me! I recognize ptry-fr-its-wn-ske.
The formula which I was addressing, though, was "difficulty". If you are going to talk about this particular noun with respect to poetry, I think it has, as I said, less to do with technique than with ethics.
Jordan's "proxy" notion seems a little thrown, if you ask me. Almost a Horatian approach (its function is to succeed in expressing its audience's wishes & desires for it). I guess I'm more aware of the poet working to formulate his or her own dilemmas & puzzles ("out of the quarrel with ourselves..."). It becomes accessible, because both poet & reader recognize that our dilemmas are shared. & if someone is pleased/edified in the process - well, that's literary history in the making.
The formula which I was addressing, though, was "difficulty". If you are going to talk about this particular noun with respect to poetry, I think it has, as I said, less to do with technique than with ethics.
Jordan's "proxy" notion seems a little thrown, if you ask me. Almost a Horatian approach (its function is to succeed in expressing its audience's wishes & desires for it). I guess I'm more aware of the poet working to formulate his or her own dilemmas & puzzles ("out of the quarrel with ourselves..."). It becomes accessible, because both poet & reader recognize that our dilemmas are shared. & if someone is pleased/edified in the process - well, that's literary history in the making.
Following interesting chit-chat among Josh, Jordan & Mike.
I have some trouble with both Josh's & Mike's formulations. Josh makes "difficulty" sound easy. Just another of those sophisticated pleasures we arty intellectuals share, part of the general joie de vivre. It's a sunny perspective.
Mike faults poets for not recognizing the coterie problem, the extent of the challenge involved in finding a way for poetry to "break in" to the awareness of the ordinary reader of fiction & non-fiction.
I guess my reservation about both arguments hinges on the nature of difficulty. Basically I think it's kind of a "boundary problem", a question of the framework. That is, the kind of difficulty we think we have in mind - the sort of problematic that grips the reader in an unshakeable wrestling hold, from which they will never get free - this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question. That is, it is not something that can be finessed by aesthetics or rhetoric. In fact, it stems from the core of a difficulty with words & word-mongering itself: that words & deeds are not always the same thing; that life & literature are incommensurate; that promises and vows can be emptied of content, become vehicles of illusion, vanity, hypocrisy & deceit.
From this perspective, literary relevance, impact &/or difficulty is more of an ethical rather than a technical-aesthetic issue; it remains difficult even for the most sophisticated & talented writer, since it reaches into human commitments rooted beyond the literary "making" itself.
The art which most compels a readership seems often to emerge from a seemingly insoluble impasse or crisis or dilemma - a dilemma which, through the talent of the poet, results in a representation which has meaning for both the poet and for "society". It may stimulate a radical re-working of literary style & subject-matter. We are talking about a phenomenon which does not follow either from exhortations to the literary community to "work harder at it" (ala Mike), or from mere literary sophistication (ala Josh), which takes pleasure in arcane works, but shuns the ethical implications or demands that words sometimes entail.
I have some trouble with both Josh's & Mike's formulations. Josh makes "difficulty" sound easy. Just another of those sophisticated pleasures we arty intellectuals share, part of the general joie de vivre. It's a sunny perspective.
Mike faults poets for not recognizing the coterie problem, the extent of the challenge involved in finding a way for poetry to "break in" to the awareness of the ordinary reader of fiction & non-fiction.
I guess my reservation about both arguments hinges on the nature of difficulty. Basically I think it's kind of a "boundary problem", a question of the framework. That is, the kind of difficulty we think we have in mind - the sort of problematic that grips the reader in an unshakeable wrestling hold, from which they will never get free - this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question. That is, it is not something that can be finessed by aesthetics or rhetoric. In fact, it stems from the core of a difficulty with words & word-mongering itself: that words & deeds are not always the same thing; that life & literature are incommensurate; that promises and vows can be emptied of content, become vehicles of illusion, vanity, hypocrisy & deceit.
