And I think you’re probably excited.

Are you excited?

I think I’m excited whether or not you’re excited.

And it’s embarrassing.

But it’s too late. We’re having a conversation.

I don’t know when all the talking picked up (late aughts?) but it’s only too visible now—I don’t think we’ve heard this much collaborative noise from poets since the sixties-thru-seventies? Last night I did a little online magazine check, just to be sure I wasn’t smoking the vapor of coincidence—got bored after counting a few dozen collaborations, bored only to be counting and not reading. Magazines, but we’re having books as well. A few of what’s exciting me: CAConrad & Frank Sherlock with The City Real & Imagined; Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch with Ten Walks / Two Talks; Alli Warren & Michael Nicoloff with Bruised Dick; Jen Hofer & Patrick Durgin with The Route, Brandon Shimoda & Phil Cordelli with six installments of The Pines; Brandon Shimoda & Sommer Browning with The Bowling; Brandon Shimoda & twenty some-odd collaborators figured as “Headmaidens and Bridesmen” in The Alps…

Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps (flim forum press, 2008). Dead middle is a titled section “the Headmaidens & Bridesmen”, in which twenty some-odd poets (named in the acknowledgments) contribute poems, each erected below twenty-five empty square frames, centered, all at the same alignment, as cells in a film to suggest—what exactly? The occasional alpine glades of Guy Maddin’s tribute to silent German mountain film, Careful? In which the folks of Tolzbad can talk and move freely without fear of pricking an avalanche? The empty frames as visual referees for the antic dialogue of silent film? Interesting, as ‘avalanche’ and ‘snow’ throughout the book hazard terrifying slippage with atomic blast and nuclear winter. The empty frames as lodges for the apophatic, the unspeakable? Interesting, as the poem ends with a quote from Thomas Merton’s “La Salette”. Merton the Trappist monk whose practice of silence (though not the popularly imagined literal vow) was informed by an understanding of Zen practice as coinciding with that of the Desert Fathers. “La Salette” begins: “Ventured to stand upon the pastured grass of the high Alps”. I looked up the poem, it happened to be in the slim selected Merton I have—Shimoda leaves only one stanza out of the “quotation”. And it’s the only stanza in the poem which locates us in the atomic century: “John, in the might of his Apocalypse, could not foretell / Half of the story of our monstrous century, In which the arm of your inexorable Son… Has bombed the doors of hell clean off their hinges.”

Shimoda: “I love the way bread explodes when pulled apart by two people.” There’s a motivated turn in this phrasing. And it serves as a figure for collaboration, not as the sharing of bread by people coming together, but the explosion of bread in that custom’s overlooked gesture of severance and retreat.

Collaboration supersedes methodology in The Alps—it becomes figuration. The collaborators are the headmaidens and bridesmen. Their texts are clued to the book’s concerns, but we’re not informed how and to what extent. The blank frames which crown their entries are mimicked by a sort of formal reversal in the (presumably) single-authored sections. Clipped lines of verse, alternating flush right and left so as to trace a square and center-aligned field of text, pose (or threaten) a sort of formal trespass on the collaborators’ headstones. This trespass is so cleanly animated, yet the stakes and motivations of its figures are constantly redoubling. Chorus vs. solus. Solus as chorus. Silence, noise, east-west. Capture, neutrality, frame, subjection, release. Rabbits vs. abbots. Because…

The book opens to a candid of two boys, likely brothers, possibly Shimoda and his brother, propped on a swing in bunny costumes—the younger staring down the camera with a look of blame, mopery or boredom, the older with his head either cocked back in anguish or rolling with bliss. Is it cocked or rolling? Is the other kid stoic, aggrieved or just full of nice soda? You’d need video or live witness to disambiguate the expressions “captured” in the frame. You’d need private and impossible access to the real moment’s full duration. Think of the irony in Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s photographs of Merton. Capturing the monk in a still photo, where his stillness and silence are rendered beyond unremarkable, just plain to the medium.

Merton became, to the surprise of anyone, a camera enthusiast after his experience with Meatyard. His photos were described by friends and critics as “natural, unarranged, unpossessed objects of contemplation” “liminal” “propositions of change” “uninterested in capturing Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’” “he did not seek to capture or possess”. So the monstrous formal animation of The Alps. Monstrous because constantly redoubling with motivation and argument. Too restless and living for capture.

Back to the family candid. It’s never a straight pitch, but there’s a trace of family narrative provisioning the book’s east-west movement and counter-movement, as in here: “I love tongues, I love beef tongues, I love to sink my hand sideways /       Into beef tongues. They said my grandfather bit off / His tongue and spit it / Out the window of the train carrying him from the south.” This isn’t to say, at all, far from it, that these personal tracings are posed as guarantors for the book’s historical screen. Which would be the danger of just ending this post with the above. Which I almost did. Mistake. But I feel the same seizure reading alone. How do you leave The Alps?

Back again to the snapshot. We can’t help hearing “abbot” in “rabbit-suit”. By example, the book shows us to hear it. We might later be drilled to hear “hear” in “hare”. And then, reward, be treated to vapor-like columns of h’s. And be drilled to hear expiration.

It’s a drag, but an obvious drag, we don’t have the authority to invite new headmaidens to The Alps. So here’s trespass:

Jared Stanley, from “Inner Voice”
in The Outer Bay (Trafficker Press, 2008) :

My voice was so outside
that it was on a mountain
when it died

when quiet was quiet
and everything diluvian
said “you”

on the outside, so I listened.
“You” was not only not a poem, then,
it was air.

