Marginality, Manifesto, and Poetry's New Thing

No, no, I'm not dead or otherwise incapacitated: it's just that I've been busy tapping out some reviews and plugging away on a chapter about Tennyson for The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, Politics, and Poetics, which, if my current pace continues, promises to be a posthumous work.

But that's not why you stopped by. You wanted to ask "what have you published lately, chump?" Ah! Glad you asked. Well, the June issue of Poetry just arrived, and it includes "Marginality and Manifesto," an essay I wrote about poetry manifestos. Specifically, the essay responds to the collection of manifestos from the February issue of Poetry.

Long story short, what I say in the essay is this: when one looks over the February collection of essays, one wonders whether the manifesto form might be, for the moment, exhausted. Not that the manifestos were bad: they were, without exception, interesting, clever, and engaging. But they tended to be anti-manifestos of one sort or another. Some parodied the will-to-power aspect of the genre, others were deliberately provisional where manifestos have traditionally been bold, others were defenses of tradition where manifestos have tended to be avant-garde, still others were nostalgic for a lost era when manifestos seemed to matter. Why, I wondered, this sense of exhaustion?

To answer the question, I had a look at what I took to be the two main motivations of manifestos in the early 20th century: to challenge the marginality of poetry in society, and to challenge the established poetic style from the margins of the art. The first of these goals still seems to motivate poets across a wide stylistic spectrum (it's the impetus behind both Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? and Charles Bernstein's "Warning Poetry Area: Publics Under Construction"). But the second, which always produced more manifestos, doesn't seem to pertain: we don't, I argued, really have an establishment style in any meaningful way. Which is not to say we don't have a poetic establishment (Jed Rasula's book The American Poetry Wax Museum is a great study of just how that establishment works). But the establishment isn't predicated on style so much as on institutional access and support, on big name journals, grants agencies, and prestigious university posts. One could rail against this, as one's instinct is to rail against all privilege. But in a way, we're lucky to have grants and university posts: in the early 20th century, poets were, by and large, without any kind of market or patronage, having lost the old aristocratic system of support over the nineteenth century. One could even see the flurry of manifestos in the modernist era as a symptom of a climate of scarcity: when people are well fed, they're less inclined to fight. Or so I argued.

Of course the movement away from prescriptive, declarative manifestos doesn't mean there aren't broad shifts in style, and attempts to describe them: in fact, the latest Boston Review contains a very interesting essay by Stephen Burt on just such a stylistic shift. The essay, "Poetry's New Thing," argues that emerging poets (emerging, I suppose, to broader visibility) like Graham Foust, Devin Johnsoton, Zach Barocas, and Elizabeth Treadwell have moved away from the elliptical style that became one of the more prominent modes of poetry in the 1990s. These poets, Burt claims, are more interested in documentary, mimesis, and things in the world than were the elliptical crowd. He's certainly right to see the influence of Objectivism on many of these poets, and I'm happy to see him single out The Cultural Society as an important venue for the work of many poets in this crowd: I think it's one of the best poetry things going on the web.

Steve, who gave elliptical poetry its name a decade ago, is out to name the new thing, too. In fact, given this kind of poetry's emphasis on things (as opposed to linguistic disruption), he offers "The New Thing" as a name. I kind of like the minimalism of it. We'll know it's taken off as a term if people start arguing about it. I'll start now: Steve argues for Rae Armantrout as a major precursor to The New Thing. Fair enough, but since The New Thing includes, along with neo-objectivists, an emphasis on documentary, I'd argue for John Matthias and Michael Anania as precursors, and point to their influence on a number of the poets Burt names, such as Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary. And while I'm glad Steve points to the University of Chicago as a breeding-ground for The New Thing, I wish he'd mentioned Garin Cycholl, currently teaching there, as an important documentary-style poet. Anyway: it's an exciting essay. Sadly, it's not on the Boston Review website, at least not yet. But you can scoop up a copy at the bookstore when you're picking up the latest Poetry.

UPDATE MAY 26: Will Fertman, the self-described "P.R. goon" for the Boston Review dropped me a line to say that Steve's piece is now up online. Check it out!