From this perspective, literary relevance, impact &/or difficulty is more of an ethical rather than a technical-aesthetic issue; it remains difficult even for the most sophisticated & talented writer, since it reaches into human commitments rooted beyond the literary "making" itself.
The art which most compels a readership seems often to emerge from a seemingly insoluble impasse or crisis or dilemma - a dilemma which, through the talent of the poet, results in a representation which has meaning for both the poet and for "society". It may stimulate a radical re-working of literary style & subject-matter. We are talking about a phenomenon which does not follow either from exhortations to the literary community to "work harder at it" (ala Mike), or from mere literary sophistication (ala Josh), which takes pleasure in arcane works, but shuns the ethical implications or demands that words sometimes entail.
11.13.2003
Jonathan takes issue with this article on Language Poetry (by Oren Izenberg) in Critical Inquiry. Maybe I'll get back to it.
Note to myself : subtract "I" & "voice." Add "text." Try to do before Fri.
Note to myself : subtract "I" & "voice." Add "text." Try to do before Fri.
11.10.2003
Jordan & Ron on "vagueness". I commented to Ron, but I don't think I got it right either. Poetry is not "more primitive than politics". One can intepret or intuit the political aspect of any experience or situation.
I guess what always bothers me is the equation "moral high ground = poetic innovation". Morality always seems easy for the moralists; therefore it can become a function of style, the sword & shield of whole literary movements.
Undoubtedly the state of a culture - its educational & moral values & standards - will be reflected in its literary styles. But these are HARD TO READ in contemporary circumstances. How much harder to invest & bind them into literary-progressive movements.
Art & poetry are always being marshalled into somebody's scheme for world improvement. But to create an original work of art is a different & more difficult undertaking, because the work is a kind of end in itself : and AS AN END IN ITSELF it makes a statement about the nature of experience which jars with programmatic or politically-correct (in anybody's system) this-leads-to-that projects for world improvement.
None of these formulas (mine included) get it right, because we want to hear it straight from the work of art itself; we want the voice saying YES or NO to come from the poet & the poem, not the commentator. Criticism & comment are dogged by this inherent irrelevance, always talking AROUND something not yet achieved. I suppose someone has noted this constitutive flaw (in fact the deconstructionists did : but their mistake was to think that such flawed theoretical discourse was all there is).
I guess what always bothers me is the equation "moral high ground = poetic innovation". Morality always seems easy for the moralists; therefore it can become a function of style, the sword & shield of whole literary movements.
Undoubtedly the state of a culture - its educational & moral values & standards - will be reflected in its literary styles. But these are HARD TO READ in contemporary circumstances. How much harder to invest & bind them into literary-progressive movements.
Art & poetry are always being marshalled into somebody's scheme for world improvement. But to create an original work of art is a different & more difficult undertaking, because the work is a kind of end in itself : and AS AN END IN ITSELF it makes a statement about the nature of experience which jars with programmatic or politically-correct (in anybody's system) this-leads-to-that projects for world improvement.
None of these formulas (mine included) get it right, because we want to hear it straight from the work of art itself; we want the voice saying YES or NO to come from the poet & the poem, not the commentator. Criticism & comment are dogged by this inherent irrelevance, always talking AROUND something not yet achieved. I suppose someone has noted this constitutive flaw (in fact the deconstructionists did : but their mistake was to think that such flawed theoretical discourse was all there is).
8.06.2003
Jordan writes:
The resistance pressure I tend to overcome by throwing grappling hooks to the immediate environment. The continuous present/peasant. A post-Apollinaire method. Where the accepted Anglo tendency is Wordsworth's recollection -- the bias in the Anglo-American mainstream is toward that honey-thick congealed deep time mode. The kind Chris Lydon was asking Jim about, and was confused about what kind of poetry the bloggers were writing -- or rather, revealed his certainty that it was not a kind he recognized.
What's my suspicion of that mode -- do I have a bias that present witness is somehow more authentic?