Last week, sitting down with pages and pages of notes on Dana Ward, Alli Warren and Brandon Brown and left with an hour or so to write. Up high, down low, too slow. Want to hear a not-platitude? More like a plea? I’m finding Dana’s chapbook Typing Wild Speech (Summer BF press, 2010) to be one of those rare events that could easily move someone to launch a press. I’ve found a lot of company, anticipating Dana’s first full collection. Who wouldn’t want to have an intimate hand in that occasion?

Typing Wild Speech, alternating verse and prose meditations, is casually framed by the first of many nested anecdotes, that of a game played by Dana and his partner, Sarah:

“When Sarah & I watch movies we like to game resemblances. The game, insofar as it is one, depends upon poetic resolution & the charmed associations we draw between performers & their peers, or more seductively, between beautiful actors & our friends. Our agreements in this game are erotic, confirming shared indices of faces & bodies that when opened to identical entries circulate correlated ooh-la-la’s between us. The disagreements are minor catastrophes wherein the border between us is massed with warring troops. Détente must be achieved before the third act concludes.”

The first film put to the game is Control, about the life of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. It becomes the occasion for an extended meditation—always returning to the game as a pedal, and never introducing new concerns that don’t later meet with repetition and re-versioned significance. From Control, we find ourself ushered to David Larsen’s The Thorn (Faux Press, 2005) which we learn includes (a reproduction of) a handwritten poem, “Wild Speech”. Which is, by no coincidence, also the title of the first poem in Dana’s Typing Wild Speech. Dana begins to explain, “I had fantasies of publishing my typed version as a poem of my own as I continue to be taken with modes of individuated unoriginality…” That in mind, we’re soon moved back to Ian Curtis, and his resemblance vis-a-vis ‘the game’ to Geoff, a friend of Dana’s who had taken his life. This relay of resemblance… these relays of resemblance, Ian to Geoff, Dana to Ian to Geoff, David to Sarah to Ian to Geoff, Dana to David, are conduits for empathic charge. Figure. Resemblance to friend. Relay. Light. Lover sharing in figure’s resemblance to friend. Relay. Light…

Resemblance and empathy. Even here, on the posture of calling oneself ‘poet’:

“I’ve allowed a lot of myth to hold sway over how I perform that for myself. Some writers claim an important distinction. They are not ‘a poet’ but ‘a person who writes poetry’, & in making this distinction they dissolve an alienating modality that abets false consciousness…. I used to see ‘being a poet’ as an intoxicating costume that was just over there & if I could inch ever closer to it I’d be contaminated fully & mixed with its essence forever. Often times I have nothing to add to this confusion beyond the lightning storm of my own political depravations, for which my poetry is an endless sea of waiting metal rods. So there’s the face of a part of my trouble. Thus, as a ‘poet’, I must drink, must smoke, must travel, must dodge employ as much as possible. I guard these aspects jealously as I’ve allowed their presence to assume a causal life inextricably linked to my production as a poet. A sort of Fordist assemblage of romantic clichés that when operating in consort give me access to a consciousness that floods the factory backwards, destroying it, & that’s called a poem.”

It’s so easy to quote Dana, but how to keep it brief? It’s hard to know where to stop typing, even harder to want to stop. It feels too good being his pianist. Did it feel this good for Dana to be David’s pianist? “I type David’s poem again, slower this time, & pretend that the keyboard’s a piano….” The meditation really moves, and where it moves is “around”, and the casual urgency of its observations never land without some order of propulsive and intimate hesitancy that makes reading forward uncomfortably resistless.

The casualness of Dana’s strange wagers are so effortless I can’t help thinking of conjury. And the finger—that primary conjurer’s organ, on convulsive display when (merely) claiming impossible extensions of will onto environment, and in almost fluid repose when retracting that claim in private and (merely) setting up trick—the finger, is that the finger in the book’s opening poem, “Wild Speech”?

I am drawing a finger in the sand

With a crooked finger, and I am

Leading you on with it

Showing you the way, the way

Im throwing a French Fry

To the dog      La

La La       La

La

La

Already you’re less deceived

I’ve been reading Typing Wild Speech alongside Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat (Fence Books, 2010) and Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps (Flim Forum, 2008). They make fascinating if forced company, but it’s late. I sat down about an hour ago, to write this post on The Alps. Next with The Alps. Has anyone been reading The Alps?

Brandon’s line “The approbation of the contours by which our statements meet” could have served as the inscription over the gates of Space Space that night.  The work they read from and the chapbooks they distributed betray each author’s fidelity as a reader of the others’ work. The result was something on the order of a concert whose respective movements treated similar, if not identical themes, but with variations in tone, gesture and mood.

Brandon’s and Alli’s texts are full of those animals intended for consumption or sacrifice: goat meat, beef, lamb, sparrows and pigeons dissected for divination. There is appetite and there is beef. Figs, honey and cream glisten on the page and to quote Alli, it “looks like someone’s spending a lot of time / moving it around with his fingers.” Their engagement with Greek and Roman ritual practice is rivaled only by their love of hip hop. Indeed, one of most striking features of all three poets’ work is the unexpected confluence of classical and hip hop sources and rhetorical styles. The boast made in curation of a public persona appears regularly in Brandon and Alli’s texts (Brandon: “I surpass my whole neighborhood”; Alli: “yeah, I was a senator / and I tapped that legally”). Dana’s style is effectively an inversion of this; it would seem his performance of vulnerability and self is his boast.