The Scholar Escapes (For Now)

I've done it: I've watched the students troop off from campus, to whatever beach or internship awaits. Much to the dismay of the sensitive observer, I've gone sockless, kitted-out in sandals and shorts and Mexican short-sleeved shirt. I've hauled the bicycle out and had at it with oil and wrenches, readying it for the dusty trail. I've laid in a supply of frosty beverages, and piled the appropriate books out by the adirondack chairs. Summer, people, is on the way, and I'm hauling out one more thing, for all the academics who are experiencing the end of the teaching term — an old poem by Austin Clarke. If he hadn't lived in the considerable shade generated by Yeats' monumental stature, he'd have been the most musical Irish poet of his generation. Check out the crazy consonance, assonance, half-rhymes and scansion here, and the (to my mind) devastating turn at the end, when the easy flow of pastoral escapism comes to a screeching halt, and the scholar once again finds himself, as we all do, working for The Man. I'm going to have to scare up a slim volume of Clarke's to cart around on the bike trails while the summer lasts...

The Scholar

Summer delights the scholar
With knowledge and reason.
Who is happy in hedgerow
Or meadow as he is?

Paying no dues to the parish,
He argues in logic
And has no care of cattle
But a satchel and stick.

The showery airs grow softer,
He profits from his ploughland
For the share of the schoolmen
Is a pen in hand.

When mid-day hides the reaping,
He sleeps by a river
Or comes to the stone plain
Where the saints live.

But in winter by the big fires,
The ignorant hear his fiddle,
And he battles on the chessboard,
As the land lords bid him.

—Austin Clarke

**UPDATE MAY 7** Mike Begnal has posted some comments about this to his blog, noting that Clarke is actually reworking an old Gaelic poem, reversing the earlier poem's point even as he honors its sound patterns. Good stuff!

Mayday!

The premiere issue of Mayday is up online, featuring (among other things) Kent Johnson's "Some Darker Bouquets," an open letter responding to Jason Guriel's Poetry magazine defense of negative reviewing. The good people at Mayday invited a host of people who review poetry to respond, and there's a big, here-comes-everybody set of responses to Johnson (including, for what it's worth, my own). It's a real debate, people, and despite my contribution, an intelligent one!

Frank Zappa, Commodity Logic, and the Dawn of Postmodernism

So there I was, puffing away on the treadmill, preparing for bicycle season (Team Slow Ride, the crew with which I so inelegantly ride, will be doing a Milwaukee-to-Chicago run this summer, and believe me, I'm in no kind of shape for anything more than a downhill roll to the local ice-cream truck). I'd wedged Frank Zappa's autobiography into the treadmill's little magazine-holder thing, and was a chapter or two into it when I ran across the following passage from Zappa's account of his blue collar, small town teenage years in the 1950s:

One day I happened across an article about Sam Goody's record store in Look magazine which raved about what a wonderful merchandiser he was. The writer said that Mr. Goody could sell anything—and as an example he mentioned that he had even managed to sell an album called Ionization. The article went on to say something like "This album is nothing but drums—it's dissonant and terrible; the worst music in the world." Ahh! Yes! That's for me! I wondered where I could get my hands on a record like that, because I was living in El Cajon, California—a little cowboy kind of town near San Diego.

Zappa couldn't find a copy in El Cajon, but one day, when visiting a friend in nearby La Mesa, he hit the record store and paydirt, in that order:

After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston Records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist [Zappa, whose father worked in a metallurgy shop, had a kind of mad science vibe to him at the time, and made of the mixing of chemicals and the blowing up of shit the main non-musical activities of his youth]. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up—and there it was the record with "Ionization" on it. The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong—the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I...

The LP cost a princely $5.95, and Zappa had only $3.75 to his name. He made an offer, and, since the record seemed unsellable, the clerk let him buy it. The record was an ear-opener, and soon Zappa was laying in a supply of Stravinsky, Webern, and the like, along with the usual teeny-bopper stuff, and used blues records from old jukeboxes. "Since I didn't have any formal training," writes Zappa, "it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called The Jewels... or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music."

Anyone who's spent time listening to Zappa's music can tell you it's the result of the collapse of the high culture/popular culture distinction — a collapse typical of what we think of as postmodernism. But what's interesting here is how Zappa starts on the road to being a postmodern musician: it has everything to do with the dominance of commodity logic in American culture. Firstly, there's the article in Look, which presents us with what, in historical terms, is a very strange kind of heroism: Sam Goody is no knight in shining armor, nor is he a holy man or a martyr. He's a hero because he can, Midas-like, convert anything he touches into a commodity to be sold (even something so resolutely non-commodifiable as Varèse's experimental music). It is only because the tale of the triumph of the Knight of Commodification over the Dragon of Aesthetic Innovation was being sung in the pages of Look that Zappa heard of Varèse in the first place. Secondly, there's the actual triumph of markets and commodities in midcentury America: the country was well on its way to being the everything-all-the-time-if-you-can-pay-for-it nation it is today, and you could even find a Varèse album in a shitkicker county if you traveled a town or two over. Also, there's the sense that the only value is the market or commodity value. What's the value of Varèse? Only what the market will bear, by the logic of commodities. And, since the market in La Mesa wouldn't bear $5.95, Zappa was actually able to afford the album.

