Caché

Films don't come much more unsettling than Michael Haneke's Caché, which I took in at Cornell Cinema (this is starting to become a habit) last night before dropping in on the English department's annual meet-n-greet party at the A.D. White House. It's a film about complicity: the individual's complicity with history and with the political policies of his nation, and the complicity of the viewer with what happens on screen. We never learn who's making the mysterious videotapes that push Georges and Anna off their complacent bobo perch, though the infamous closing shot suggests a mysterious collusion between their son Pierrot, and the son of the unfortunate Majid, an Algerian orphan whom Georges spitefully disenfranchised when they were both children. This mystery remains a provocation and irritant that lingers after the film has ended, mimetic of the bad conscience that Georges' private-eye antics fail to solve, and which can ultimately only be assuaged by sleeping pills.

When I see a film which privileges its technique and formal qualities over the usual Hollywood values, my thoughts turn to poetry, as with Days of Heaven (another film with class privilege on its mind) last week. Whereas Malick's film had the lushness and interiority of lyric, Haneke's self-conscious deployment of digital video, which turns the camera back on its habitual wielders far more effectively than "reality TV" does, makes me think of more those austere modes of modernism in which personal history and more global histories are made to interact so the reader can trace his or her own habits of constructing them. The example that comes to mind (and which affectively mimics both Haneke's coolness and his moral disgust) is Barrett Watten's Bad History, which among other things is an examination of the bankruptcy and exhaustion of the generation of '68 and of what is coming increasingly to look like an aberrant moment of spiritual expansion that has, like Majid's rooster, had its head chopped off and whose twitches are decreasingly lifelike. I also think of Bruce Andrews and of flarf—or rather of a poetry that could somehow succeed in re-presenting the word salad of our lives back to us in all its unalienated dismajesty, so that we recognized the world we have made. In other words, it's too easy to dismiss flarf as Other, as not our language, as something we personally privileged readers have no responsibility for. But maybe that's not flarf's fault, or art's fault—even watching Caché I found myself agreeing somewhat with Georges that he couldn't be blamed for something he did when he was six. But then that's the problem of responsibility: we've all been trained not to see ourselves as part of history, or to recognize the ways in which we've benefited from the horrors of primitive accumulation. (My great-great grandfather might have been dodging Cossacks in Russia, but that doesn't mean I haven't indirectly benefitied from the wealth extracted from American slave labor, for example.) Art falls short of moral instruction: it can only prick your conscience if you have one. Far from being a shortcoming of art, this points toward the failure of an education system and a culture which ruthlessly exports all "values" into the nuclear domestic heterosexual family. The aesthetic does include and require the ethical, but through the back door. What Haneke's film does, like Watten's poem, is show us how rotten the facade of the house is.

Fewer than three weeks before the wedding, a little more than two weeks before the MLA Job Information List opens for business, one day before my first class teaching Shakespeare. Instead of planning for any of these, I am rearranging a poetry manuscript. Over at right under "Poetry" I've listed some poems under the title, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, in my opinion one of the best titles I've ever stolen (it comes from the last chapter of Kafka's Amerika, aka The Man Who Disappeared). In spite of this the manuscript's been rejected time and again by, well, almost everybody. This might have something to do with the current trend in poetry publishing, the concept book: a mere "collection" of poems isn't as sexy as a book that has some kind of narrative or metanarrative hovering about it. Akin to this is the formally unified book, in which a device, constraint, or composition method creates a kind of (wo)man on the flying trapeze effect that publishers and readers alike find compelling. I've written both kinds of manuscript, arguably at the same time. But Nature Theater doesn't fit into either of those categories. While there are definitely recurring themes and moods, and to me at least the book does tell something of a "story" about my engagement with my Jewish-Modernist heroes, the poems themselves are various in subject matter, tone, form, etc. I think there still ought to be a place for the collection and so I've resisted trying to turn Nature Theater into a hardcore concept book—or more to the point, the poems have resisted me. But that does leave the problem of arrangement. I've tried putting the poems in thematically consistent sections, and I've tried dividing the book into two sections that seem to somehow oppose each or complement each other, and I've tried creating a continuous stream in which elements that really recur by obsession appear to recur by design. I've never been satisfied with any of them, and so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the manuscript hasn't yet satisfied an editor.

This weekend I came up with a new arrangement that, at least for the moment, both satisfies and excites me, and restores the flow of the book's energy (when a manuscript hangs around for a long time it can get stale in the writer's mind, even if individual poems out of context still seem fresh and urgent): alphabetical order. It may seem like a cop-out—Ron for one has complained about magazines that publish their poets in alphabetical order, so as to shirk making editorial decisions about juxtaposition and conjunction. But surrendering to a constraint, even a simple one, has given my work a shot in the arm in the past, and I think it's happening again. In alphabetical order the poems interact in ways that I didn't force or control, and the conversation between them is far livelier than anything I've tried previously. Plus that quality of obsession that I mentioned earlier is, I think, more on the surface: more nerves are exposed. And the old poems are ventilated in a way that makes room for new ones: I've found a home for many of the poems I've written over the last two years (basically, post Severance Songs) here, and they engage playfully and provokingly with the older stuff.