If it's a bias, is it a stylistic bias? I mean NY School poetics seems to emanate this general stance. On the other hand, recollection can also be a present-tense activity - searching for something lost. Yes, Arcadia-childhood-recollection is an oppressively cliched "mode". Romanticism looking for lost felicity-divinity. On the other hand, the "it's all here now - be happy!" manner of bambini-poetics is just as limited.
The resistance pressure I tend to overcome by throwing grappling hooks to the immediate environment. The continuous present/peasant. A post-Apollinaire method. Where the accepted Anglo tendency is Wordsworth's recollection -- the bias in the Anglo-American mainstream is toward that honey-thick congealed deep time mode. The kind Chris Lydon was asking Jim about, and was confused about what kind of poetry the bloggers were writing -- or rather, revealed his certainty that it was not a kind he recognized.
What's my suspicion of that mode -- do I have a bias that present witness is somehow more authentic?
If it's a bias, is it a stylistic bias? I mean NY School poetics seems to emanate this general stance. On the other hand, recollection can also be a present-tense activity - searching for something lost. Yes, Arcadia-childhood-recollection is an oppressively cliched "mode". Romanticism looking for lost felicity-divinity. On the other hand, the "it's all here now - be happy!" manner of bambini-poetics is just as limited.
3.21.2003
The Kwinter paragraph (see below) sorta stopped me too, Jordan (post of today), though perhaps for different reasons. I mean it seems very schematic, would have to be fleshed out before I "get" it.
His description of the possible as a kind of diagram of the real - the traditional way we think of an idea or theory becoming a mirror of what we accept as reality - and the shortcomings of this idea : and how he opposes it to this more dynamic or unpredictable concept of how real things happen -
anyway I get the feeling this is an echo of old philosophical debates between immanence & immanentists versus transcendence & transcendentalists. . . Bergson's time-vitalism has had sort of a recurrent vogue for artists. . . for me time has to include both stillness & movement somehow, vitality, change - it's not one OR the other. . . but I will be curious to see how Kwinter develops all this.
John Irwin's book about Borges & Poe (Mystery to a Solution) comes to mind. When is a poem NOW but not simply a flash in the pan? According to Irwin, Poe & Borges figured out how to write mysteries we'd want to come back to and READ AGAIN (even though we already know the answer to the whodunit). Here's a question for poetics : what values sustain a poem in its own NOW??? & transport that now into different time-environments?
His description of the possible as a kind of diagram of the real - the traditional way we think of an idea or theory becoming a mirror of what we accept as reality - and the shortcomings of this idea : and how he opposes it to this more dynamic or unpredictable concept of how real things happen -
anyway I get the feeling this is an echo of old philosophical debates between immanence & immanentists versus transcendence & transcendentalists. . . Bergson's time-vitalism has had sort of a recurrent vogue for artists. . . for me time has to include both stillness & movement somehow, vitality, change - it's not one OR the other. . . but I will be curious to see how Kwinter develops all this.
John Irwin's book about Borges & Poe (Mystery to a Solution) comes to mind. When is a poem NOW but not simply a flash in the pan? According to Irwin, Poe & Borges figured out how to write mysteries we'd want to come back to and READ AGAIN (even though we already know the answer to the whodunit). Here's a question for poetics : what values sustain a poem in its own NOW??? & transport that now into different time-environments?
3.13.2003
Have to disagree with Jonathan on two points:
1) No, he's not getting dumber (that was just a Borgesian take-off on Ron Padgett): he's getting smarter & more scintillant as he blogs along.
2) No, my comments do not provide an example of Heriberto's point. One person's "ideological projection" is another person's empirical observation. Sure, there's continuity between the child you & me & the adult you & me; but there's a difference too. As Jordan pointed out, the difference is dependence (economic, social, psychological). It's a relationship which changes the terms of its balance as the child becomes the independent adult (& perhaps a parent in turn).