Moreover, since young Zappa wasn't exposed to any system of cultural hierarchy other than the commodity, he encountered all music as equal (all commodities are in some sense exchangeable -- lead, feathers, fighter jets, bassoons, church windows, first folios of Shakespeare, truck tires, Van Gogh paintings, whatever: pile them up high enough and you can trade one for another). In another time and place he'd probably have learned one or another kind of snobbery. I mean, if you read old issues of Gramophone from the 1920s, the world of music is pretty clearly split into classical, on the one hand, and everything else, which was seen as worthless crap, on the other). So: the logic of commodities, where everything is curiously the same, was the only logic by which music was sorted for young Zappa, pure product of America that he was. And it was, I suppose, from a million little actions like Zappa's purchase of Varèse that the collapse of cultural hierarchies, of Webern-good, Lightinin' Slim-bad, followed. It's been said that with the triumph of market forces, all that is solid melts into air. It turns out that includes aesthetic hierarchy.


By the way: I'm ashamed to admit I didn't know, until reading Frank Zappa's book, that he and Captain Beefheart hung out together in high school. And thinking about them together reminds me that the guy who first turned me on to Belgian Surrealism, Michel Delville, is not only the editor of a book on Captain Beefheart: he plays in a band called Trank Zappa Grappa in Varese, which is well worth checking out.

Rimbaud Notebook

I've been working on an essay about Rimbaud and, as always, taking more notes than necessary. Here are a few of them...


*

The hagiographic quality of the French commentaries on Rimbaud can be overwhelming. If the French ever found the bullet with which Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist, they'd put it in Lourdes and use it to heal the lame.

*

In 1901 a Belgian book-lover discovered all 500 copies of Une Saison en Enfer in the storeroom of the printer Rimbaud had hired 28 years earlier. Rimbaud, it seems, had never paid the man.

Rimbaud never tried to publish Illuminations: it was his former lover Verlaine who got it into print, long after Rimbaud departed for Africa. At the time, Verlaine thought it was a posthumous publication.

Whatever else you can say about Rimbaud, he was not a careerist.

*

Mallarmé said that Rimbaud "amputated himself" from poetry. It makes you wonder: what did Mallarmé amputate himself from by staying a poet?

*

I, like everyone else, really want the "Adieu" at the end of Une Saison en Enfer to be the last bit of poetry Rimbaud wrote, but the chronology remains muddled. It's probable some of the Illuminations came afterwards. Rimbaud is as inconsiderate of others in chronology as he was in everything else.

*

I don't think we can underestimate the role France's national humiliation in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 played in setting the mood for Rimbaud's poetry. The "Mauvais Sang" or "Bad Blood" section of Une Saison en Enfer revels in the idea of the French as a debased people. The self-doubt of a defeated nation becomes an opportunity for Rimbaud to undermine one of the pillars of bourgeois morality: pride in nation.

*

Everyone who writes about Rimbaud has an opinion about the statement "Je est un autre" ("I is another"), But for me the real interest lies in a related statement, "C'est faut de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire on me pense" ("It's wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought").

I could find only one truly first-rate gloss on the passage, by the great Geneva-school phenomenologist Georges Poulet. For him, "I am thought" (meaning something like "something thinks me," not "I am composed of thought") can be paraphrased as an undoing of the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am." Poulet: "I am, I do not doubt my existence, nor do I doubt that it is personal, or that the way in which I apprehend it is not equally personal. I am, and feel myself to be, living. But this being that I am and of which I am conscious, is dependent upon a power I cannot reasonably attribute to myself. My effort to think myself can only lead me to situate, somewhere back of me, a determining power of which I am the passive subject and about which I am at a loss to speak."

It's in the context of these ideas that "Je est un autre" takes on fuller resonance. Against this powerful sense of being formed by forces beyond one's control, "Je est un autre" can mean (again, in Poulet's words) "I can think myself other than I am or was."

