Last night I just glanced at Kent Johnson's malicious black book. I might write something about it, maybe on the essay blog. I'm represented, 'grammed, & I get off easy (whew!).

In two short lines, Catullus (sort of) compares me to Dante (oy vey...). But somebody else is playing Dante here. Many will find themselves awkwardly a-wriggle on a pin - in a special pen of Kent's devising.

Malice is a form of love, says Dante. Kent reminds me a little of those guys in high school who followed other people around, because they were just so enthralled, in love, fascinated with other people. So caught up in others' charisma that they came off as inadequate hangers-on themselves. (I'm remembering myself, here.)

But they weren't, really, inadequate. They were just experiencing love & awareness to a degree that overwhelmed their own capacity for role-playing (which is easy, on the other hand, for egotists).

Kent is actually in love with Poetry World and all that happens in it.

Mandelstam tried to grasp Dante's persona (though he was actually projecting himself). He called Dante a raznochinets, a deracinated populist intellectual - always ill at ease, awkward in society, not knowing how to conduct himself.

Shakespeare, hiding behind the curtain of his characters.

This book of Kent's sorts ironically (which I will have to think about) with his promotion of anonymity, Pessoa, heteronyms, the dissolution of the "author-function". Because here we have idiosyncratic "quick sketches" of writers, which meld together, and foreground, caricatures of quasi-public, literary personae - individuals, characters - with a judgement on their writing.

I know I shouldn't take the book too seriously, though. We are all still in high school, & Kent Johnson is still reading Rabelais.

I was walking home from work yesterday, thinking that in literature, as in everything else, you have to be safely dead before they do an autopsy. When I got home, there on my doorstep was Epigramatitis : 118 Living American Poets.

My thoughts on the basic motives & purposes of poetry after the movements of the 20th century can be juxtaposed with these interesting remarks at Boston Comment. As Kent Johnson & Stephen Burt in particular pointed out, the demand to innovate originates, not entirely but to some degree, in a political stance. One could say that literary innovation and difference, as we have come to know them, have two roots: first in what I described before as the attempt to catch up with contemporary historical change, and secondly in the notion that literary "experimentalism" (as opposed to simple experiment) marks the boundary of political opposition to mainstream institutions or allegiances.

If one accepts the notion of the poetic word as harmonizing a duplex form of time & reality, then the first motive for innovation noted above has to be revised. I'm not sure how such a poetics applies to any specific political stance.

Kent J. tyalkin' about heteronyms.

I've noticed that puttin' on a mask & speaking through it is basic for fiction. (I'm writin' a novel in the voice of an old college roommate, and a short story in the voice of a goofy film-maker.) Not sure how it relates to poetry, though. Makes me nervous.

Kent, what's the connection between masking and remembering?

I mean perhaps the best way to remember the 60s, for example, is to play a role, take on a voice. Get into the part. Method Acting.

Kent Johnson emailed me the following question, & suggested I post it with my response here. I'm doing so, despite misgivings : I don't like using the word "shit" in public (or private, actually). But according to such august authorities as Yeats & Akhmatova, this is where poems come from. . .

Henry, so all these connections and layers-- layers connecting and connections 
layering... You seem to be able to verify it all and with impressive empirical 
aplomb. 
> 
>  
Did you plan it all out, or did it just happen? 
> 
> 
 (A bit of both, I suspect, but could you talk about how all these tropic and 
allegorical interweavings were woofed on the warp and vice versa? You might 
consider this a follow up question to our interview at Jacket.)
> 
>  
Kent

 
Hi Kent,

 
it's hard to explain, because as you know writing happens in sort of a liminal 
area.

 
I remember a key moment when I was reading the Mandelstam Voronezh poems again, 
about "black earth". I have a feeling for that kind of landscape, coming from 
where I do. Who knows, maybe on a certain freudian level it's all just playing 
with shit (like the kid in the poem I published today, playing with mud between 
her legs)!!

 
But there was a moment when I was identifying with the sound & imagery of that 
rural place which OM was evoking, & I linked it with "letting go", & going into 
the earth, & somehow retrieving all the broken things in my life from the past & 
dealing with them (unrequited love, divorce, Julie's suicide, etc.) - & doing 
this through the Orpheus thing. all that plus actively "mimicking" a certain 
sound I thought I heard in the Voronezh poems.

