The Trivedi Chronicles

Review on Jacket2

2011-08-01T22:20:00.004-05:00

My review of Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory [saina] at Jacket2, Explorers, anthropologists, and historians

Jennifer's New Blog

2011-06-22T12:13:00.002-05:00

Jennifer has a blog with recipes on it. Hope you'll check them out (and there are even a few from me!).

What We Can Still Learn From T.S. Eliot

2011-05-24T16:49:00.004-05:00

(N.B. This was a paper written for Keith Waldrop's class, "The Wasteland and After." Again, I don't assume anything will happen with it, so this seems like the place to post it.)

People fall in and out of favor all the time. In Eliot’s case, Dante and the metaphysical poets were “in” and the Romantic poets were “out,” and in the same vein, Eliot has gone out of fashion and come back to us in new ways. For the generation immediately after his death in 1965, Eliot was too established, too much the mainstream success to be of any use to a crowd coming of age during the 50s and 60s who were raised on rebellion and anti-establishment ideals. Now, however, more than 45 years since Eliot’s death, there are things to read and understand in Eliot’s work and now, as time has passed, in his life. As we are removed from the period in which Eliot was working, it is not only possible to look at this work with fresh eyes, but also possible to want to unpack his work with a contemporary eye. There are still plenty of things we can learn from Eliot as a poet and from his poems.

Eliot seems to a part of the first generation of poets who had to work in order to support their art, which of course is nothing new to the modern writer. Before Eliot, it seems that poets and writers came from a more literate, self-sufficient class, but as literacy and thus the desire to become a writer has increased, it seems that the number of writers who had previously been able to support themselves via art, or at least have someone else support them because of art, has dwindled. This is, of course, not a bad thing. Not at all: art should be made from every group and aesthetics should be the concern, not whether or not the poet has the luxury of taking the time to write.[1] This is, of course, a myth perpetrated by the Romantic poets who seemed to lead exotic lives and die young. Poets of course have always been seen as poor, but Eliot does something interesting: he chooses to find work rather than find a way to survive via his art. His generation has not followed this per se: Ezra Pound seems to have lived off his parents’ money; James Joyce taught English and borrowed quite a bit from friends and family; Ernest Hemingway seems to also have gotten by on his family money. So for Eliot to work was probably unusual at the time for a poet and writer, but for the generations after him, work was entirely necessary in order to fund writing and the generally unusual lifestyle most writers lead. While academia has had a certain draw since the proliferation of creative writing programs, plus the access the libraries and odd work hours, other writers have chosen different paths for the sake of interest as well as time. Joseph Ceravolo began writing poems while in the army, but upon return worked as a civil engineer and, along with his wife Rosemary (who is a visual artist), raised children and lived a relatively regular life, minus writing poems which took in the Mexican desert with language and rendered it back as a new image for his reader to absorb.

While the job aspect may seem rather trivial, it is Eliot who shows us the way to handle both. Eliot worked first at a bank and later as an editor for Faber and Faber, which not only allowed him time to work but also exposed him to new work coming through. This also allowed him to do something that Pound did (perhaps still more brilliantly) which was promote the writing of others, which is now incredibly commonplace among poets of this generation. Perhaps a cynic would say that poets do not act altruistically, but rather hope to get something back, but the model already existed with Pound, who would attempt to publish others as well as himself with great vigor, but hoping to forge relationships as well. With so many small pressed and publishers now, poets are often publishing their friends and colleagues, often with the desire to get published in other places as a result of their kindness. In an age with so many poets writing, the Eliot/Pound relationship model has much to teach us about networking and getting ahead. While some may scoff at this kind of business-like activity, it seems to be the way that the poetry industry (often jokingly called “PoBiz”) works now. Whether art should be an industry is certainly an issue, but it is and the way forward understands how to navigate it in that manner. For Eliot, who wrote generally little, his sense of direction was incredibly strong and his knowledge of trends seems to have been fruitful for him. It is a skill of Eliot’s that ought to be studied and it has clearly impacted the current nature of the PoBiz. The modernists, in a sense, created the current model of poets working and interacting etc.

As mentioned, Eliot published relatively little compared to Pound and compared to other writers and poets in general (at least in terms of those who are successful at getting published, which could not have been Eliot’s issue). This would suggest that he was very protective of his work and careful to keep an eye on his image as a poet and critic, again, something modern poets can learn from. In this period where publication can lead to a career in teaching, the desperation to do so is staggering with many poets submitting work as quickly as they can write it. However, as is the case with Eliot, many poets could benefit from holding back and purposefully steering their careers a little more directly than being desperate to publish. This is not to say, of course, that Pound was desperate, but perhaps in some sort of Freudian reading, we could understand his motivations better. Unfortunately, that is beyond the scope of this paper. Regardless, a lesson that can be learned from Eliot here is to hold back, perhaps not quite as much as him, but at least in some sense with a hope of guiding work in a given direction.

There might be something wrong in this logic: in Eliot’s case, he published little, but he also wrote very little, often putting down various lines and not writing for long stretches rarely if ever. What should the more prolific writer do? In the case of Pound, he sent out everything he wrote, but perhaps the solution here is a balance between submitting blindly and holding out. While publication is a desire with mixed motivations, it seems only worthwhile to be slightly protective of one’s work and not carpet-bomb journals, etc.

Beyond lifestyle choices and decisions regarding publication and protection of work, the majority of what we can still gleam from Eliot is aesthetic in nature. Eliot is not the first poet to include abstraction and reference in his work, but his usage of these things is not only essential to his work, he also allows gives other poets free license to do the same. In terms of reference, Eliot draws from any and every source known to him, especially from great literary works that his is familiar with. This has become a common thing now: Eliot’s aesthetic of referentiality expands not only beyond poetry, but very much into all forms of art. Collage in painting as well as poetry is able to grab from a variety of different sources and places them together in a way that creates a cohesive work. Even television, which could nominally be considered “art” allows for a heavy referential nature. The simple thing to say, however, is that it begins at Eliot- this pulling from other things and bringing together. For Eliot, considering his work pace, it seems that there was no way to escape the works that were floating around in his mind, which comes from not only being a voracious reader but also someone inclined towards reflecting his knowledge.

In the age of information, it seems impossible for the modern artist to not consider their surroundings- not that this was ignored before Eliot, but after The Wasteland, there is no going back. In a way, Eliot’s most lasting contribution to art is the acknowledgement that all art and all world works together. Even consider the title The Wasteland, which was written primarily during the “Great War” or the First World War: the area between trenches on the Western Front was called the “no man’s land,” or the area over which most of the battle occurred and was considered the most dangerous place to be as a result of direct fire. The allusion here is obvious in that the “no man’s land” is a sort of “waste land,” strewn with the dead and injured bodies of young soldiers. It is difficult to separate the two images, the violence of war and the inner-turmoil of Eliot’s poem. There is a war going on inside, it seems, which mirrors the violence of the world around Eliot. Of course, the title is perhaps more a reference to John L. Weston’s book From Grail to Romance, but considering the period of writing and publication, it is hard not to read the title and poem in this way.

Eliot’s writing process was a slow one, especially in comparison to his friend Pound’s. Eliot would often come up with a line he liked and write it down. He would then set it aside for a period of time and come back to it (though not always) and very slowly construct a poem over a great amount of time. This process seems to work in a modern world where jobs and lives interfere in the writing experiment, though many poets and authors still happily write for long stretches of time. However, considering that Eliot is in many ways the first modern writer, concerned with having to make a living as mentioned before, this process is one that many poets could learn from, especially in the age where having a computer that saves files and a smart phone which will record audio or allow you to write down even the tiniest of ideas is available.[2] Of course, this technology has existed for at least several decades with tape recorders, etc., but the proliferation of technology along with the chaos of everyday life lends itself to a more Eliot-esque style of writing.

What comes out of this, and why this process is important, is that rhythms and ideas become more buried and subvert Romantic ideas of literature. Because a poem is made of thousands of tiny ideas and phrases, the cohesive nature of Eliot’s poems comes from the overall reading of any section in The Wasteland versus the poems leading somewhere by the end. This is not to say The Wasteland’s sections are without direction, but rather than each section must be examined in order to see how Eliot’s process plays out and that it is at the end of the poem where the full image emerges. As a result of Eliot’s process in Wasteland and after, he is creating a mindset in the overall poem instead of creating a single image by poem’s end, which contradicts many Romantic poems immediately. This is a method for current poets to move forward. The poet Aase Berg, in the wake of having children, admits that while she has not changed how she writes a poem, she has had to begin building poems in little pieces as a result of time constraints. This is not to say that time was not an issue for the poets before Eliot, but it seems that Eliot is the first poet to acknowledge and exemplify that there are things that one must do in order to survive other than write poetry.

Eliot is in fashion of late, it seems. Scholarship on his work has increased and his poems are easily part of the canon from high school on. This is not to say he will stay in vogue from now on, but rather than at this moment, there are many things that can be gained from reading his work for modern students and poets alike. While the examples presented are only a few, they cover the basic scale of Eliot’s writing, especially in his period of writing The Wasteland and the poems that follow, especially Burnt Norton, which he wrote while working at Faber and Faber.[3] Until a poet with the with the power and readership of Eliot comes along again (which seems impossible considering that small presses have divided poets into tiny units and there are so many poets writing and publishing today that no one poet could ever have the market share that Eliot did) his work will continue to polarize and be in and out of style with the current generation of poets.[4] Eliot and Pound both seem to have set up a pattern that continues to be the trend in American poetics that will continue until someone comes along to subvert it in the way they did to the Romantic poets before them. Also, maybe poetry has changed more than that and more quickly to really say that the Eliot/Pound model has continued, but at least at present, it is easy to see the parallels.

[1] I hate thinking that this is next to impossible because poetry is still seen as such an elitist and intellectual endeavor. However, so many people write poems in their spare time, but self-esteem seems to be an issue in terms of publication.

[2] I mention this, of course, because this is how I work now, especially my thesis worked this way, though I did manage to work in stretches, but only because time was crucial. If it were up to me, I would gladly spend years working on a book, but alas Brown University has requirements.

[3] Eliot also spent his time playing cribbage, as was pointed out in class by Keith Waldrop.

[4] As if to add insult to injury, the Romantic poets are still the most widely read by student and adult alike. Keats, Shelley, and Byron seem to be the most popular poets around, even still.

Audio of My Thesis Reading

2011-05-02T19:30:00.004-05:00

This is the audio from my thesis reading, April 26, 2011.

Wonderful introduction by Forrest Gander, who has been the most wonderful advisor a fellow could have.

The poems are from my thesis, and now shop-able manuscript, Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed.

If you have some interest in reading the whole or parts, please email me at amishius at gmail dot com.

I believe video coming soon.

What Else Can Poets Be Doing?

2011-04-16T09:14:00.005-05:00

(N.B. I wrote this for the workshop with C.D. Wright last semester. I don't agree with most of it and, figuring it's not going anywhere, what better place to post it than my blog.)

My brother was here this weekend- it was my birthday- and we went to the Graduate Center Bar to have a few drinks and meet some of my classmates. As the evening wore on, I realized my brother was in fact having the better conversation with my friend Kate Schapira: “What’s the point in writing poetry? I mean, what good can it do?” I had been thinking about this issue for a while and so I listened intently.

My brother is a money man. He has been working in banks since he was in college and has been working at credit unions attempting to figure out strategies for their growth, etc. He is not without his creative outlets, however: he’s been writing music (mostly lyrics) since he was a teenager and he has written poems all of his adult life and before. So while I was a little shocked to hear his question, I suppose that was foolish: he is a full-throated Capitalist. If there is no profit to be made, what is the point of anything? Of course my brother would ask this question.

But that, in fact, was not his point. He was not worried about money or jobs, etc. at all. Ultimately, my brother told me, he believes that poetry ought to do something to add to social consciousness. Not necessarily social justice or activism, per se, but just that it can be something that makes some kind of difference in the world at large, versus the rather insulated poetry community.

It is hard to disagree with him: right now, poets are generally read only by other poets, a built-in marketplace where work is also written for that audience. I admit for myself that this is the case and that I am hopefully aware that my target audience is also the group of people whose work I read. As this is the case, are we enclosing ourselves from the world of those who exist beyond the walls of academia? Are we, in the long-term harming the readership of poetry and the effect of it if we keep ourselves so blocked off?

Obviously the answer is quite complex. I have no doubt that there are poets working beyond the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)/university system who are quite talented and for whatever reason, they do not see “writing” as a career and are content to work on their own and maybe work towards publication, be it through contests, open submissions, self-publication on blogs, websites such as Reddit[1], etc. I’m not sure what stop people from pursuing career as writers. Anyone can apply to an M.F.A. program and in fact, only a Bachelor’s degree is required. It is not like applying for a biology degree and never having studied biology as a student: you can be a writer in an M.F.A. program with a background in anything, biology included.

However, there are risks involved with getting an M.F.A. If you have been working, the change in pay is not one that will allow a person to continue with a standard of living as they had before, so either they have to take out loans or hope that they can lower their requirements. For many these things seem foolish, or more importantly, they may well be content in their jobs and to write on the side. Either way, there must be a population of people who write well, but keep it either to themselves, or promote their work in ways similar to anyone who has an M.F.A.

What has happened, I believe, is that we have created two tiers of writers. The advantage of the M.F.A. program is that your work comes under greater scrutiny than if you are simply sending off work for publication without another reader to give critique. This is in fact the strength of the creative writing class and what gives writers in those classes an advantage above others. The group critique process seems to lead to a better quality of work more geared towards publication. However, the question is whether or not publication is the most important thing.

The answer to that, I feel, is ultimately “yes”: without publication, there is ultimately no way to know what exists that is interesting. While someone may be working away at home on amazing poems, what difference does it ultimately make if those poems are never seen? Of course, we can point to Emily Dickinson as someone who worked for decades and saw less than a dozen pieces of her work published, and yet she is considered one of the greatest poets in America’s history. However, she never had to contend with the number of writers that exist in today’s market, coming out of the M.F.A. mill we’ve seen beginning in the last half of the 20^th century. If Dickinson’s poems had not been found and initially edited by Thomas Higginson and Mabel Todd, we would likely have never heard of Dickinson. While later versions of Dickinson’s poems have appeared without the copious edits, ultimately it was this editing which led to the first acknowledgement of her as a major poet.

Of course, what is interesting to me is that she did indeed seem interested in getting published so of course she wasn’t just writing for herself. I would imagine that getting published, seeing your work being read by others is, if not the primary goal of writing, than certainly in the top five. I admit it sounds elitist of me to say that one of the primary goals of writing is to be published, but otherwise what would be the use of committing language to the page? While it might serve some kind of purpose in a diary as a confessional exercise, I cannot imagine taking the time to write and craft without any desire to ease those poems into the world.

If the desire to publish is one reason to write, certainly poets must be interested in having more readers. So then, why are we insulating ourselves into a world of poets, by poets, for poets? In a way, I believe that we have accepted that only other poets will read our work, and therefore, only focus on them as readers. However, this has come at a cost: poetry is seen as difficult and thus has alienated large groups of people outside of literary circles. What is read and purchased by the masses is what they were left with after having taken English classes in high school: the Romantic poets. This is assuming they don’t hate poetry all together.

Overall, this is not a bad thing and I do not want it to sound as though I am against the creative writing system or think that poetry is overly hard or abstract, but let’s face it: the general public does not read contemporary poetry. The ultimate view of poetry is lyric or confessional- that somehow if one does not express their emotions in poetry, then it is not poetry. While I disagree with this view, I do not think that dismissing readers for they want from their poetry is the way to win them back. The best way to move forward is to show them that poetry can be all things and is not an elitist endeavor. Poetry is not above using what Wordsworth calls “the language of men” and does not necessarily have to be about rising above ideas that can be accessed by nearly anyone. It is like going to a chili cook-off: everyone attempts to make chili as spicy as possible, forcing many to avoid their booth. However chili does not have to be spicy, it can very simply taste good and that is something nearly everyone can enjoy.

How can poetry do this? One idea is to create work that engages with the world at large. Poets should embrace living in a world beyond art and that their work can take on the issues that afflict us all. To an extent, this was previously the goal of lyric poetry, but I believe that the lyric is no longer necessary. Look at Mark Nowak’s work, which is blatantly anti-lyrical, and yet is some of the most socially engaged work being produced today. While Nowak is generally considered in the lineage of the objectivist poets, his work is decidedly activist and thus subjective in nature. Upon hearing my talk on Nowak at the Louisville Conference in 2009, my brother asked “Why aren’t more poets activists?” Some poets are activists, I told him, but how would you know it? Poets’ books are not advertized on television and they do not appear on Oprah. Poetry generally is not seen as a socially conscious art form. Perhaps the issue at present is that language has ceased to shock us and when it does shock, it is from more culturally relevant sources like television and music. Poetry, overall, is not relevant.

When Eliot Weinberger was here, I was amazed to hear that in European and Asian countries, poets are “public intellectuals” that appear on television discussing the issues of the day. Why doesn’t this happen in the United States? Are American poets not on the whole interesting and varied enough with a general interest in issues to be on television or write op-ed pieces in the New York Times? The issue is not just that people are unaware of what poets are capable of but there is a general stigma in this country against intelligent people and in the last few years, we have begun to glorify those that are purposely ignorant such as Sarah Palin. So why would anyone be interested in the opinion of a writer who is intelligent in a non-authoritative way? The sad fact is that general public is not: they are only interested in having their viewpoints confirmed or in oppositional opinions they can demonize and as academics are generally demonized already in the media, there is simply no need from them.

So it is a two way problem: on one hand the general public could not care less about modern poets and their poems and on the other, modern poets could not care less about attracting an audience beyond pre-determined circles. For poets, this has led to the proliferation of M.F.A. programs, which function much like a Major League Baseball farm team in that they are a testing ground for up and coming talent (but that does not mean there is not an ace pitcher outside of the system). These programs are not only grooming future writers, but also future critics, audience members and book purchasers.

Ron Silliman and Seth Abramson had a discussion on Silliman’s blog about the number of poets currently writing.[2] Abramson claimed that Silliman greatly underestimated the number though made no judgment on Silliman for reducing the population. To me, the discussion of numbers signals a shift in readership away from casual readers and towards a group made up of poets. If there are going to be more people writing poetry, there necessarily have to be more people reading it, but if the general public has stopped, the only population available is other poets.

None of these things are not necessarily problematic: as universities have come to be run in a more business-like manner, talent and intelligence are not enough and for writers, and books are now a quantifiable measure of success. As a result, applicants for writing positions are required to have a few books published in order to be qualified for tenure- and non-tenure track jobs. How would it have been if Keith Waldrop had been turned down for a job at Brown due to a lack of publications? Obviously Professor Waldrop was hired for reasons beyond publication, but at this time, with the market tighter than it was even a decade ago; books have become the marker by which previously qualified candidates are now separated. What better than having an audience that is necessarily interested in purchasing your book and promoting someone they like? And they are necessarily interested because, of course, they are poets too and they want to be on your good side because YOU have a published book and they have a manuscript, of course.

Now, I do not want anyone thinking I have any issues with this- it is a necessary system for the most part and, as I mentioned before, I believe that work that has been through the workshop process has a quality advantage above non-workshop material. I also do not want any readers of this piece to think that I am somehow above these tactics: I certainly like meeting poets who come to town and in fact my classmates tease me because I “know everyone!” However, the M.F.A., I believe, is a networking degree and it is necessary for moving forward in the poetry world. It seems very likely too that poets who have M.F.A.’s may well be more likely to be published in book form or in publications.

With all these things in mind, we will go back to the initial issues at the beginning of this piece: what all can poets and poetry do? What is the point in writing a poem at this point in history, beyond having something for your classmates to read and sending out for publication? While Adorno famously said that there was no way to write poetry after the horrors of Auschwitz, poetry marched on and does still, but what role can poetry have at this moment of time?

(On a side note: I wonder now how many philosophers are writing about poetry. Many of the 20^th century’s most famous philosophers have written about poetry and society, but now I feel like most writing about poetry comes either from other poets or Ph.D. students who are also poets. Perhaps this is a future research project!)[3]

The reason I write poems is because I believe language is such an ingrained process that only poetry has the ability to break it down and restructure it. Poetry beyond all other forms of art has the ability to streamline the issues humans face each day. Poetry has the ability to work within and beyond the limits of language in order to accentuate it.

Please note well that I said ability. Poets have to be willing to try and make poetry something beyond a counter-public gathering mechanism. Poets, not unlike journalists, have to b willing to step in and fill the voids that are exploited in modern society. While many complained about reporters while the Bush administration got away with its activities, I would like to know where the poets were. The Bush administration was able to do what they wished because of their advanced usage of language and therefore poets should have jumped into the fray and challenged the Bush administration beyond blog posts and the complaints that many other Americans were already lodging. Poets could have critiqued the Bush administration for the same things that they critique each other for: their use of language to almost literally pull the wool over the eyes of the American people. This is the most definite example I can come up with: imagine if there had been a group speaking out against Bush & Co. early on but not based in politics, but rather with a mastery of rhetoric. While it seems clear now that the Bush administration would have gone on with their plans regardless, I believe that at least the oppositional movement would have found some kind of center beyond pacifism and angst.[4]

The last decade has been the perfect time for contemporary poetry to find its way back into the American consciousness, again because poets could have been the rhetorical check on the political situation. However, I do feel that poets may have missed a willing window by insulating themselves and reinforcing the mentality that poetry is difficult and obscure. I am not advocating that poetry should be easy or that it should be lowered to meet a falling standard- quite the opposite, in fact: poets should have taken the opportunity to reinvigorate the general populace about what poetry can do by showing them what poetry is already doing. This would have been the time to prove that poetry is indeed relevant to the modern world and that there is place of the kind of critique that only literature can create.