If I view this through a theological kaleidoscope, this does not mean its basis in empirical reality is cancelled out. The child/parent relation is there : it's not an ideological projection (though my theological corollary, on the other hand, might be).
Heriberto saying there's no such thing as childhood strikes me as a kind of sophism (nominalism?).
1) No, he's not getting dumber (that was just a Borgesian take-off on Ron Padgett): he's getting smarter & more scintillant as he blogs along.
2) No, my comments do not provide an example of Heriberto's point. One person's "ideological projection" is another person's empirical observation. Sure, there's continuity between the child you & me & the adult you & me; but there's a difference too. As Jordan pointed out, the difference is dependence (economic, social, psychological). It's a relationship which changes the terms of its balance as the child becomes the independent adult (& perhaps a parent in turn).
If I view this through a theological kaleidoscope, this does not mean its basis in empirical reality is cancelled out. The child/parent relation is there : it's not an ideological projection (though my theological corollary, on the other hand, might be).
Heriberto saying there's no such thing as childhood strikes me as a kind of sophism (nominalism?).
3.12.2003
Today will try to record some thoughts on poetics, my poetics, hgpoetics, which came on coffee break on Thayer St. this morning; drawing on some threads from nearby bloggers, without being too prolix I hope. Inchoate ideas. Because I may be on strike (I hope not) in a day or so, & blogging may not be so easy after that.
David Hess is asking for a definition of "post-avant", an adjective applied by Ron Silliman. Interpreting Ron's perspective (hypothetically): he's referring to contemporary young poets coming after the Language Poetry phenomenon. He thinks perhaps of langpo as an American terminus (language/writing brought to a certain limit) for avant-garde literary energies of the 20th century. After the terminus, that energy has waned & new demands, new cultural forces & imperatives, have yet to crystallize.
Jordan & Jonathan meanwhile, wrote a little this week about childhood - what it means. Which reminds me of what I wrote on this blog in various places about the status of the Person in poetics; and the comment I made yesterday about Frank O'Hara's tongue-in-cheek manifesto on "Personism" (in the context of various worldview-scaffoldings which help undergird modernist poetics & technique).
I know this DOES sound prolix & rambling; please bear with me.
In an essay in Mudlark, I wrote about how the Byzantine-Christian anthropology of humankind as imago Dei underlies Western art & the poetics of Mandelstam. We are talking about ultimate worldviews or scaffoldings. I would like to consider childhood as a theological category. How so? The child - as opposed to the adult - persists in a particular relation to the parent. Consider the child/parent relation as a symbol of the human person's relation to God. Consider it before dismissing it : think of it as an image of an image, a fractal corollary.
God as parent : how ridiculous! But only if taken literally. And about God we can take nothing literally.
The poetics of the modernist & postmodern 20th century can be regarded as a culmination of the Renaissance concept of Man. The Renaissance concept placed the human intellect at the center. The Medieval concept (stemming from Byzantium), on the other hand, developed a trinitarian anthropology : body, soul, spirit. The soul is like the somatic mirror of the body in another dimension (eternity). The spirit is like the intellectual light which unites body & soul in insight & discernment.
These three, of course, correspond to the divine Trinity : Father, Son, Spirit.
The character of any poetics of the Person would be determined by its underlying anthropology. How do we know & respond to experience through this particular lens?
Consider Charles Olson's Jungian "Maximus" projection as a counter-weight/imitation of Yeats & Pound's sense of the history-transcendent uber-Self (at the vortex of the decks of cards playing out the personae of both A Vision and The Cantos). (Kenneth Warren in his magazine House Organ has mused on this extensively.)
I look upon Jung & Olson as fascinating, searching. . . heresiarchs. Gnostics of poetry. Look instead at THIS Maximus (from Byzantium) :
Thunberg, Lars
Microcosm and mediator : the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
Chicago: Open Court, 1995
(I call them heresiarchs in no dogmatic sense! Only in the sense of Nicholas Cusanus and his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance". These metaphorical-theological-conceptual scaffoldings are metaphors for religious & spiritual insights - experience at the borders where words fail & vision goes dark.)