Whether or not the new arrangement is pleasing to publishers, I hope it will please me enough to help me move on to something truly new. It can be hard to have an old project hanging over your head for years and years: hard to see past or under or through it.

Odds and ends:

- What can I say about the experience of seeing Snakes on a Plane? A dramatic example of the power of low expectations: we were thoroughly entertained.

- Aaron has the word on how our Friday reading went, if you're curious.

- Also, I'd belatedly like to acknowledge poet Sina Queyras' short review of Compostition Marble, which she picked up passing through Ithaca while I was in Montana. Thanks for the kind words, Sina!

Saw this tonight at Cornell Cinema. It stars a very young and beautiful Richard Gere, a nearly as beautiful Sam Shepard (though I was often disconcerted by an unexpected resemblance to Denis Leary), Brooke Adams (who in face and voice often reminded me of my first great movie crush, Karen Allen, aka Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and an uncanny young woman named Linda Manz who also spiels one of Malick's trademark elliptical voice-overs. Set in the mid-1900s just before the United States made its entry into WW I, it shifts tone continually from something resembling socialist realism to something more like a fairy tale (or rather, one of the more fairy-tale like episodes in the Bible, the Book of Ruth), and then in its last fifteen minutes or so becomes a kind of reprise of Malick's Badlands. Above all I can't help but see it as a masterful espousal of and meditation on pastoral, especially since Malick is the American director whose sensitivty for nature combined with intensity of sheerly visual perception (though this is to slight the complex and beautiful soundtrack) is unmatched. Much of the first half of the film is taken up with images of labor on a vast wheat farm in the Texas panhandle: the work is dirty, dangerous, and exhausting, yet there's a kind of beauty and joy to it and to being part of the landscape that all of Malick's characters seem to find infectious. Then the pastoral mode shifts into the domestic interior of Sam Shepard's character's mansion on the hill; another kind of interlude precariously balanced on the lie that Gere and Adams are brother and sister rather than lovers. (In a kind of artistically magnanimous gesture that I can imagine few other directors pulling off, this interlude is prolonged by the arrival of a miniature circus via prop plane.) Shepard's discovery of the truth coincides with the arrival of a literal plague of locusts, and then a hellish firestorm which ends in the violent confrontation that had been deferred only by the integrity with which the figures of the film composed themselves in their beautiful wind-haunted landscape. At the end, after Gere has been hunted down for the apparent murder of Shepard, Manz, something of a wild child (whose wildness is magnified by the strangeness and beauty of her voice-over) is deposited at a dance academy where we are given to understand she will somehow turn into the teller of this story, or maybe as she at one point muses, "I could be a mud doctor, checkin' out the earth underneath." Adams, haunted by her part in the deception and in love with two dead men, is seen boarding a troop train, transformed metaphorically into a black-haired Helen. But the film resists allegory in whatever mode—Biblical, classical, Marxist—even as it invites a kind of doubled awareness in the viewer, who has the leisure (the otium) almost unheard of in contemporary films to look and look and to discover mystery in its images.
One of the things that fascinates me about Malick's films (I haven't yet seen The New World) is how often they're spoken of as being "poetic," and how right that description feels. This quality is easier to define negatively: plot, characterization, and dialogue have diminished importance in the films I've seen. But to speak positively, there's a curious mixture of extreme precision (one reviewer has noted that Malick's close observation of the wheat harvesting process could easily belong to a documentary) with the mythic, a combination I can't help but regard as quintessentially Modernist. Myth and precision meet most immediately in the lingering shots of natural phenomena, and also in the silent, listening faces of the actors (in Days often shot from below, magnifying their stature). Then there's the voice-over, which imposes a single startling subjectivity over the action and more or less substitutes for the usual through-line of fiction films, plot. This is a literally de-dialogizing move: Malick thus moves toward the poem and away from the novel/narrative in an almost Bakhtinian sense, except that the language of his voice-overs is not that of Homer or any other epic narrator, but the fragmented half-savage consciousness of a teenage girl. (In Badlands, the narrator is a disturbingly affectless and morally obtuse Sissy Spacek, while in The Thin Red Line we have the diffused "epistolary" narration of various soldiers; the Homer-loving Colonel played by Nick Nolte seems countered in his desire for a heroic narrative by the distracted terror of his men, minute figures in the wandering seagrass.)

Does this have anything to teach me as a poet? Perhaps only that "the poetic" is not a catalog of means, or at least not only that, but also a desired stance toward experience, and the staging of resistance toward the means of narration we associate with prose and the "true story" alike. There is also, it seems, a place for largeness and scope, and mixed contemplation of universals alongside socio-historical particulars. It's inspiring to think on. It reminds me that the process is the goal.

SOON Reads Soon

SOON Productions founders and local poets, Theo Hummer, Josh Corey, Karen Anderson and Aaron Tieger team up to present selections from their work on Friday, August 25th at 7:30 in the Poet's Corner at Bookery II, 215 North Cayuga Street, Ithaca, New York.