Now, I understand full well that in this piece I am biting the hand that feeds me. Not only am I happy to be in an M.F.A. writing program, I have also benefited greatly from the networking and name-recognition that being in a top program has brought me. This essay is not meant to press an end for M.F.A. programs or even substantive changes, just that there is a culture that led to it and a culture that has come out of it now.

I will not venture a guess on the future of poetry, but I imagine the power of the M.F.A. will wane and that there will eventually be a movement away from academia, only because the insularity of current poetry will create a rift. Unfortunately, I feel that poetry has been an always will be read by those whose lives are generally made easier by economic status, though poetry too has the ability to blur those lines. Before it was because only a select group of people could read, but now it will be because only a few can find the time or have the desire to read. While desire may not be a class issue, the ability to give poetry a space to show what it can do might well be entirely related to class. Hopefully this is not the case, but only time will show us how the choices we make will affect the future of poetics.

[1] Reddit.com has thousands of “sub-reddits,” including one specifically for people to submit poems and receive feedback: http://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/

[2] http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2009/04/four-deaths-in-and-around-poetry.html

[3] Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin just to name a few.

[4] I have attempted to discuss this on my blog in the past, here on a post titled “Poetry and the Uncanny Valley”

I'll Be In My Basement Room...

2011-03-20T21:31:00.004-05:00

Before I could post about the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers," Johannes beat me to it on Montevidayo. It seems we've both been obsessed with the song of late. My iTunes tells me I've listened to it 43 times since I purchased Sticky Fingers a few weeks back. That's a lot.

The beauty to me of the song is how, like the album as a whole and the one after it, Exile on Main St, take something considered socially "vile" and turn it into something sexy. There's no surprise that Keith Richards, here at the height of writing his best songs, I think, was also in the middle of his heroin addiction.

Of course, it's wrong to glamorize drug use and all that D.A.R.E. crap, but the songs do the work in "Dead Flowers," even though the song is ostensibly against the use of the drug. Don't you just feel aroused when Mick looks at you when he sings it!

He does it with the next line too, nearly avoiding eye contact, but just barely making it. It's incredible and creates the headspace of the whole song in those moments of the video above (you can watch the whole thing here).

Johannes' post focuses on the first line of the song, discussing the "upholstered chair." I think it would be great to think of the parallel of "upholstered" to "rose pink," both signs of indulgence, certainly.

The indulgence of the song is purposely contrasted to sort of dirty degeneration of the second set of lines in each verse:

Well I hope you won't see me in my ragged company

You know I could never be alone

and

I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon

And another girl to take my pain away

Both couplets make me think of drug use: the company one keeps of other users, certainly. Smokers who quit say that one of the things they miss is the people they meet.

How can a line about taking heroin be both classy and dirty at the same time? At once the line gives us a "basement room" away from the main floors and seemingly isolated and a needle and spoon and no doubt a dirty belt to tie the arm off. However, rather than giving us any colloquialisms referring to heroin, Richards and Jagger give us what I consider a classy allusion. This isn't Requiem For A Dream's traumatic sex scenes: it's Trainspotting's discussions on life and living.

Johannes' post has a great number of interesting points, including a section on Townes Van Zandt's cover.

Post on Rothenberg's Blog

2011-02-26T00:23:00.002-06:00

A new post on Poems and Poetics, Jerome Rothenberg's blog, is about the process that went into my manuscript, Sound/Chest, written by me. Jerry was nice enough to include seven poems as well.

Hope you'll have a look!

Dwelling, Regret, Permutational Art

2011-02-18T17:55:00.005-06:00

(N.B. I wrote this for a class last semester. It was rejected. I kind of like the idea still and I figure my own blog cannot reject me, no matter how wrong I am. Sorry for any layout errors, I copy and pasted. As a result, the foot/endnotes don't worry- they are trying to link to the original document for some reason.)

When Johannes Göransson came to my class to discuss A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, one of my students asked him if he hated the world and what his relationship with his parents was like. As the teacher who invited Johannes, I was a bit embarrassed. However, if the student felt the need to ask those questions, there must have been something that came up in the text for her. After that point, when discussing students’ poems, I have done my best to push them away from asking those kinds personal of questions because initially did not want them to feel limit the scope of their discussion. I have gone to the measure of acting as though the author is not in the room during the first read. Now, at the students’ insistence, they are getting poems for workshop a few days in advance, forcing them to come up with their own interpretation before they even hear the author read their poem.

It is ultimately foolish, however, to tell my students to remove biographical inquiry from their toolbox. With poems in general, sometimes whatever key it takes to get into them is a necessary item to have, even when that key requires you to look beyond the page. Is it possible to read the Dream Songs without knowing a bit about John Berryman? No. Although, I do admit biographical context is itself a problematic method for understanding poetry. But while the New Critics would say that one should not look beyond the page and that the work should stand by itself, I think a contextual approach ultimately allows readers to understand a work better. It might not be fair to the author to focus on them rather than their work, but I believe that ultimately, all work is a manifestation of its creator.

Berryman’s Henry is a version of himself, although Berryman does attempt to separate the two identities. Paul Mariani writes in his biography, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, that Berryman and his second wife Ann Levine came up with names for one another— “Henry” for John and “Mabel” for Ann (Mariani 298). These pseudonyms allowed them to blame one another somewhat indirectly for mishaps in their marriage. It was out of this context that Henry emerged as a permutation of Berryman's own identity, a creation of a dream world of the poems. In a way, Berryman uses the construction he and his wife had to lay upon Henry all the issues that Berryman is working through at the time. This includes his father’s suicide when he was twelve, a major factor in all of his work and possibly the catalyst for his own suicide in 1972. As if foreshadowing the actual outcome of Berryman’s own life, it was the dwelling on issues that led to the creation of Henry even in the context of Berryman’s marriage: if he and his wife had not been dwelling on the disagreements that they had been having, they would never have needed to create characters to blame. As a result, Henry comes to be the center of Berryman’s own dwellings and regrets in The Dream Songs.

In Dream Song number 4, Henry is at dinner where he sees a woman (who might be part of Henry’s table) that he finds particularly attractive:

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken páprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

'You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry's dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

--Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

--Mr. Bones: there is.

(Berryman 6)

Berryman uses his poetry, and the character of Henry, to dwell on and process his regrets over a shared experience. Mariani’s biography of Berryman suggests this may be similar to a real life incident. Of course, the universal desires of a lyric poem aside, how else could Berryman have reconstructed the moment and given us his experience of it other than in art? Even though Berryman could perhaps have told people his desires, only in art is there the sense of closure that comes only from artistic reconstruction because in speaking of desires, there is no ability to recreate the space. And while it can be argued that it is Berryman speaking directly, Henry truly serves as the agent of Berryman’s emotions. The sense of guilt that Henry expresses is twofold. First, his lust would be frowned upon if anyone knew that is how he feels. Second, Berryman regrets not doing what he wanted to do. Here is Sir Bones’ (whom I will discuss a bit later) indictment: both feelings are wrong and as a result, and Henry has been preemptively outlawed. Perhaps this self-critique is harsh of Berryman, but if this is how he is feeling, we should not argue.

We can endlessly discuss whether or not Henry is really Berryman, but I would argue that there is no separating the two, regardless of Berryman’s introduction to The Dream Songs (v)[1]. Berryman asks us to attribute the character of Henry to the title of the work, suggesting that Henry is truly only a figure of Berryman’s imagination and nothing more. However, again on page 298 of his biography, Mariani tells us that Berryman had been putting together his dreams for some time, but it was finally upon adding his wife’s hurtful nickname as the character that Berryman began work earnestly on the series of poems.

I am bringing in permutation, a math term, as a way of thinking about the biographical relation between the author and the work. The term “permutation” refers to all the possible combinations of a set of numbers. For example, if you had the numbers [1, 2, 3], then there are five other permutations of it: [1, 3, 2], [2, 1, 3], [2, 3, 1], [3, 1, 2], and [3, 2, 1].[2] What the mathematical permutation does not allow for is any change in the ultimate outcome. No matter how you arrange the set of numbers, they are still the same numbers. However, the part I am interested in is the process in which the numbers are rearranged. How the numbers are arranged, I believe, can change the perception of those numbers. A permutation in a creative sense is the reorganization of existing events in order for there to be a new outcome. Permutations exist not only in poetry, but in other artistic forms as well. I believe these other art forms can be looked at as a text. Film, for example, is in many ways the modern equivalent of the mass produced lyric voice because film attempts to address many of the same issues as the lyric has historically covered by giving us the sense of experience versus only being a list of events. Permutational art is an offshoot of the idea of an author's surrogate, which of course allows the creator to exist in a work as a character or narrator. I believe that taking this a step further is a permutation, the manipulation of that character to fit the ideal of the creator.

This permutation is often based on regret because regret is where dwelling is usually focused. Regret, however, is not enough to spur on an artistic endeavor. Martin Heidegger writes in “…Poetically Man Dwells…” that only language, and specifically poetry, creates the ability for a person to dwell. However, I believe and will discuss how we as a society now dwell in other art forms in similar ways. What happens in much of art, especially writing, is the creation of a permutation of an existing situation. The reason I say especially writing is because Heidegger points out to us that language is the ultimate use of art because language is the tool we have developed for all things. Permutations are born from dwelling because then the principle here is the motivation for creating a new version of what occurred. For example, if in real life an individual wanted to seduce another person, but for whatever reason felt inadequate, art serves as a means to keep their feelings obscured and somewhat distinct from their person, but to still express them. Ultimately art becomes the means to an ideal conclusion. Now, “ideal” can mean different things and is not beholden to a positive conclusion. What is important here, though, is that art is very often the place to make up for a situation which did not turn out as expected. Art, beyond the mind, is the only place where these permutations can manifest themselves and is certainly the only physical exercise which works. Regret has the ability to become compulsion- to become reenacted in thought so often that there are only a few outlets: insanity, of course; violence (which is not all together dissimilar than insanity); and creative reconstruction.

Heidegger’s definition of dwelling is not necessarily disputed by this essay. If dwelling is meant to be a physical place, like Earth in Hölderlin’s poem, then the goal of permutation is not to take the emotional dwelling and leave it there: the goal is to create a physical dwelling for the reconstruction via art. While Heidegger says that the goal is to broaden the dwelling place, the degree should be mutable and can be considered a smaller dwelling: that of the art, which is, ignoring its performance or display, an inherently personal endeavor[3], a very small dwelling indeed.

Before I go further, I want to take a minute and talk about “ideal.” Ideals vary greatly, which seems obvious, but that means that permutations also vary quite a bit. The beauty of my definition of permutation is that it really means a nearly infinite set of possibilities, limited only by the context of the biographical antecedent. For example, if your antecedent is that you wish you had told someone you loved them but instead ended up crying, terrified of being rejected, your possible list of permutations can only be so many different things. If you are interested in realism, you cannot really turn into a bee and sting the object of your affections. Obviously, if you do not care for realism, that opens up the possibilities greatly. Of course, your list of possibilities will only be able to reflect the ideals that might meet your goal. If you want to recreate an outcome which is positive to you, then obviously there are a limited number of options. In recalling and in manipulating is where I believe there is some desire to achieve an ideal, a version of the situation that best fits our perfect vision of it. This is, of course, entirely subjective, especially considering that different ideals permeate every person and every person in a single moment, and the way a moment plays out is a reflection of those ideals, by either meeting expectations or denying them. Plays and poems I have written, which I will return to, are certainly idealizations of moments that turned out less than perfect. This is not an issue of fault, but rather a situational reflection: certain things just could not go the way I would have wanted, so as a result of recalling those memories, I constructed a creative method of dealing with the issues. And I'm certainly not alone.

An example of permutation as an attempt to reform an ideal being forced into the real life of the work is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo where, in order to save the woman he loves, Scottie Ferguson forces Judy Barton to become Madeleine Elster again so that he can stop her from allegedly killing herself. Of course, he figures out that Judy was the woman he fell in love with before. She was pretending to be Madeleine so that Gavin Elster could kill his wife and Scottie would be a witness to it and at the same time unable to stop the actions from moving forward. However, the point remains that Scottie, in attempting to recreate the situation, was hoping it would turn out differently so he could absolve himself of fault as well as carry on his relationship with the new Madeleine. Even while attempting to delude himself that Judy was a different person that Madeleine, Scottie, simultaneously on subconscious and conscious levels, knows that the permutation that allows him to save his love cannot happen. As this occurs, he pushes Judy further and further into looking like her version of Madeleine. Of course none of this works and Judy too falls to her death, out of surprise, in contrast to Madeleine's murder.

Personally, I have worked in permutation, though I did not define it as such at the time. During my first two years as an undergraduate student at the University of Georgia, I wrote a short play each fall semester to be performed as part of an evening of short pieces. The second one, Seeing Somebody was a re-imaging of events that had transpired in the months prior: I had been spending time with a young woman and I had no idea how to gauge her level of interest in me. Eventually I decided that she had no interest in me at all, which turned out to be incorrect, but only because we never discussed the issue. The play then, is about a male and a female sitting in a theater, first silent and then gradually beginning to discuss how they feel about each other and what to call their relationship. To be honest, the play was terrible, but for me, it was a version of what could have been, ideally. Ideally this person and I could have talked to each other, but because I was awkward and nineteen, I just avoided it. I do not know her motivation, but obviously in my revision, it is not terribly important: the woman, as they wait for the movie to begin, asks “So what are we?” Again, this would have been ideal (at the time).

I think that those two plays owe a lot to the work of Woody Allen. Allen generally plays the same character in many of his movies and the main characters in my plays are basically versions of me. Is the Woody Allen of real life anything like his on-screen personas? Does it matter? Well, not really, I admit, but what does matter is that in the roles that Allen is writing, he sees a version of himself in those characters. Maybe he does not do this consciously, but I think we can all agree that we imagine that Alvy Singer or Larry Lipton to be Woody Allen in one way or another. Not only can we not avoid that viewpoint, I think that Allen knows it is a character that can be identified with and so he, until he took a break from acting in his roles, writes that same basic version over and over again. I would argue beyond this that Allen purposely chooses to have characters similar to himself so that he may give it his feelings and emotions while putting them in either situations which he can rework creatively OR situations which are long term expansions of permutations. I would say that Manhattan Murder Mystery is one of those expansions, a dream of an ideal life for Allen, assuming he had stayed with Diane Keaton. It is obviously kind of a cliché situation finding yourself in the middle of a murder mystery, but I think the plot is separate from the life the Liptons had been leading up to that point.

In his film Manhattan, Allen’s character Issac Davis is dating a 17 year old, played by Mariel Hemingway. Hemingway’s character is reportedly based on Stacey Nelkin with whom Allen had a relationship that began when she was 17. Allen has never acknowledged this relationship, but based on his history as a filmmaker and actor, I cannot help but wonder if this is not yet another example of permutation in Allen’s work. I can imagine him saying to his young girlfriend that perhaps she should plan her life without him in it, that she should take the opportunities that come to her without regard for anyone else. Allen seems to have written an ideal version of what he would like to have said to appear on screen. None of this would be possible if Allen were not dwelling on the antecedents, which led to his regret.

This is not atypical for Allen and looking at Play It Again, Sam we even see his character having visions of Humphrey Bogart telling him how to move forward as he is in love with his friend’s wife. In a sense, Bogart appearing to Allen’s character allows him to do the most with permutation because not only does he have his own version to rely on, Bogart’s words become a second level of Allen being able to express his emotions within the film. Once again, the object of Allen’s affection is played by Diane Keaton and she also starred in the stage version prior to the making of the movie. It seems a pattern in Allen’s work to focus on Keaton and on permutations, and ideal he is attempting to reach.

For Berryman, Henry arguably has his own permutation in Mr. Bones, a sort of hallucination that Henry has throughout the course of the 385 poems that make up the book. It is “Sir Bones” who tells Henry that there is, in fact, a law against him and is often the person who responds to Henry’s comments. In a way, this permutation is not set up as any kind of ideal per se, but one that only speaks the truth to Henry, harboring itself against ideologies. Now, Berryman’s answer to all this is that the nature of the title informs all choices in the poems, but of course by bringing it into the conscious world, we have to question Berryman’s motives and decisions. What can be agreed upon, I hope, is that Sir Bones is Henry’s Id and that by bringing the Id into a named being, has created another permutation.

One thing that allows Berryman to work in permutation is that he has his permutation create its own permutation, allowing himself to further explore many angles and in fact examine the events and experiences that happen to Henry. While Berryman is a good example of this in poetry, by looking at television and film, we can see other examples of permutation within permutations, allowed for by the medium in which they are expressed. For example, there is the play inside the film Annie Hall and there is the show inside the larger show of Seinfeld. Why do such examples work? Because in examining permutations of permutations, we are further forced to look at the biographical context of their creation and it becomes necessary to admit we have to move beyond the work depicted. In the case of Alvy Singer’s play at the end of Annie Hall, the resolution is Alvy’s ideal permutation, in which Annie’s stand-in decides to follow Alvy back to New York City after Alvy’s stand-in’s passionate speech. Of course, Alvy really responded by asking for the check and getting upset and losing control of his emotions, crashing the rental car and having to deal with the police in a humorous conversation. In his play, Alvy manages to keep his cool and takes on a Bogart-esque masculinity, which endears Annie to him enough to return. Alvy even jokes about it: “Tsch, whatta you want? It was my first play. You know, you know how you're always tryin' t' get things to come out perfect in art because, uh, it's real difficult in life.” What better definition of permutation?

So here is an example of a permutation where we understand the ideal of the writer: of course Alvy wants Annie to come back because he is in love with her and because he has an artistic medium, he can live out the fantasy of her return. However, in the television series Seinfeld, the ideal seems to be keeping the status quo for an unknown creative purpose. Famously a show about nothing, what would have happened had the show “Jerry” been picked after the pilot episode aired? Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, and their team of writers would have had to abandon the idea that the show was about “nothing” if Jerry and George Costanza were working on a television series. The show is doomed to fail for this reason and I would be willing to guess that it had been planned all along. It should be noted too that after this point, Seinfeld generally abandons the idea of having a seasonal arc, something that Larry David picks back up in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The permutation nature in both shows from the point comes to a micro level with both leads acting the way they wish they could act in real life. David especially speaks of wanting to act as he does on Curb but realizes that that kind of behavior is unacceptable in the real world. However, in the world of his show, David can write his permutation with as much anger and disdain as he chooses and create his own consequences from those events. While sometimes his choices have positive outcomes, any regular viewer of the show can realize that Larry David very rarely ends up a happy person. In this case, the ideal is for people to laugh and for the show to be critically acclaimed, so in David’s case, this is done at his own expense. It seems unlikely that in real life anyone would like to be laughed at for having a fight with their friend at the doorstep of a jewelry store.

For Heidegger, such examples and permutational art in general, all use language in order to express the dwelling and regret that leads to the constructive or reconstructive act. Do painters dwell on subjects that they eventually use in their craft? I assume they must, but there is no way to really measure or understand that in the visual realm of art. With language, we have the ability to create and manipulate the space in which we work, and so for writers that work in permutation, it is with language that they made their dwellings become the new project. Even if man does dwell only poetically, there is no doubt that I believe it is possible for the poetic to exist in other forms of art. I would even argue that films are a modern version of the lyric poem, attempting to cover the same ground that poetry used to hold. Where reading existed a means to pass time, now television and film fill part of that void, so it is necessary to look in that direction for a modern example. That said, in the future, I hope to be able to intelligently discuss the world of visual art in regard to this idea of permutation, but it beyond my knowledge at the moment.

I think an interesting hybrid example of language and visual use in a permutation would be the play within the film Rushmore by Wes Anderson. Before I go further, I do not believe Max Fischer (played by Jason Schwartzman) to be a permutation of Anderson, though it is certainly possible and even implied in the New York Times review of the film where Winters briefly states how Anderson and Fischer (“his comic creation”) are similar. The permutational work is between Fischer’s life and the life of his main character in his play “Heaven and Hell.” This play is perhaps one of the more difficult to understand examples of permutation because Fischer does not directly recreate the events that we have seen in the film or before that point. However, it is clear that when the movie is viewed as a whole, the play within it is Fischer attempting to create an ideal experience.

“Heaven and Hell” is prefaced by Fischer who dedicates the play to the memory of his late mother and the late husband of the teacher (Rosemary Cross, played by Olivia Williams) for whom he has been pining. Here Fischer, and to an extent Anderson, draws a connection between the play and the relationship between Fischer and Cross, which Fischer initially believes is hampered only by Cross’ love for her dead husband. In acknowledging Cross’ husband, Fischer seems to now understand the reasons why their relationship cannot work, though in the film it is clearly beyond this issue.

The play proper begins with soldiers during the Vietnam War. Dirk, Fischer’s friend, leads the group and says that in his mind, he is in Cheyenne, Wyoming, his hometown. It is this escapism we have been seeing throughout the film from Fischer: in order to avoid his home life, with his widowed father, a barber, Fischer takes on an impossible number of afterschool activities. At the same time, when asked about his father, Fischer says he is a “brain surgeon,” and while obviously a lie, it shows how he is attempting to create a façade in real life that cannot ultimately hold.

The connection to the Vietnam War is explained early on in the film: Fischer’s new friend at the beginning and eventual love interest of Ms. Cross, Herman Blume (played by Bill Murray) was “in the shit,” suggesting that he saw heavy fighting during the war. We see Blume crying at the end of the play when Esposito, Fischer’s character holds up his fingers in a peace sign saying “Maybe we’ll meet again someday, when the fighting stops.” This parallels Fischer’s dedication to his mother and to Cross’ husband in that it is an acknowledgement to his father, Ms. Cross, and Blume acknowledging that he now understands what those three characters have gone through in their lives. This is a sign of Fischer’s maturation throughout the course of the film, and, to an extent, his creation of the play is a signal of that maturation because it is through the play and through the manipulation of Esposito that he indicates his personal changes.