A post-avant poetics of the Person would interpret our experience of time, the earth, the universe, science & art, good & evil, mortality, love & knowledge through a post-Renaissance lens. Such a lens would offer no prescriptions for technical developments in art : but it might change the way we perceive the role of art in the life of the person, and by extension, the role of the poet in the life of the culture. Such things have stylistic & literary-generic repercussions.
David Hess is asking for a definition of "post-avant", an adjective applied by Ron Silliman. Interpreting Ron's perspective (hypothetically): he's referring to contemporary young poets coming after the Language Poetry phenomenon. He thinks perhaps of langpo as an American terminus (language/writing brought to a certain limit) for avant-garde literary energies of the 20th century. After the terminus, that energy has waned & new demands, new cultural forces & imperatives, have yet to crystallize.
Jordan & Jonathan meanwhile, wrote a little this week about childhood - what it means. Which reminds me of what I wrote on this blog in various places about the status of the Person in poetics; and the comment I made yesterday about Frank O'Hara's tongue-in-cheek manifesto on "Personism" (in the context of various worldview-scaffoldings which help undergird modernist poetics & technique).
I know this DOES sound prolix & rambling; please bear with me.
In an essay in Mudlark, I wrote about how the Byzantine-Christian anthropology of humankind as imago Dei underlies Western art & the poetics of Mandelstam. We are talking about ultimate worldviews or scaffoldings. I would like to consider childhood as a theological category. How so? The child - as opposed to the adult - persists in a particular relation to the parent. Consider the child/parent relation as a symbol of the human person's relation to God. Consider it before dismissing it : think of it as an image of an image, a fractal corollary.
God as parent : how ridiculous! But only if taken literally. And about God we can take nothing literally.
The poetics of the modernist & postmodern 20th century can be regarded as a culmination of the Renaissance concept of Man. The Renaissance concept placed the human intellect at the center. The Medieval concept (stemming from Byzantium), on the other hand, developed a trinitarian anthropology : body, soul, spirit. The soul is like the somatic mirror of the body in another dimension (eternity). The spirit is like the intellectual light which unites body & soul in insight & discernment.
These three, of course, correspond to the divine Trinity : Father, Son, Spirit.
The character of any poetics of the Person would be determined by its underlying anthropology. How do we know & respond to experience through this particular lens?
Consider Charles Olson's Jungian "Maximus" projection as a counter-weight/imitation of Yeats & Pound's sense of the history-transcendent uber-Self (at the vortex of the decks of cards playing out the personae of both A Vision and The Cantos). (Kenneth Warren in his magazine House Organ has mused on this extensively.)
I look upon Jung & Olson as fascinating, searching. . . heresiarchs. Gnostics of poetry. Look instead at THIS Maximus (from Byzantium) :
Thunberg, Lars
Microcosm and mediator : the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
Chicago: Open Court, 1995
(I call them heresiarchs in no dogmatic sense! Only in the sense of Nicholas Cusanus and his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance". These metaphorical-theological-conceptual scaffoldings are metaphors for religious & spiritual insights - experience at the borders where words fail & vision goes dark.)
A post-avant poetics of the Person would interpret our experience of time, the earth, the universe, science & art, good & evil, mortality, love & knowledge through a post-Renaissance lens. Such a lens would offer no prescriptions for technical developments in art : but it might change the way we perceive the role of art in the life of the person, and by extension, the role of the poet in the life of the culture. Such things have stylistic & literary-generic repercussions.
2.26.2003
Responding to Jordan Equanimity's blogdentity crisis: he's such a natural!