SOON Productions was formed in 2004 to support innovative and small press poetry in Ithaca. According to Aaron Tieger, "We are committed to bringing new poetic and critical voices from across the region and around the country to present their work in the community." You can find out more about SOON Productions at http://soonproductions.org/wordpress/index.php.

Theo Hummer earned an MFA from Cornell in 2004 and is now at work on a PhD. Her poetry has appeared in Sentence, Vox, and The Indiana Review and on the Verse magazine website, and will be included in the Best New Poets 2006 Anthology. Her first chapbook, The Parrot Bride, recently appeared from Anchorite Press.

Josh Corey is the author of two prizewinning poetry collections, Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), as well as the chapbook Compostition Marble, and mantains a popular blog on poetry and poetics at http://joshcorey.blogspot.com. He has been a Bookery II employee since 2003.

Aaron Tieger moved to Ithaca in 2004 from Cambridge, MA, where he was Poetry Editor at the magazine Art New England. In addition to numerous online and print publications, his work has appeared in the chapbooks Sea Shanties of Old Vermont (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), Merge Point (Anchorite Press, 2004), Days and Days (Pressed Wafer, 2004), and February (Fewer and Further Press, 2006. His blog can be found at aarontieger.blogspot.com. He is the editor of CARVE, a small magazine dedicated to innovative and under-the-radar poetry whose seventh issue has just been released.

Karen Leona Anderson is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop and the recipient of a Rotary Scholarship to New Zealand who has had work published in Jubilat, Verse, Indiana Review, The New Republic, Fence, Pleiades, and VOLT. She is currently writing a dissertation on poetry and science at Cornell.

Bookery II is the city's largest and oldest independently owned bookstore and is located in the DeWitt Mall, in the heart of downtown Ithaca. Open Monday through Saturday from 9 am to 9:30 pm and Sunday 9:30 am to 6 pm.

Exhaustingly improbable character names gleaned from scanning the September issue of BookPage:

Miss Celeste Temple
Cardinal Chang
Stratham Younger
Cordelia Blackburn
"Highly successful hotelier Faith McBride"
"headstrong, brilliant teenager Fiona Montgomery"
"FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast [and] his demonic younger brother, Diogenes"
"Entertainment jounralist Mick Sever owes his career to pop star Gideon Pike"
Moon Blake
Gemma Bastian

Blogging has fallen low on the priority pole as of late, not so much because of busy-ness as because of stress over anticipated busy-ness. To wit:

- Teaching Shakespeare to freshmen starting Thursday (the plays: Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale);

- Getting married (30 days remain);

- Beginning the search for an academic job;

- Finishing the sorely neglected dissertation.

That's a lot of a lot.

Still I'd like to record something of my impressions of Montana, especially the powerful nostalgia and sense of recognition I felt in Missoula and Helena, the two towns where I actually lived. Helena was where I picked up the pieces after the end of what had become a disastrous relationship, and after I found myself twenty-six years old with no career to speak of and no accomplishments save a dead novel in a cardboard box. I found a little furnished apartment just off the main street, which bears the melodramatic name Last Chance Gulch, licked my wounds, and returned to poetry after six years' absence. Certainly I was under the influence of Richard Hugo, whose work I'd first discovered while shirking my duties as messenger for an evil law firm at the New Orleans Public Library. And the landscape itself is a powerful influence, literally expansive after youth and young manhood in the East. In retrospect, it's clear I was also being influenced by a Helena poet who I worked with for a time at a guidebook publisher there, a man named Rick Newby. Last week I picked up his most recent book of poetry from The Montana Book Company just after breakfast at one of my favorite Helena haunts, the No Sweat Cafe. The book is The Suburb of Long Suffering from a local press, Bedrock Editions, and I was surprised by how good it was, how moving I found it. Surprised not because of any perceived deficiencies in Rick's earlier writing, but because I'd come to assume that my taste had evolved to the point of unrecognizability from that of the poetry reader I was ten years ago. Well, it isn't so: Rick Newby practices a sly, elegiac, thoroughly post-Modernist (by which I mean his sensibility has been woven and charged with the work of the modernists: painters as well as poets, and Europeans as well as Anglo-Americans) poetics that charms, pricks, and delights me. He risks sentimentality and also a surprising degree of Orientalism that he seems to get straight from Pound (there's a prose poem in here about how Jeanette Rankin, Montana's Congresswoman [first of her kind], was introduced via letter to Homer Loomis Pound, Ezra's father) but generally evades the charge through precision of imagery and careful attention to the Montana landscape in which he, his town, and European civilization are but precariously perched. Here's another prose poem—I find them the most quotable:

Montana Landscape Hypnotized by Solitude

for Peter Merts

The cast-iron stove gleams dull in diffuse light. The cobwebs, the antic breezes stirring curtains, the cattle rummaging in the tall grass. Nothing can capture the tranquility of this moment, not oils, not water-soluble resins, not the ready presence of a small camera tucked in a canvas bag and shuttered. It is so quiet you hear the squeak of a rabbit under the floor. Alert to your silence, a lover leads you to a cot open to the sun. Dare to shiver in this cool weather. In Japan, you encounter—erupting out of a bay—the snake-like profile of a sculptor's fancy. In your side yard, deer nibble, and a cougar glides through eucalyptus and lavender. Solitude is a savage word. Wear it faithfully, like a mendicant monk who dons his paper raincoat before setting out. Great cast-iron objects cast adrift on sand. Slim legs of a girlish firgure. Footsteps marching to the edge of continents. Verge of the sea. Gleam of seaweed. Rumble of breakers. Harsh wind. Tenderness at the knees.