Brandon read first, from his Catullus translation. He gathered consensus among his listeners through delivery and gesture that might have done Quintilian proud. (This rhetorical emphasis is present in his texts as well, in the form of parenthetical asides and the use of italics.) By generating this sympathetic mood, he was able to pitch us images of sexuality and brutality we didn’t feel obligated to recoil from—returning us through this irony to a paganism we thought we were long past.

Next up was Dana. Assuming the mic with an Isaac Hayes baritone, Dana’s openness was the next rhetorical weapon of choice. While brutality characterized the most intense moments of the first reading, intervals of tenderness marked the second. The line he read from the chapbook “Typing Wild Speech” illuminated Dana’s vision of rhetorical virtuosity for me: “Next I imagined ET’s spindly finger moving toward Eliot like it were elocution, like something said with such empathetic poise that the physical fact of its sound made a light…”

Alli Warren’s line “Inflection is feigned” (“My Factless Autobiography”) from a chapbook dedicated to Brandon Brown suggests the attitude they share toward performance. Alli, however, chose not deliver and gesture away our hesitance upon hearing her work. She instead adopted a persona which kept us at a distance and allowed freer interpretation of the performance’s irony. In this way, it felt she was being open by remaining closed, a neat paradox.

March 24.

Last class before Spring break. The room is hot and smells like the french fries that a student is eating before class begins. Probably her dinner for the night and at least a thousand calories. (I’ve seen students dump about 6 packs of sugar into their coffee).  I borrow a fan, and we start.

My classes are a mini-United Nations, In this room, students from the old Soviet Union sit in the center while the perimeter is African-American or Puerto Rican or Nepali. Still, they listen to each other, and it seems like the cultural divisions excites their curiosity.

I read from Eleni’s Book of Jon and Eileen Myles’ Cool for You, non-fiction novel.

The theme is autobiographical and fictionalizing the autobiographical.  The assigned story is W.C.Williams’ “The Use of Force.”

In class writing assignment: to write a scene about a banal conflict at work and find the drama/comedy within it by exaggerating the characters in order to fictionalize. Some were successful, most a bit boring.

March 26.

Bowery Poetry Club: Lewis Warsh read a chapter about Liz Taylor and Monty Cliff, from A Place in the Sun. his new novel. I learned that James Dean was gay, I feel stupid. Of course, he was.

Saw my former student from LIU, John Casquarelli, a Cuban American poet, who told me that he invented an acrostic sestina. Here’s an excerpt from Pardon My French

“faces in the afternoon tell a story

uttered on river banks across from notre dame.

cathedral that once embraced monarchs and nobles.

kings whose floors were perched on hilltops,

yearning for kinsmen who rest in vineyards.

once i owned a key to your home

until the sunflower fields called me away from home.

young artists peddling macaroni art, sharing a story

of towers and gargoyles and victor hugo sleeping in vineyards,

undaunted by the cry of the bell in notre dame.

families hiking through olive groves on hilltops,

urging children to sing of monarchs and nobles.”

March 27.

Grey Gallery. Downtown Pix, Mining the Fales Archives 1961-1991.

David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in NY series ends this week.

Books Received or bought:

Dies: A Sentence, Vanessa Place

Cities and Memory, Barbara Henning

A Place in the Sun, Lewis Warsh

March 26.

Bernstein reading. Rumors in the air. Is it true that the actor James Franco will be the next Poetry Project director? Will there be a Dunkin Donuts flagship store in Richard Foreman’s old space?

Eating at the crowded counter at Velseka, I want to sweep out my left arm and clear all the dishes to the floor. All these beautiful people are killing me.

March 30.

Gazing at the Mouth of Hell from the Book of Hours, by Catherine of Cleves  (the Morgan). Did you know that Purgatory can last thousands of years? I guess that’s why your relatives are allowed to pray you into a higher realm. Book of Monday that features a man’s death. They buried you in a cloth, let the flesh rot away, dug you up and chucked your bones onto the pile with the other previous people.

A random thought: Sometimes I see Kiki Smith at the Y. Star tattoos exposed in the locker room.  Her presence, a good omen.

The raven flew away.

Wish I’d waited till the reviews, esp. New Yorker one, were in before buying tickets but I wanted to see Christopher Walken on stage.

March 19

Eleni and me are hanging out, run into Lee Ann Brown who makes us extras in Tony Torn’s movie. The Cellbutross. Its a scene in a bar where everyone is texting or talking on their cells. A giant cell phone overhead, that rings, its someone’s boss.

Then its onward to the Whitney to catch an hour of the biennial.

March 20th

KiKi Smith show at the Brooklyn Museum. Main figure must be Elizabeth Murray, its a beautiful elegy. Clearly about transmission from one generation of women artist to another.

March 21

8th Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion Reading in a Williamsburg loft. Eleni Sikelianos, Major Jackson, Pierrie Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte and their family band.

March 22

Notes from a Talk on The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos. Eleni was the guest writer for John High’s MFA class called Writers on Writing. The Book of Jon is a memoir of Eleni’s father, Jon, a handsome, talented man who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. He died broke, alone in a hotel room.

Mistranslated notes from her talk:

“Poetry as a way to cool the material down. To tell an emotional truth without skirting the issues/ hot middle…how blind we are to ourselves… It is possible to get in trouble [some family members disapprove]… The disappeared father…  Of  some fragment we all have, bodies, brains, stories… Part 1 I wrote while he was alive–Part 11 after…about grieving… Who am I writing it for? Me… Not curative because we forget about the art… The notion that the living help the dead… He needs help now even on the other side…‘need oven mitts for the material’ Tom Clark to Jo Ann Wasserman [on writing The Escape, her poems on her mother’s death in a car crash]

Books Received

The Port of Los Angeles, Jane Sprague, Chax Press

The Tsatsawassans, Vol. #2, Ed. by Bernadette Mayer

March 23

Morning composition class. We walked to Madison Square Park, wrote and walked for thirty minutes. No one wanted to share their work. So I did:

Who is Roscoe Conkling?