“Heaven and Hell” ends with Margaret Yang, who is evidently interested in Fischer, playing a woman pointing a gun at Esposito. Esposito turns and points his M-16 at her and asks her “Will you marry me, Lei Chan?” “You bet I will,” she responds. After the end of the play the characters are all dancing and Blume attempts to cut in with Yang, asking Fischer, who is dancing with her, “Can I dance with your girlfriend?” Fischer responds saying “She’s not my girlfriend,” and Yang retorts, “Yes I am!” While Fischer outwardly attempts to dismiss his relationship with Yang, it seems clear from the end of the play that he has acknowledged that Ms. Cross is in the past and that Yang is the future, if not the present.

The reason that Rushmore is a hybrid example is that the permutational nature can only be inferred and pieced together while in Berryman the evidentiary pieces are there. Rushmore presents the permutation as something outside of language because it is not only language used by Fischer to express his feelings. While he does use language on a limited basis it is the visual of Esposito being lowered by the helicopter that gives us the most prominent signal: Fischer wants to be the hero, not just for himself, but for the people that he cares about. However, with the end of the play, the hero is only leaving, the war still being fought and his friends who were just saved by him are moving on to another battle. While Fischer wants to be the hero, in Esposito’s exit, it seems clear that Max understands he can only be a hero for his friends and father in one moment, not in all moments.

I have not placed Rushmore along with the other examples listed above of works within works because we cannot necessarily understand how Fischer or any other character in the film is a version of Anderson created as a response to some event. In fact, in the same New York Times review, Anderson states that he and co-writer Owen Wilson attempted to create a "slightly heightened reality” which would indicate that they were not attempting to emulate reality for the sake of reconstructing it, but rather that they had some idea separate from themselves for the film. As a result, it would only be speculation to connect Anderson and Wilson directly to the world of the film. That said, Fischer provides enough for us to discuss and sift through.

None of these examples should suggest that permutations are only a retroactive endeavor. Quite the contrary, actually: one can create a permutation as a means to work forward creatively speaking, whether it be a book, a poem, a film, a play, or a yet unmentioned form of art. My friend David Smith is currently a translator of Norwegian and critic, but he has had the desire to write fiction that works in realism, believing that the events of normal life are worth placing in a creative frame. I listened to him speak candidly about some personal issues and things going in his life and, mirroring Seinfeld, I said, “See, this should be the book!” The idea, I told him, was not to make it directly biographical, but to give the scenario and the emotions that go with it to someone else, a fictional person. By handing these things over to a fictional person in a fictional space, the creator immediately disengages from the emotions, allowing them to manipulate the circumstances as they see fit. This detachment is not universal—I do not imagine any detachment by Berryman—but in thinking about the reasons for creating a permutation, beyond the mere desire to emote, I think it is useful to consider that stepping away opens up the number of permutations possible, removing the question of ideal partially, thought ideals are such that they can adapt to fit around whatever the artist is trying to do.

This idea of permutational art is not perfect, nor is it exhaustive: C.D. Wright correctly pointed out to me that literally any poet or writer can be plugged into this essay as examples as writers generally tend to insert themselves into their work in some fashion. However, what seems to be the case is that while “author insertion” is discussed as a literary technique, it does not seem to have a more nuanced meaning beyond that. At the same time, permutational art might not need another definition: is it really any surprise that art reflects its creator? Do we really need a paper discussing how art reflects the desires of the artist to fix the things that go wrong in everyone’s life? I believe this reflects the genesis of the paper: what leads to the biographical reconstruction that takes place it art? The answer now is regret and dwelling, but perhaps that too is obvious. Perhaps the best answer for the point of this paper is to illuminate something is present in art and no doubt will be well into the future of human imagination. It is clear to me that often the things around us have no discussion surrounding them but they ought and so too should permutational art.

The other flaw in permutational art is that it requires some knowledge of the creator of that art, which is only possible in the last few hundred years. There may be works of literature that have permutational qualities that we can never know of because their authors are long since lost to history. In a sense, this idea can only reach so far back before it dissipates. Perhaps down the road there can be some better level of knowledge that can help situate correctly the work of those who were using permutation before we have some idea of “author insertion.” Thinking about dwelling again, it seems clear the dwelling is nothing new, so that man must have been doing so poetically for millennia.

________________________________________________

Works Cited

Annie Hall. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. United Artists, 1977.

Berryman, John. The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Print.

David, Larry. Curb Your Enthusiasm. HBO. New York, New York. Television.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

Manhattan. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel

Hemingway, and Meryl Streep. United Artists Corporation, 1979.

Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. New York: Paragon House, 1992. Print.

Play It Again, Sam. Dir. Herbert Ross. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. Paramount, 1972.

Rushmore. Dir. Wes Anderson. Perf. Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray. Touchtone. DVD.

Seinfeld, Jerry, and Larry David. Seinfeld. NBC. New York, New York. Television.

Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Jimmy Stewart. Paramount, 1958. DVD.

[1] Perhaps what Berryman is really doing here is attempting to throw us off the case, a slight of hand, if you will.

[2] Wikipedia’s definition of permutation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation

[3] Of course there are collaborations, but then it is not a personal activity if working with a partner or a group.

Montevidayo

2010-10-12T08:26:00.002-05:00

If you're not already reading it, you should be. Montevidayo is a great place to catch up on discussions pertaining to some contemporary lit issues. Fantastic cast of characters that make up the site as well.

Franz Wright calls Johannes an "asshole," which is worth the price of admission already.

Check out Pismire

2010-06-28T17:32:00.002-05:00

Wanted to alert you all to an up and coming online publication, edited by an up and coming poet:

Ezekiel Black is asking for submissions for Pismire.

Submit:

Before you submit a poem, please read the manifesto because it describes Pismire's aesthetic. A poem, regardless of quality, that does not require a recitation to function is best suited for another journal. If you believe your poem does meet the conditions, though, follow these instructions:

1. Call (404) 939-1350.
2. After the beep, recite your poem. Hang up.
3. Email your poem and biographical note to pismirepoetry(at)gmail(dot)com.

Fair enough? Go!

The Screaming Trees

2010-06-21T23:07:00.003-05:00

Might as well post about this here, since I'm quite certain its impact on the poetry community as a whole will be so massive in ten years that everyone will feel stupid not having written about it already.

Ron will claim to have always been a fan, though he won't even post the link.

Despite all that, a piece I'm pretty proud of, The Screaming Trees is out now on Conjunctions' website.

Please have a look.

Ultimately, I'm a Federalist (Draft)

2010-06-02T19:37:00.003-05:00

The battle has been the same in American politics since the very beginning: do individual states deserve power, or should the Federal government be the ultimate arbiter of what goes on in this country? Historically speaking, Federalism has always won out, and, I believe, led this nation to be among the best (at least in terms of technology, quality of life, etc.).

When the first government of the United States was formed under the Articles of Confederation, it was discovered rather quickly that having a weak central government was not in the best interest of the nation. Later on, it has been the direction of the federal government that has led to our greater achievements as a nation: a coast to coast, border to border highway system (which we take for granted, but try driving across Southeast Asia or Africa); a relatively stable political system, which so far hasn't led to too much upheaval (check out, well, EVERYWHERE else); etc. The Federal government led the way in these things. The Federal government took us into space, which has led to many of the advancements of the modern era.

It's been the Supreme Court that has been at the forefront of the changes to American life. Desegregation generally would not have occurred had it not been for Brown V. Board, and then later, leaders calling on Federal troops to enforce these changes. Many, of course, will say that the Federal government had no right to enter a state battle, however, this is still ONE country, and in that country, there must be certain standards.

I believe this in no way conflicts with what the Founders had in mind. I don't think Health care or highways or any of that conflicts with what this nation was founded on, which was the ability of each person, regardless of who they are, to succeed. In fact, I would, and have argued that something like Universal health care allows for greater prosperity.

And so what if it does conflict with what Thomas Jefferson wanted America to be? We treat the founders of this nation with some kind of religious fervor, as if they were not only perfect people, but God himself guided Jefferson's drunken hand to write out the Declaration of Independence.

Times change. Things change. America has evolved, the world has evolved. We should have a system that continually moves with these changes.

And we do. We have a document that allows for it's very core to be changed and interpreted. There is literally nothing in the Constitution that is supposed to remain untouched. If we as a nation agree on a course that requires a change to the Constitution, we have the ability to change or add to it. And I don't imagine James Madison or George Washington would be too upset over it.

See, they knew they were building a system which would have to adapt. Heck, they themselves rarely got along, why would they expect us to get along? They didn't: they knew we'd have disagreements and want to go in different directions. And so the system made in Philadelphia in 1787 was meant to be malleable.

So what's my point? My point is that it is because of a historically strong central government that America has progressed. In fact, I would say that states acting under their own power has traditionally set us back as a people. I cannot think of a single act by a lone state which has not ended in trouble. Obviously each state has it's own laws on certain things, but I would mostly say that any law that was less progressive than a national average has led that state to suffer, generally in terms of health care and education.

(To be continued...)

An Open Letter to John Edwards

2010-04-28T22:58:00.003-05:00

Note: I refer you to this post.