 
At that moment, when I think of it, I was at a point where all my somewhat 
unsuccessful efforts were behind me, as PRACTICE & preparation, & something new 
was about to unfold.   The best way I can describe it, is that it happened - all 
those layers & connections - the way an algorithm works. A fairly simple 
combination creates a certain energy-stimulus : and that energy AUTOMATICALLY 
starts to spiral & complexify. That's what it felt like to me. Those 3 yrs or 
so writing this poem, I was exploding with connective energy.  It wouldn't let 
me go. I certainly didn't "plan" it all. when I finished Stubborn Grew, I 
thought it was done. Then when I finished Grassblade, I thought it was done. 
But only a few days after finishing each book, the next book would come at me 
like a giant WAVE. I felt a kind of dread when that happened because I knew how 
much time & energy it would involve, totally absorbing. "one thing led to 
another".

stay warm,
Henry

A friend emailed to say how much he liked my awkward comments earlier this week about the anonymous, "un-literary" dimension of poetry's presence in the world. It reminded me somewhat of Kent Johnson's forthright criticism, in various places, of the merely theoretical-academic politicization of poetics. The distinction he draws between theory and actual civic-political realities is a sane & healthy one, I think.

The email also reminded me of this old poem, a little different from my usual. The last two lines say what I meant better than the blog comments did.

ARS POETICA

                              in memoriam W.W.

 
Walking over the bridge to the post office, the wind
raking trash against the steel fences, I saw a carpenter
hoist on a nonchalant frame of ropes and wood – intent,
healing a wounded wall, a gash of red bricks
curved like a crazy smile beneath an empty window.

 
Maybe this carpenter is cruel – rough, cold
to his children, beating his wife.  Maybe cheats
on his taxes, scams his customers; maybe
he harries gays and poets and femmes like me
in order to prove he can still get stiff,
or get those lingering rumors off his back
about his adolescence. . . maybe this man is evil,
in all the ways an old sinner like me can imagine.

 
The wind smashes newspapers, election notices
across the road, over the bridge wall.  The world
rages in throes of death and thirst echoing
over the tough skin of the rooftops – the scream
of an orangutan, stuffing a broken body up the shaft.

 
Scant light from a failing sun penetrates the clouds,
glows a little against the face of the wall.
Unexpected beauty, like this faint light
holds firm that workman on his floating planks.
Unheralded, unglorified, the earth is secret.
Mundane eloquence, whispered every day.

I've never been too interested in Kent Johnson's obsession, the problematic nature of authorship. But reading through the latter part of his interview in Vert makes me wonder if there's a connection between his idee fixe & the version of negative capability[?] I wrote about earlier here - the idea that the emotional ground of a poem is where both author & audience connect, and that this emotional area is outside the author's control. (On some level, is every poem written by Anonymous, then? That's stretching it. But neither is "identity" in a simple identifiable state at the moment of composition.)

This might also have some relation to the notion of sincerity which Kent also discusses. Edwin Honig was always concerned with distinguishing between the authentic poem and rhetoric : he would often slash away at whole stanzas of others' poems, saying "you don't need this, it's just rhetoric". Perhaps what he was getting at was the difference between authentic emotion in poetry & the rhetorical manipulation of a phantom emotion. (Honig also once proposed an anthology made up entirely of poems by Anonymous. Not incidentally is he one of the leading Pessoa scholars.)

Kent Johnson interview. Expand your mind.

& I want to thank Kent Johnson for once again guarding the marches of freedom over there in Ron's comment box. I am completely bemused by the way this question of exclusion keeps coming back to haunt me from Buffalo. The world is as small as the buffalos in it.

I go back to Kasey, & find Kent Johnson on Pessoa & the 17th Way. There you have it.

This just in : cowpoke Kent Johnson , ol' pal of legendary Jack Spandrift, applies once more for re-entry to Buffalo Poetics List. Application denied.

History : in every American's 3rd left rib there is a tiny crystal Buffalo named Tony. Don't try to pet him : he's ornery, he's contrary.

Haven't had much time to blog lately.

Readers probably put off by my para-religious discourse sometimes. I can't help it, sorry : it's part of me, ever since religio-psychological crisis here at old Brunonia in 1973, when I thought Shakespeare & Jesus were hovering around my dorm room.

My work in poetry a scrap heap of hesitant forays. Line from which the title came :
"Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose."