I think I'm blogging to find readers and provide a context for my poems at the same time. It's been such a lonesome road. & also to stay near poetry through this new technic of writing, when often I feel very far from the creative state. A giddy person trapped inside the body of a saturnine phlegmatic pre-Alzheimer(?) fiftian. I don't have a poetics, I just have a history which can be thought about as the practice of poetics of some kind. & also I just like these blogs, their variety & characteristicness. All the antennae out there - those blogs with 500 links along the side. Joe Duemer for example as he says was way before Ron Silliman. & also to change the dynamic: ie. I want to TALK SOME MORE ABOUT MY LONG POEM PROJECT !! Because of the odd thing that happened on the Poetry Lists in the 90s : what was that?? Well, the attention I attracted through a new medium (Buff Poetics List) actually militated against finding readers. Here I was, doing what I thought was very much in the swim of "experiment" in American poetry : & I felt very physically the swishing sound of the "innovative" world turn its back on me. Hey, folks, I've written a 900 page American Long Poem !! Hello?? Oh, they don't like me. I was probably putting them down without even realizing it, or maybe I was realizing it.
I think I'm blogging to find readers and provide a context for my poems at the same time. It's been such a lonesome road. & also to stay near poetry through this new technic of writing, when often I feel very far from the creative state. A giddy person trapped inside the body of a saturnine phlegmatic pre-Alzheimer(?) fiftian. I don't have a poetics, I just have a history which can be thought about as the practice of poetics of some kind. & also I just like these blogs, their variety & characteristicness. All the antennae out there - those blogs with 500 links along the side. Joe Duemer for example as he says was way before Ron Silliman. & also to change the dynamic: ie. I want to TALK SOME MORE ABOUT MY LONG POEM PROJECT !! Because of the odd thing that happened on the Poetry Lists in the 90s : what was that?? Well, the attention I attracted through a new medium (Buff Poetics List) actually militated against finding readers. Here I was, doing what I thought was very much in the swim of "experiment" in American poetry : & I felt very physically the swishing sound of the "innovative" world turn its back on me. Hey, folks, I've written a 900 page American Long Poem !! Hello?? Oh, they don't like me. I was probably putting them down without even realizing it, or maybe I was realizing it.
2.10.2003
Responding to Jordan's comment today:
There's rationality, and there's self-interest. Everybody has to integrate them both. But there's something else too: fellow-feeling, altruism, self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Isn't rationality, or enlightened self-interest, the ability to work beneficially for others as well as ourselves?
The past few weeks I've really begun to question my own capacity to think rationally, because I find myself tempted to take stands on the Iraq crisis which amaze me, which I can't believe I believe in, which I don't completely believe. That is, I'm tempted to argue FOR war (and marshall those arguments on my blog). Why?
1. For the hell of it. For the curiosity of it. Because Saddam has it coming.
2. Because all the poets seem to be marching lockstep, of one mind. I have a reflexive need to differ (learned in the Poetry Wars). I question some of the self-righteousness of those who are always ready to impugn the motives of the ones they disagree with (ie. perhaps it's not just "oil profiteering by Bush & Co.").
3. Because over the years, without even being aware of it, I've become complacent or conformist - I simply don't want to believe what's happening to my government & my country, I close my eyes.
4. Because I can't completely discount the arguments for attacking Saddam either. In the post-9/11 world, I can entertain serious justifications for a pre-emptive strike, if the claims being made about Saddam's aims & capabilities are really true.
5. Because I'm having a failure of imagination : failing to consider the real alternatives to attack; failing to reckon the carnage & suffering war will bring; being naive about the mentality of those promoting this war.
I'm having difficulty with this. . .
There's rationality, and there's self-interest. Everybody has to integrate them both. But there's something else too: fellow-feeling, altruism, self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Isn't rationality, or enlightened self-interest, the ability to work beneficially for others as well as ourselves?
The past few weeks I've really begun to question my own capacity to think rationally, because I find myself tempted to take stands on the Iraq crisis which amaze me, which I can't believe I believe in, which I don't completely believe. That is, I'm tempted to argue FOR war (and marshall those arguments on my blog). Why?