John Edwards for President,
~~~~~~

Dear John,

My wife and I were proud to support you during the 2008 Democratic primary. We caucused for you in the state of Iowa, in Iowa City. We both moved on to the second level of the process, even though you had dropped out by that time. I was elected to go forward to the state convention but was unable to make it. In January 2007, you visited Iowa City and spoke at the University’s student union. We were honored to hear you speak and meet you after.

The reason I’m writing you today has nothing to do with the money we donated to your campaign. In fact, the pecan pie recipe we purchased was totally worth it and we’ve used it several times. Thank you for that.

No, I’m writing you because on that day in January 2007, my wife, our friend Susie, and I gave you a MoonPie.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a MoonPie in Iowa?

We brought it with us from Georgia (where we’re from) and we gave it to you because we adored you and we trusted that you would probably enjoy it, being a fellow Southerner. You said thanks, gave us your autograph (which we still have) and you handed the MoonPie to your handler. We figured it was a security issue and that you would eat it later, when you had the chance.

Do you even like MoonPies? I have no idea now- you seemed so excited at the time, but honestly, I have no clue anymore if you were genuinely excited or just lying to us, as it seems you’ve been doing.

Anyways, I don’t want money back. Heck, I don’t even want an apology. I just want a MoonPie.

It can be single decker and of any flavor, though the original chocolate is preferable. You’re welcome to send us a box, as they’re only about $4, but that’s up to you.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter. Whatever you may think, I do wish you well and hope that things turn around for you.

All Best,

Amish

Dreams of an Ideal Life

2010-04-08T19:06:00.000-05:00

Poetry was kind of the last stop on the line for me. Well, it's been a round trip. The first anything that was "out there" by me were two plays- one I directed (under admittedly false pretenses) and the other directed by the fantastic Dan Guyton.

I think that, in a way, fiction that derives from the biographical has the amazing opportunity to correct the moments in our lives that we might regret, or that didn't go the way we were planning. Writing allows for a kind of consummation that life does not.

I write a lot, I've noticed, about permutations. Mathematically, a permutation is a rearrangement- all the possible arrangements that make up a series of numbers, etc. I believe we do the same thing with memory, forcing ourselves to reenact, at least in our minds, the many ways in which any given situation could go.

And this has the ability to become compulsion- to become reenacted in thought so often that there are only a few outlets: insanity, of course; violence (which isn't all together dissimilar than insanity); and creative reconstruction.

I think creative- and perhaps more exactly- biographical reconstruction is a necessity of the human condition. I know other animals are capable of memory, but humans alone, as far as I know, have the ability to recall that memory and manipulate it. Again, this can be compulsion, but I believe that in the process of recalling is itself compulsory. The true shame, of course, is that as humans, we must eventually suffer from memory-loss, it seems.

In recalling and in manipulating is where I believe there is some desire to achieve an ideal, a version of the situation that best fits our perfect vision of it. This is, of course, entirely subjective, especially considering that different ideals permeate every person and every person in a single moment, and the way a moment plays out is a reflection of those ideals, by either meeting expectations or denying them.

The two plays of mine I'm referring to are certainly idealizations of moments that turned out less than perfect. This isn't a fault-based thing, of course, but rather a situational reflection: certain things just could not go the way I would have wanted, so as a result of recalling those memories, I constructed a creative method of dealing with the issues. And I'm certainly not alone.

Email Interview for Cousins Reading Series with Darcie Dennigan

2010-04-03T20:22:00.002-05:00

People rarely ask me questions beyond "What did you say?" and "What's wrong with you?!" but Darcie Dennigan sent me some questions and I answered them to the best of my ability.

Email Night Email Chat with Amish Trivedi

My Problems with the Long Poem as Documentary Project

2010-03-31T20:35:00.002-05:00

Rarely is this blog a place to discuss my own personal aesthetics or problems, but tonight, I feel inclined to spill/dish.

I never thought I would work on a real documentary project. Mostly, the idea just never appealed to me. However, I'm taking a class with CD Wright in which I am to work on a documentary project.

Well, I was searching around in the dark for a while when, one morning, I heard the phrase "public history". I don't know why I had never heard it before, or maybe I had, and it finally hit me in a specific way. Either way, I was intrigued. That, and I saw a press having a chapbook competition. I started thinking "What is a 'public history'?" and decided it would make for an excellent poem. Or two. Or maybe a long poem. Either way, I was going to have something for workshop with Forrest, that was for sure.

One morning, after I'd written section I and workshopped it, and I was working on sections II and III, it occurred to me that yes, I am working on a documentary project. I didn't even know it. Suddenly the way through become clear.

Unfortunately, I've hit a snag. I've finished I and am mostly finished with II and III, but four has really got me stuck. I don't even know where to start. Section IV is going to be called "A Loser's History of the United States" and I want it to focus on a narrative of American history that isn't just the oddball stuff, but about the people on the losing side of the issues we know so well. Because there is a very clear progression through American history: guerrilla warriors win fighting guys in redcoats in the forests, and loyalists worry about whether or not they'll be hanged in a new country. Paul Revere rode about 20 miles from Boston to Concord, but Israel Bissle rode from Boston to Philadelphia- but of course, we all know who Paul Revere is. Bissle is one of the many losers in American history.

But where to start? Maybe talk about how the "Earth is flat" story from the Columbus voyage is completely untrue? In fact, people had known the world was round for centuries.

Recently, my parents sent me my notes from Mr. Sneed's 10th grade history class. Sneed, by the way, is the central figure in section III, coincidently titled "Talk Like Larry Sneed Day". My goal is to form a narrative of those fantastic stories he told us, but I'm worried about whether or not I can do it. I have been intimidated by the stack of papers my parents sent me because there is so much in there. And it's from another time for me as well: a relatively quiet 10th grader who was into Latin and playing guitar. Perhaps I'm afraid of myself in this too.

Not too say it should be too difficult a project. It should have been pretty easy. But the task isn't all that simple, I suppose: take our consensus history that has created a national identity and break it down. Even though many seem to have done it so far, I feel no one has done it poetically per se.

Locationality: The Ezra Pound Break Down

2010-02-17T23:03:00.002-06:00

OK, so location CAN be important. It can be especially important if, say, you were arrested (probably rightly so) and put in an outdoor holding pen in which you had a few books, the view of a mountain, and a bunch of free time.

As Ezra Pound wrote the Pisan Cantos, these were his conditions. On top of being locked up, he lived every moment with the fear that, at any moment, he could be dead. I would imagine location would become very important.

But this still leads to my previous argument: Pound did not CHOOSE this location. This location was thrust upon him. Sure, he was in Italy, but to be locked up outside was not by choice. Obviously his choices led to the situation, but there was no direct agency.

The discussion can, in a way, come down to luxury: Pound did not have the luxury of bringing with him terribly specific items. He didn't have his desk or his chair or his fuzzy slippers. What he had in there was minimal, and he made it through more due to luck than anything else. He simply did not have the luxury of choosing to write. He wrote because it might have been the last thing he ever did.

Locationality

2010-02-16T21:49:00.003-06:00

Last week, I was sitting in our department lounge with a classmate and a professor. The classmate mentioned she was heading to her "second home" in a sort of vacationy spot. She writes better there, she says.

I have never felt that way, and said so. I have never felt beholden to any location or space for the sake of writing. Not even the desk I purchased for writing has of any kind of special sensory relationship for me. I could write there, but I can also write on a board on the couch or put a series of notes into my cellphone while waiting in line. No place has special meaning for me in that way.

This kind of gets back to these posts (Setting I and II) where I was inspired by photos on the International Writing Programs webpage where they showed the spaces some writers worked in. I felt completely detached from that photo piece.

I'm not sure the cause, really. "It's like the opposite of nostalgia," I said: I long to long for a place, it seems. I want to feel attached to a spot, but perhaps it's a good thing to feel nomadic and unattached. Perhaps it's lending something to my writing that I don't see. Or maybe it doesn't. I have no idea.

I say in Setting II that

setting isn't an issue of choice. I don't believe it is possible to create the proper environment for writing or any other artistic activity. This is what I suppose I mean by the fetishization of locale.

Don't get me wrong: I don't fault my colleague for her attachment to a space. I wish I had that, in a way. Perhaps it's an avoidance of the hyperstability that marked my life prior to moving to college. My parents still live in the same house I was born in and I should say, I hardly feel attached to my hometown anymore, besides the Atlanta Braves and people.

Location can be important though, and I acknowledge that. It's just not important to me.

Jhumpa Lahiri's "Hell-Heaven"

2009-12-28T23:05:00.000-06:00

My brother and I were born to Indian parents, but raised in the United States. My brother was born in India, but a year and a half after his birth, our Mother brought him on a plane to the United States, where he would meet our Father for the first time.

I never really thought about my experience, or my brother's experience, as particularly "Indian," though I know it must have been. Certainly language is a huge one, but there are many cultural things I'm slowly becoming more aware of. I'm not complaining, mind you, just saying that it was different than any kind of "norm." I never thought about how that deviation from the "norm" was related to my first generation upbringing until I heard Jhumpa Lahiri read the first half of her story, "Hell-Heaven."

Reading the whole thing (printed in the New Yorker) and thinking again about her reading I felt an immediate connection not necessarily to the plot of the story, but to the moods and tones surrounding her characters. Something about the looks the characters share sounds so familiar to me that I immediately attempt to find characters in my life that are the same as these. There must be some kind of mirror that I'm just not seeing.

"Museum of Vandals" from Cannibal Books

2009-12-07T19:14:00.006-06:00

Museum of Vandals
by Amish Trivedi
Accordion-style Mini-chapbook
Boundless Books Series #1
Limited Edition of 150
$5

OR

Order Both Shane Jones and Amish Trivedi

The Nightmare Filled You with Scary
by Shane Jones
(hand-sewn chapbook)

&

Museum of Vandals
by Amish Trivedi
(accordion-style mini-chabook)

$10

W00t

2009-12-03T22:06:00.004-06:00

A Few Thoughts on the Last Half of "Vertigo"

2009-10-27T00:13:00.004-05:00

**This Contains Spoilers**

I feel like I’ve read a lot about the second half of Vertigo and the obsession displayed by Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty character, but in a lot of ways, the story in the second half has more to do with Judy’s desire to make Scotty love her rather than her former alter-ego. Judy, despite her obvious knowledge of all things going on plot wise, doesn’t seem to grasp Scotty’s obsession with her version of Madeleine. This is in spite of her near-obsession with gaining Scotty’s affection, which is only truly achievable by playing to his obsession. It’s almost as if she has herself convinced that she has done nothing wrong- her part in the events leading to the real Madeleine’s death and the birth of Scotty’s obsession are non-existent. She even childishly runs off to the corner, upset that she is being turned into Madeleine, rather than denying or attempting to obfuscate Scotty’s attempts to change her back to her Madeleine avatar. Scotty’s oft repeated line “it can’t matter to you” leads me not to think of it as some kind of male chauvinism, but rather his knowledge that this is Madeleine and that if she has been transformed once, she will be transformed again in order to feed his desire. But Scotty to a great extent is willing to play along rather than let on until near the end that he is aware of the double-cross. In fact, I believe he is not fully aware of either his actions, or the realization that this is his Madeleine.

Judy even ends up admitting that she no longer cares for herself and that, in order to satisfy her quest for Scotty’s love, she is willing to creep slowly closer to a re-transformation, all the while unaware that Scotty isn’t as blind as he appears. Judy does know, however, when she enters in full re-Madeleine that the hair style is the final conversion- and she fights it. However, upon stepping back into the room having put her hair up as Scotty requested, Judy’s look of satisfaction upon seeing Scotty’s reaction to her completes her quest for his love, even if he hardly cares for Judy at all. Unfortunately, Judy cannot separate herself at all from Madeleine and chooses to embrace her exterior transformation. Scotty’s decision to kiss her completes the obsessive satisfaction for both.

However, for Scotty, this is not enough. He must do two things: save Madeleine from her death, and perhaps over-ridingly, solve the puzzle that has been created. Hitchcock’s shot of Scotty and Madeleine as the camera rotates and Scotty looks away from Madeleine isn’t the birth of his desire to save her, but rather than decision that he has been duped.

Hitchcock makes it obvious though, of course, by giving us obvious visual cues. It’s one of the main faults of Hitchcock’s film making here, I think: he gives away when he could hold back. It’s his desire to make the audience feel as they know better than Hitchcock’s character and create a kind of tension. However, I would be interesting in seeing the film without Scotty’s realization played out so completely. A subtle look and then his forced march of Judy and his explanation of the crime to her and his interrogation would make it even more surprising for the audience.

But I digress…

Judy it seems is motivated by guilt when she rips up her letter to Scotty and chooses not to leave but rather give him the love she hopes that he wants since she is in love with him. Her guilt, however, leads her to the fatal, and I believe sub-conscious, mistake of wearing the necklace which leads to Scotty’s detective side realizing that she has been lying to him the whole time. However, more interestingly, when Scotty tells her he knows and that she shouldn’t have been so sentimental as to keep a souvenir of the crime, he means himself and not the necklace. He’s her souvenir of the crime as much as she’s his souvenir of Madeleine.

Judy’s immediate reaction is to tell Scotty the truth, which is an act revisited by her mistake. She sub-consciously chooses to tell Scotty the truth by showing him evidence that even in his advanced state of psychosis he would be forced to notice. While I don’t believe Judy needed to die, she certainly needed to have Scotty know because her ultimately goal was making Scotty love her.

Scotty’s violence towards the end of the movie when they reach San Juan Bautista is a fantastic combination of his obsession and his knowledge of Judy’s deceit. However, Judy sees it, for a moment, ONLY as Scotty’s obsession and when she realizes that Scotty knows, her resistance becomes even worse. She’d been fighting him, realizing that Scotty’s obsession had gone too far during the drive south of San Francisco.

Typefaces

2009-10-26T10:30:00.007-05:00

So we watched Helvetica again. It's a pretty fascinating documentary not only on the font itself, but what it means to use type and what that type carries with it.

Today, I am writing from the John Hay library at Brown University, where I am working on reading a book for Claire Donato's class. I am sitting in on Claire's undergraduate poetry workshop in preparation for my own teaching.

As Graham Foust told me, you can gauge a good library by whether or not they own Joseph Ceravolo's Transmigration Solo, a book which reader's of this blog and of the Ceravolo Project blog know I am well-acquainted with and in adoration of, so when I knew I was coming to look up one book, I naturally checked to see if they had TS.

Brown's copy is number 93 and is signed by Ceravolo himself. All the copies I've seen so far are signed and numbered. This is the highest I've seen, having seen #36 at Iowa. I cannot remember the number at UGA. I might ask someone to look that up for me.

Anyways, about typefaces: Transmigration Solo is set in Centaur, which was created by Bruce Rogers in the late 1920s.¹ It's a serif font which has a lovely emotionality that comes with it and adds nicely to the text of TS. There's a level within the font that adds to the lush nature of Ceravolo's poems- like the layers of Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" production method. It's fuller with the font than a font that attempts to remove all emotionality.

________________________________________________________________________________
1. Fonts.com piece on Rogers and Centaur.

The Gold Party

2009-10-01T09:33:00.001-05:00

My old friend Benji Barton's band, The Gold Party:

Fashion Poetics V: The Empire Strikes Back

2009-09-14T09:11:00.005-05:00

I’m not immediately against Capitalism. Well, I guess I’m more against it now than I ever was before, but ultimately, it’s not the worst system. I do believe, to some extent, in the personal freedom that *ought* to come with Capitalism- in that you’re not living in some despotic Communist-in-name-only country. I figure if you want, you should be able to own a business and sell stuff you want.

Same goes for presses, of course. Publish what you want. You have more money; you publish more stuff you want. Sometimes it sells, which means you ought to sell it, right?

Not exactly. Looking back on some of the early Fashion Poetics posts, I got to thinking again about the analogous nature of fashion with poetry: there’s fashion that goes on the runway and fashion that sells at K-Mart. Some might argue that the “fashion” at K-Mart isn’t fashion at all, but rather a utility, but at some level, it was designed with an aesthetic in mind.

Of course, I’m hard-pressed to call something utility clothing, because by extension that means there’s utility poetry- poetry that serves a basic function and sells in high quantities just so people can buy some poetry for whatever reason (actually- why do people buy utility poetry?). To say that there’s utility poetry means there’s someone out there writing poetry in order to sell it, and maybe I’m just not that cynical.

But maybe I should pretend for a while. Maybe I should consider that beyond someone writing poetry in order to sell it, they’re writing poems they think are meeting a certain aesthetic, like the clothes on the rack at K-Mart (which, I should say here, I’m not knocking- do I look like I’m a high fashion guy?). You hope to meet a certain aesthetic and they hope you buy it, thinking you’re meeting that aesthetic.

But you’re not, and they’re playing you. They are crafters of a pseudo-aesthetic style that makes sense to the great majority of people. “These are jeans. They fit. I bet they’ll look good.” However, my guess is, for Fashionistas, there’s a lot more to even just basic jeans that maybe the average person wouldn’t give a shit about.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying poetry should attempt to be beyond the reach of the average person, but maybe what I’m saying is that it should not apologize for it. Poetry should not feel bad for being “difficult,” if anyone can define that term. Poetry shouldn’t attempt to play to any denominator because maybe it shouldn’t end up on a mass-consumption rack.

It might not sell. It’s not supposed to sell. It’s supposed to be pushing the edges of what we understand language to be. Well, maybe not, but your aesthetic ought to be whatever you make it, but selling it should not be your goal. If it is your goal, I suppose you’re what I’m railing against.

Back to the earlier question: why do people buy their poetry from Barnes and Noble or the other big chains? Is there anything interesting there? I think it has to do with poetry being viewed as some kind of higher level- some kind of elite tradition which, by not only shopping in the poetry section at B&N, but also having it on your bookshelf at home, you’ve now included yourself in. Poetry is considered, as Johannes once said, “high falutin’” and it’s something you’re into when you’re attempting to appear superior to others. However, all you’re doing is continuing to support the established set by considering it in that way and buying with that in mind.¹

While I say poetry should not apologize for being “difficult,” I think that’s separate from what I believe most poets want to say about their work these days. Yeah, I’d say my poems are a bit weird, but there’s nothing to “get” about them necessarily, a common complaint I hear. “These are kind of cool, Amish, I just don’t get poetry.” Neither do I, to be honest.

This Fashion metaphor isn’t perfect. What I suppose I mean by it is that yes there are channels and options in poetry like anything else and simply because something appears not to have a practical use doesn’t mean it’s useless. Poetry doesn’t need to comfort or make you feel anything about a specific event. I’m reminded by a book of “Friendship Poems” that I have, given to me by David. Is it necessary to categorize poetry in that way? Aren’t all poems love poems or hate poems in some way? Aren’t they all about friendship and death and all these topics common to the “human experience?” Maybe poetry isn’t any of those things at the same time.

Art, I feel, has its own merit beyond its ability to sell, or at least it should. It should be more about the limits and pushing past them, which should not be tied to sales or even jobs. In fact, on the subject of jobs, I think poets ought to be hired for how far they are outside of the norm within a department, not how well they meet it. ‘Ars gratia artis’ and all that.

_____________________________________________________________________________

¹ Do Non-Poets Buy Poetry Books?

A Fellow Brown MFAer

2009-09-13T19:33:00.002-05:00

Mark Baumer can't manage to write a novel, but he's writing fine blog posts. Check out his web page, which will be over on the side once this post is pages away.

Oh, and the dartboard image? That's my shot. It was magical.

Jennifer was useless, but it's darts: mano y mano and all that.

Just the Part with the Glenn Beck Bit

2009-08-31T22:43:00.002-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The quote I was looking for: "Just remember: when you put yourself up there, you can never drive in the last nail yourself."

Cosa Nostra Update

2009-08-26T19:39:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends of Cosa Nostra,

We're proud to announce the release of Anthony Madrid's The 580 Strophes and Mary Hickman's How to Be Healthy & Heal, in addition to two broadsides: Benjamin Paloff's "Maimonides on Scriptura...l Passages with Seemingly Purposeless Contents" and Mary Hickman's "[The comets laugh...]." These letter-pressed items are now available at http://www.cosanostra-editions.com/.

The President's Health Care/Move to Providence

2009-08-17T19:29:00.003-05:00

1. That Barack Obama was elected by no small majority of Americans seems to have been clearly wasted. No, I don't always think that legislation ought to be forced through, but clearly, Americans chose to give the Democrats a certain level of power and they have fucked it up royally.

That Obama backing down from these incredibly well-organized faux grass-roots lunatics is kind of surprising to me, honestly. There have been nut-jobs all along and Obama has done an amazing job of avoiding them in order to, for example, get elected. To back down now is much worse, I would say, than simply losing this fight. Obama has weakened himself throughout much of this term and is certainly in no position to help Democrats maintain their numbers in 2010. I think there's a good chance that we could well lose enough to be back to even in the Senate and House.

That the Right and conservative Democrats have been able to maintain their funding from the health care industry at the expense of the American people is nothing short of corruption. That the organized Right have been able to cause such a ruckus as to make it so that facts have been completely obscured and their "bull" (to use the phrase of that NRA guy in Montana) has become larger than life is disgusting. They claim that people are mobilizing themselves at these rallies, even when faced with the evidence of busing and corporate sponsorship.

The removal of the public option is disgusting, and that Obama seems to be on the verge of abandoning it is nothing less than denying the mandate which he was given when elected. That Obama and the Democrats are so afraid of these fuck-nuts protesters to the point of changing their tactics is perhaps one of the greatest let-downs in modern American politics. Without a public option, this bill is just an excuse to force Americans to buy expensive health care with no alternative.

As Mark Wallace points out, the fat lady has yet to sing, but I fear the Republicans, smelling blood in the water, are circling quite close.

2. Providence has been...interesting. We've had a rough time of it so far, to be honest, though I have no doubt we've been spoiled a bit in the past. It has been HOT and with no A/C, Jennifer and I have had a rough time sleeping (at night) or doing much of anything during the day time.

Providence is lovely but quite busy, and moving from the quiet streets of Iowa City hasn't helped. There's constant noise from the street and I think it's just contributed to the feeling of things being different.

The car decided to pick this period to mess up, so now that we've spent a chunk of money on it, we're not doing terribly well on money, which of course simply adds to our nostalgia for Iowa City.

On the plus side, all university-related issues have been easy and fun. I've hung out with the Waldrops and emailed back and forth with students who are coming in. I'm unbelievably excited about school, though slightly nervous about, you know, actually HAVING to write on a regular basis. School starts in a few weeks, so we'll see how it goes.

Needless to say, I've been glued to the television watching the news, especially regarding the Healthcare quagmire.

Soon: a post of the motivations of the Right in all this mess.

Our Favorite Song of Late

2009-08-09T18:25:00.000-05:00

An Open Letter to Sarah Palin

2009-07-28T12:45:00.003-05:00

Dear Sarah (I know I can still call you “Governor,” but that doesn’t seem like either of us, really):

I hear you’re recently unemployed. Isn’t it kind of liberating to walk out of a job? I actually quit my job recently as well because I’m headed back to school. Are you going to school this fall? It’s good to have a back-up plan, so my father tells me. My “back-up” plan has always been music, so I guess it’s not much of a “plan” at all. We can’t all listen to our parents, as you are no doubt well aware.

I worked at my job for nearly four years, which I heard is the term for the Governor in Alaska. Did your term expire? Oh right, you quit your job too, which is why we have so much in common of late.

Unlike you, I didn’t go in planning to work at my job for four years. Wait...did you? I guess my job never had a set “term,” if you will, and honestly, I never imagined being there more than a year. How long did you think you were going to be in your job when you started?

I have to admit, I really admire your stance on quitting so you wouldn’t waste tax payer money. I did quite the opposite: I quit in the middle of the month so that my health insurance, etc. would continue until the end of the month. I guess that’s probably not something you have to worry about since you’ve apparently got a lot of money, yours or donations.

I hear you don’t really like the “Gotchya” media. Did you have to go through an exit interview? I did and while I understand that they have a right to know certain things, I was a little upset that they asked so many personal questions, like “What did you do on an average day?” There goes that machine again- politics as usual, right? Well, none of that for you and me anymore, right?

Wouldn’t it be strange if you quit your job just to join the media that has had it out for you this whole time? Actually, that’s not a terrible idea. If you could somehow control a small part of the media, maybe they wouldn’t talk about your virgin daughter who had the child or all these made up allegations they have all this evidence lying around for. Maybe YOU could be in charge of finding other people to make stuff up about. That’ll show ‘em, Sarah!

Anyways, best of luck with your future plans. I’m sure you’ll land on your feet. As long as you find something and keep at it, even if you don’t like it, you’re bound to get where you want to go eventually.

Best,
Amish

An Open Letter to Emma Watson

2009-07-27T22:11:00.002-05:00

Dear Emma (I hope you don’t mind that I call you Emma- I’ll assume for now that I can):

No less than a dozen people have told me about how you’ll be attending Brown University beginning this Fall. They’ve told me this because I too will be attending Brown, but instead of coming in as an undergraduate student, I’ll be starting graduate school in the Literary Arts program. According to Yahoo, you seem to have decided on “reading literature,” which will put you across Fones Alley from me, at least in terms of a home base.

Similar to your “gap year” or the period you’ve taken to try and figure out what you want to do, I’ve taken nearly four gap years, but instead of the word “gap,” try “rejection.” It’s great to have some time off, isn’t it?

As you well know though, it hasn’t been a vacation. While I’ve been working at the University of Iowa’s library, you were making movies, which have made you pretty famous worldwide. I assume this is why you took a while to decide and announce where you would head to school. I suppose I didn’t do that. In fact, when I got the phone call from Brown, I said yes before the caller could finish his schpiel. I guess I was pretty excited.

You must be excited too: Brown is an excellent choice for an undergraduate degree. Assuming you stick with literature, there are several wonderful scholars teaching there, including Montlu Blasing, who teaches classes on Modernism and the like. There are so many wonderful opportunities for you as Brown, not to mention all the coffee and Dunkin Donuts you can handle in the Providence area.

I know you’re quite worried about how your fame might cause trouble for you while in such a public space. Believe me, Emma, I’m worried about it too, which is why I’m writing this letter. Speaking as someone who has gone relatively unnoticed and uncared about most of his educational career, here are some pointers:

1. Hang out with stoners. For some reason, due to our backwards nature as Americans, we’re immediately negative about people who do drugs because, of course, people who do drugs are destroying society and have no business being alive. People will immediately discount drugs because, of course, people who do drugs are destroying society and have no business being alive. People will immediately discount you, even if you’re not actually doing drugs.
2. Find people who are interested in the things you’re interested in and talk about those things endlessly. This will immediately force hangers-on to either assimilate or slink away. Either way, it’s win-win for you.
3. Be that person at parties that doesn’t drink. Not only will people not want to hang around you, you’ll also get a great amount of fodder for future acting roles.
4. Do all of your binge drinking in private. This will also keep people away from you and keep those paparazzi from snagging pictures. It’s hard to get pictures of you while you’re passed out or throwing up in your own home, right?
5. Lie and say you’ve actually been doing #4. People will think you’re weird, but they won’t try and save your life or any crap like that. Showing up drunk or actually getting sick will make people take notice, which is what you’re trying to avoid.

Best of luck while studying at Brown! Hopefully, I’ll be teaching a poetry class over at Literary Arts your second year, so feel free to go through the application process if you’re at all inclined to write poems.

Best,
Amish

Again, In Absence of a Real Post

2009-07-06T22:17:00.003-05:00

Michael Penn's solo album March is quite fantastic. The main single off of it, "No Myth" was a pretty decent hit for Sean Penn's brother and it's a shame he's never quite had the same level of success again. "No Myth" though, has that excellent pop sensibility and a fantastic hook.

I admit the song is a bit schmaltzy, but I don't feel like it has aged much. In fact, a lot of the alternative movement of the 90s seems to be in this vein. And he's playing a 12 string. Can't beat it.

Lily Allen

2009-07-05T14:35:00.001-05:00

Jennifer said this song/video reminded her of my poems.

Thanks, I think?

Poems by Aziz Shakir-Tash in eXchanges

2009-06-26T20:03:00.002-05:00

Some poems I helped with back in Fall of 2007.

Notes

2009-06-04T12:00:00.002-05:00

1. That Andy Richter is back with Conan O'Brien as he begins hosting The Tonight Show is fantastic. I miss the old days and was very glad to see them do a new version of "In the Year 2000," retitled as (you guessed it) "In the Year 3000." I was laughing so hard I was crying, and a little weepy too at the prospect of both guy being back together. If you haven't seen Conan yet, he's quite good and not "Late Night" Conan. He's prepared to take on the middle-aged people that used to watch Leno, who, of course, is much less funny than Conan.

2. If you're so inclined, pick up or download (which you can do legally) The Decemberists' new album, The Hazards of Love. It's a concept album, but more than that, it's really goddamn good. It's a bit rough in patches in terms of theme, but if that bothers you, I'm not sure how to help you. Like all concept albums, there are songs that have been hammered into the round hole, but the more I listen to the songs, the more I feel like they are together.

3. Moving preparations are coming along. I'm so excited about starting school that I can hardly express it in any available form.

Old/New Link

2009-05-26T16:15:00.003-05:00

A link I should have added a while back:

Blake Butler's blog has fascinated me for a while and I kept meaning to add it but never got around to it. Blake not only is from Atlanta, but one of his high school friends is one of my college friends. Small world, really.

I think I recall Blake's foot from a photo on Bo's wall.

Anyways, check out Blake's blog in this post and over to the left.

Note

2009-05-23T21:47:00.004-05:00

I'm alive, just have nothing terribly good to write about of late. Still working on "Sound/Chest." Planning a move to Providence at the end of July. Took a trip there last week and had a blast.