The most remarkable work in the book is the title poem, which is among other things a pastoral meditation—I shouldn't be so surprised to realize that my interest in that genre dates back to Montana days, but of course it does. The imagining of Helena, a small (but it appears to be growing with dismayingly rapid speed—subdivisions everywhere, and I saw this also near Missoula and in the Flathead Valley) state capital in what most people wouldn't hesitate to call the middle of nowhere, as a suburb comes to seem apt, as suburb itself seems perfectly to describe that which is defined by its separation from the urban, traditional home of a polis which is nowadays nowhere to be found, just as no one is willing to define themselves as anything other than "middle class." Newby's suburb of long suffering is inhabited by strangers and wanderers: the Great Emperor, now seemingly in retirement from his career of domination and violence; the Strange Ones of Rose Alley, who represent the always only partially domesticated Other to be found in so-called open societies; Anna, a painter and the speaker's muse; and Newby's favored persona, the Man in the Green Loden Overcoat, alternately protected and isolated by his fears, his lusts, his aloneness. The poem's melancholy pleasures seem to me to come close to that synthesis of social formalism—the thinking-through-fragmentation of the contested place of subjectivity—and the poetics informed by myth that I have given the unsatisfactory and tentative name of wisdom poetry. It's good now to express my apreciation for Rick's work, and also to discover, as I did with Hugo, that strong impulses toward innovation can be found in the work of poets who some might dismiss as avatars of masculine quietude.

More later, maybe.

Montana

The view from our B&B just outside Glacier National Park.

Bob Baker and me outside the Liberal Arts building at the University of Montana.

Me and Emily and a friend in the main quad at the U of M.

Emily looking sassy on a hike in Glacier.

A passing mountain goat.

A Columbian ground squirrel is more interested in the camera than his larger friend.

Smoke plume from the Red Eagle fire, which was burning in the eastern half of the park.

I am subdued by Henry, the child of Emily's friend Cheri, who lives in Whitefish and guided us on a float down the North Fork of the Flathead River with her partner Dave.

The trigger for our trip was the wedding of my cousin Daniel to a lovely woman named Bethany from Livingston, MT. Here two of Daniel's dogs, Moses and Timber, wait for the ceremony.

Bride and groom. They'd carefully selected August 12 because it had only rained twice on that day for as long as they've been keeping records. Well, August 12, 2006 was the third day.

After the ceremony.

Unearthly evening light in a horse pasture near where the wedding took place.

A view of Yellowstone National Park.

An elk in Yellowstone.

View from Inspiration Point overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River.

Yellowstone deer.


Two more elk (I think) near the entrance to the park at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Home. Tired. Scrambling to put my syllabus together for class, which begins next week. Tales of my travels anon.

I've had nothing to say thus far about the carnage in Lebanon and Gaza and I still don't really have anything to say, except that I am disgusted and horrified daily. It's difficult to orient myself in the narrow field of available positions that I find in the media and blogosphere. It seems to me that Israel is double damned for slaughtering civilians and for pursuing a strategy that has no chance of long-term success. But I'm hardly pro-Hezbollah, either: the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the likes of Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah is blood-curdling. It's hard enough to be an American and thus implicated in the imperial adventures that Bush & co. have led us into; to be a Jew in addition only amplifies that sense of existential disgust. But I am American and I am a Jew. Both of those identities are at historically associated with some of the most precious human values: why, then, are their most vociferous partisans so keen to discard any value other than might makes right, us versus them?

Flying to Montana tomorrow for ten days vacation, culminating in the wedding of my cousin Daniel in Livingston. Ten days goodbye to all that. While in Missoula I hope to meet the other Montana Josh that I'm aware of and hoist a beer at the Union Club. And then north to Glacier and later south to Yellowstone, to stare at creeks and mountains, bison and bighorn, and let the big big sky cover everything and everyone.

An obituary for Patricia.

Been too hot and distracted to contribute to the conversation on ethical poetry that's been evolving in my comments box below. In addition to getting our wedding invitations printed and sent, we're preparing to travel to Montana on Saturday for almost ten days' vacation, the climax of which shall be my cousin Daniel's wedding in Livingston on the twelfth. Sad that I won't get to see Patricia as I'd originally hoped to do.