Frozen custard

Floats, cones, shakes

Tue is Mango Madness.

Pinot Noir $22.

Suspended walkway between buildings.

Wedge of the Flatiron

Empire State silver needle in the sun

Dogs sprung from penthouse prisons

Morning sun blazes on my coat

Leaf blowers buzz like  gnats

Dogs in designer coats

Doberman in Burberry plaid

English bulldog in rhinestones.

Night composition class uptown. We are covering “The Metamorphosis.” So I ask the students to write about a time when they or someone they knew was treated or felt like a bug. One student, a Trinidadian woman about my age, wrote about taking the 6 hour bus ride to see her son in prison, “faces on the bus knew no color or age” and about how the visitors felt like bugs, powerless. Images conveyed through the senses, “the guards are the thorns”  “steel met

steel “(clanging of the gates and cells) her son keeps his milk cold by storing it in the toilet. “This prison it’s mine.”  Her last line reminds me that when one person is incarcerated the whole family is in effect also imprisoned.

(From Woodstock)

Bernadette and Phil are going to see The Crazies, a horror flick, in Hudson tonight. Last film we saw with them was Boogeyman in Catskill.

Bird songs, fresh mint crawling out from the snow.
Deer scat in back yard.

Going for a walk with Grace Murphy, that one, the one with all the 2nd generation NY school poems dedicated to her. Esp. from Bernadette, Steve Katz, etc. Bernadette, Grace, and Peggy DeCoursey went to high school together.

Books Received:
Gurlesque, ed by Lara Glenum & Arielle Greenberg
Volt, Volume 15
Either She Was, Karin Randolph, Marsh Hawk Press
Town, Kate Schapira, Factory School
The Imperfect, George Tysh, United Artists
Thirty Miles to Rosebud, Barbara Henning, BlazeVOX.

Courtesy of Tonya Foster, 5 chapbooks from Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative series: The Amiri Baraka/Ed Dorn Correspondence,The Kenneth Koch/Frank O’Hara Letters: Parts I & II, Philip Whalen’s Journals: Selections, Parts I & II, Robert Creeley: Context of Poetry with Selections from Daphne Marlatt’s Journals, Muriel Rukeyser: Darwin & the Writers.

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. A relief to read something smart about the crap we’re being fed. She also traces the origins of the positive brainwashing culture back to the 19th century.

A blog is not a journal or diary. The temptation is to pour my heart out as in a private document, but in reality, I would out myself as well as others, even though that these words will mostly go unread except by Stacy (who posts it) and the next guest blogger checking in. That I like, the thought of writing to an audience of Stacy and myself. Rumor is the “comments” command is dysfunctional. Good. No thumbs up/down on my posts. I want this space to be silent like the page. This is a monologue not a conversation. Or is it gossip? Too thin-skinned to be a full time blogger, I want to be liked too much.

Thinking of the problem/pleasure of writing in a public space, the fluid nature of online writing, and how ugly the word “blog” itself is. Like slog or clog. And how every blog at some point requires the writer to acknowledge the medium, just as I am here. Still the temptation to put it all down is present, the quietness of composing is seductive. Filling the endless void of cyberspace with letters is a silent luxury, yet I censor myself.

March 11

(back in East Village)

The raven is at the top of one of the largest trees on the cemetery outside our window. In the fall, it stayed close to the ground. I heard that was rescued from a ditch in Arizona, and that it hates men and loves women, and eats dog food.

Sometimes Red Tail Hawks perch in the treetops too and hunt pigeons.
Rat ran across the top of backyard wall in the rain.

Went to see “Time Stands Still” by Donald Margulies, on Broadway, set in Williamsburg loft, about photojournalists and the Iraqi war. Not a great play but a good one. It deals with the role of the photojournalist: the job is to witness, not to intervene. All of the characters except for the Sarah, played by Laura Linney, decide that there is nothing they can do about the war but snatch at happiness by having babies and forgetting about it. Except Linney’s character, who has returned home to heal after being blown up by a roadside bomb. She goes back to the war zone as a witness.

I ignore pain, haven’t dealt with it directly in my writing. A friend of mine, did a self-portrait with a nail, penetrating her forehead. “It’s my pain,” she said.

March 13

Rain day and night. Simon Pettet over for dinner. He walks in soaked to the bone, takes off his raincoat and boots, and from a book bag pulls out a very dry copy of Other Flowers, James Schulyer’s uncollected poems that he co-edited with James Meetze. Mixed review in the LA Times.

March 3, 2010

I envision this as workspace: a place to build a form, to gaze, to know or to try things out.

Did you know there is a field of poetry therapists?

Picture of Sylvia Plath in the chapter on depression in an Introduction to Psychology textbook. Sometimes its a photo of Virginia Woolf,  Great, my students who are mostly non-writers, like to point it out whenever I talk about the life of a writer.

“John McPhee has described writing as “mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor.” Each day, he says, brings a “new form of writer’s block.” He elaborates: “You suspend the normal world to reproduce the normal world. It is a suspension of ordinary life.” from an interview in the LA Times.

Introducing a writer at the Tenth Muse Series. “…writing about the shadow of a toothpick on an apple” John Ashbery.

“Writing is waiting.” India Radfar

“Its as if the language wants to say this.” Attributed to Bernadette Mayer

Dream: in my cousin’s living room, a family gathering for mother’s day.