Oh, and Jennifer's a Mets fan. I feel betrayed, but at least she's kind of getting into baseball.

My fantasy team sucks again.

Sold a bunch of books and bought pants.

Thinking about buying some cheap guitar pedals from Danelectro- like $12 a pop. They seem to sound good and I don't do a lot of "stomping."

Our place in Providence is out of our price range but happily worth it. It's beautiful and the landlord is a classy guy, much like our current landlord, Kermit. We've had some luck, to say the least.

Jennifer's sister Annie is graduating from high school this coming week. She's heading to Syracuse. My wife and I will be within 5 hours of each of her sisters. And Cooperstown. And Waterbury, VT, home of Ben and Jerry's. There's a factory tour.

I'm thinking about writing a poem for an event. It's a good choice in terms of "events," but I feel strange that my mind is wandering towards it. Fortunately, when asked initially, I said I wouldn't write something, but rather find something to read. It will be a happy surprise for the event planners, no doubt.

I'm happy that Keith Waldrop is teaching the first workshop next Fall. It was an incredible honor meeting him and his wife of so many years, Rosmarie. She spent a lot of time with us at a reading while in Providence and she was so kind.

The other class I'm thinking of taking is on Modernism in the English department. It's being taught by Mutlu Blasing and I've read some great essays from her. She has a book on form and politics in poetry. Sounds right up the alley I was heading in the Nowak essay.

My last day of work at Media Services is July 16.

I've been in a Leonard Cohen mood lately, not quite a "Leonard Cohen afterworld," though.

Mark Nowak's Iowa City/Lucas Iowa Visits

2009-04-20T18:25:00.001-05:00

If you're a local person, Mark Nowak is reading at Prairie Lights on Friday night at 7pm and if you're a slightly less local person, he'll be in Lucas, Iowa at the Coal Mining Labor Museum on Saturday.

Should be a fun time for all.

Ten Years Since

2009-04-20T07:00:00.002-05:00

It's strange to think that it has already been ten years since the Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999. I was in high school then, and there was a wave of panic that swept through the school. Mostly because this guy, Zach, and his friends, also wore trench coats, a recognized fashion aesthetic at the time as a result of Harris and Klebold's rampage.

Zach, of course, was a perfectly normal high school student who everyone knew was a good guy who was demonized by the school administration and his fellow students for being in the "Trench Coat Mafia." We know now, of course, that Harris and Klebold weren't just dudes in trench coats or in a mafia or gang, but simply two unstable students who took what they believed to be revenge on their fellow students and teachers. If their plan had worked out, apparently parents and service workers arriving at the school would have been met by bombs set in Harris and Klebold's cars. Fortunately, it seems as though Harris' bomb-making skills were terrible, which is really no consolation at all.

It's strange to think back now- ten years on- that Columbine is still a pretty crucial moment in the lives of anyone around my age. 9/11 obviously had it's impact, but to be in high school at the time another high school went through something like that was more personal and had a deeper impact, and to some extent, still does. Perhaps it's that 9/11 became such a Right wing clusterf**k that we were somehow desensitized to the images, but still the idea of two students roaming through their cafeteria chills me.

There are, and already were, other school shootings before April 20, 1999, and I have no doubt that those had an impact on people as strongly as Columbine. But there's something interesting in our generation, I feel: people our age were responsible not only for that massacre, but the other major massacre at Virginia Tech back in April of 2007. April isn't the cruelest month for nothing, it seems, and yet somehow I feel odd that there's such a stigma on my violent generation- it's daunting really.

And what Harris, Klebold, and Cho seem to have in common is some desire to see pain in others for the pain they themselves felt, a pain which seems to have either gone ignored or was so far buried that there was no chance to help out. In Harris' case, it seems he had sociopathic tendencies that were unknown at the time. He was apparently charming- something he could turn on and off. Something he could control within himself to pass as "normal," it turns out.

There was such a rush of panic that went through my high school, my county, and my age. Everybody was suspect. Everybody tried to be nice to everybody else because if you weren't, that person could show up the next day with a gun and blow their school away. If you wore a trench coat, you were apparently a part of a nationwide gang bent on destruction and watching the world burn. If you seemed like you weren't popular, you were about to kill everyone.

Of course most of this is untrue. Zach, as far as I'm aware, is alive and well and never harmed anyone other than the things we generally do to each other in terms of break up and break downs. We as Americans are quite reactionary and quick to find blame and fault, which is exactly what we have done after every single Fox News bulletin and CNN Breaking News signal. Somehow, I feel it is this reaction that leads to more violence than the video games and music that everyone blamed right after Columbine.

I don't know. It's an odd thing to think back on, at least.

My First Inkling of Liking Anything by Robert Frost

2009-04-16T15:28:00.006-05:00

I've pretty much ignored Robert Frost since I first read the standard "The Road Not Taken" back in middle and high schools. For years now, I thought it was because Robert Frost sucked- he had some old school vision of poetry (which he might still) and it was all landscapes and personal freedom crap. Some kind of American lifestyle that was exemplified in his poetry that has led him to being so revered by the pezzonovante.

There is something I still find kind of old school in his style and use of language- there's little attempt, at least in my initial reading, of trying to do anything different with poems and language. It's the same crap- David even says they read it in a Romanticism class so they could talk about HOW to read a poem- can you imagine??

But today- perhaps somewhere in the last few days, really, I heard something that has stuck with me. And while I realized it was Frost, I, as always, ignored it. However, like some kind of parasite, it has been on my mind all day, which is why I'm writing this post.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep

The words and rhythm struck me in a way that I generally don't take note of. I generally find rhythm is yet another construct and a method by which to sort of fit language into a space, rather than allowing language to expand of its own volition. There's a burst at each iamb:

The WOODS are LOVE-ly, DARK and DEEP

Shakespeare's iambs don't burst for me- and as I said, I normally would ignore such a thing, but today, the rhythm of this line has been dragging me along with it. I'm caught on each stressed syllable in a way that's quite new to me.

And then the text itself: there's something deliciously morbid and, I would argue, grotesque about it. "The woods are lovely"- ok, yeah- trees and nature are nice (something that's bothered me about Frost anyways...) "dark and deep"- whoa! These aren't just pretty woods that seem to extend beyond sight- there is something sinister afoot. I've read some things today on this line and suicide, and I am totally buying it: there's something enticing about the darkness of these woods- something that is engaging and tempting in them that is beyond a general enjoyment of nature. There's something lonely out there, almost- a morbid wood, really.

What really gets me about the rhythm and the words is that it fall apart to me in the next line:

But I have promises to keep

"Promises" kills the rhythm dead- breaks it into pieces. It seems impossible to read the line without the rhythm falling apart before your eyes and suddenly clearing the dream-like vision of suicide out: the narrator has responsibilities to get back to, and as lovely as death sounds for him, he knows now is not the time.

NB: Rereading it now, I might be wrong on this point and "pro/mi/ses" may function like the rest of the poem- but I like my reading better :)

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is luring you in along with the narrator- the rhythm relatively consistent up until the "promises" line (or beyond, I guess...) and I believe the interesting thing about the poem is just how it does that and how it turns what seems like into an natural aesthetic piece and creates a nearly 90s Goth tone.

Reading the U Illinois Modern American Poetry page, Jeffrey Myers notes three of the poems lines are "transformations" of lines from other folks. The "woods" line is a transformation of Thomas Lovell Beddoes' (who??) "The Phantom Wooer": "Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet." There is something sexual here in the original, and something that leads us over to death in Frost. The bed as luring as death is intriguing to say the least and I think that Frost is even attempting an objectification of death to some extent. To sexualize death would be nothing new, but this seems to be going on here as well.

Myers, actually, makes my point in the next paragraph (which is kind of disappoint AND comforting):

The theme of "Stopping by Woods"--despite Frost's disclaimer--is the temptation of death, even suicide, symbolized by the woods that are filling up with snow on the darkest evening of the year. The speaker is powerfully drawn to these woods and--like Hans Castorp in the "Snow' chapter of Mann's Magic Mountain--wants to lie down and let the snow cover and bury him. The third quatrain, with its drowsy, dream-like line: "Of easy wind and downy flake," opposes the horse's instinctive urge for home with the man's subconscious desire for death in the dark, snowy woods. The speaker says, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," but he resists their morbid attraction.

I don't know about all the horse stuff, but certainly the lure of death is Frost's primary theme and the horse's feelings are clearly intended to be a juxaposition to that.

There's something about poems about nature that are dull to me- like it's been done to death and so I just tune out. I'm not saying it's a positive quality, and obviously the very nature of nature is change, but something struck me today about the layers in the one line of "Stopping."

Fayetteville, AR

2009-04-14T12:51:00.003-05:00

So, if you exclude the Vox Reading Series of Athens, GA, which is run by the grad students in the Creative Writing program at Georgia, Matt and Katy Henriksen were the first folks to invite me to read at their first Burning Chair reading in Fayetteville, AR. They had been running the series before in Brooklyn, but last year moved to Fayetteville.

If this is what this gig is, where do I sign up for more?

I had such a blast, even though I made the trip an incredibly quick one- driving down on Friday and back on Saturday, spending a total of 35 hours away from the house, 14 of which were in Fayetteville, roughly.

Everyone who read was simply amazing and not just as poets- as we hung out before and after the reading, I found Joe, MC, and Keith (who came back to Matt and Katy's after the reading) to be really cool folks. Kate Pringle was incredible kind as well, though I didn't get to spend much time with her. Carolyn I didn't have a chance to meet, but perhaps I'll correct that in the future.

It's clear that what's necessary- and what's been lacking for me in Iowa City, to an extent- is this community: we talked about all sorts of topics, swirling around poetry and poets, for hours. Joe had to leave and I had to get to bed, but other than that, I'm certain we could have been at it into the morning.

It was really cool to hang out with similar folks and really cool to feel included!

Parts of Episode III You Weren't Expecting To See So Soon

2009-04-01T18:14:00.004-05:00

Other selections from Episode III in Which Mr. Wyndham's Cat Kills the Milkman at Seven Corners.

Speaking of David...

2009-03-31T16:23:00.003-05:00

David talks about his run in with Neil Boortz when we were in high school so many years ago.

David does not mention that:

a) it was AP European history
b) we were watching a video (Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation')
c) we and many others were asleep
d) I bet David a penny that year that he would not read an entire book of 1000+ pages that we didn't have to read. He swore he would. I won the penny easily.
e) D has nothing to do with the story other than me winning a bet.
f) we both did incredibly well on our AP exams, despite Neil Boortz and his attempts at ruining David's life. And despite sleeping a lot in that class.

Atlanta: Yesterday's City of Today

2009-03-31T16:16:00.003-05:00

Sent by David Smith, currently of Norway, but former enemy of one Neil Boortz:

Why You Keep Going

2009-03-30T09:35:00.001-05:00

"Here, and on my own blog, we've all be following the success of a poet in his fourth year of applying to programs who got into Brown! These stories are real, these people are real, and if you continue to show courage--which being a writer will require of you your whole life, anyway--you will end up where it is you've dreamed of being, I promise you!"

- Seth Abramson on the MFA Blog's April Mailbag

A follower of the MFA Blog, Peachy, correctly pointed out that the "poet in his fourth year of applying" is yours truly. Imagine how hard I laughed when a) I saw that there was some other poor loser who had waited four years and would be heading to Brown and b) I realized it was me!

Yes, I first applied to M.F.A. programs beginning in the Fall of 2004, hoping to start in the Fall of 2005. I was naive: I thought that since I did pretty well in Johannes Goransson's workshop in the Spring of 2004 and then went on to do well in Brian Henry's Spring 2005 workshop, I figured I was a shoe-in.

I was also an idiot.

Who knew the process was so hard? Who would guess that there were THOUSANDS of other people just like me across the country and even the world, who were "doing well" as undergrads in their workshops?

There are plenty of folks who get in their first time, I know, but I felt the first rejection year was incredibly humbling, thought perhaps not humbling enough. When we moved to Iowa City, Jennifer having been accepted to the Ph.D. program in Anthropology, I felt like I was even more of a shoe-in to get into the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Clearly still naive, I applied for a second time during the 2005-06 application season. Because we were living in Iowa City at that point, I only applied to Iowa, which was kind of a silly thing to do, in retrospect. And it was certainly a silly thing to do again in 2007!

Thinking about it now, Iowa and I just aren't a good fit. It's about where you fit in, I think- the place that's going to be somewhere you can work and where the environment is solid for you. And while Iowa City has been a great fit in many ways for almost four years now, it's exciting to think that there are a few places that I do seem to fit in.

Johannes was right. G.C. was right. Seth is certainly right as well: apply to as many programs as you can afford to apply to- to as many programs you can bare doing the work for. You're not going to run the table- even the most "qualified" folks don't do that- but you do increase your chances of getting in.

Now, that won't guarantee you anything, especially considering that the whole process really is a crap shoot to some extent. There are so many variables (who's reading, for example) and there is really no way to gauge your writing to decide where you're going to fit in- you kind of have to trust that some program somewhere will like you.

And that's why, if you really enjoy writing, you keep at it. Even if it doesn't work out right away, certainly it CAN work out if you keep trying and never get bogged down. Perseverance is pretty much one of the most difficult qualities to work towards. It's easy to give up, and I think to an extent, we're set to give up. And there are limits, too, but you have to decide that for yourself.

It hasn't been easy, certainly. Many times did I think "f*** it! I'll just work some crappy job forever and write poems when I feel like it." But I knew, even when I was down, that that would never make me happy. And fortunately, beyond my own desire and ambition, I have a fantastic support network, including my wife, my family, my friends, as well as other folks who just were pulling for me all along (Seth included). People want you to be happy, after all, and they can normally tell that you're not on some basic level. I guess folks can just tell that there's some place you'd rather be than where you are.

So I haven't done it alone, certainly, but from within, you have to pull some kind of desire and strength to keep at it. You have to manage to figure out why you're doing it, beyond just wanting to do it for it's own sake. It can't be about some perceived prestige or desire to simply get a degree. Any degree should be about more than a title or a series of letters.

It's hasn't been an easy few years, and it's really quite strange to think that this period of my life is over and that I'm finally getting back on the track I began. Now, however, I know why this is the path I wanted to go on and I kind of have a feeling why I'm here.

And that's been worth the frustration over the last few years, most definitely.

Fashion Poetics IV Addendum

2009-03-26T20:20:00.003-05:00

Poets.org's list of "Most Popular Contemporary Poets" for 2008:

1. Billy Collins
2. Gwendolyn Brooks
3. Charles Simic
4. Nikki Giovanni
5. Gary Soto
6. Allen Ginsberg
7. Kay Ryan
8. Rita Dove
9. Adrienne Rich
10. Naomi Shihab Nye
11. Mary Oliver
12. John Ashbery
13. Donald Hall
14. Louise Glück
15. Lucille Clifton
16. Sharon Olds
17. Yusef Komunyakaa
18. Sonia Sanchez
19. Jane Kenyon
20. Mark Strand

Sweet Jesus. Ginsberg? I love the guy, but he's not Contemporary. "Contemporary to what?" I suppose is the question.

Actually, let's take this a step further (from Dictionary.reference.com):

con⋅tem⋅po⋅rar⋅y /kənˈtɛmpəˌrɛri/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [kuhn-tem-puh-rer-ee] Show IPA adjective, noun, plural -rar⋅ies.
–adjective 1. existing, occurring, or living at the same time; belonging to the same time: Newton's discovery of the calculus was contemporary with that of Leibniz.
2. of about the same age or date: a Georgian table with a contemporary wig stand.
3. of the present time; modern: a lecture on the contemporary novel.

–noun 4. a person belonging to the same time or period with another or others.
5. a person of the same age as another.

Let's go with #3, "of present time." This list is a Barnes and Noble list of poets and people that people have heard of. Brooks? Love her stuff. Dead. Not contemporary, I'm sorry to say.

I suppose this actually has little to do with the issue of 'difficult' poetry, other than having come directly from the previous posting's thoughts on canon. I suppose the only real point I could make here is that these are the people that end up in textbooks and in high school heads and ears. OK, so very few of these people are in textbooks, but the mentality is there. And I think the only reason some folks are on this list is because there are people who vote them up with no real interest in moving beyond a canon. They're interested in perpetuating the same group of people they've been thinking about and hearing about for the last 30 years.

Fashion Poetics IV: "I Don't Get This Kind of Fashion"

2009-03-26T12:24:00.004-05:00

Jennifer got back from Santa Fe, New Mexico on Monday. Getting back into our normal schedule of TV watching, last night I happened to watch a few minutes of that Bravo show "Make Me a Supermodel." Now, I tried watching a few episodes last season, and I hated it. I also don't like it much now, but I don't mind hanging out with my wife while she's working on her comprehensive exam question(s).

Last night though, I did catch something she said, and catch something on the screen at the same time: people dressed in strange wire type outfits (maybe it was a repeat? who knows). What caught my attention was Jennifer's statement: "I don't get this kind of fashion."

It made me think again about my on going thoughts on poetry and what fashion can teach us about poetry and what people generally seem to understand and not understand. This, again, comes down to the word "difficult": the wire outfits are no doubt difficult for myself and I imagine what must be the Bravo audience (guys waiting for baseball season to begin, maybe?).

A quick search of "most popular poet" (which I assumed would yield your Romantics) brought up a poll of Top 10 Poems, as polled by the Classic Poetry Aloud website. Be shocked that everyone but Kipling was dead before 1900 (Kipling dying in 1936) and that with the exception of a Shakespeare sonnet, everything else is 19th century (and the Kipling poem I suppose is 1910).

It seems strange to say this, but for most people, it seems poetry stopped existing as soon as they saw Prufrock or something! As if there was a collective throwing up of hands and shouting "I'm out!" and since that point, new poetry has existed as a counter-public, with the exceptions of your Collins's and Pinskies, who seem to be read as an example of what's out there currently. Otherwise, poetry exists in a little vacuum: we read, write, and publish for each other- our own incestous bubble. Contemporary poetry has been cast out of the main stream, it seems

I want to mention here that I don't think that's a problem with poetry or poets: it's the way we teach poetry in schools and beyond. We test kids to death on "sinews of the heart" from Blake, but exclude, until you're in a creative writing or contemporary poetry class at University level, anything particularly new. If you're lucky, you *might* get Plath or Ginsberg in high school text books. Of course you never get to it since teachers are busy with all sorts of other issues, including standardized tests, which make sure you're up on your Keats and Shelley.

So back to "getting it": it seems simple that the main issue is this idea that poetry and everything else ought to be understood and be able to be absorbed within the first reading. If we like, we can call this the "Soundbyte Effect" in which everything should be able to be ascertained within 3 to 5 seconds and the rest can be discarded for YouTube.

Poetry should function the same way, it seems. There ought to be understandable words and language. There ought to be a theme that's understandable immediately, hence the popularlity of love and war and death. There ought to be rhythm and meter because if there's not, why not write an essay? Lines ought to rhyme (slant rhymes acceptable).

Of course, this is all stupid: death is boring and so is love. Can you define love? How about defining a sandwich?

We've seen an evolved path in the 20th century (ok- so there are folks that were doing it before, but I mean a concrete "system") where in poetry is allowed to move beyond the restrictions of previous generations, and yet, it is this that seems to be enjoyed by a public who find "comfort" in Romanticism.

"Getting" poetry isn't necessarily something that's good: poetry, I feel, ought to be something you have to work out and yes, if you're looking for pleasure in poetry, perhaps you'd be better off sticking with people incredibly dead (not the recent folks, of course). If poetry should or ought to be relaxing to you, perhaps it's best to avoid modern poetry.

However, I believe writing and reading modern poetry is a challenge and ought to be challenging. There's a lot going on and life too is complex. Poetry ought to meet the complexities of modern life and the complexities of modern language and its usage.

So yeah, it sucks not "getting" a certain type of fashion. But maybe we're not supposed to "get" it. The goal is individualized and removed from objective measurement, though for some reason Make Me a Super Model seems to be running a show of objectivity.

The Burning Chair Readings at Fayetteville Underground

2009-03-24T08:31:00.002-05:00

The Burning Chair Readings
at Fayetteville Underground
present a night w/ Cannibal Books
featuring poetry from

Carolyn Guinzio
Kevin Holden
M.C. Hyland
Keith Newton
kathryn l. pringle
Amish Trivedi
Joseph P. Wood

Friday, April 10, 6:30-8 pm
Fayetteville Underground
East Square Plaza
1 East Center Street
fayettevilleunderground.com
$5 suggested donation

Handmade & other books available at a discount, w/ refreshments, gallery tours, & social hour following the reading.

Cannibal Books publishes hand-sewn literary journals and chapbooks which focus on divergent and emerging poetics. While our products fit into the category of book arts, the focus is entirely on presenting daring work from a broad range of styles. An aesthetic definition cannot define the hunger. Founded in Brooklyn, NY in 2004, Cannibal Books currently nests in Fayetteville, AR.

Visit flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com or query flesheatingpoems AT gmail DOT com.

Author Bios
Carolyn Guinzio is the author of Untitled Wave from Cannibal Books, Quarry (Parlor Press) and West Pullman (Bordighera). Her work has appeared in many journals including Blackbird, Colorado Review, and New American Writing. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Read two poems in Typo.

Kevin Holden is the author of Identity from Cannibal Books. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Colorado Review, Ecopoetics, The Harvard Advocate, The Liberal, Parcel and Typo. He is from Rhode Island and lives and teaches in Iowa.
Read an excerpt from Identity in Typo.

MC Hyland is the author of four chapbooks: Residential As In (Blue Hour Press, 2009), The Hesitations (a collaboration with Friedrich Kerksieck and Kate Lorenz, Small Fires Press, 2006), Incantations (reject sheep press, 2006), and Lost Gospels (Ponkapoag Press, 2005). She currently lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches creative writing and letterpress through local nonprofits, and runs DoubleCross Press.
Read “Epistolary” in H_NGM_N.

Keith Newton’s chapbook Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City was published this winter by Cannibal Books. His poems and translations have appeared recently in Harvard Review, Saltgrass, and Open Letters. He lives in Brooklyn, where edits the online magazine Harp & Altar.
Read “Materialization in a Black Sea” in Typo.

kathryn l. pringle is the author of Right New Biology, just out from Factory School/Heretical Text Series. She is the author of The Stills (Duration Press) and Temper & Felicity are Lovers (TAXT). She is an editor at the literary magazine minor/american, and the co-founder of the minor american reading series. She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Read The Stills at Duration Press (requires Adobe Acrobat).

Amish Trivedi’s electronic chapbooks include Selections from Episode III (Beard of Bees), The Ink Sessions (Scantily Clad), and The Breakers (Absent Magazine). His poems appear in La Petite Zine, Cannibal, Word For/Word, and Backwards City Review. He lives in Iowa City.
Read The Ink Sessions at Scantily Clad Press.

Joseph P. Wood’s first full book of poems, I & We, will be published by CustomWords in 2010. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Travel Writing (Scantily Clad Press) and In What I Have Done & What I Have Failed to Do (Elixir Press). He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Read “Anatomy of a Bullet Wound” in Typo.

Mark Nowak's Blog

2009-03-17T13:24:00.002-05:00

Happy to mention Mark Nowak's new blog, Coal Mountain's Blog, a compliment, I would say, to Mark's new book, Coal Mountain Elementary.

Check both of them out, certainly.

Brown University

2009-03-14T00:56:00.003-05:00

After a phone call today from Brown University, I immediately said yes, agreeing to come to school there this Fall. I'll be working towards an M.F.A. in poetry in their Literary Arts program.

I was holding out on Brown, but honestly I had wonderful offers Notre Dame's M.F.A. and Illinois State's MA program, for which I was offered a wonderful fellowship.

As readers of this blog will note, this hasn't been without a lot of hard work over the last years, and a great part of that is the patience of friends and family, and especially my wife, Jennifer. She has been through a lot with me, with a lot more crap to sludge through, I'm sure.

I must also thank Johannes, G.C. and Joyelle for what I imagine must have been wonderful letters of recommendation. It's so strange to have one part of your file that you have absolutely no idea about, but that could have made a huge difference. That these three were willing to take a chance on me four years into my Iowan exile truly means the world to me. I'll never be able to thank them enough.

We'll be moving there this August, and while we're really going to miss Iowa City, I think it's the perfect time for me to start school and get on with my life. Jennifer is coming with of course, though she'll be heading off to do Ph.D. field work for her Anthropology degree. We'll be apart some, but again, this is the time to do it.

Anyways, we're so excited- today has been an incredible Friday the 13th, certainly- and there's just so much to think about and look forward to. There will be some things to stress out about, but for now, I'm going to enjoy it.

Setting Part II

2009-03-12T13:00:00.003-05:00

Natasa, who ran the translation workshop I was allowed to sit in on, sent me an email with a link regarding setting. I hope she doesn't mind my posting the email and link here (she wanted to post it herself, but didn't want to sign up for anything else new- for her, I'm removing the login issues, BUT I'm going to begin moderating so as to cut the ads out).

"Also, I'm here attaching the link I wanted to post as a comment to your funny "the writers-who- fetishize- their mise-en-scene where- the-good-stuff-will- happen" blogpost on The T-vedi Chronicles..."

http://iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol5_n2/postcard/index.html
_________________________________________________________________________________

The argument I'm trying to make is that setting isn't an issue of choice. I don't believe it is possible to create the proper environment for writing or any other artistic activity. This is what I suppose I mean by the fetishization of locale. There's a desire to set a desk in a proper place or sit in a certain type of chair, I suppose, but I think the desire to have THAT be somehow be necessary towards writing is ridiculous.

There's a desire for the mountains around you or the beach to serve as "inspiration." While I don't believe talent is something you're born with, I do believe that the desire to act is something you ought to have and not something you should expect to come out of the environment. I say this, of course, knowing full well that many rely on this. Joseph Ceravolo's introduction to Transmigration Solo is an example of how the location can be inspiring, but I suppose what interests me is that Ceravolo wasn't suddenly wanting to write as a result of being in Mexico: he was already writing and happened to be in Mexico where he was taken by the setting. Now, I argue partially in my Recovery Project piece on him in the Octopus #9, that Mexico is an influence on Ceravolo, but there's something to be said for feeling that the poems aren't about Mexico. I suppose my point to is that of expectation and anticipation: I don't believe Ceravolo expected to be inspired to write by where he was going. I think it just happened.

Writing, I believe, lacks a certain agency: there ought to be inner desire and external design on the work, rather than the whims of the setting.

Setting

2009-03-01T12:51:00.002-06:00

I'm kind of weirded out of late by people talking about "where" they write: what kind of lighting they use. What music they listen to. Do they use candles? Is there a mountain outside or a lake? Maybe it's snowing and there's something inspirational about the snow.

Maybe music sounds interesting. Johannes always suggested throwing on Godard's "Pierrot le fou" in the back ground. I recall him getting in some hot water over his regular exercise at the time: showing Un Chien Andalou and having the class write while it was going on in the background. I'm quite certain I got some cool poems from that exercise, but my "hot water" comment clearly shows that I'm one of the few who thought the practice was great. Apparently for others, it was a reason to complain that they weren't "being taught to write."

I'm bothered that someone writing is a Romantic or ritualistic practice, like somehow you'll just have pages of words flowing as soon as you get the perfect mise en scene down. It reminds me of people that go and by special notebooks and pens and expect that these are the things that create good poems or stories or whatever.

I guess I'm just over it. I don't know if I can write anywhere or whatever, and I'm not saying that a location isn't important. I'm just saying a location isn't going to make you better or worse or make you more or less creative. If you're inspired by the snow or mountains, perhaps you ought examine what you're really doing.

For another thing: can anyone teach you to write? I don't think that's the goal of the workshop or the MFA, for that matter. I think the best anyone can do for you is give you the space to write and time to do it. The workshop, at its best, is a place for feedback and learning to think critically about yourself and others.

Anyways, spaces and places, lights and sights. What good are these things if your poems suck anyways?

Selections From Episode III, a Beard of Bees E-Chap

2009-02-28T23:43:00.004-06:00

I'm really proud of these poems. Maybe the first significant set I started working on after I moved to Iowa City.

The poems were initially meant to be funny and vulgar, and here in the selected set, Eric Elshtain's done a fantastic job of picking some of the best of the entire set, which is actually 37 poems long. They're all short-ish.

Johannes calls them my "Parland poems," and they are that: poems that attempt to extract the silliness out of the random situations we find ourselves in. I remember Johannes really loving a great majority of these poems, and if anything, these are dedicated to him, and of course, Henry Parland.

Parland really touched upon something with language and thematically, in terms of the banality of things that happen to all of us, even if Parland didn't live long enough to see the technological marvels of the 20th century. You could probably show someone Parland's poems right now and they would wonder who wrote these very modern, very new poems. It's my opinion that anyone reading Parland in 2109 will feel the same way: for dying at 22, Parland fits every era.

I've been in talks with another publisher to put out the whole set, but until that happens, I'm very thankful for Eric's help in getting these out.

Hope you all find them as much fun!

Selections from Episode III from Beard of Bees.

New RealPoetik

2009-02-16T23:40:00.000-06:00

Featuring yours truly.

http://realpoetik.blogspot.com/2009/02/amish-trivedi.html

This is Fantastic

2009-02-13T16:33:00.003-06:00

The Memory of Hank Aaron

Happy Poetry Day!

2009-02-13T08:30:00.002-06:00

Since we've been living in Iowa City, which puts us at 3 1/2 years as of February 1st, I've been working from noon until 9pm, Sunday through Thursday, most of the time. The exceptions are school breaks and the occasional Friday to make up time.

With a Friday/Saturday weekend, my social life has been strange to say the least: people are rarely free on the workday of Friday, but I am never free for any of the fun things people want to do on a lazy Sunday. I've missed Easter dinners and Super Bowls, afternoons in the park and all sorts of other activities. Working until late has it's disadvantages too: never being able to make it to readings without taking vacation time (in 3.5 years in Iowa City, I've made it to Matt Hart, Forrest Gander, Johannes and Joyelle, Lyn Hejinian and Dean Young- that's all- It's Iowa City- we get amazing readings!)