It occurs to me that "fully ethical" poetry might in some circumstances be better described as wisdom poetry. Curious the binary that sets up: "ethical" is cool and intellectual, while "wisdom" is warm and mystical, inclining maybe too quickly toward the likes of Kahlil Gibran, as Gabe suggested. I like wisdom because for me it has a sense of investment in the bodily—there's something overly Cartesian about ethics. (And I'm also thinking of how, in Dungeons and Dragons, Intelligence and Wisdom are separate character attributes, and you use the latter to determine whether your character notices something unusual, say, or to tell if another character is lying.) Real wisdom comes with thinking as a body among other bodies, and it also means thinking the past in such a way as to redeem it—to liberate the energies that historical trauma turns into bruises and contusions. To my mind that has something to do with the thinking of futurity that Benjamin Kunkel talked about in his essay on the memoir in last week's NY Times Book review, and which was also a topic in his magazine's "American Writing Today" feature that I blogged about a few months back. You can find a good summary in today's post at Long Sunday.

Anyway, as far as poetry goes, I agree that you can never abandon form and constraint without abandoning the terrain of poetry altogether. I'd just like to feel through to the significance of content a bit more quickly in my own writing, or at least some of my own writing: I reserve the right to simply fool around and see what develops, which is maybe only permitting language itself its own wisdom.

Reading quite a bit. Two sides of the pastoral manifest in two recent acquisitions: Paul Naylor's Arranging Nature (nicely reviewed here by Hank Lazer) and Gary Lenhart's The Stamp of Class. The one is a Romantic, downright Ronald Johnsonian excursion of the self into nature—but Naylor always maintains a kind of ethical reserve, sensitive as Adorno says we must be to natural history, which is the history of suffering that humans have inscribed on nature (in the same fashion that Kafka's torture machine inscribes prisoners). And yet nature promises someday simply to be, as lyric promises the rounded personhood that eludes most of us day by day and minute by minute. Can't quote the most gorgeous parts here because of the formatting, but it's a book I'm looking forward to going more deeply into. As for the Lenhart book, it's an engaging survey of American poets' engagement with class; among other issues, he looks at how rural and working-class poets have been fetishized for their supposed connection to the natural, which is of course the pastoral gesture par excellence as described by William Empson. That train of thought has brought me into closer contact with the work and life of John Clare, who features prominently in recent scholarship on poetry and ecology (I'm thinking particularly of Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth and Angus Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry). But Lenhart's poets are, after an initial chapter on the eighteenth-century English poets Stephen Duck and Ann Yearsley, variously American: Whitman of course, and Williams, but also Marcia Nardi (infamously assimilated into the good doctor's own Paterson) and David Schubert (subject of a lovely essay in Ashbery's Other Traditions), and chapters on Melvin Tolson, the New Americans, Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, and Diane Wakoski, Eileen Myles, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, and Tracie Morris. Lenhart's concern, of course, is to establish and historicize the subjectivity of working-class poets; but he can't do that without also talking about how they've been used and abused (when not simply ignored) by the patrician literary establishment. (It does not seem irrelevant that every scholarly book I've linked to in this paragraph, including Ashbery's, was published by Harvard University Press except for Lenhart's, published by University of Michigan Press.) This too is important for my thinking about pastoral, which usually exploits the "natural" but which can also work to liberate the voices of those who have been history's objects—trees and humans alike.

Wisdom, futurity, redemption. Lenhart quotes a fragment of David Schubert's that seems relevant:

A ghastly ordeal it was. In
Retrospect, I am no longer young.
Wise, sad, as unhappy as seeing
Someone you love, with whom life has
Brought suffering, or someone you
Have nothing in common with, yet love--
Unable to speak a word.

If when I say this I weep, it is not
Because my heart has turned into a
Lachrymose commentator; the
Discus thrower's still
There--the shining one, quick. It is because
In my moment of rejoicing, I
Thought that one who has suffered with me shall
Rejoice. There was no
One. Not one answered.

Of suffering, who wants to be reminded?

Perhaps the best description of the heroism demanded from readers and writers of lyric poetry available.

Dreamed last night that I was riding a bicycle and Bogie was running alongside. A sweet visitation. I picked up his ashes from the vet hospital yesterday. They are startlingly white, wrapped in plastic and then encased in a small wooden box. About one pound total. We're going to scatter them this weekend with some friends.

Grief changes what I want from poetry. The mystic strain that I'm usually both repelled and fascinated by suddenly speaks to me more clearly, even pragmatically: Duncan, Rilke. The elegy-world (Rilke's "Welt aus Klage"), search for consolation. Of course mourning a dog is simpler and in some ways sharper than mourning for a person. The relationship is much purer, or at least so it appears to the human being. We don't know what dogs truly feel—we just hurl ourselves into a good guess. Leaving behind: me, wag.

Change of content. Like Gabe (linked to above), I felt Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs portended some kind of sea-change; yet I tried to assimilate it into my idea of "social formalism." Not entirely unvaluable, but beside the point if Gabe is right that we need to think content in a new, "fully ethical" way and to stop fetishizing aesthetic forms. Forms are the hard thing we need to articulate the soft, but isn't the soft the goal? Vertebrate vs. invertebrate. I'm going to be looking now for poems that enlarge inner horizons, or that make useful contact between inner and outer. I'll let you know what I find.