My own thoughts are that my teeth, jaw and neck problems are based on my timidity, of self censorship. My speech, my voice. A life long struggle over shyness.

Bought two signed copies of Just Kids, by Patti Smith, as gifts for my die hard Smith friends at St. Marks.  But first I will read one gently, with clean hands, without coffee or tea, opening slowly and turning the pages with care. Saw them online going for a hundred bucks each already.

Listening to Democracy Now in the morning. Cindy Sheehan coming to town. Thinking about how she never sold out and has not been seduced.  Think back to around Christmas of C.A.‘s request to take part in a (soma)tic poetry exercise for a speech against troop escalation in Afganistan. I was in the throes of grading and teaching, so I missed the deadline and finished it too late for him. He graciously read it later, and liked it.

March 4, 2010

David Nolan’s memorial at St. Marks Church. I never knew him very well, he was quiet. I recall him at sound board with John Fisk and I marvel at his patience to sit through marathon readings. At one point, about 15 years ago he purged himself of worldly possession.  He gave me a victorian bedspread, striped bell bottoms, vintage flag. All of which I still have.

Notes from Baldwin – Sheinfeld  conversation at the college where I teach.

For the past two years Prof. Gary Sheinfeld, a close friend of James Baldwin, has read the transcript of a conversation he had with Baldwin, it turned out that this was the last conversation/interview that Baldwin had in the United States. The conversation took place over dinner and in a cab on the way to the PanAm terminal at JFK, in 1987. Sheinfeld read his own part and Dean Tim Taylor read Baldwin’s part. I brought my class.

Notes from the conversation:

Everyone needs a friend to tell the truth too….The self is a journey….

Betrayal is always self betrayal….When in love {I] crawl towards the broken glass…. Trouble of telling the truth…pressure to lie…. Europe is not the center is not the center of the world….Most people want to be saved…. If you are afraid to die you are afraid to live…. Leaving home in the hopes of saving my life. How do you explain that to a 5 year old girl [his niece]?   I’m afraid of flying. ,I hate PanAm,  I’m afraid of London….. If you’ll be my witness, I’ll be yours.

Last night teaching “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” I ask the Russian students to fill the class in on the context of Tolstoy’s time.  A hot debate erupts over the meaning of Tolsoy’s famous line, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore the most terrible.”

Probably all comparison is specious. At least wrong. There was feudalism and then there was capitalism. There were horse drawn carriages and then there were cars. For a while there were both and it was natural to compare them as ways of getting somewhere. Or the telephone as a way of communication soon to be replaced by ‘texting’ message.  (The mayor of Las Cruces, surprised by the sudden wave of opposition to the development of a privately built ICE Detention Center, proposed to my friend Dana that they ‘text’ on the matter.) I suspect that the invention and proliferation of instant text exchange has altered the face to face encounter – speech upon being in physical proximity is no longer self-evident. As far as manners and etiquettes of compassion in our new textual spaces, I suppose we just need to figure them out. When I think like this I think maybe it isn’t true that there is nothing new under the sun. Maybe that is all there is. Negation, replacement.

There are three books on my mind this week. They are kari edwards, Bharat jiva (Belladonna/Litmus, 2009), Spring Ulmer, Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay, 2009) and Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence, 2009). Each of these books, written during the oughts and published on the eve of their demise can be placed under the category defined by Wagner’s serial title “Everyone In The Room Is A Representative Of The World At Large”—although perhaps the more accurate phrase would be “Every body in the room represents and receives the world at large.” These books, two of which are poetry books and one, Ulmer’s, is a book of poetically informed essays. Ulmer’s essays study the self as part and parcel of our moment of genocidal current and aftermath. Note: here the collective first person ‘our’ that I am utilizing is informed in part by the premise of Ulmer’s work: in times of virtual representation, we are not only overwhelmed by information and reality, we become it. Aware of the world and its injustices since her birth, being born and growing up in rural Vermont in a kerosene lamp-powered house her radically-left parents built, Ulmer writes of brokenness as hers and also not her own. “An Atlas of the Itinerant Nature of Perspective,” which touches upon her study and time in post-genocide Rwanda (I keep stumbling over writing that, thinking the concept impossible, there is no post-genocide), ends with the line “I will then concede that Abraham’s broken heart is much more broken than mine. There is, of course, no comparison (45).” Since this quote is out of the context, I will explain that what I think is being said is that while there is no comparison, neither is there a clear line of demarcation.

edward’s book, Bharat jiva is in some way a poetic-political-existential-spiritual accounting of her year in an intentional spiritual community in Tamil Nadu, India. The book, like our list of 1970’s movies, ends bleak, perhaps even bleaker than its beginning: her final attempt to find hope in community has failed edwards, it’s the same as every other flawed attempt to get beyond consumption, and the spirit-murderous branding required by consumption (for more on this see Rob Halpern’s excellent essay “Reading the Interval, Reading Remains” in Bharat jiva’s companion volume, NO GENDER, published simultaneously by Belladonna/Litmus—in this Halpern publishes edwards’ emails critiquing ‘community’). The flip side of the abandon and rage and frustration implicit in Bharat jiva is an accounting that the poet brings onto her self-same body alongside every other body (once again, ‘our’ as radical ego collectivity). A passage from the preface reads:

“…when we mention the people, we do not mean the confessional body of the people, we mean the particularly itinerant bodies in mechanic flux, preaching freedom beyond flesh pamphlets of authority, concealed in blind devotion.” (3)

Through the duration of the book, this preaching, edwards’ critique, her attempt to render a different story through witness and poetic action is (now, from the aftermath), “replaced by a generous claw/with nothing to say (115).”