One thing I have had though, is an advantage: considering everyone, including Jennifer, has been busy most Fridays, I have spent this time as wisely as possible. Yeah, sometimes I end up playing video games or watching TV. Sometimes I end up going to the mall and sometimes I can't tell where my Friday went!

Mostly though, Friday has been my Poetry Day: the day I sit down to read thoroughly, take notes, and catch up on my own writing ideas that I've been scribbling down all week. I read blogs all week, certainly, but it is on Friday that I try to really get into what has been going on in the online poetry community we seem to be a part of (as Johannes say, "glorified thing "The Blog Writer""). I take Friday as my day that I am not an employee, but someone whose primary interest in life is an art form and everything that goes on around it.

This has taken great dedication, especially considering that I took part in the International Writing Program's Translation Workshop on Friday afternoons for the last two Fall semesters. And by the end of those semesters, I felt like I was dragging and behind and unable to comprehend what had been going on while I had been in class. I wrote during odd hours, especially at work or late at night. I read poetry only when I needed to (like reading poets at schools I applied to). I kept up with blogs and blogging, but if you look back over my posts from the last 8 months or so, the frequency is inconsistent, to say the least.

To know now, that in some small way, this has paid off, I am happy:

Last Friday, I was called by one of the MFA programs I had applied to an offered admission for next Fall. After four years of applying, most of which was to the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, since they're in my back yard and all, it has been a truly gratifying experience to know that giving one solid day to my "hobby" was a good idea.

But it's not a hobby as much as it used to be. The idea that everyday can be this way to some extent (minus teaching or other work related to surviving through an MFA) is such a wonderful feeling, and maybe a bit scary too. That I have at least one place saying that my faith in myself as a poet and as a person whose intellectual curiousity has led to considering language and all its trappings as the basic underpinning of our relationships and culture as a whole has been such a fantastic feeling this last week.

I'm not done though: of the 13 schools I applied to, this has been the only one I have heard from so far. I am going to do my best to keep my head straight through this process and hopefully I'll be able to pick the right school for me at this point. This is assuming I have an option, but if I don't, I have nothing but positive feelings about my one acceptance and would be honored to matriculate there this Fall.
_________________________________________

Poetry Day for me has been an escape to some extent, a double-life as someone who hasn't been doing what he's been wanting to do. Fridays are a way of pretending that I'm someone I am not, but hope to be. Fridays have been a way for me to distance myself from my forty hour week and keep myself from giving in to the feeling that I'd never get out of it. I had been desperate, certainly, to move on "career"-wise (assuming anything like that still exists for today's MFA graduate). But even getting into school is a wonderful step in the direction I want to go and it's a lovely feeling.
_________________________________________

It occurred to me last night that what had been a "hobby" for the last decade of my life, minus a few stints in creative writing classes while at Georgia, is now a "job" of sorts. This is great news! While in Johannes and Brian Henry's classes, one in Spring of 04 and the other in Spring of 05, I thrived under the pressure of needing to have something to present on certain weeks. I recall especially while in Johannes' class that my output was quite high, though obviously not all of it was stellar. I'm really looking forward to having to write, as right now, it's something I do because I want to, so, Poetry Day or not, I have to make myself do it. External pressure will make this great.
_________________________________________

For those keeping score, that's 1 acceptance, and 12 undecideds. I hope to hear something soon from the others.

Lightness Essay

2009-02-10T19:08:00.004-06:00

(N.B. I started writing this almost 18 months ago and never finished this. I don't plan on finishing it, so I'm posting it here. Probably part of an introductory thought on The Breakers)

If I may spend a moment wrapped inside of a cliché:

I really can’t seem to find what I’m looking for. And I’ve read the suggestions and the comments on my blog. But I, very seriously, still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And I wish it were something so simple as Bono’s vest and ponytail.

I’ve been on a poetic quest over the last few months and though I’ve received excellent directions from those electronically within my grasp, I still seem to be stumbling about in the dark with nothing but the glow of my Timex watch to guide me.

(end clichés, hopefully)

I’m looking for lightness in poems. I don’t mean lightness in the thematic sense, like poems about puppy dogs and ice cream, which I got enough of in undergraduate workshops. I don’t mean lightness as in the opposite of heaviness, in the sense of Italo Calvino’s lecture on lightness in Six Memos for the New Millennium. I mean the opposite of a heart attack crushing your chest. I want a poem (or more, if possible) that feels as though it could easily come off the page and leave no residue behind: no poems that need peeling from a page. Poems that desire to float away on their own.

This does not mean, however, that the poems need to be short or have a bunch of white space in the middle of letters or words or sentences. Length is fine and a lack of space is fine. I believe it is possible to have both a decently long poem and little or no space and to still not feeling constricted by the poem.

I’ve unfortunately tapped into a general definition of lightness when asking for others about it, and while all suggestions have been well-intentioned, I feel like I’m unable to reach the style I want and have ended up elsewhere. Unfortunately, too, I am unable to give a true definition for what it is I am seeking. I call it ‘lightness’ because it is the best adjective I can think of.

The suggestions have been interesting on this quest. Italo Calvino’s lecture (though it’s really an essay due to Calvino’s death) gives us lightness as a construct in which thematic issues create this sense. Calvino’s lightness seems to require taking on levity with respect to topics and issues, rather than style and form. Calvino gives us Dante, in that The Divine Comedy.

I recently finished reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the hope that the Czech writer could give me some idea of the direction I need to go in, I read it slowly and thoughtfully, hoping to capture the minutiae of events and language. In some way he has given me a direction: through his characters, Kundera gives the reader an example of lightness in terms of day to day existence. Sabina and Tereza are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Sabina hoping to live and die in a state of lightness and Tereza being unable and perhaps unwilling to give into the lifestyle. Tomas is somewhere in between: at the beginning of the novel he is living his life in lightness, but is eventually caught in the struggle between his lover Sabina and his wife Tereza. I believe that by the end, his death with his wife signals the migration from lightness.

I believe that to Kundera, lightness can be exemplified by a lifestyle in which no issue is given any true significance. Sabina is not unfeeling, but through her avoidance of kitsch, she becomes Kundera’s character of the light. She seems to do her best to avoid assigning meaning and therefore structure to her existence. At the same time, Tereza assigns meaning to all things in her life: her dreams, her husband, her jobs, and her dog. As if to throw at us just how anti-lightness Tereza is, she is even superstitious, seeing it as a sign when Tomas tells her that he is in room six and that her shift at the small-town café also ends at 6pm.

Tomas, as I said, is caught in between. I believe he is shocked to find out that the things he considered meaningless, which allowed him to live in lightness, actually do have some meaning to him. I believe the first moment (upon which he dwells through out the novel) is when Tereza comes to Prague to basically move in with him. He has assigned meaning to his bachelorhood and to the life he had made for himself as a surgeon. After that point, however, he begins to discover that the only item with true meaning in his life is his wife. He is forced to stop being a surgeon, reunite with a son he had ignored, and move out to the country and live a life away from lightness.

But I’ve gotten off track: this isn’t an essay on Kundera- it’s an essay on lightness. What I feel Kundera and Calvino are going towards is the insignificance of issues presented under the practice of lightness. This, however, goes against what I’ve been trying to get at all this time: lightness should not exist in theme, but in style and form.

One can be serious and still write a light piece. Significance can “weigh down” the piece with its Calvino-esque “heaviness” and still exist as light. In correspondence, I have been referring to them as my “light poems”. I hope these poems exhibit the quality I am attempting to find amongst the essays, poems, and writings of others, because I know that deep down, I am not searching for anything truly new. It must exist somewhere for all of us to read, understand, and analyze.

I have found, I would like to admit, contemporary examples that should hopefully show what I am attempting to get at. The reason I’m not presenting my own poems is that I believe several poets have attained a light feeling to their poetry and I hope by holding them up as examples, what I have been talking about will become clear. These examples are not the only ones that exist, but are the ones I have read in preparation for writing my own light poems.

New 'Action, Yes'

2009-02-10T16:57:00.003-06:00

is here

from Johannes' blog:

It is very big. Some figures and frameworks will be familiar (but hopefully not too familiar) to readers of this blog.

It includes two "automanias" by Swedish poet/performer/novelist Sara Tuss Efrik.

It includes several pieces addressing "the gurlesque", including texts by Lara Glenum, Dodie Bellamy and Aaron Kunin.

It includes work by Tina Darragh and P.Inman, whose work Mark and I have talked about on this blog.

It includes poems by James Pate as well as his essay on Clayton Eshleman.

It includes two poems by Clayton Eshleman, including one dedicated to Laura Solorzano (who is about to give a reading here on the Notre Dame campus).

And a whole bunch more,including work by such participants of this blog as Angela Genusa, Christian Peet, Ron Klassnik and Evan Willner.

New Titles from Scantily Clad

2009-02-08T09:52:00.000-06:00

- GROVER FUEL by Stan Apps

- ONE SIZE FITS ALL by Daniel Borzutzky

- DOG THE MAN A STAR by Tyler Flynn Dorholt

- POEMS FROM A NEWS TICKER by Ryan Downey

- BLOODY FLORAL SANDALS by Molly Gaudry

- RURAL RADIO by Andrew Hughes & Whit Griffin

- I SOMETHING SCOTT INGUITO YOU by Jared Stanley

- THE INK SESSIONS by Amish Trivedi

visit:

http://scantilycladpress.blogspot.com

Cannibal: Issue Four

2009-02-08T09:46:00.001-06:00

Now available

Cannibal: Issue Four

Featuring poetry from Stephanie Balzer, Zach Barocas, Laura Carter, Dot Devota, Christopher DeWeese, Claire Donato, Buck Downs, Christopher Eaton, Bonnie Emerick, Jeff Encke, Clayton Eshleman, Lucas Farrell, Drew Gardner, Garth Graeper, Meg Hurtado, Ethan Hon, Kevin Holden, Bethany Ides, Shannon Jonas, Pierre Joris, Friederich Kerksieck, Michael Koshkin, Mark Lamoureux, Hank Lazer, François Luong, Amanda Nadelberg, Linnea Ogden, Akilah Oliver, Cate Peebles, Lanny Quarles, Elizabeth Robinson, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Brandon Shimoda, Stephen Sturgeon, Janaka Stucky, Amish Trivedi, & Allyssa Wolf

140 pages, hand-sewn in signatures, screen printed cover
$15

http://flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com

The Main Article on Wikipedia Today

2009-01-30T10:39:00.013-06:00

The Music of Athens, Georgia

Jennifer and I are just to the right of the photographer in this photo of Pylon in 2005. Fantastic show. I was wearing a "University Exploratory Forces" shirt Jennifer made me- mostly to make Gilbert, my awesome boss at the UGA Hargrett Library laugh. I believe he did.

I had this dream when I went to Athens that my "music career," which had just started performance-wise in January of 2001, would pick up because Athens was where you went to become a musician, especially if you grew up in the SouthEast. (I was 18- cut me some slack). Maybe you go to New York if you're from Watertown, MA, but Athens was it for us. Besides, I realized I had trouble working with others on creative projects- one of the many reasons why I stopped collecting poems in a notebook and started working on them, almost a full-time gig at this point.

I've thought many times and even outlined a story- turning Athens into Joyce's Dublin- kind of. But perhaps I'm not removed enough yet. While Athens is easy to romanticize for me, it hasn't yet reached the point of an abstraction. Perhaps as the specific memories of this beloved place fade, I'll be able to write about it.

Also, my attention span doesn't work with a narrative/story format. You can blame that on Athens as well.

Speaking of Neil Young

2009-01-28T12:03:00.003-06:00

There had been some discussion about Neil Young over on Johannes' blog in the last few days.

Out of nowhere, I found this today:

http://wildmercury.blogspot.com/2008/12/transformer-man.html

Just had to share.

Fieled on Stempleman

2009-01-27T20:48:00.002-06:00

Adam Fieled posted on Jordan Stempleman's String Parade.

Jordan is, of course, this blogger's patron saint.

The Obama Scorecard

2009-01-25T12:29:00.005-06:00

Many who disliked Obama are on a fantastic kick of trying to find every flaw in everything the guy has done so far (hasn't even been a weak and America's already ruined, right?). That's cool- we did the same thing to Bush and were called Un-American and Un-Patriotic for not supporting "our" President. I won't go the same route, mostly because I'm not an asshole. You shouldn't support anything simply because you feel you should. You should want to support something.

Anyways, for those of you interested in finding fault in the guy, and for those of you who are able to be "objective" in viewing him (ie not in love with everything the guy does, but not out to watch him fail like that bacon of Fatassery, Rush Limbaugh), then you might enjoy this site:

The Obameter: Tracking Obama's Campaign Promises

I'm not sure of the bias of the site, though I'm sure both sides will find something they don't like, which means it's probably quite good.

I'll add a label for "Obameter" so that there is a link on the right hand side towards the bottom of this page.

Maximum Gaga

2009-01-11T16:23:00.004-06:00

Available from Action Books

Normally, going to our friend's Rob and Juli's place is a real pleasure. Jennifer and I love spending time with them. We were scheduled to be at their place by 6pm, and since I got off work at 5pm, we figured we'd hit the grocery store and pick up some things we needed. Nothing too exciting: just some of the basics.

Since we had milk, we figured we'd swing by home and drop off the bulk of the purchases, save for some soy ice cream sandwiches we purchased for the evening (Juli being intolerant of lactose). I offered to run in since it was barely an arm full and noticed that the mailbox was propped open by something inside of it.

I realized that it must be an envelope from Action Books containing my dual purchase of Sandy Florian's The Tree of No and also Lara Glenum's Maximum Gaga.

Rather than take the envelope inside, I privately planned to take the books with me and hope to thumb through them while sitting at Rob and Juli's. This isn't to say that I planned for the evening to be boring, but I figured while Jennifer, Rob and Juli were busy talking about their plans for the next semester, I'd get a few minutes to begin enjoying my new purchases.

This was complicated, however, by the fact that I had gotten hit on the head within the last two hours by a 16mm film which fell from the top of a shelving unit in the basement. Greg, who I've mentioned many a time in this blog, and I have been slaving away in the basement, reorganizing films that had been displaced by the flood this past summer.

I was a little worried to say the least- what if this heavy film has completely destroyed my mental faculties? I'm hoping to start an MFA program this fall- I knew God would never allow me to be successful- but I didn't want to worry anyone too much.

Upon arriving at Rob and Juli's we check my pupils to see if they were dilating and I also took some Ibuprofen, planning on the pain to come eventually. It was around this time that Rob noticed the two books in the envelope I had brought along, commenting immediately on the cover of Lara's book.

"This is kind of freaky...and awesome!"

After dinner, we sat down, and I was still feeling a bit of fuzziness post-head injury. Nothing was wrong though, as a concussion would have manifested itself within the first hour or so, according to Jennifer's Mom, a former nurse. As we settled down to watch "Keeping Up Appearances," the BritCom, Rob and I looked over both books, especially spending time on Maximum Gaga.

Immediately, we were taken over by Lara's continuing (well, I knew "continuing" ...Rob generally isn't into contemporary poetry and certainly wouldn't know Lara's previous juggernaut, The Hounds of No) fascination with the Grotesque and Gothic themes. Part of this is an interest in the body and in carnality- certainly one of the central ideas of Gurlesque (if you're into the whole movement thing).

While I've finished reading the book, I'm not up to the review yet- I haven't written a decent review yet, certainly- but all I can say is that if you're reading this blog, you're probably someone who ought to own this book.

Review? Hopefully...eventually...

Proof That I'm Not A Bad Debater

2008-12-30T12:00:00.003-06:00

I seem to have done a decent job in a previous post of convincing at least one person that I believe in a MACHO RATIONALISM that should exist in art and poetry.

This blog is a tool- a device- for testing my intellectual muscles. What that means is that sometimes these posts are honest expressions and sometimes they are merely oppositional ones. In order to an understand an argument, sometimes you have to know both sides.

So sometimes, on this blog, I write something I don't believe in simply to exercise my mind in thinking in other ways. Ron Silliman's MACHO RATIONALISM- the idea that poetry and strive to remove emotional thinking and replace it with a purely objective reality- serves as a background to the Poetry and the Uncanny Valley post.

For the record: Poetry is emotional. It's unavoidable. That anything can be rationalized, especially through poetry, seems ridiculous to me and is part of the same thinking that provides us with "The Best New" this and the "Brightest New" that. That you can objectively measure all things is not a belief I hold. As Jennifer has pointed out to me many times, even baseball isn't that objective- a strike, while it ought to mean one thing, doesn't.

I suppose for the future, there ought to be some way in which to show I'm serious or I'm not serious, but that would take all the fun out of the posts! When the person who was questioning my previous post emailed, I felt proud that my argument skills had not magically died off in the last 3.5 years of Iowan Exile.

I think the best idea, if something seems argumentative in the post, is to post in the comments section about how and why I'm wrong- the debate's the thing!

Word For/Word #14

2008-12-10T15:53:00.001-06:00

(Including some poems from yours truly)

Dear Friends,

I’m pleased to announce that Word For/Word #14 is online at

www.wordforword.info

As always, I'll welcome your comments and feedback. Also, I’m taking poetry, visuals, essays and reviews for the next issue (#15). I have a list of good books that need good reviewers, but I’m open to other projects as well. If you’re interested, let me know. The deadline for issue 15 is July 1, 2009.

Cheers!
Jonathan Minton
www.wordforword.info

Poetry and the Uncanny Valley

2008-12-02T19:02:00.007-06:00

What we've been through as a country for the last eight years is little more than the rhetorical equivalent of smoke and mirrors. Language that has been both familiar and duplicitous is something we now find disgusting the point that someone who for the longest time was known as a real "Maverick" could not escape the projectile nature of our anger. Language has been used against us in order to further and ideological goal that had been created by opposition politicians while they were waiting for a leader of their own party to come to power.¹

Language is and always has been the tool of power to control those that ought to follow. Americans have been blindly following the piper for the last eight years (at least) into the deserts and wars that only language has brought us into. You and I never saw the charts and maps and vials of yellow cake uranium. What we heard was George Bush on television pointing and telling us the problem was our (and his Dad's) old enemy, Saddam Hussein. Fortunately, most Americans were still in such post-9/11 shock and terror that they listened to Bush's tune. 4000+ have died as a result.

Judith Butler talks about the paradigmatic shift after 9/11, but what about the realization that we'd been lied to? What about the shift in national thought that has lead to the backlash the Republicans couldn't avoid? How blindly will we follow in the future? What does language do to us now?

In the latest shift of paradigm, Americans, now revolted by the language of hate and the politics of finger pointing, have turned to Barack Obama and the language of hope and opportunity. Things aren't sunshine and puppy dogs, no, but instead of telling us who to blame, Team Obama has chosen to figure out how to fix the problem. Whether he or any person in his position can fix the problems we're facing in America at this time, I can't say. However, for the first time in a long time, it just might be a fair fight.

But what can poetry do at this point? What is the goal of poetry at a period when we have reached the opposite slope of Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley?² Now that we're coming out of the point where language has disgusted us as the tool by which we were tricked, what can poetry do to avoid the naive peak at the top?

Poetry ought to continue to explore the construction of language, especially as we've been victims of the rhetoric that's been built around us. The goal of poetry is the create the detachment by which we can understand the nature of our designs. In the past, poetry has been used to describe a sunset or a lover, simply because it was felt that there was no other format in which language could adequately express our emotions.

But poetry should not be about emotions. Poetry should be about the process of examination into the rules and constructs that we have created as a society. Poetry can function politically in this manner, like my paper on Mark Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down suggests.³ Poetry can and ought to be *the* tool by which we examine "his master's voice" - the language of those in power.

For this purpose, however, poetry ought remain the depths of the uncanny valley. Poetry ought to be the language and themes that disgusts us with it's familiarity. Poetry ought to be nauseating, to the extent that the ideas and abstractions within it should provoke a physical reaction. The realization ought to be that poetry is itself manufactured language that is a tool by which to understand manufactured language. Poetry should, and I believe already has, move beyond language for the sake of "beauty" or culturation and should refocus itself on the detachment that I feel only poetry can attain.

Eventually I'll write about detachment and poetry- once I figure out what I want to say.

________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Like Donald Rumsfeld working for neo-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century and "realizing", while chair for the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States everyone he had hated for a while could suddenly send a missile over the oceans destroying blue jeans, Rock and Roll, and freedom.

² Wikipedia article on the uncanny valley

³ A paper I will be presenting at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in mid to late February.

The Trivedi Chronicles Present: The Official Song of the 2008-2009 M.F.A. Application Season

2008-11-17T16:22:00.005-06:00

It's an odd choice, no doubt, but here it is, in YouTube form:

Some lyrics which made the decision easier for me:

1.
I got some money in my pocket about ready to burn
I don't remember where I got it, I gotta get it to you

2.
You keep telling me I've got everything; You say I've got everything I want
You keep telling me you're gonna help me, you're gonna help me but you don't
But now I'm in too deep
It's got me so that I just can't sleep
Get me out of here; Please get me out of here
Just help me, I'll do anything if you just help me get out of here

3.
Please get me out of here
Someone get me out of here
Just help me I'll do anything, anything
If you'll just help get me out of here
Tonight I'm gonna make it right
Tonight, tonight, tonight.

Also, though no one asked, here is the final list of MFA programs I applied/am applying to (in some sub-concious order, i.e. the order in which they popped into my head):

1. Brown University
2. University of Massachusetts-Amherst
3. University Texas at Austin
4. University of Michigan
5. Indiana University
6. University of Alabama
7. Washington University, St. Louis
8. University of Notre Dame
9. Illinois State University (M.A. program)
10. Syracuse University
11. University of Arkansas
12. University of Mississippi (Ole Miss)
13. Columbia College, Chicago

I Miss Georgia Sometimes

2008-11-11T18:29:00.002-06:00

There's this Simpsons episode where Ranier Wolfcastle, an ego-centric Germanic actor who is basically Ahnold, fights with a group of "Commie-Nazis," the joke, of course, being that these groups are only linked really in the American conciousness. Fascism, of course, is quite different from Communism or Marxism. However, because we went directly from fighting one group to not fighting the other, they are forever linked in the American mind, especially if you're mentally challenged in some way.

One of these mentally challenged people is Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), who represents North East Georgia, including parts of Clarke County. He seems to think that Barack Obama, who is the most Right-Wing Marxist I've ever heard of, will start a Gestapo-like force to promote his "Marxist or fascist dictatorship" upon the American people, depending on which way the Chicago White Sox 2009-2012 seasons go.

Obama's "Commie-Nazi"-ism aside, I personally am enjoying the new rhetoric by which the Right is attacking the Left and the new President that 62M+ Americans seem to like. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) implies that while the campaign was going on, America was simply hitting an economic slump. Now that Barack Obama has been elected, however, we're in a full-on recession. As my Dad used to say, "When your neighbor loses his job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression."

The goal of this Gestapo, of course, will be to force people into homosexual marriages and force abortions on any non-mutt people (high fives all around). Gun-owners will be forced to spend an extra $.50 on trigger locks and reperations will be forced out of White Americans, especially those who had nothing to do with slavery.

Geek Cool

2008-11-09T12:14:00.000-06:00

If You Can't Say Something Nice, Now You Know How I Feel

2008-11-05T15:21:00.007-06:00

Having spent the last eight years as an "other," I'm really not sure what to do today. Jennifer and I have spent most of the last eight years being told we hated America and that we were Un-American and that we were terrorists for disagreeing with George Bush and his plans (or lack there of).

For the last eight years, Republicans have been throwing around the word "mandate," which supposedly meant they had the right to do whatever they want with the country and constitution. What we saw last night was the American people saying enough- no more will we continue to allow a President to run wild through the world with false information. No more will we allow an administration to terrorize us into doing their bidding and believe their "patriotic" mantras.

But Facebook today is filled with those that wish a Socialist America well with our Socialist President. "I can't believe it!" says one person, going on to say just how sad they are that America would allow a big goverment to get bigger under Obama. Somehow, they've forgotten that it was a Republican that made it larger over the last eight years.

My wife says I should be kind- I should be above the partisanship that has been going on in this country that the Republicans have basically been waving at all of us. She's quite right: I should manage to be better than them, be the bigger person- the better person.

And while I really want to be, I feel that the Left has endured so much crap over the last eight years that perhaps the Right deserves a little of its own medicine, splashed back in their faces with a hearty laugh. Perhaps the Right should hear that if they don't support President Obama, they are Un-American and hate America and want to see the terrorists take over. Perhaps the Right ought to hear that by saying no to health care (which the last few months has pretty much wiped out- so thanks for that, George & Co.!) that THEY hate America and that we, the Left, are the bearers now of all things American and that Progressivism is the mandate this country has asked for.

But maybe I don't have to. With a seven million vote buffer in the popular vote, perhaps Americans are just plain tired of the same Republican games. Maybe Americans have decided for themselves what they consider American. Maybe the this election was a referendum, not of President Bush, but of the McCarthy-esque calls for "Communist!" Maybe America is moving into the 21st century.

But how can we not? Look around: Europe is coming back big. China and the East are our saviors in this financial crisis. We as Americans are falling behind. We're blowing all kinds of money on things, but still cannot manage to help with the basic necessities in life (health, education, etc.). And in this, the Republicans have been holding us back.

The last eight years, it seems, are the final pulses of 20th Century America. We can finally say that America no longer needs to lead with bombs and guns- we can lead with influence and not bullets. We can move on to the next phase of being Americans, and while I believe we're no longer a Super Power, that doesn't mean the world can't look to us as a beacon for freedom and a model for justice.

During the last eight years, we lost that, but hopefully President Obama can help us with our world standing. And while some parts of America claim they could care less for how others feel about us, many on the Left believe this is the first step towards combating global terrorism. Instead of bombing people into not hating us, maybe we can start giving people a reason to like us. Maybe if terrorists had a reason to like us, they would stop trying to hurt us.

I actually spent a few minutes today feeling bad for Barack Obama: he's fighting an uphill battle due to the ditch that the Republicans have been digging for the last eight years, and the six before that as they controlled Congress. President Obama is starting off in a position of losing in that there's pretty much no way he can succeed with all the things he wants to do because he is starting a half mile back from the starting line. And instead of being aware of this, the Republicans will attempt to take advantage of it in 2010 and 2012. They will say he's done nothing in his four years as President, but he's been given nothing to work with. George Bush and the Republicans have all but destroyed America. Not physically, but in pretty much every other way, America has regressed or been stalled from moving forward. Obama's going to have a hard road for the next four, and God-willing, eight years.

But we ought to be gracious. The past is just that. George Bush, in 70-some odd days will be put out to pasture. Rather than blaming him for all our modern ills, we should forget them and move forward.

He was, after all, sooo last century (or close enough).

!!!

2008-11-04T23:38:00.001-06:00

AMEN

'The Breakers' Electronic Chapbook

2008-10-23T09:31:00.003-05:00

'The Breakers' is now available through Absent magazine!

Two Americas

2008-10-22T15:46:00.003-05:00

Bill Maher is right: there are two Americas.

One America wants to be a socially progressive, European state and the other America wants to be an uptight, backwards society where people don't have to pay taxes to a government that allows all the guns you want and barges into your bed room to make sure you're having sex with a member of the opposite gender. That government has every right to your body and no rights to your money or arsenal.

One America wants to make it so that Americans can prosper by taking care of each person's basic needs (like healthcare). The other America wants to make it so that if you're not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, you're being trampled at the bottom by those richer than you.

One America thinks it's ok to scare people by saying Gays will take over the country if allowed to marry, and the other America thinks that two people, regardless of gender, should be allowed to enter into a marital contract with another person.

One America wants to scare people into hating Gays.

Can you guess which America that is?

Absent 3

2008-10-20T20:06:00.003-05:00

(I know everyone's quite eager to read 'The Breakers,' and though the poems are the same, it's going to look quite a bit different soon, so wait and read it in its more awesome form- ADT)

At long last, absent 3 has arrived! Featuring new poetry, prose, sound, image, translation and manifestos by

Amish Trivedi * Ana Bozicevic * Babs de Genlis * Bill Brown * Carl Tillona * Catherine Meng * Chad Reynolds * Chris Nealon * Chris Tonelli * Dale Smith * Donna Stonecipher * Dorothea Lasky * Igor Shatner * Jane Gregory * Jennifer Anderson * Jenny Boully * Jo Guldi * Joe Amato * Jonathan Haeber * Leigh Stein * Matt Hart * Norbert Francis * Pavel Arsinev * Rick Prelinger * Sergeij Kitov * Tung-Hui Hu

Read & enjoy & get angry.

Cheated by my own subconscious

2008-10-15T12:40:00.002-05:00

I was going to write a blog post today discussiong how American Conservatives have no place to go if they want to flee the liberal oppression of health care, welfare, and Gays.

And then it turns out, Slate beat me to it.

Read that while I cry in the corner.

---

Ok- I was going to suggest Austrailia, China, and Russia, but now you'll never know why. Israel's a good choice. Poland, sure, because they've foolishly stuck with us the whole time, but come on. Poland?

My choices are better, but now you'll never know why.

Thanks to Kyle Stine for making sure I didn't look like an idiot or plagerist for copying Slate's idea.

---

Why, you may ask, do I feel cheated by my subconcious? Because the idea came to me while half asleep this morning, rolling around in bed, ill.

Fuck you, brain!

No

2008-10-02T10:24:00.005-05:00

Dear Nancy Pfo....well Phony Nose, anyways,

You don't need to be a Washington attorney in order to know Supreme Court cases.

You need to not be fucking stupid, which is apparently something neither you nor Sarah Palin can manage.

I hope I don't run into you in the street.

Because I'll laugh at you really really hard. And call you stupid to your face, assuming it's your real face.

Fuck you,
~~~~