I was saddened to learn last week of the passing of one of my teachers at the University of Montana, Patricia Goedicke. It was kind of a shock, even though she was in her seventies and frail-looking, because I saw her every year at AWP cutting it up on the dance floor. It was in her workshop that I first met some terrific poets and terrific people—really an exceptional cohort—that includes Deborah W. Pattilo, Cat Meng (who just lost her beloved cat, Winnie—it's been a tough couple of weeks!), Nils Michals, Ken White, Sarah Gridley, and of course Richard Greenfield and Trevor Toland, who were bacheloring it up with me in Vegas last weekend (details NOT forthcoming—sorry, Deborah!). Patricia was a passionate and inquisitive teacher who modeled poetry as a serious business for all of us and who took a distinctly maternal pride in our poems and accomplishments. We didn't always see eye to eye aesthetically when I was a student, and in fact we had many arguments—but in hindsight I wonder if she was trying to nudge me down the more experimental path that I did eventually follow. Her own poetry is sharply observant, attuned to the rhythms of human relationship, risking the sentimental and only sometimes succumbing to it; plus she had a keen interest in biology and cognitive science which I'm only now beginning to appreciate. By way of saying farewell, I'd like to share a poem of hers from her 2000 collection of elegies for her husband Leonard Robinson, As Earth Begins to End:

What Holds Us Together

is almost nothing, a little
surface tension at the edges.

Inside ourselves, but how?

Two blood bottles,
weak capillaries in pajamas

rowing across the night.

Into whose arms, the
self says,

will I permit it, at last
let myself go, trust others

to receive me when I'm dead?

By day we irritate each other, unwitting.
At breakfast, say, over burned toast.

By night, over the black potholes
of the snores between us I reach out

for you and find only
a piece of bare, unfeeling

forearm. This flesh

I touch so carefully in the dark
ignores me, in its sleep

indifferent, cold, unknowing
as the cold hiss of the ocean

and who we are is buried in it.

I know you'd mother me
forever, and I you,

but here, at the end of everything
we know

as waves spill themselves on the beach
in foaming avalanches, crackling

stone suckles stone. Even the kindest

words scrape against each other like seashells,
flesh, kneecaps, numb lips

nearly raw now, almost ready to break up,

crumble themselves into that loud
nameless energy we must return to

and can't, not yet,
nervously tying our pajamas

as tight as we can against the taut
temporary skin

of the bodies we tremble across the world in.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in or commented below with their condolences about Bogie.

Got back yesterday morning from Las Vegas, of all places: in spite of what happened, I decided to go ahead with the bachelor party I'd planned with my friends Richard and Trevor months before. It was a good time, though needless to say none of us won anything playing slots or blackjack. Acting on a tip, on Saturday we dropped in at the Riviera to check out the annual convention of The International Society of Poets, aka the jokers at Poetry.com. If you're not familiar with this organization, they're notorious for inviting submissions of poems, then accepting every one of them, no matter how dismal, and writing back to the author as "Dear Published Poet" and fleecing them for all they're worth by selling them expensive yet cheap-looking copies of an anthology that will contain their work but will only be read and purchased by the hundreds of other gullible souls who paid to be included. Other modes of exploitation include plaques, tote bags, laminated wallet cards, and the conference itself, which costs $595 to attend, not counting hotel and other costs. Every attendee receives an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry statuette, plus there are "workshops," an appearance by American Idol Ruben Studdard, and the main event, a chance to become Poet of the Year and win $20,000 (presumably this part has to be legitimate—the society claims to award $100,000 in prizes every year, which they can easily afford given how many people must be paying for anthologies, self-published books, and knick-knacks—for example they'll print 100 copies of a 60-page or less book for $1,285).

The conference resembled nothing so much as a fourth-rate, Bizarro AWP. The Riviera's convention center is dull and dingy, and security was lax, so we could walk right in. Immediately we saw a book table with W.D. Snodgrass meeting and greeting folks. There's no telling if Snodgrass's endorsement of the conference is cynical or criminally naive—maybe he thinks he's being democratic by reaching beyond the academic audience, but the crudity of the exploitation seems too obvious to miss. David Wagoner is the other poet I'd heard of who's bolstering the ISP's reputation with his own credibility: shame on both of them. We saw a workshop which appeared to consist of several hundred people listening to the speaker read off "powerful words" that had been submitted by the audience: I heard "beautiful," "savior," "rich," and "success." Another room held a book fair in which the poets (who each wear a nametag that says POET on it) sat somewhat glumly behind tables that displayed the aforementioned self-published books, laminated cards, etc. Most of them appeared to be working-class types, ranging in age from twentysomething (only a few of those) to sixtysomething and up. The poems on display had a certain dreary family resemblance: a lot of prose broken up into centered lines, a lot of Jesus, and a surprising number of references to poetry itself as a kind of synonym for creativity, inspiration, and soulfulness. It would be easy to laugh at these folks, but mostly I felt sad that their search for some kind of recognition had led them to buy into what amounts to a pyramid scheme. Of course many argue that AWP and the MFA business is also a pyramid scheme, with hopeful students providing the funds to support the few of their number who will actually get teaching jobs. There's a kernel of truth to this, especially if you preoccupy yourself with the financial view, but of course there's a lot of potential value to be gained from attending an MFA program aside from the professional credential. It is, after all, a form of education—the education on view at Poetry.com hardly seems worthy of the name, and in fact, the organization's survival depends on its victims' ignorance. The poets at that conference would do themselves a lot more good to create local writing and reading groups, and to publish their own magazines and chapbooks (you could do a kickass chapbook for twelve hundred bucks). I can't fault them for wanting to write and publish—they're no different from me in that respect. But it's a shame that that desire has turned them into the prey of heartless opportunists.