*

It's freedom Rimbaud is after, but he's always after it the way a prisoner is, when he dreams of escape. Rimbaud feels the constraints of family, school, career, and religion, and satirizes them brutally in his earliest poetry. But what does escape look like? Sometimes it's a dream of a return to childhood (think of "Le Bateau Ivre," in which the only boat he cares for is the toy one launched by a child in a cold black puddle) and sometimes it's a dream of dissolving, and being swept away into nothingness (think of another part of "Le Bateau Ivre," where he dreams of the storms tearing his ship apart). Sometimes, too, it's a desire to transcend the limits of existence by having more than one life ("It seems to me we are owed other lives," he wrote in Une Saison en Enfer).

Robert Baker, in his wonderful study The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Philosophy gets at the nature of Rimbaud's escapism when he writes "At one extreme of his experience, Rimbaud explores theatrical, expressive, metaphoric multiplications of himself... while at another extreme he evokes a kind of translation of the self into the sweep of light."

What to Make of the NDR?

Back in the fall of '97 I opened my mailbox to find a free promotional CD from Naxos Records, a label specializing in inexpensive recordings of the more obscure corners of the classical music repertoire, often performed by fairly low-profile orchestras and ensembles. The CD was called Naxos: Ten Years of Success, and I suppose the bravado was merited. The good people at Naxos had succeeded by at least two criteria: they'd made a financial success for themselves, and they'd brought a vastly expanded range of music into broad circulation. The commemorative disk was a success, too, at least for me: I still listen to some of the tracks, long since scanned into my laptop and ported over to my various pods, phones, gizmos, and devices.

Today I opened my mailbox to find another collection commemorating a decade's worth of putting art in front of the public, only this time it wasn't music, it was writing: an anthology of poetry and fiction called Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years. The title's got none of the fine bragadocio of Ten Years of Success, although I suppose the implied existence of a second decade ahead is a bit of an expression of confidence, given the lifespan of most literary ventures. Still, one is tempted to ask: in what ways, if any, could the journal's first decade be described as "ten years of success"?

I've been reading the Notre Dame Review since its first issue, and have written for it more times than I can remember (there's a poem of mine, "Victory Over the Sun," in the anthology, too). There's generally been something I've been impressed by in every issue, and on occasion something I've disliked, but generally I've disliked it with a grudging respect. So even though I've only had the anthology in my hands for something like two hours, and read only bits and pieces, I feel like I've got a pretty good sense of the journal and what it has tried to accomplish.

The anthology has two introductions, one by each of the editors, John Matthias and William O'Rourke. Reading over Matthias' introduction helps clarify what has been best about the journal, as well as its shortcomings. Let's start with the main shortcoming. "All issues since the second," writes Matthias, "have an an umbrella-like theme — 'Dangerous Times,' 'Work,' 'Signs and Surfaces,' 'Body and Soul'..." This is true, in that each issue has a title, and several of the pieces inside relate to the title. But one senses some bad faith on the part of the editors: the themes tend to be quite general ("Signs and Surfaces" is hardly a theme in the way that, say, "New Cuban Poets" would be), and if you can write a convincing defense of how each piece connects even to the general theme, I'll come over and paint your house for you. There are exceptions: I remember one issue devoted to writing from the &NOW Conference of Innovative Writing. But overall I rather suspect that the idea of themes was part of the proposal written for the NDR early on, and that the editors experience it as a burden more often than not.

Other statements from Matthias' introduction really do clarify what has been best about NDR's editorial policy. "One distrusts a reader of Pound who cannot admire Auden, a reader of Elizabeth Bishop who will not open a book by Susan Howe," writes Matthias, and this broadmindedness informs both the journal as a whole and the present anthology, in which Caroline Bergvall and Derek Mahon rub shoulders. The presence of Bergvall and Mahon doesn't just indicate open-mindedness about form, either: it also indicates a sensitivity to writing from outside the United States, in translation and in English. Until the Chicago Review became a kind of American outpost of Cambridge School poetry, the Notre Dame Review was your best bet for finding exciting British poetry in an American literary review. Outside of a particular range of experimental work, it still is.