PS: I can tell you right now, at this moment, that by the time I'm 35, I'll be more qualified to be President than Sarah Palin. You suck.

Carlin's "Soft Language" Bit

2008-10-02T09:51:00.002-05:00

This is brilliant: it's Carlin discussing how language has evolved to in order for "smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins." I guess this sort of follows my theory that comedians have become the cultural critics we needed all along. Carlin, especially, was the master of this, taking on all kind of subjects no matter how much hot water he ended up in.

"Hot water" ? Carlin would probably prefer I said "shit."

Enjoy-

Why Sarah Palin Will Still Be On the Ticket Come Election Day

2008-09-27T22:24:00.002-05:00

Everyone says Palin's going to withdraw this week before the debate. Several, including Kathleen Parker of the National Review have come out and said she needs to withdraw, but this doesn't mean she is withdrawing. Heck, my brother and I have a $1 bet over it. I think she's staying in.

This isn't to say she's at all qualified for the job, mind you. I'm just saying this is still the Republican party of George W. Bush.

Regardless of the excuse Palin comes up with to say she's leaving, everyone's going to see through it, which means McCain's going to be asked whether or not he regrets having chosen Palin in the first place. If he says no, then he's an idiot. If he says yes, then he can't make a decent decision to save his life. If we've learned nothing from the last eight years, we've at least learned that the McCain campaign has learned nothing in the last eight years.

They will not, under any circumstances admit that they were wrong, and that means keeping Sarah Palin right where she is.

And regardless, the rest of the short-list, the people who maybe even thought they'd get the call from McCain, would not sign on now. Who would play back up to Sarah Palin?

The bigger problem is that this person would either already be training for the debate, which means somewhere there's a bunker with debate practice going on because as far as I know, no one's in the bullpen waiting to go in. Anyone would certainly need a few days to get ready to face Joe Biden in a debate.

All save for Rudy Giuliani.

When Jennifer mentioned Giuliani, several factors did come together in my mind: he claims to be ready for foreign policy issues, Biden's strong suite. He's also swarmy and slimey and has perhaps been waiting to get the hand off from McCain as soon as Palin is out. He would have no qualms to being second choice and he would be able to step in and out 9/11 Joe Biden, at least in his messed up mind.

But that's not going to happen. Even if Sarah Palin comes on TV and cries about her Down Syndrome son needing a mother at home, or her daughter having too much trouble planning a wedding with morning sickness, her dropping out of the race not only *unfortunately* brings back into question whether or not a woman can run a country, it also brings Sarah Palin's political career to an end. If her entire claim to the job was that she's been governor and mayor, and she's been selling that she's prepared to be Veep as a result, her leaving the race for any reason will be a cannon blast to her political life. It will be back to hockey momming and sleeping with Todd Palin's business partners.

Karl Rove will find a way around it. He knows that Mac and Co. can't admit they were wrong. Let's put it this way: Rove is more likely to run Palin out into the woods and push her out of the car doing 90 than having her stand in front of the press and quit or have McCain put out a statement saying Palin was the wrong pick.

If I'm wrong, I'll be happy, but I don't think I am.

Expect to see Palin at least until election day.

* Just a note on whether a woman can run for the highest office in the land: Yes, of course. Just not Sarah Palin, in my opinion. Not because of paternal/uxorial duties but because she's just too uneducated to be President or Vice-President. Stay in your current job, run for Senate, stay there for a while and then come back and run for office, Governor Palin. I will still not like you, but I'm not most Americans.

Beautiful Image of Obama

2008-09-27T18:14:00.003-05:00

Even in this moment, by himself, he seems ready. What an extraordinary set of emotions this man must be going through. Yet this image is so peaceful- no great sign of any inner stress. Not a white or black person, a Senator, or a Presidential candidate. Just a guy. Maybe a moment of prayer, maybe trying to remember if he paid the cable bill. Beautiful, regardless.

McCain NOT On Letterman- and Letterman’s pissed

2008-09-25T18:37:00.001-05:00

If you haven’t seen these yet, hop to it.

Letterman, edited, railing about McCain’s cancellation:

The full Olbermann interview, part 1:

Part 2:

Meera Naam Joker (My Name is Joker)

2008-09-20T23:10:00.006-05:00

So I don't understand a word of these songs, generally, but I still love them. They're in Hindi and yes they come for an Indian movie. I don't speak Hindi (I speak Gujrati). This is sort of proto-Bollyhood. Yes, there are songs in the movies, but it's more in line with the American musical. And these aren't you standard songs in Raj Kapoor's Meera Naam Joker (1970).

I used to love Raj Kapoor movies as a kid: each one of them has a Chaplin-esque quality that I imagine Chaplin himself, if he saw any, would have enjoyed as well. Kapoor himself was an incredible actor, director, and producer who was backed up vocally by the singer Mukesh. Then, as now, there are professional singers that sync up with the actors. Mukesh and Kapoor had a symbiotic relationship, it seemed me to me. They could never be separated and I was quite upset when I found out that Raj Kapoor wasn't singing himself.

Kapoor, already quite popular, decided to make a sort of epic about life, love and the arts. Semi-autobiographical for sure, Mera Naam Joker tells the story of Raju, a man who constantly falls in love and who hides his inner pain behind the smile and makeup of a clown. OK, so it's not terribly original. The idea of the tragic clown is rather contrived, but that Raju, at the end of his career, invites the women back to see his smile and broken heart is fantastic to me. Raju basically wants only those women to see what he has become with his pain, even though after years of wandering, he has become one of the most famous entertainers.

I wish I could provide a translation of these songs, but I can't. They're just entertaining and, of course, a bit sad. If anyone (the millions of people who read this blog every minute) finds a translation, please post it in comments or email me (addy off to the side).

I'll draw a line and put some non-Mera Naam songs below it...

My brother loves this one:

"Where have the days gone?" or something like that, I think. Certainly my favorite:

Kapoor himself says "Have you seen my heart?" which must be the title of this song (note it's the end of the movie):

___________________________________________________________________________

Probably the most famous collaboration between Mukesh/Kapoor Shree 420 was about The Tramp, plain and simple. And this song is pretty famous (with subtitles finally!):

What kids wouldn't love this song? But I never noticed the nationalism rampant in the song! I mean, I knew what the opening stanza meant, but I've never read the rest. Apparently its popularity in a newly free India should be too surprising.
_____________
This one isn't Kapoor "singing", but rather him watching a drunken man stumble around. It's from the movie Jagte Raho (Stay Alert/Awake) in which he plays a bum who gets caught up in all sorts of things. Yet another Tramp-ish quality, eh? (I don't think it's the same song at the beginning...wait for the whimsical drunken music!):

There are tons of others, but eh, who's reading anyways?
____________________________________________________________

In general, I notice that many of Kapoor's films have a Marxist twinge: you'll not the Russian woman in the Mera Naam Joker clips. India at this period in time greatly flirted with following a Soviet/European Socialist model and many believe that Nehru was hoping to follow that path. Can't say I blame him, certainly. Kapoor's films generally deal in the "boy goes to big city, becomes a greedy Capitalist/avoids becoming greedy Capitalist, meets girl."

In the case of Mera Naam Joker, Raju's Soviet lover has to go back to Moscow and offers for him to follow, which he cannot because of his Mother's age and health. He must ultimately let her go, but I believe that there is the implication that if Raju simply had followed her, he would be happy and wouldn't be a sad clown at the end of his career.

Perhaps in the future, I can sit down and go through Kapoor's films with a fine-tooth-Marxist comb.

A Defense of Obama and Liberalism to Fence-Sitting Undecided Voters Who Will Probably Vote McCain Regardless

2008-09-17T13:00:00.005-05:00

I believe the term "Maverick," which McCain certainly earned the right to call himself until 2004, implies a certain loneliness. You're not with a group if you're working against them, as McCain claims to have been doing his entire career/life.

That said, if the Maverick, and not the awesome Jim Garner version, becomes President, I believe he will still remain alone because the implication is that no one else thinks like he does, which means that he'll have to fill the rest of the White House, etc. with current Bush cronies and other Republican bureaucrats. So what you're really getting when voting for McCain is a President who has people under him who don't care what he says because he's "The Other" in his own White House. The mainstream Republicans who you yourself annexed from will continue to run the White House and the government.

Regardless of experience, because that issue has now been negated by McCain's own choice of running mate, I believe what it takes to run a government is not bringing in the people from the last administration but a vision, however murky, for the future. Vision's a tricky thing: you can't clearly state anything because you have no idea what kind of situation you're going to inherit. All the Republicans complaining about Obama not having a plan are quite naive: George W. Bush is the only person who can move forward with the same ideology regardless of reality. Any decent human being would adjust to fit the circumstances, which is why experience, sadly enough, isn't the greatest factor for success as President. I believe strongly that it's about having an idea of what you want America to be and finding the way there, versus forcing the square peg into the round hole.

I believe Obama has this proper vision of the future, at least in that he and I share a similar hope for what America can be. I believe McCain, in a very un-Maverick-like manner, wants to take America back to some golden age that never really existed except for those that were so sheltered from reality in the first place.

Now, the real issue, I believe, is that it comes down to what you believe the basic function of government to be, an argument my brother and I get into all the time. I argue that it is the job of government to do what individuals cannot on their own. That does mean helping the least among us in society through government and through taxes because there's nothing the uber-wealthy won't be able to do as a result of paying a slightly higher tax. I believe that "providing for the common defense" doesn't just mean bombing the hell out of anyone that looks at us cross-eyed. I believe it means strengthening education and health care and making sure that even the least among us in society is still better off than others around the world- our own brand of patriotism. It's not just exporting arms and armies, it's exporting the example of what a modern society can do when they create a government together of ideas.

If you believe that government is in charge of making sure people don't attack us, but that everything else is up to you, then I guess you're better off voting for the Republican. I heard a thing on the radio this morning wondering where all this money that the banks are losing is coming from. Basically, the person explained, it's all about promises. Say I tell you I have a million dollars to give you and you go to the bank and say you've got a millions dollars so they give you a million dollar loan. When you come to me and I don't actually have a million, the bank is now out two million dollars. However, people are still owed money, so banks dip into that massive pile of money- our money. So the $85 billion AIG got this morning isn't from anywhere other than our pockets.

It's nice to know that after 70 years, the Republicans finally embraced the New Deal. I know it was hard for them, but I'm glad they've seen the error of their ways. Unfortunately, as you well know, the New Deal was considered a Socialist tactic- a way for us to lean to the Left in order for us not to fall head first to the Right in a period where another formerly strong government that had fallen on incredibly tough times due to debt ended up embracing a far Right leader. But now, the Republicans have turned it into the most Capitalist act of making sure their friends still get their $26 million dollar golden parachutes while the people at the bottom, who got up and went to work everyday like we all do, get to go home and explain that they won't be getting to retire or do any of the things that they were promised by their bosses.