Wagner also makes a statement of poetic negation: “If a poem is active/Its action aborts in you/A colored light flies into black.” (36) Overall, My New Job asserts a practice of poetry as a shared fact, if not reduced than joined by the grunts and sighs that are the facts and banality of contemporary work and getting by. Not without pleasure, penises, vaginas and good fights with lovers, the poem is brought into the world physical body with sound gestures, and nursery rhyme, and commercial jingle

STILL not finished review

but productive day and feeling

GÜT

like a fine mama

SHÜT

putting down some

RÜTS

like the lost queen

TOOT

TOOT

TÜT TÜT TÜT

These poetries, which all put the subjective body forward as a shared space suggest to me that yes, the fantasy of ‘wandering on alone” is forever gone and that ‘our’ bodies, behind screens that watch us back and no longer able to be removed to some colonial outpost, are in fact themselves the site of our new public, our new commons.

Epilogue

Though I’m fairly sure I didn’t get very far in the great project of considering confinement in our times I did learn something about blogging in our times which may after all be critical to the thinking about confinement in our times. Every time I mentioned the blog to someone, their response was inevitably, “Oh you blog???” The way they might inquire if I were a skier, or a practitioner of S/M…”So, you’re into S/M?” And this appeals to me as an analogy because like skiing and S/M, blogging is in fact, not something I ‘do’ but rather now something I have tried, done, dipped into like I have dipped into so many things that one can ‘do’ with no intention of sustaining them as a practice in the way that I practice things like swimming or getting tipsy or sitting on the couch and watching tv or reading New York Magazine talking to Dana now often on the telephone since she has moved so far away. Like skiing and S/M, I find blogging does have its fun but is too much machinery, too ritualistic, its accountrement of too many steps, so much always themselves in the same way for me, i.e. the ski lift and its line, the leather and its fittings, the constant presence of the format. Perhaps holding onto a fantasy of escape, I prefer my watery little dream world where I get to just jump in.

[Note: you can listen to Catherine Wagner read “Coming and I did not run away” in our Audio section.]

Poetics of Speed

What is a blog and how do you do it? I had a plan and now find myself surprised to be without internet so I can’t get into facebook to check on my list of bleaker 70s movies and where is the Melanie lyric? But I was talking about confinement and there was a thought about the body in the interface, and my anxiety to not meet the fact of speed, of easy speech, and what if I forget my lines? I’ve been fixated on a notion of the poetics of speed and how badly, truly I fail at this, how disappointing I often feel when I’m looked upon to speak and cannot. I’m amazed at Eileen Myles’ ability to rise when she’s looked to, and speak/testify to the injustice, even suggest something new. When I see something bad I begin to grunt, because I find I must say something, yet when I turn my grunts into slow speech or writing it hardly gets any better, I’m accused of being negative, of getting in the way, my mental meandering generally unrecognizable. (Are there not multiple languages and can’t we all be talking at once?)

Both Gertrude Stein (“Composition as Explanation”) and Paul Virilio (Speed and Politics) recognize the 20^th Century as the one in which turns in military strategy (of the 19^th Century) become the rhythm by which everything turns in the 20^th, i.e. the masses militarized into a constantly roaming shooting machine, through cities, across continents and over oceans, deployed in total eternal war, whose civilian arm is the affordable automobile. Stein makes the point well that military advances are always a hundred years behind and so does Virilio, citing Carl Von Clausewitz as the 19^th century engineer of the strategy that would serve the bourgeois cause toward domination of the proletariat—by the method of uproot, displace, keep them moving.

“In order to know one must always go back” (Stein, Lectures “Plays”)

Besides using the above spin as a statement/complaint against speed pressure, besides pointing out its relation to confinement–as my friend Rick Karr points out in his PBS special: the internet too is a highway upon which we move as directed, paying toll collectors along the way–I would like to use it as an opportunity to acknowledge some movies from the 1970’s (and a few from the 60’s) which perhaps theorized the present tense of our ‘dromological progress.’

“Let’s make no mistake; whether it’s the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, Olympic champions or travel agents, the military industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction , into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds…” (Virilio 136).

In the mid 1970’s (I was born in 1963) I began to feel that something was going on and that I was going to miss it…like the waft of bread from a bakery whose load has already been trucked away. I could smell it, but I could not see it. Based on that sensation, I built a nostalgia for an imagined time of resistance to domination—and responded quickly to any opportunities I had to join radical collective action in my sphere. And then in the 1990’s I stopped…to write poems and make connection to other people writing poems. This too felt like a potential, but different, means of resisting, by joining in imaginative activity with others, and in building a viable counter-culture. My imagined late 1960’s, early 1970’s life—the one that I had just missed–was one which (in my imagination) expressed idealism, connection, advancement of thought, the sense of possibility.

So it came as a surprise to me when I returned to the movies of my youth and found my lover to be correct when he said that they always end worse than they began, offering an even bleaker picture of the world.  This is not our expectation of the movies we watch today, which all seem to end with a joyous wedding.