Matthias proudly points out that the first issue of the journal contained, along with much else, work by two Nobel Laureates and two poets publishing their first poems. One suspects the Nobelists were there as the result of some arm-twisting and some calling-in of favors, but I take Matthias' point: NDR has been neither hierarchical nor in-groupish, and this, too, is something in which its editors can take pride. There's a kind of centripetal force that afflicts some journals once they've become established, and it can result in a narrowing down of the range of contributors. Notre Dame Review has kept itself admirably open. This isn't to say that there's a lack of personality to the journal, though. There are, in fact, editorial preferences, best summed up by Matthias' observation that he and O'Rourke "notice that, among the selections, there is not a lot of first person hyper-subjectivity or narrow manifestations of identity poetics; when the self appears, it seems to be fully conditioned by history, and conscious of that." This seems entirely right to me in two senses: it's right in that it's an accurate description of the editorial preferences at work for the past ten years; and it's right in that it's a good policy to follow. We are, after all, always involved in a dialectical interaction with the past in one way or another (literary, social, political, etc.), and there aren't enough journals devoted to publishing writing that begins by acknowledging this. The idea that the writer should engage the past is as old as T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and as fresh as Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. We need more of this, and the NDR is one of the places where we can count on getting it.

The anthology includes both fiction and poetry, but none of the critical writing that makes up a substantial portion of each issue, and this really is a shame, because NDR has been one of only a handful of journals (like Pleiades, Chicago Review, and of course Parnassus, among a few others) where reviewing habitually stretches its wings and becomes something more than publicity. When someone like John Peck writes a few thousand words worth of criticism, it's well worth anthologizing, and I wish some of that had been done. Still and all: I think the editors could, if they'd been less modest, have taken Naxos' route when titling the volume. Try it for size: Notre Dame Review: Ten Years of Success. Yeah, that fits.

Planets on Tables

A short review I wrote of Bonnie Costello's new book of criticism, Planets on Tables is now up on the Boston Review site. Costello's put together an interesting book of lit crit, tackling the big question of the role poetry plays in mediating between public events and private life. She treats the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, and (surprisingly) the works of artist Joseph Cornell.

Death of a Surrealist: Franklin Rosemont, R.I.P.

Some very sad news: Franklin Rosemont has died at the age of 65.

Rosemont was the kind of man for whom the epithet "American original" was made. He was the real, true, independent bohemian, through and through: the son of a labor activist father and a jazz musician mother, he was a scholar, an activist, a poet, a publisher, a Surrealist, and a historian, and he was all of these things on his own terms, all the time. I only met him a few times, but every time I did I got a taste of what genuine independence was all about. He didn't hold an academic post, and, since he and his wife Penelope ran the old I.W.W.-affiliated press Charles H. Kerr and Co. together, he didn't have to write with an eye to what a publisher would accept.

A couple of years ago the artist Tom Denlinger and I were teaching a seminar on the artistic and literary institutions of Chicago, and Franklin and Penelope Rosemont were kind enough to drop in. Tom and I had been teaching the history of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Poetry, and the Chicago Review, among other institutions, but the Rosemonts came to tell us about an all-but-forgotten counter-culture, the bohemian world of Chicago's Towertown in the early twentieth century. It was a world where Kenneth Rexroth and Carl Sandburg rubbed shoulders with hobos and Wobblies and all manner of political, sexual, and social dissidents. Rosemont's collection of documents pertaining to that world's central venue, The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle is still the best place to get the flavor of a lost world where home-style Dada met midwestern labor radicalism.

Rosemont's commitment to Surrealism ran deep. He met André Breton in Paris in 1966, and later became a leading light of the Chicago Surrealist Group, which published an irregular journal called Arsenal, held international exhibits, and upheld the idea that Surrealism shouldn't be the prisoner of the very artworld institutions it initially protested. Rosemont's edition of Breton's selected writings in English translation, What is Surrealism?, remains unsurpassed.

For me, Rosemont represented a somewhat paradoxical position: classical Surrealism. He was always true to his sense of what Surrealism was about, and for some this seemed like a too-rigid adherence to the ideas of Breton. There may be something to that charge, but let's remember the best side of Breton's Surrealism: the insistence on Surrealism as life, not just as art, the sense of a continuity between labor-centered politics and Surrealist activity, and a conviction that (to use the title of one of Rosemont's books) there must be a "revolution in the service of the marvelous."

Pierre Joris has a fine tribute to Rosemont up at his blog, and the Chicago Tribune has a detailed obituary.

*

I think it's fitting to bring something else up here, since it's very much in line with the kind of thing Franklin Rosemont believed in, and the kind of commitments he lived out. Zena Sakowski (with whom I went to high school, and whose father was a colleague of my dad at the University of Manitoba's School of Art) has continued a long string of Situationist-style radical art/life actions by opening the Chicago Free Store, which she describes as "a nomadic, temporary free store that irregularly visits a variety of Chicago neighborhoods." If you're in the Chicago area, be sure to check it out.