Have been reading a lot about the ancient Greeks. Am interested in POETICS as an exploration of the borderline between different kinds of knowledge : philosophy, science, history, poetry. & poetry as means of presenting states of feeling & experience that are elusive, not so easily subject to definition & categorical discourse. Talking about this some in the Jacket interview with Kent Johnson.

No, this blog post is not a resume, sorry.
No David H., I'm not a "projectivist". Too much magic thinking & mumbo-jumbo, not enough art.

But I AM recurrently interested, very much so, in the concepts circling around poetry and "polis", or city-making. It's a steady theme in Pound, WCW, Olson, Crane's long poems. It's something I've generally taken an interest in, having an M.A. & experience in neighborhood organizing, living in a little city-state, etc. No this is not a resume, sorry.

Poetry is not rational discourse. But it's not necessarily irrational. Wallace Stevens was so interested in this issue. It's not rational because underlying its organicness (sound & sense synthesis, animality) is a kind of a priori AFFIRMATION, prior to dialectics or discussion. It's an enunciation all by itself that creates a roundedness, a sense of pleroma, fulness. That a priori emphatic phatic speech - is that what worried the philosopher (Plato)?

Funny doubleness of poetry : dangerously solipsistic on the one hand; amazingly responsive to direct immediate particular reality, nature, thingness, emotion, experience, on the other. Consequence of the impulse to make sounds, prior to their "correctness", appropriateness (Dante ends Divina Commedia with imitation of baby talk).

Yet the art is about fitness & finish. Which also represent or reflect ethical qualities. Place in good poetry where technique, theme, inspiration coalesce. Cannot be willed or faked. Also often domesticated into permanent Boredom-world (I too dislike it).

Orphism represented "soul search" in Greek world of power-polis. World poetry, poetry in English, American poetry, New American subcultures - what a universe of Babble ! But poetry is an unaccountable synthesis, an appearance of talent, a rarity. & we sicken ourselves on rich food.

Here's an old poem (I know, I posted this back in Jan.):


at noon

Orpheus sings alone,
his lyre left in the wind
moaning in elliptical harmony.

Persephone sleeps, her head
hidden in her arms, and shadows
of clouds passing over her hair.

And John, in his prison, hears
dance music in the rooms above,
and the sound of an axe on stone.

Stubborn Grew is, among other things, a populist poem with quite a bit of direct political commentary. Kent Johnson, Ron Silliman, Eliot Weinberger, et al. are busy burbling about the political content of post-langpo blah blah blah.

My book has never been reviewed (nada, Nada).

I see that at around 7 am on Sunday 3.2.03, Gabriel Gudding (see Conchology link) was tanking the car at the Cumberland Farms 3 blocks from my house.

I will try to keep a journal of my walk to work next week (if I still have a job). It's about a mile - quite a trip for a Rhode Islander. Stay tuned. The world is going to Sheol in a shoebox, but Gabriel & I, I & Gabriel, Gabriel & me, me & Gabriel & I, we will keep reporting.

Was very sorry to miss Kent Johnson's reading a few other blocks from here last night. I had a vestry meeting, and I am T.S. Eliot.

Another poem re Eyerack by Kent Johnson over at Skanky Possum (posted Feb. 17). Reminiscent of poem by Cesar Vallejo (from "Himno a los Voluntarios de la Republica"):

Pedro Rojas, asi, despues de muerto,
se levanto, beso su catafalco ensangrentado,
lloro por Espana
y volvio a escribir con el dedo en el aire:
"!Viban los companeros! Pedro Rojas."
Su cadaver estaba lleno de mundo.

[Pedro Rojas, thus, after being dead,
got up, kissed his bloodsmeared casket,
cried for Spain
and again wrote with his finger in the air:
"Long live all the combanions! Pedro Rojas."
His corpse was full of world.

- trans. by Clayton Eshleman]

Ron Silliman's give and take with Rodney Koeneke on the question of the unconscious & religion in contemporary poetry. Some thoughts from me on this can be found in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket.

Joe Duemer has another response to my recent comments on Iraq. We are all in the midst of one of those dramatic prologues to decision, when everybody's position sounds simplistic because no one can characterize the total complexity of the situation. Joe's comments are similar to some made previously by Anastasios - a suspicion about the imperialist, expansionist motives of the hawks in the Administration.