I don’t have the facebook list or the internet so I have to speak to the ones that are fresh in my mind. Spoiler alert! Some movies and their endings: Dog Day Afternoon (end with the cops shooting Sal in cold blood), The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 (original version), Soylent Green (“Soylent Green is People!”), Death Wish (kids keep being cold blooded criminals, the vigilante architect keeps killing kids), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (we know how it goes, and that it is 1969 but can’t resist, Burt Bacharach soundtrack and all) 2 Lane Blacktop (ends with the love object taking off with some guy and the film reel, it’s image of the lonesome drivers, catching fire), and my most recent favorite, and one that has truly haunted me since watching it on ‘instant watch’ – George Lukas’ first film, the beautiful, high design THX:1138 (filmed in then spanking clean and space age state of the art BART stations). THX 1138 ends with THX (pronounced ‘thicks’) climbing out of the structure, circumventing his first attempt at escape into the inescapable hell of the superstructure (see dromological progress), pushing up the manhole, standing up on the OUTSIDE, only to be silhouetted by a skin melting, melting sun.

Not hopeful, these films take as their  premise that everything is all fucked up, the system has us all by the balls and our options are only ever diminishing. What I find remarkable is how willing, how spunky and resistant the characters are, knowing the system is bigger than them and will eventually do them in. One of my favorite lines of all times is Al Pacino playing the queer bank robber Sonny Wortzik (aka John Wojtowicz) negotiating hostage release with the cops saying “Kiss me. When I’m being fucked, I like to be kissed a lot.”* Rather than making good with the system that has the better of them, they do their own thing.  They don’t act against the system in order to beat it, they resist because they still can. Which is maybe as ‘outside’ as it gets.

END

*For John Wojtowiczs’s dramatization of the story see “The Third Memory” by Pierre Huyghe

The internet is working, I’m about to send this to Stacy but quickly, here are some bleak 1970’s movies my ‘friends’ on facebook offered:

*Note: Dystopia or not, things are always getting worse.

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Taxi Driver

The Wicker Man

Fox and His Friends

Don’t Look Now

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Carrie

Chinatown

The Stepford Wives

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman version)

(And it’s 1968, but it seems like an important precedent): Night of the Living Dead

The Conversation

Killer of Sheep

Wanda

Night Moves

Blow Up

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The Champion

Five Easy Pieces

Two Lane Blacktop

Vanishing Point

The Exorcist  (no kidding: my father took me to see this when it came out, I was 9)

Apocalypse Now

The Last Picture Show

The Night Porter

The Kremlin Letter

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Caddyshack

The Last Tango in Paris

Klute

Nashville (“the ending appears bright but this Altman” says PSJ who offered this one)

Boesman & Lena

Mean Streets

Saturday Night Fever

Jesus Christ Superstar

Star Wars

Jaws

Panic in Needle Park

“the first Godfather film? What about King of Comedy, the ending of which is at least weird, if not bleak?”

Shadows

A Woman Under the Influence

Faces

Ali or Fear Eats the Soul

The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant

Alice in the Cities

Oh, and here is the Melanie:

“We were so close, there was no room

We bled inside each other’s wounds

We all had caught the same disease

And we all sang the songs of peace.”

YOURS in struggle,

Rachel

Stacy asked me to do the February web log, the first one due today and I said yes, what might you like to see me log about? Stacy said, ‘your work teaching in prison.’ I can’t probably do that very directly but, since last semester’s teaching at Woodbourne and Arthur Kill, two New York State Medium Security Correctional Facilities (NYS has 67 facilities, housing between 60,000 and 90,000 people, depending on the report), I am beginning to think more coherently and/or obsessively about confinement. On one hand how could I not—just last week a friend was arrested and processed because the police had no record of her payment of a speeding violation (which she had paid but that seems moot—they picked her up on 5th Ave in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and kept her for five hours). But also I have come to realize that in fact I think about confinement all the time anyway, that this thinking is always already before my thinking on liberation. I understand confinement to not only be the condition of the massive prison population in this country (600% growth since 1970s despite declining crime rates–more stats listed below), the massive incarceration of young men of color from cities, the 1 in 3 African American males that are predicted to go prison at the time of their birth, and the fact that they are/will be mostly ‘kept’ by white non-urban prison guards—but also the condition of our policed cities and bodies on the outside, the disciplining of the emotions implicit in pumping psycho-pharmaceuticals into children and students and now their professors too, and also the condition of gates and walls built against those these ‘unruly’ policed cities and borders and migrating bodies looking for food and work and home. Fear run amok making room for surreal and politically/humanly horrific experiments in safety. I like the way that Jena Osman talks about this in her introduction to the Chain Links book Refuge/Refugee while discussing the constricting aspect of ‘sanctuary’ (writing adjacently about camps designed for both animals and humans): “In order for a refuge to keep its contents safe, contained, and “carefree,” it must maintain a radical separation from that which exists outside of its frame.” And while as Osman notes, “such detachment is impossible,” it is these more and more radical efforts to hold the lines that increase our state of confinement. The computer poses another question: does the internet/world wide web obliterate or proliferate the razor wires we find ourselves writing behind?

And then there is the question of what we as poets do when we enter and intervene in conceptions of reality. I have a rough thought that one of the things we do when we represent reality, is to delimit it, and by doing so imagine what it is not, or what is outside of it, and that it is possible to view representation as a craving for liberation/autonomy from the world and its heavy totality. Here, I would like to place Gertrude Stein’s book The Making of Americans, and her attempt to construct “an orderly history of every one who ever was or is or will be living” alongside consideration of the refuge or refugee camp, psycho-pharmaceuticals, police arrest for traffic tickets, and the generally increasingly radical efforts being made to contain human and animal lives.

I propose that by in this exercise, Stein, in putting down entirely the whole of what was inside her (the there no longer in Oakland as Joan Retallack aptly points out, refining the sense of that famous comment) imagines she might then step outside, exist separately from that whole, become the unrecognized (by ‘little dog’) “figure” wandering “on alone.” (The full quote from “Identity a poem” is “I am I because my little dog knows me. The figure wanders on alone.”)