Don Share and Chris Wiman Channel The Piqueray Twins!

No! Go away! I've had it with you lot, always banging on my door and demanding that I blog about Belgian surrealist poetry of the 40s and 50s. Haven't you had enough? Can't you leave me to my humble task, building a 3/4 scale model of Kurt Schwitter's Merz Palace? No? Well. I can't help you now. But the good people at Poetry magazine should be able to throw a steak or two to the howling wolf of your curiosity. Yep. They've got the new issue up online, and it includes "A Pedal-Pusher Said to Me," one of the nuttier of the Piqueray twins' poems, translated by Jean-Luc Garneau and the current humble blogger. And if that's not enough for you, check out the first five minutes of the Poetry podcast, where editors Chris Wiman and Don Share read the poem and comment on its various oddities (the rest of the podcast is good, too).

Now, where'd I leave my blowtorch and floral-print wallpaper? Let's get this Merz house built!

Meet the Piqueray Twins

I've just fished the April issue of Poetry out of my mailbox, and am stoked to find Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray — Belgian twins, Surrealists, and poets of the mid-twentieth century — quoted on the back. Their lunatic oddball poem "A Pedal-Pusher Said to Me" appears inside, in a translation by me and Jean-Luc Garneau. Jean-Luc and I have translated a bunch of poems by les frères Piqueray over the years, and they've appeared here and there. But this is the most prominent appearance of a poem of theirs in English translation, and I'm glad they made the cover.

The Piqueray twins didn't like the idea of individual authorship (I think they took Roland Barthes' idea of the death of the author seriously — Barthes said it was surrealism that helped kill the author, after all, and the Piquerays published Barthes, along with Beckett and other luminaries, in their journal Phantomas). So they always published their work under their joint signature, and they delighted in creating weird personae for themselves. Here's a series of poems they published under the persona of "Guy Pezasse," along with their brief preface. The series originally appeared in Samizdat, and has a kind of deadpan whacko quality typical of the old Belgian surrealist scene, but not seen often enough elsewhere in poetry.

The Sproks

Guy Pezasse


Preface

Guy Pezasse was a very great writer – and poet – of the 1960’s. He had the ability to observe with astonishing clarity his contemporaries’ actions and gestures, and to translate their daily existence into clear language.

Living in the constant company of two relatives and a friend, Guy Pezasse wrote about their daily occupations and worries with great success.

Guy Pezasse gives us the whole world, and nothing else: familiar scenes; remarkable, living situations.
The Sproks, which owes its title to Guy Pezasse’s love of those fish, was written when Guy Pezasse was in his 86th year.

Guy Pezasse was to die a mere ten years later, when his lungs unaccountably stopped working.

The Editors



Tale of an Experiment

Whenever
He gets a chance
The man
Tears a head of lettuce
Into thousands pieces
And stuffs them into a very strong
Cup of filtered coffee.
And then
He takes
What remains of the lettuce
And dumps it
Into a vat,
Drenching it with coffee.


Example of an Activity

This man’s uncle
Sometimes carries
An immense mattress
On his head.
And he staggers
With this mattress
From the top of the stairs
To the coal bin,
Where he lays it down
And throws himself on it
Pumping his legs in the air
In excitement.


An Action Among Others

The same uncle
Who lives on the seventh floor
In the center of town
Is sometimes
In the habit of filling,
At dawn,
A large pan
With strong black coffee
And balancing it
On the window sill
With the help of his nephew;
Then sending it
Careening into the street,
Not giving a fuck
About anything.


Tale of Another Action

It is this same gentleman
Who, with the help of his uncle,
Fills an immense cast-iron
Stove
With gooseberry jam.
When they’ve done this,
The gentleman and his uncle
Throw handfuls of jelly
At each other’s faces
For fun.


An Activity Among Others

What also happens
Sometimes,
Is that the gentleman,
His uncle
And his nephew
Tear many heads of lettuce
into thousands of pieces
Then pour strong coffee
On them,
In a vacant lot
On a slope,
With
Coal heaps
And piles of shattered windowpanes
At the bottom of the slope.
Then
They speed down the slope
On their bicycles
Without braking,
Their legs spread wide,
Feet held away from the pedals;
And then,
At the bottom of this slope,
The tires make a crackling noise
In the coal
And a farting noise
In the shattered windowpanes.
Then the gentleman,
His uncle
And his nephew
Jump off
Their bikes
And pelt each other
With old heads of lettuce,
Very strong coffee,
Coal,
And shattered windowpanes
Until they grab some shovels
While leaping
On mattresses
Filled with plaster
And pumping
Their legs in the air
In the gooseberry jelly
Of their excitement.