All I can say at this point is, I hope both of them are mistaken. I understand the logic of resisting the spiral of war & violence for as long as possible. But I also recognize the logic of Colin Powell's argument. In response to the French position - "why war now? Why not let the inspections process continue?" - the argument can be made that, given that Saddam has produced and failed to account for huge amounts of chemical & biological weapons in the last 10 years, and given the context of what happened on 9/11, containment has NOT worked, and will not work, without a willingness to cooperate on Saddam's part. & the record of that willingness or unwillingness over the last 3 months is plain to see. It will grow even plainer in the next 2 weeks.

The complexity of the situation - this is the real work cut out for poets. Poets writing : evoking, describing, understanding, penetrating. The heart of the situation & the mind of the situation & the realities of the situation. For that, see Kent Johnson's poem posted Saturday (2/15) over at Pantaloons.

Strong statement on poetry & politics by Eliot Weinberger in talk at Poetry Project in NY, forwarded by Kent Johnson to Poetryetc. list on February 3 (see February poetryetc archive under posting titled "Poetry is News"). Not sure his either/or argument about the last 30 years (which goes something like: either you have direct political speech & political engagement or you have pseudo-engagement & obscure wind-baggage over academicized issues of race/class/gender(basically a right-wing argument itself); and we've had the latter, while the Right has been dismantling rights & justice) - not sure either/or is that simple, but it's certainly a challenging polemic to those on the left. (Is it also sour grapes over the criticism of his anthology of 20th-cent poetry as too exclusively white & male?) But his comments about 3 typical approaches that poets have taken to political engagement are interesting & maybe useful.

As I see it, poetry can have a very substantial political character, while remaining poetic language (see for example the pervasive & deep political context of Montale's poetry of the 30s & 40s - often damned by ideological Italian critics as politically neutral or irrelevant); yet at the same time poetic language is just about as far from "political speech" as you can get, and the 2 should not be confused. . . but with poetry there are always the stunning exceptions. . .yes. "poetry is news".

Socrates: Hen, you AWFUL good at glurping out them shimmery concept-bubbles which unfortunately tend to pop before they drop. This gander about "para-form" fits the genre to a T. Sound sushpicioushly like a dead end again.

Henry: Well, I know, Socky. The special temptation to verbalize from the preconscious cortex afflicts us daily.

Socrates: the question I have for you is, ain't "conceptual" form been done about 30 yrs ago, with a lot of boring art anyway?

Henry: Likely so. But maybe the deal with poetry is somewhat different, since the verbal & the conceptual are such close cousins. & often poetic expression tries to put into words the pre- or nonverbal aesthetic/conceptual apprehensions which are also represented in music & painting.

Socrates: And?

Henry: Well, in the essay on Form which I put into this blog a couple weeks ago (Jan 6), and in the interview in Jacket with Kent Johnson, I was trying to get at this idea a little more. The Form essay draws on Rifatterre's study of poetics, which emphasizes the close relation between aesthetic form in poetry (poetics), and semeiosis. The poem is a signal of wavering or variant meaning(s) - not hermetic, but not disclosed in a fixed form either. I would like to build on that notion of the poem as an allusive object of multivalent meaning (simultaneously self- and other-referential, self-sufficient & symbiotic), by adding to it the meta-role of the poet in culture & history. The role I have in mind is a figure (one among others) for the role of the artist in general.

Socrates: & ?

Henry: Think of Yeats, for example. Engelberg's great monograph on him, "Vast Design", brings out the depth and variousness of Yeats' interactions with other arts, particularly painting & drama, and theorizes a "European" concept of all-round culture (he compares Yeats with Goethe in this respect). (Hey, OK, think of Ashbery too if you want.) A unity of being toward which Yeats yearned.

Socrates: Et?

Henry: Et in consequendum heh-heh. The formalities of what US poets have come to think of as formalism languish like chunks of grid-architecture tossed by the side of the highway if they are not integrated into some more natural/traditional sense of aesthetic form - beauty, if you will. In this respect maybe I'm close to the perspective of the US/Israeli architect Moshe Safdie (featured in a recent NYorker article). Beauty that is "functional" in a cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual way all at once. & in a social sense this is perhaps the "unity of effect" for which the utterances of the poet correlate local formalisms informalisms & semiotic signals. The telos of technique. Para-form.

There is more table talk about Mandelstam, long poems, and the HG scheme of things in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket issue #10. My only regret about that interview is that I was a little contemptuous (& uninformed) about the New Formalists (not that I will ever be a New Formalist).