In this vein, I’ve long been confounded while tickled by Walter Benjamin, who at the crossroads between centuries (writing on the Nineteenth century in the Twentieth), identifies the writing process as so much perpetuation of the notion of the isolation, singularity and genius, i.e. the poet of the original in “The Task of the Translator” separated and protected from any consideration of the work’s “receiver”, writing in “the true language”; or those adorable rules for writers of the “major work” in the “Post No Bills” section of “One Way Street”; i.e. don’t read from the work until it is complete, have the right pen around at all times, let no thought pass without writing it down in the notebook you always carry, etc.

Echoing Benjamin’s sentiments in this century, Giorgio Agamben has a great piece in Profanations on how the god Genius is profanely and dangerously bowed down to in secular society. And yet this is the same 21st century that, in poetry at least, begins with a massive proliferation, even might I say fad, of conceptualisms, and full on use of the internet as medium for generation and distribution, where we claim no ego, no defining difference, no authorship (well, we still put our names down, as the authors of ‘projects’ but who’s counting?). The notion of waiting until a piece or a project or a conception is finished before considering the audience seems ridiculously solipsistic and absurd, since there wouldn’t be a piece without the audience there to begin with, and we all know it, feel it, pressing on our in-boxes, blogs, facebook pages. And in our desire for nothing special, no extreme emotions or political stances we get confused by that which moves us, when we find ourselves feeling it or calling it especially beautiful and well-wrought: god Genius rearing profane head.

For now, here is my question: Is our recycling of material, our full embrace of technology and networking devices, our DIY culture in which it’s really hard to get anyone to actually show you how to do anything toward mastery because you are supposed to be able to figure out how to do it yourself or pay someone to teach you—do they represent merely a continuation of the modernist urge to capture the world and wander on as autonomous figures alone or is there a new urge to mix and merge, be one with the political and metaphysical world as it is presented to us? Am I correct when I sense that poets no longer crave an outside? Is that a capitulation or radical participation?

And what has this to do with our condition of confinement?

Next Week: the singer Melanie and the bleak outside-less landscapes of our favorite 1970’s movies.

-Rachel Levitsky

—-
Prison Statistics as compiled for me by Dana Greene, a professor of Criminal Justice at NMSU:

Race & Prison/Corrections:

Figures vary significantly by state, however, nationally:
5,000 per 100,000 African-American men are incarcerated
2,000 per 100,000 Latino men are incarcerated
800 per 100,000 White men are incarcerated

African Americans comprise 40% of the prison population but about 13% of the U.S. population.

Self-report studies consistently show little difference in criminal behavior across race.

Almost 1 in 10 (9.3%) of all African American children have had a father in prison or jail; 3.5 percent of Hispanic children and 1.2 percent of white children.

U.S. Adult inmates by race: (national data)
36.5 African American
48.3 White
9.8 Hispanic
5.8 ‘Other’

Correctional Officers:
30% of all correctional officers are from racial and ethnic groups labeled ‘minorities’ (21.7 African American; 6.3 Hispanic; 3.2 other; 69.7 White).
23% of all correctional officers are women.

There are under 1 million correctional officers in the United States (between 800,000 & 900,000 thousand).

Prison Growth: (data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics most of this is copied verbatim)
Between 1940 & 1973 the incarceration rate held steady. Since 1975 continuing exponential increase is the norm.
The incarceration rate in 1973 was 96 per 100,000 United Statesians
The incarceration rate in 2006 was 497 per 100,000 United Statesians (a growth of about 600%)

The U.S. incarceration rate is the highest on the globe. The U.S. spends about 70 billions dollars a year on corrections (probation, parole & prison) About 7.5 million United Statesians are under correctional supervision. About 2.5 are in prison.

Of today’s men in their 30s 1 in 28 has been to prison; 11% of male children born this year AND a third of male African Americans born this year) will go to prison.

Crime rates between 1993 & 2005 fell by more than 50%.

The Big Four:
4 states dominate U.S. corrections (2006 data)
California (largest in the country) 170,676 prison inmates; 384,852 on probation; 110,262 on parole
Florida: prison = 62,743
New York: prison = 89,768
Texas: prison = 169,003

Women and prison:

Since 1960 the feminization of poverty has accelerated = women and children currently comprise 80% of the poor in the United States.

The growth rate of women in prison has surpassed that of men since 1995. From 1995 to 2005 the male population in state and federal correctional facilities increased by 34 percent & that of women 57%.

Feeding the prisons:
The Children’s Defense Fund have an interesting report called the ‘Cradle To Prison Pipeline’ the url is http://www.childrensdefense.org/helping-americas-children/cradle-to-prison-pipeline-campaign/

What fuels the pipeline: (from the report)
Pervasive Poverty
Inadequate Access to Healthcare
Gaps in Early Childhood Development
Disparate Educational Opportunities
Intolerable Abuse and Neglect
Unmet Mental Health needs
Substance Abuse
Juvenile Justice System

(The source for much of CDF data is the U.S. Department of Justice)

Lifetime risk of a boy born in 2001 of going to prison:
Black boy: 1 in 3 chance
Latino boy: 1 in 6
White boy: 1 in 17

Lifetime risk of a girl born in 2001 of going to prison:
Black girl: 1 in 17
Latina girl: 1 in 45
White girl: 1 in 111

While more white children are poor in the United States Black and Latino/a children are more likely to be poor:
1 in 3 Black children is poor
1 in 4 Latino/a children is poor
1 in 10 children is poor