You can find more info on the scam here.

Bogie

Bogie was much sicker than anyone realized. He went to the vet three times this week for lethargy and lack of interest in food, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong. He seemed much better on Saturday and went for a longish walk with Emily and me. That evening, after we got home from Richard and Brian’s reading (which was terrific, I should mention), we found him almost immobile, breathing shallowly. We took him to the Cornell Animal Hospital emergency room at midnight and, after less than an hour, he went into arrest and died. We won’t know why until the autopsy and we may not know then either.

Bogie was about nine years old—he was maybe ten months when I first got him at the pound in Missoula, Montana in early 1998. He was a dear companion to me and later also to Emily, living together with us in our house on Pleasant Street here in Ithaca for three years. A wise and playful animal who almost never barked: everyone who met him loved him. He enriched our lives immeasurably.

Goodbye, Bogie. Thank you.

This blog will be quiet for a while.

Some great comments on the fiction vs. poetry post below. I've been a little too distracted to participate in the conversation: Bogie's been ill with some mysterious ailment all week. We're going back and forth to the vet and trying not to worry too much. Brian, who got into town on Wednesday, has been a great help, as well as a great sport about spending his vacation with a couple of worried pet owners.

Speaking of Brian, it's time for me to remind you about the reading tomorrow at 7 PM at the State of the Art Gallery here in Ithaca. Featuring:

Brian Teare, author of the award-winning book The Room Where I Was Born and the startlingly gorgeous chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown, and

Richard Greenfield, author of the amazing and well-received book A Carnage in the Lovetrees and a new manuscript, Tracer, which hopefully will find book form sooner than later.

Also, here's an article about SOON that appeared in our local paper yesterday, along with an interview with Brian.

This post from John Latta has me thinking about poetry vs. fiction again. More specifically, a paragraph of commentary by Edmund White, worth requoting here:

Here’s an admission: I sometimes wonder why people bother with poetry. After all, the best novelists (Proust and Nabokov, to name just two) offer the reader page after page of language as precise, as unpredictable and as ravishing as the language of any poet—and the novelists simultaneously make their local delights serve larger structural or thematic ambitions (the generation of suspense, the play of ideas, the revelation of character, the depiction of society, the weaving of a thick, tragic sense of duration). In great fiction the language is not only satisfying in itself, but it also fulfils larger purposes of design: it is sculptural, in the round, gestural. Fiction makes a world, dense and social. Or, to change the figure, in poetry words are like notes from a flute, the tracery of a tune, whereas in fiction words are like notes of a symphony orchestra—compositional, the integers of a giant calculus.

I say all this, at the risk of seeming philistine, in order to demonstrate that I’m no friend to poetry unless it is indispensable to me, unless in does something no prose could emulate.

This is from an essay on James Schuyler, who obviously by White's lights must be offering that something indispensable and un-emulatable. Anyway, I value White's paragraph because it's such a succinct defense of fiction along the axis of—what? call it simply quality of language—and so is the perfect double to my objections to fiction. In other words, to tweak White's metaphor a little, I prefer listening to chamber music over symphonies because I can hear the individual instruments better, and pick out subtle patterns. (And a string quartet is capable of breathtaking feats of narrative and world-building, but perhaps I push the metaphor too far.) Also, it's impossible to imagine a symphony that could improvise with any success: you need a single instrument or small group to do that. In short, the symphonic seems overdetermined and unsubtle when compared with the lyric, yet no one would deny that the lyric is incapable of achieving sublime and overwhelming aesthetic effects.

White's account also neglects the powers of poetry to integrate themes and social density over the course of a series or a book or a career. I find the social formalism of a poet like Rodrigo Toscano or Ed Roberson much more compelling than what I imagine to be their novelistic equivalents, if only because they both incite and leave room for thinking, whereas it seems to me the continuous immersive flow intended by most fiction repels or retards thinking as it sweeps the reader along his or her desire to find out what happens next. This is to leave aside what is still the major territory for lyric poetry: the exploration of an individual subjectivity. The novel can do this too, but such novels can feel thin or obsessive if they don't do some of the other things we traditionally expect from them: character development, plot, settings and descriptions.