1. For the hell of it. For the curiosity of it. Because Saddam has it coming.
2. Because all the poets seem to be marching lockstep, of one mind. I have a reflexive need to differ (learned in the Poetry Wars). I question some of the self-righteousness of those who are always ready to impugn the motives of the ones they disagree with (ie. perhaps it's not just "oil profiteering by Bush & Co.").
3. Because over the years, without even being aware of it, I've become complacent or conformist - I simply don't want to believe what's happening to my government & my country, I close my eyes.
4. Because I can't completely discount the arguments for attacking Saddam either. In the post-9/11 world, I can entertain serious justifications for a pre-emptive strike, if the claims being made about Saddam's aims & capabilities are really true.
5. Because I'm having a failure of imagination : failing to consider the real alternatives to attack; failing to reckon the carnage & suffering war will bring; being naive about the mentality of those promoting this war.
I'm having difficulty with this. . .
2.07.2003
Over at Equanimity, Jordan provides a link to a book by John Mearscheimer, Can Saddam Hussein be Contained?. The link includes a lengthy abstract.
It's a reasonable argument, but Mearscheimer downplays a few things:
1. there probably are operational ties between Saddam & some of the international terrorist networks. The assassination of diplomat Foley in Jordan has been directly linked to a high-up al Qaeda operative based in Iraq.
2. the impact of the "success" of the 9/11 strikes, as an incitement for further action by the international terror networks. This has serious implications in gauging the danger posed by Saddam's activities.
3. the current existence of a major WMD production program in Iraq. Mearscheimer tries to portray Saddam as a logical actor in world politics, which in my view is pretty untenable, given the obsessions & policy priorities of this extremely brutal Stalinist-type regime. This is why the UN limits on those activities & priorities were imposed in the first place.
Mearscheimer tries to make the argument that containment rather than preventive action can work with Saddam. But containment was precisely the policy instated by the UN after the Gulf War. Colin Powell made a pretty forceful argument at the UN that containment is NOT working.
While I'm still trying to figure out where I stand in this tumultuous situation, to my great surprise I seem to be finding myself swayed, if not yet completely convinced, by the hawks' arguments. The big question mark - aside from the almost guaranteed attacks from al Qaeda which will follow any attack on Iraq - aside from the impact of a war on civilians - is how the Middle East & the Islamic world as a whole will respond to an American invasion. Bush's whole strategy in the war on terrorism seems to be, that the best defense is a good offense. But does this apply across the board, in all situations?
It's a reasonable argument, but Mearscheimer downplays a few things:
1. there probably are operational ties between Saddam & some of the international terrorist networks. The assassination of diplomat Foley in Jordan has been directly linked to a high-up al Qaeda operative based in Iraq.
2. the impact of the "success" of the 9/11 strikes, as an incitement for further action by the international terror networks. This has serious implications in gauging the danger posed by Saddam's activities.
3. the current existence of a major WMD production program in Iraq. Mearscheimer tries to portray Saddam as a logical actor in world politics, which in my view is pretty untenable, given the obsessions & policy priorities of this extremely brutal Stalinist-type regime. This is why the UN limits on those activities & priorities were imposed in the first place.
Mearscheimer tries to make the argument that containment rather than preventive action can work with Saddam. But containment was precisely the policy instated by the UN after the Gulf War. Colin Powell made a pretty forceful argument at the UN that containment is NOT working.
While I'm still trying to figure out where I stand in this tumultuous situation, to my great surprise I seem to be finding myself swayed, if not yet completely convinced, by the hawks' arguments. The big question mark - aside from the almost guaranteed attacks from al Qaeda which will follow any attack on Iraq - aside from the impact of a war on civilians - is how the Middle East & the Islamic world as a whole will respond to an American invasion. Bush's whole strategy in the war on terrorism seems to be, that the best defense is a good offense. But does this apply across the board, in all situations?
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