The April Poetry looks to have a lot of good stuff in this special translation issue, including some poets for whom I feel particular affinities, such as Göran Sonnevi (a Swede from Lund, where I used to teach), and Jules Supervielle (on whose poems I riffed in my own Home and Variations).

Adam Lambert and the Erotics of American Idol

Maybe it's because I finally got around to ordering up Milk on the pay-per-view the other day, or maybe it's just because I've got some gay friends, family, and colleagues, but one way or another I actually found myself caring about the fate of an American Idol contestant on last night's results show. Specifically, I became deeply invested in the fate of Adam Lambert. He's a pretty out gay guy, and (more importantly) I think it's fair to say he sang as a gay guy, and the question of whether America would be cool with that mattered to me.

For those of you who have lives, here's the lowdown: this week was country music week on American Idol, and contestants were coached by country star Randy Travis on how to sing songs from the country music canon. Most chose to give those songs fairly traditional, country-style performances, with mixed results. One excellent R&B singer did so to her detriment: it was like watching Glenn Gould limit himself to picking out the Goldberg Variations with a pair of chopsticks. But Adam Lambert took a bolder approach. He was quite bubbly and excited when meeting Randy Travis, saying that he'd found a wonderful, sitar-laden arrangement of the old Johnny Cash classic "Ring of Fire" (turns out it was the Jeff Buckley version). Randy, who otherwise seems like a decent guy, was visibly creeped out by Adam, saying to the cameras "where I come from we don't see many men with nail polish." Argh! I mean, why not say "I'm from some tight-assed village of homophobes, and I've failed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a lifetime traveling the world and working in the music industry to broaden my horizons and become a reasonably tolerant person"? Maybe that was too wordy for the sound-bite format...

Anyway, Adam, who has — no lie — all the technical chops of Freddy Mercury, and a lot of stage presence to boot, went with the arrangement. The performance was overtly eros-infused, both in the vocals (and I regret I don't quite know how to describe the particulars of just how the vocals were eroticized) and in the stage performance (Jim Morrison-style writhing, plus thigh-stroking, butt-wiggling, and the making of eyes at the camera). It kind of freaked out the judges, and there was a lot of speculation among fans that Lambert might be kicked off the show. The speculation was further fueled by pictures from Adam's website (like the one above — that's Lambert on the left) which showed him kissing men, wearing makeup, and cavorting with a bunch of semi-naked guys at Burning Man. Was American Idol — and indeed, America — going to be okay with this?

It's not that American Idol has been unfriendly to mildly eroticized performances in the past. While the majority of the acts have been about as sexy as a slice of Wonder Bread served with a glass of skim milk, there have been exceptions. Idol seems pretty cool with a kind of low-grade female sexiness in performances. This can be overt, as it was with Brenna Gethers, who more-or-less flirted with Simon Cowell onstage during season 5 (Simon, it seems, likes 'em feisty). Or it can be in the slightly hypocritical mode that the great novelist Angela Carter described, in her study The Sadean Woman, as the "the good bad girl" act: the woman who's sexy, but acts like she doesn't know it (I'm thinking here of Kellie Pickler from season six, who spent an entire song crawling around the stage like a cat in heat, but got all doe-eyed and innocent when Simon called her "a little minx," responding "I'm a mink?"). The vast majority of the men who sing on American Idol do so from some kind of neutered, desexualized space (think Elliot Yamin, or the blind guy from the current season, whose music is so utterly bland I can't be bothered to look up his name), but there have been notable exceptions. Bo Bice, for example, would occasionally smolder with good ol' Allman Brothers-style southern heel-stompin' shitkicker heterosexuality.

But what about the gay guys on Idol? Well, Clay Aiken did very well and (I'm told) still sells out a lot of shows. Clay was in the closet, at least as a public figure, but then again so was the great Paul Lynde, officially. I mean, some closets have glass doors, people. But whether the audience knew Clay Aiken was gay or not, he didn't sing in an eroticized fashion: he had all the sexy, steamy drive of, say, Opie. Not so young Mr. Lambert. He comes across as an eroticized performer, and not in the way Bo Bice did. I mean, Bice was all about the straight male gaze: he performed a kind of burning desire for a female erotic object (women can do this too: Melissa Etheridge's "Come to My Window" is a clear case in point, though now that I think about it I don't recall ever seeing anything Etheridge-like on Idol). But Lambert performs differently. He performs as though he's aware of himself not as the desiring subject of eros, but (at least in part) as the desired object of the gaze.