Nevertheless, as a writer, the novel tempts me: but is it because I long for symphonic effects or for the increased prestige and listenership that accrues to symphonies? Symphonies are Romantic: you are unquestionably in the presence of (at least an attempt at) Great Art, and the completest possible rendering of Spirit. I don't sneer at such ambitions, or see them as mere nostalgia for a more unified, nineteenth-century-style culture; I'm just trying to tune in to my own signals through a great deal of static. The largest ambition is to express not just one's own Spirit, but the Spirit of the Age. What's the right medium for that? And how to foster the peculiar combination of arrogance and humility required for the task? I think it's a moral duty to find the largest possible scope for one's artistic ambitions—to push whatever talent one has as far as possible. But how does that imperative intersect with what readers want or need? Maybe it doesn't. You write for yourself and for strangers, like Stein said—relying on the power of the and to suggest a sympathy, a common ground.

If Jed Rasula is right to think of "poetry as ecology in the community of words," then the patch-corridor-matrix model of landscape ecology might be most useful not in describing individual poems, but as a non-hierarchical representation of, say, the mosaic of American poetry. So we have numerous aesthetic patches, sometimes with regional inflections, and innumerable corridors that serve as connectors (between the DC and the San Francisco scenes, maybe, or between Language poetry and the New York School) but also as barriers, and perhaps most interestingly, as habitat—aesthetic territory in its most minimal and attenuated sense. The matrix, then, would be addressed by questions like "What's American About American poetry?"—what is shared, if anything, besides geographical and historical circumstances, by these patches—what makes them a mosaic?

Weapon of Choice

You can go with this, or you can go with that: Compos(t)ition Marble is now available for ordering from Pavement Saw! Just click on the link to go get it.

Fascinating SCT lecture by Eric L. Santner yesterday called "Neighbors and Other Creatures." Santner's a professor of German Studies at the University of Chicago and he does inventive and imaginative critical theory with the history of monotheism, Freud and psychoanalysis, Jewish theology, German idealism, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Holderlin-Rilke-Celan, and divers other texts and topics. His lecture focused on the implications of the commandment from Leviticus to "Love thy neighbor" and on how the Other agitates us to the degree we are unable to navigate or integrate our own otherness. I was very interested in his last book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, and I'd like to read his latest, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. If people express interest in seeing my lecture notes, I can post 'em.

Beginning to investigate the field (pun intended) of landscape ecology, so that a term like "ecolage" can be a little bit more than a metaphor when I use it. It's really interesting to learn a new technical language, especially one that has rich implications for poetry. I've got a tome by one of the leaders in the field, Richard T. T. Forman, out from the library: Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions. I probably need a more introductory text, but I'm learning a lot notwithstanding. The idea of the land as a mosaic is obviously very suggestive given my project of reconciling pastoral with the modernist practice of collage: Forman's theory derives from the view of landscapes that can be provided from a height, such as from an airplane, which makes it sound very technological and perhaps more about manipulation than deep ecology. But what it actually is is a highly pragmatic ecological approach, one which recognizes the impact humans have on nature and tries to find ways to work with that rather than devoting energy solely to wilderness preservation, say. Much of the first chapter is devoted to explaining the spatial units by which landscape ecologists study the land: there's a wonderful diagram that's reminiscent of the child's game of describing where they live as (for example), "Pleasant Street, Ithaca, New York, the United States, the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Universe." The three principle spatial units that Forman identifies for studying landscape are called patch, corridor, and matrix. A patch is "a relatively homogeneous nonlinear area that differs from its surroundings"; this could be a meadow, a stand of trees, a wheatfield, or a tract house. A corridor is "a strip of a particular type that differs from the adjacent land on both sides. (Corridors have several important functions, including conduit, barrier, and habitat.)" A matrix is "the background ecosystem or land-use type in a mosaic, characterized by extensive cover, high connectivity, and/or major control over dynamics." This is the hardest one for me to understand but I gather the matrix is what makes a particular landscape seem coherent as a landscape, despite the diversity of its mosaic of patches and corridors. There are a lot of echoes from aesthetic theory here. At one point Forman quotes another ecologist as saying, "Form is the diagram of force," which sounds like a variation on the Shaker expression that Guy Davenport once went to town with. And Forman explicitly compares this model of perception with aesthetic ones: "The patch-corridor-matrix model has analogues in other disciplines. Point, line and plane are fundamental concepts in art [here he cites books by Kandinsky and Klee) and in architecture."

It is tempting to look at Ronald Johnson's writing through this lens, especially given my belief, expressed here, that ARK is a view from above, a mosaic of modernism, Americana, natural phenomena, and Oz. But one has to be a little cautious when thinking analogically—it's a mode that comes very naturally to me, but it can be difficult to maintain an argument with it. Anyway, I'm excited to be coming to grips now with actual ecological theory (many ecocritics seem to have a hazy, transcendentalist grasp of the term ecology) and relieved to discover that it's not so technical I can't grasp it.