You know, when my Dad voted Bush (hissssss) in 2000, he wanted to change the culture in Washington- the Clinton "Every body's a Victim" culture- that he really hated. Maybe you're not fed up with how the country's been doing in the last eight years, but I sure am. We're falling behind other countries, especially the juggernaut that is the European Union. Everything America had been able to be to the world for the last 90 years is what the European Union is quickly turning into. Soon, the "third world" won't need America anymore. And I believe that begins with this election.

Immediately, regardless of what the rest of the world knows about us, they'll look at the election of another Republican as a sign that America has no interest in moving forward or changing. The ideals will be as they have been for the last eight years, and that's not something the world wants to deal with. America will be written off as lost- a once great nation that used to stand as a beacon of freedom- now a husk, a shell of a nation that is so crushed under the weight of it's own bloated systems that it's of no use to anyone, even itself.

And saying that McCain is a Maverick won't matter then. Slapping a toupee, a tie, boots, and suspenders on a pig still makes it a pig.

It's just a pig that looks like Newt Gingrich.

Sick Confession or, Who Reads This Anyways?

2008-09-14T22:53:00.003-05:00

Every school had them: the kids that didn't go straight into first grade but were in a limbo year after kindergarten. At my elementary school, they called it Readiness, which, in retrospect, was kind of a direct title. I knew some folks that went into it (as in, "Where's my friend from last year?") and some folks that came out of it and they seemed cool, except that they had this issue with self-esteem (which I myself have struggled with most of my life) in the sense that they knew they were behind people their own age, suffering from the same "Where's my friend from last year?" syndrome.

Of late, I have felt the same way, like I'm greatly behind on my career or something. I feel like I'm well ahead in life, in that I'm married and in a few years, plan to start a family. All that seems to be well in progressing.

But career-wise, and maybe talent wise, I feel like I'm not developing- like I'm behind those of my numerical age group. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's very easy to look around and feel that others are progressing at a good rate and look at myself and realize I am not. Three years down in Iowa City and one to go, I wonder what I can do for myself to feel better about my position. Certainly the idea of getting out of the current job and perhaps into school will *feel* like progress, but what if I don't get into school? I certainly don't think I have the energy to keep failing at my hopes of an academic career, or at least more degrees. So what will I do with my life?

I think I will keep writing, but what will be the motivation? While I'm sure many would say there is no MFA glass ceiling, they generally aren't the ones looking up through it and knocking. I suppose the question even right now is about what has kept me writing during my three years in Iowa City? Is it something I feel I'm good at, or have I stopped developing on my own? I feel like I've gone as far as I can writing by myself right now with the only feedback being the occasional Johannes response and the equally occasional "I like the poems, but they're not the right fit for issue N." While this all has helped me develop, I feel like I need some kind of dedicated time and place to write. And I'm not talking about a schedule or a sturdy table with good light. I'm talking about a place mentally where I feel like I can concentrate on writing and concentrate on reading more and more. That's really what I want to do and that's really why I want to go to an MFA program. I want someone to give me the go ahead that I can dedicate myself to it for the long haul. I want someone to validate the life I want to have. I want to plan something and have it work out!

Speaking of, I mention that because nothing I have really *planned* has worked out: everything has either literally or metaphorically fallen into my lap, from Jennifer to Iowa. While I would certainly say I've been lucky, I just want, for once, something I've worked towards to work out. Call it whiny (I know it is), but it seems like at some point, you have to make things to fall into place and can't just wait for them to happen. However, so far, I've been better off just waiting, it seems. But how long can I wait until I'm happy with something career-wise that comes to me?

Or maybe this is it. Maybe this is as good as it gets. This library job. This insurance. This life that pays the bills and helps my wife follow her career plans- maybe that's supposed to be enough for me and I'm supposed to just stop and enjoy it rather than hoping to improve. But it's kind of hard at 25 to give up and say this is it. It's equally easy at 25, I know, to say "this is how it will always be and nothing good will come to me," and that's equally stupid.

But maybe just a bit easier, eh?

McCain setting himself apart from his party, aides say

2008-09-05T09:39:00.002-05:00

You know ultimately, I think, the American people admire someone who brings *a* party along with them, not someone who sets themselves away from their party. A politician without a party is like a...ronin, maybe?

Either way, I think Obama & Co. need to keep hammering McCain on "Bush's 3rd Term." It may sound cheesy, but I think it has a definite effect on the way people take in what McCain says.

I've been saying this for days, and now that both conventions have come and gone, I say it more strongly than before: THIS ELECTION IS FOR BARACK OBAMA TO LOSE. And he can lose it, certainly. And I'm sure Karl Rove is working right now to find out how to make Obama lose, but let me say this again- it's for him to *lose* and not for McCain to win. McCain has the easier task of sitting back and doing nothing because his victory hinges on whether Americans will buy Obama's brand of change. Americans hate change, generally, because they never want to admit they've been doing anything wrong, so most likely, if McCain doesn't have some *new* other woman (not the old "other woman": Cindy McCain) in one of his seven houses, I don't think there's much he has to do other than keep up the minimum level of attack that some would call defense.

I have this horrible feeling that "independents" are looking for a reason other than Obama's race to not vote for him, and I believe that it won't take much to find that reason. So I still maintain that McCain can kind of sit back and coast until election day.

Heck, even if he does have another "other woman," I'm sure he'll still say that he has family values- just for multiple families or something. The Republicans are damn good at turning what would be sins for Democrats into "values" for themselves. Just imagine the firestorm if Bristol Palin were Bristol Obama or Biden. The Republicans are allowed to do what they want because voters immediately identify them with values and religion. The Democrats don't have that safety net.

At all.

On the Bristol Palin note: the girl herself should be not attacked, I admit. However, to say that she's off-limits is also bullshit. I suppose for Sarah Palin, abstinence only education only refers to the children that aren't hers? I don't have a huge problem with people being set to a higher standard, but I do have issues with people being able to hurdle a lower one. Is it because Bristol has Mommy and Daddy's money (not to mention their nanny) that she gets to do whatever she wants? These are not issue specific to Bristol Palin however: these are issues about her Mother and her Mother's ability to be the moral authority she believe she is. I have no problem with the pregnancy- I have a problem with Grandma Palin's hypocrisy. At mitzvah on the child, of course- assuming Bristol herself got to decide on whether or not she wanted to have a child at 17. Because most kids at 17 choose to have a child of their own volition. I'm guessing Sarah Palin would allow her own daugther to choose, even if she wouldn't give the same right to anyone else's daughter.

I wonder what Levi thinks. One day he's a guy out to have a good time and the next he's on stage in St. Paul, MN with the Republican party's nominee for Vice-President, who, if he makes it, will be his Mother-in-Law very soon.

If Obama loses the election with all that's going on (like Gingrich saying Palin has more experience than Obama despite Alaska having a smaller population than Illinois District 13, where Obama was a state senator), I'm going to be crushed. I'm reasonably certain that even a Dukakis could win this election. I'm convinced a trained hampster with $100 million dollars to spend on shit could win this election against Old Man McCain.

COME ON!!!!

On Sarah Palin

2008-08-29T11:29:00.002-05:00

From Jezebel (provided by Jennifer):

"Good thing that coming in second place in the Miss Alaska contest transforms really well into being a heartbeat away from leading the country. Is this an election or a beer ad?"

Fashion Poetics #4: What's B.S. About This?

2008-08-28T16:40:00.008-05:00

What is up with this chart? Silliman posted it and it seems to be exactly what I'm trying to talk in my recent posts. At times, too, it seems like this is exactly what Ron wants to do: take poets and cut lines through the middle and label each cross-section as he sees fit. This chart is an attempt to justify what different artists are trying to do. Nevermind that you can place yourself on a line, you simply can't be in multiple boxes at one time, yet I hardly can think of anyone who fits neatly into a Formalist, Classicist, Animast, or Iconoclast camp. Where's the School of Quietude, I wonder?

I think an article like this does a very bad job of portraying art to the public. It essentially attempts to limit and "rein in" the poetry/arts counterpublic which is seen as unruly and something which must be defined in order to be "understood" and for people to "get it." But we live in such a culture now that everything must have a list and everything must be defined for mass consumption.

For example, last week, Pop Crunch listed the 50 hottest women of the 2008 Olympics. Rather than saying "these women are world-class atheletes who have worked their entire lives to be defined by their skill are being objectified and defined by their looks. And of course, looks are completely subjective, just like art and artists. The comment fields are strewn with "well, what about _____?" Of course they are.

And what's with these definitions? They are as follows:

• Animists are the first artists, the shamen dancing around the tribal fire who drag raw emotion from their soul and give it to the audience. They are the instinctual artists, concerned above all with content. (Jeff Smith and Jack Kirby would both fall easily under this heading.)

• Classicists worship at the altar of beauty, and yearn to create art that achieves greatness. They believe in objective standards of good and bad, and establish the canon of great artists who embody those ideals. (Neil Gaiman and Frank Cho.)

• Iconoclasts are either the first against the wall when the revolution comes, or at the front leading the charge. They use art as a means of personal and political expression, and when asked will say that they value truth over all else. (See Robert Crumb and Alan Moore.)

• Formalists love talking about art almost as much as they enjoy creating it. They are the experimenters of any given art, obsessing about details of style and technique in their own work and the work of others. (McCloud himself, and Chris Ware.)

I'm glad the eight people that Walter chose for this seem to fit so neatly into the definitions based on McCloud. What if some days you feel like all of these things or none of these things or varying rates of these things? Why must all things fit into this space? How can all things fit into this space?

They don't. The article is just another attempt by those who feel that the measure of a book is the NYT Bestseller list to simplify art for the sake of making sure it sells. Sales, after all, are the only way to define "good."

Whatever that means.

Fashion Poetics #3: Art’s Double Life

2008-08-20T20:35:00.003-05:00

Inspired my Johannes’ near-constant blog posts, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the channels of poetry.

The mainstream: the stuff you can pick up at Barnes and Noble that is relatively easy to read and can be considered worth reading and “beautiful.”

The other/experimental/difficult/abstract/challenging/elite/outsider: you’re probably ordering it online or you’ve got a good bookstore in town. Probably not “beautiful” and probably not as accessible, however you define it.

In fact, what defines accessibility is a damn fine question: anyone who can answer it (if anyone’s even reading this) gets a cookie! What makes a poem “difficult” to read? What is it about Keats that high school students “get” that they don’t get about others? Is it the way Keats and other Romantics are taught in schools? I suppose the idea of the canon is that it becomes what poetry is for people throughout their lives- when they like it at 16, perhaps they find comfort in buying it again at 36 without wanting to look for something new.

Perhaps the average reader isn’t about the “experiment,” but are MFA students now to try and go beyond the quasi-academic audience that inevitably picks up modern poetry? On one hand, to reach a larger audience would make sense, but what does that larger public want? While it is impossible to define what the poetry counterpublic desires because it is not one mass, at least there is some idea of what one is getting into within subpublics. However, the larger public requires a level of canonization that most poets just starting out will probably never get to- and I’m guessing a majority probably don’t want to get there.

But then there is the limit of the counterpublic that is being set. Obviously there’s no number, but of course there’s the range of people we’re including. There are academics and those just beyond it (I’m including myself in the beyond for now, though I’m a wannabe). Who else is reading unless they’ve been involved in some way with creative writing and workshops somewhere?

While you may not have to accept the limits of poetry and language itself, I think there has to be an admission about the limits of audience and public in the "poetry world", which I know is a phrase many around me would disagree with. There is no poetry world, they would argue, but I believe it has been created as such, and to an extent, there may be no way around it.

But I wonder: aren't I creating a canon simply be creating opposition? And while this is a good moment to mention that I want to avoid a binary situation, is it possible for something to be both mainstream and more obscure? Doesn't someone like Pinsky, who's famous enough that no less than Lisa Simpson went to a reading of his, seem kind of silly publishing a chapbook, something generally left for those that are up and comers in poetry circles? While there's no reason Pinsky should be excluded from publishing whatever he wants to publish, somehow the idea that Pinsky had to settle for a smaller publication seems ridiculous to me. Maybe it's even a little insulting to us little guys that he can do something which we find difficult so easily.

Anyways, I wonder if there's a time element to mainstream that has yet to happen with contemporary poetry. Were people reading Eliot or Pound in large numbers at the time? Would anyone have predicted that lines from Eliot would be used in movies or other such things? It would be hard to argue that Apocalypse Now has no public.

I suppose the reason I wanted to come back to the awful Fashion Poetics analogy was to say this one point: because it exists beyond the public, as a counterpublic, non-mainstream poetry has room to do whatever it wants. The threads don't have to stay together so long as the dress itself looks interesting, experimental, and new. I would argue, in fact, that the threads don't even have to hold and that at the points where the dress rips is where you have real fashion and "real poetics." Mainstream poetry- Garrison Keillor's best poems set or whatever- must have a certain "beauty" to it or it won't be pulled off the shelf at Barnes and Noble while you're kid is screaming to go to Kay-Bee Toys next door. There's a standard the mainstream must achieve and because no one outside of the poetry counterpublic cares about it, counterpublic poetics can avoid and continue setting its own goals on language, thematics/politics, and whatever else.

Fashion Poetics #1
Fashion Poetics #2

Blog to Check Out

2008-08-18T13:43:00.003-05:00

Mike's a former Dee advisee who finished up either last year or the one before. Pretty interesting blog for poetry types.

Of course, it only matters if someone else reads this blog at all!

The Double Life of Art

2008-08-15T16:25:00.000-05:00

Just a few thoughts...hopefully my own.

1. For whatever reason, it is necessary for people to justify/understand/contextualize/ “rein in” art.

2. After these things occur, or at least the process has begun, this justified/understood/contextualized/ “reined in” art is packaged for a mass consumption and defined as art that is accessible, unchallenging, and main stream.

3. Other art is labeled as follows: difficult; abstract; challenging; elite; outsider and spun in such as a way as to make any of that art impossible for the general public to even understand.

4. Art is divided into two and leads a double life, one of mainstream access (group A) and one of obscure inaccessibility (group B).

5. This second life is where art is allowed to blossom and fulfill a variety of goals that people set out for through aesthetic texts, etc. Movements and challenges filter through group B continually, creating tension and thus a counter-public.

6. Any time art of the second life becomes too popular, it becomes part of the first life at which point it begins the whole process of becoming contextualized for mass consumption.

7. The part that is contextualized remains in the first part while anything that is impossible to “rein in” goes back to being part of group B.

About John Edwards

2008-08-12T15:08:00.004-05:00

As many of you know, I adore(d) John Edwards. Jennifer and I were both elected delegates for him in Iowa. Though I couldn't continue on due to scheduling issues, I never lost admiration for Edwards.

And to an extent, I still do like him, though I'm very glad he hasn't won the Democratic party's nomination. While his actions are quite awful and I hope that Elizabeth beat the crap out of him, that does not change the fact that many of his ideas are similar to mine. While I guess I can't really trust him, if he actually does stand for the things he talked about, I can say that my ideals are similar. Minus, of course, adultery.

While John Edwards is very much done in politics now, and deserves to be done, I truly hope he continues down the path that he began after the 2004 elections. The work he did, regardless of his personal life, was good. This includes work in Africa and the Gulf Coast post-Katrina.

Too, I hope that Edwards follows Jack Profumo, the British politician who was disgraced by an affair in the early 1960s. He spent the rest of his life attempting to rectify his mistake and when the Queen and other English folk wanted to Knight him for his efforts, he said no. He was hoping to spare his wife any of the publicity— he knew the old affair would pop up again.

It's a good lesson for the new John Edwards, I think.

Dark Anti-Marxist Knight

2008-08-11T08:56:00.003-05:00

Greg, a Media Services student employee, hates Batman.

"No one with that wealth would bother fighting crime," he argues.

Especially, I would maintain, by doing anything other than spending that wealth. I've never, to date, seen Bill Gates do anything other than write checks and talk to people.

My larger issue, however, is that Bruce Wayne as Batman perpetuates this idea that the wealthy are the only ones willing and able to solve the larger issues that face society. We cannot rely on ourselves because we do not have the means by which to fight the "ills of society": rather, we must wait for a probable billionaire to leap off a building and glide gently down and save the day. Call it "trickle-down heroism."

The Wayne's believe strongly that the wealthy must save society because only they can. But like Reagan's Voodoo Economics of the 80s, the wealthy, despite their means, don't seem to be terribly interested in the day to day issues that plague people. Curing AIDS, Cancer, providing computers in schools: these seem to be the issues they can write a check for and solve, hopefully. Crime generally is something that must be dealt with from the bottom rung on up.

Batman forces us into believing an Anti-Marxist stance because it's hard to think he's completely not cool. Hell, I adore Batman because I certainly like the idea of a real human versus some sort of alien who just happened to show up. However, I do understand that this is a serious fault of the character. In his attempt at heroic realism, Batman perpetuates a false sense of security that does not and probabaly cannot exist. It's like the esemplastic inevitable: it's possible, it's just not probable.

Stolen Fair and Square from Lisa Jarnot

2008-07-31T11:50:00.001-05:00

Sad night in Atlanta: The official death of the Braves dynasty

2008-07-30T19:44:00.001-05:00

Fellow Y! Sports blogger Jay Busbee was out at Turner Field on Tuesday night for the funeral for the Braves dynasty. He shares his thoughts below. Read more of his writings on Atlanta sports at Right Down Peachtree.

Some dynasties go out with a bang, with a player like Jordan or Elway walking away from the game at the pinnacle.

Others go out with a whimper, dribbling off into irrelevance as familiar stars suffer, almost in disbelief, through ever-drearier sub-.500 seasons.

After Tuesday, we now know which route the Atlanta Braves will go. When Atlanta dealt Mark Teixeira to the Angels for Casey Kotchman and a prospect, it signaled once and for all the death of one of baseball's longest-running dynasties.*

The Braves had so often been on the winning side of these deals, picking up everyone from Fred McGriff to Marquis Grissom to Teixeira, that it was simply jarring to see them as the meek kid getting fleeced for lunch money. Even Braves players long accustomed to the business of baseball had trouble wrapping their minds around the fact that the curtain has likely come down on the team that was once one of the surest bets in baseball.

I was there late Tuesday night as Chipper Jones stood alone in the Braves locker room. He talked to a handful of media folks in a voice so low that digital recorders could hardly pick it up. He wasn't even trying to make sense of the flaming wreckage of the Braves dynasty, he was just shaking his head in disbelief. Pretty much all that was missing was the sad-walking-away music from The Hulk.

Meanwhile, a couple stalls over, Mark Teixeira's locker sat empty, only his No. 24 uniform still on a hanger. (Upstairs at souvenir stands, replicas of the jersey were already going for half-price.) A few hours earlier, Teixeira's excitement at joining a likely playoff team jockeyed with sadness at leaving Atlanta; Braves coaches had ushered several players out of the locker room as Tex gushed at the thought of playing in October for the LAAs.

But the death of the dynasty was caused by more than just the trade of Teixeira. John Smoltz is out for the year. Tom Glavine and Chipper are on the disabled list. Tim Hudson is injured and possibly lost for 2009. Brian McCann is suffering the lingering effects of a concussion. Greg Maddux and Andruw Jones are in other uniforms. David Justice, Steve Avery, Ron Gant, and all the rest are long retired.

Oh, Jeff Francoeur tried to talk a good game Tuesday night, but even he had to keep reminding himself and the media that "I'm not saying we're out of it, we're going to keep playing our asses off ... "

But everyone in the room understood the painful truth; the days of Lemke and Cabrera and Klesko are long gone. So, please join me and the Chick-fil-A cow in one last tomahawk chop for the Braves and what they accomplished.

Yes, the team and its fans will always enter spring training with postseason hopes.

But that's a hell of a long way from postseason expectation.

*Oh, and enough of this talk about the Braves not being a dynasty because they only won one World Series ring. It's tougher now than it's ever been to win a championship. Outside of the Yankees, no team in baseball has more than a one-season postseason streak right now. The Yankees will have to make the playoffs through 2010 just to match the Braves' postseason run, and the Braves never had to use either the wild card or the Boss's bottomless checking account to get there. Okay, end rant.

Terror

2008-07-29T14:03:00.002-05:00

Well, the Right is always trying to scare me, and they've really succeeded:

I'm terrified of John McCain.

I did not dislike him before and I certainly thought he would have been a better choice in 2000 than Bush, but now, the idea of actually being President has sent the man into orbit. He's insane and he's scaring the Hell out of the American people.

He's filled with contradictions and crazy statements, not to mention fucking singing about bombing Iran, which may well be a joke to him.

I'm really, really terrified of McCain becoming President, not only because he's going to ruin our lives, but also attempt to ruin the lives of so many around the world.

Betrayal

2008-07-23T13:46:00.002-05:00

I feel about Bobby Jindal as I imagine African-Americans must feel about Clarence Thomas.

Now stop asking me.

Excitement

2008-07-14T11:47:00.002-05:00

I've been fussed at in the past for putting all my eggs in one basket, but this time, I'm excited about most of my 15 MFA programs I am applying to. Each one has something I like a lot about it, from funding to location to faculty to program ideology.

And I keep hearing "you'll get in somewhere," and I'm hoping these folks are right. But I also think I might get in somewhere this time, which is quite exciting. I hope that for all the work and application fees, this becomes my time.

And if not, I have a cool gig lined up in Florida with an old friend of mine: government PR. Possibly get towards working on campaigns for people running for office, etc. Not a bad back up, huh?

Johannes has always told me to get a "real world job" and write poetry at the same time. So I'm trying to plan for both: what I want to do (academia) and what I would be happy doing (politics). Exciting, no?

Maybe if I don't get into an MFA program I might consider law school. Can't ever go wrong with law school. It's what I wanted to do when I was 14 anyways.

Left Facing Bird

2008-07-02T15:10:00.002-05:00

Apparently I have some poems out:

A few new poems on Left Facing Bird

Glad these got picked up. Just wish I had known.