I suppose I could get off my ass and walk over to the theory shelf, pull down some books, and look up some citations, but I probably don't have to in order to support the point that, generally speaking, most heterosexual guys are less aware of themselves as bodies seen by the desiring gaze of others than are most gay guys. I mean, all you have to do is take a random sampling of, say, a dozen heterosexual men in their forties and a dozen homosexual men of the same age, and you'll get a pretty clear sense of which group has been more body-conscious (I pick that age group because by then the results of how we feel about our bodies start to show. I mean, people in their twenties don't even have to be good looking to be good looking). There are exceptions to all of this (I mentioned Jim Morrison as a straight guy who moved like he was conscious of himself as the object of the erotic gaze), but we're speaking in broad terms here. And the point is this: Adam Lambert, unlike Clay Aiken, came across as both gay and eroticized. He wasn't (like Aiken) a singer who happened to be gay. He was a gay man singing as a gay man.

And the viewers voted to keep him on. We don't know how well he did, but we do know that out of eleven contestants, he wasn't in the bottom three. This is either a testament to the bad gaydar of the American public, or to an ever-increasing level of acceptance. I'm going with the latter, and thanking Harvey Milk.

The Aesthetics of the Cute, Continued

About a month ago, in reaction to the bombardment of comments I was getting about how cute my infant daughter was, I posted something about the aesthetics of cuteness. The basic argument was this: to say that a baby is cute is to get it backwards, since babies are, through some deep-seated Darwinian hoodoo, the basis of our ideas of all cuteness. It's not that a baby resembles the Platonic ideal of cuteness: the infant itself is the ideal, and cuteness the shadowy refraction of that ideal. Also, I harped on a bit comparing the sublime (big, awe-inspiring, even terrifying beauty, to which we feel inferior) the beautiful proper (elegant, refined stuff) and the cute (which is non-threatening, and to which we feel superior, even protective). I'm posting the definitions again, below the asterisk in this post, in the event that anyone cares, but not enough to click on the link to the old post.


Now here's some confirmation from what are probably the world's leading experts on the cute, the folks at Disney:

In other cuteness-vs-sublime news, here's an article that demonstrates how, in cartoons, it's always the cute who triumph over the sublime (not all of the villains here are sublime, but some hint in that direction, especially numbers six, three and one in the countdown). You have to read between the lines a bit, since the good people at Cracked magazine don't really foreground aesthetic theory. But it's all there.


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The Sublime (from Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)

-Is vast in scale. (Ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon? That sort of thing).
-Appears rugged and negligent. (I think it's the idea of immense force that matters here: again, think of the Grand Canyon).
-"Loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation." Think of the gravitas of Mies van der Rohe's architecture: there's no whimsy here, no Frank Gehry crazy curves.
-Is dark, gloomy, solid and massive. (Again, think Miesian school architecture. All those classic Chicago buildings in the Miesian mode are big, black, imposing things).

The Beautiful (also from Burke)

-Is comparatively small (with reference to the sublime).
-Is smooth and polished.
-"Should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly" (you know, the serpentine curve and all that. The eighteenth century engraver Hogarth actually wrote a slightly nutty treatise on how the serpentine curve was the very essence of beauty).
-Is light and delicate.


If we can generalize about the difference between the sublime and the beautiful, it's that the sublime is in some sense superior to us: it is bigger than us, stronger than us, has more gravitas than we do, and embodies forces that could destroy us, if they bothered to take notice of us. The beautiful, though, we meet on more equal terms. It pleases us, without overwhelming us or trying to be ingratiating. But where would the cute fit in this scheme? On this point Burke is silent. But not me! Here's how I see it:


The Cute (my own speculation)

-Is tiny.
-Is soft and possibly a bit squishy.
-Is rounded or even pudgy, rather than elegantly curving or austerely straight.
-Is vulnerable, or at the very least non-threatening. Even perky.


It's just a step further down the continuum that led us from the sublime to the beautiful: if the sublime is superior to us, and the beautiful our relative equal, the cute is in a meaningful sense inferior to us. It is no threat to us, like the sublime: in fact, it calls out for our protection. Not awe so much as "awwww!"