Something to Say and a Way of Saying It: John Matthias' Kedging

Hot news, folks: there's a new book out by John Matthias. It's called Kedging, which (for any of you unfortunate enough not to have served, however briefly and/or ingloriously, under the banner of Her Majesty's Royal Canadian Naval Reserve) refers to the process by which a ship is moved in the least convenient manner possible: by carrying the anchor out from the ship in a boat, dropping it, then hauling the ship laboriously up to where it landed.

I'm not sure whether Matthias intends this as a way of describing his technique or not, but I do know that the naval reference makes sense, in that Matthias' subject matter here includes family history with the Royal Navy. There's also the usual wide array of material, including ekphrastic poetry, poems about music, those wonderful poems where Matthias' personal history opens up into cultural history, and much more besides. Call it investigative poetics, or late/new modernism — in a scene where vague elliptical meandering seems to have become the stock in trade for most poets, Matthias continues to come across with the two things contemporary poetry needs the most. They are (in the words of a TLS review of an earlier Matthias volume) "something to say and a way of saying it."

Why The Right Wing Can’t Do Comedy

Among all kinds of writing there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in humor, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel. It is not an imagination that teems with monsters... which is capable of furnishing the world with diversions of this nature...
— Joseph Addison, Spectator 35, 1711.

Darin Murphy has some interesting speculations up over at the Huffington Post about the failure of Fox News’ Half-Hour Comedy Hour, the show once trumpeted as the right wing’s answer to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Murphy sees the failure of the show largely in terms of the failure of the writers to grasp the nature of irony. There’s something to what Murphy has to say. But I think the waters run deep, here, and merit a little further investigation.

We could begin by asking why so few works of right wing comedy have been successful. The Half-Hour News Hour failed spectacularly. We can date the demise of Dennis Miller’s comedy career to the months after 9-11 when, understandably freaked out, he took a hard turn to the political right. Right wing attempts at comedy in the movies have done pretty poorly (remember P.C.U.? God, I wish I didn’t). Mike Judge’s King of the Hill can be pretty funny, and so can Penn & Teller in their show Bullshit, but I’m not sure you could call these conservative shows: they’re both kind of populist/libertarian hybrids. The right wing, which masters a lot of media formats in which even talented lefties tend to struggle (talk radio, say, or the personality-driven news commentary show) just can’t seem to do funny. And I don’t mean they can’t please irredeemably left-wing, egghead academic literary Green-party voters like, say, me. They can’t buy a win, even with a Fox News audience. What gives?

The answer can best be expressed in a syllogism, so dust off your notes to Logic 101 and check this:

Major Premise: Comedy is inherently subversive of authority.
Minor Premise: The right wing (at least in post-911 America) is deeply into authoritarianism.
Conclusion: Right wing comedy blows.

So, about that Major Premise — how do I know that comedy is inherently subversive of authority? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me call as witness Mr. Mikhail Bakhtin, the foremost theorist of comedy in Stalinist Russia (which qualifies as a contender for World’s Toughest Gig, right up there with coal miner and “Guy In Charge of Weeding Norman Mailer’s Ear Hair”). Maybe it was the deeply authoritarian world of gray apparatchiks and political purges around him that got Bakhtin thinking about humor as the antithesis of authority. Be that as it may, Bakhtin’s thinking certainly didn’t endear him to the powers-that-were, who gave him a bit of a rough ride. I suppose I can see why the apparatchiks didn’t like Bakhtin: he insisted that everything delightful and funny was in some measure subversive of hierarchies and authorities, famously tracing the history of laughter back to medieval carnivals, where all the established hierarchies were suspended:

The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance. Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling... and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality. On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.
—Rabelais and His World

Even something as low-grade and apparently apolitical as, say, the fart joke was in some measure transgressive for Bakhtin. Usually such jokes depend on a context where something we are meant to take seriously is dissed by being brought into association with despised and abject things like “the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs” or “to acts of defecation and copulation.” I mean, think of it: involuntarily unleashing a truly noxious and garlic-scented belch on your own in the privacy of your own living room isn’t particularly funny, but doing it at a moment when you’re supposed to be a figure of authority (while, say, delivering your lecture on Hegel’s aesthetics to your seminar) will get you giggled at by your students. Or, uh, so I’m told.

So okay. Humor is subversive of authority. Any snickering kid who ever stuck an “Kick me” post-it on the back of an unsuspecting school teacher knows that. But what about the second part of our syllogism, the bit with the somewhat more contentious premise that the American right wing is into authoritarianism lately? Since I’m probably going to get some nasty email about this one, I figure I’ll call several witnesses: Theodor Adorno, John Dean, and Jack Block.

Hard-core Adornonauts know where I’m going with this, I’m sure: straight to The Authoritarian Personality, the 1950 book he co-wrote with a group of sociologists. Here, he defines the authoritarian personality as that type of deeply insecure subjectivity that yearns to submit to authority, that seeks stability and security above all else, that dislikes divergence and longs for conformity. Such a personality sees the world as crawling with threats, and sees salvation from these threats in powerful, unquestionable authority figures. People like this are susceptible to political manipulation, often (though not always) by the political right.

Adorno, of course, didn’t have anything to say about the American right after 9-11. But John Dean does. A guy with impeccable right-wing credentials himself (in addition to serving under Nixon, he describes himself as a “Goldwater conservative”), he argues in his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience that the conservative movement he has been loyal to all his life has taken a wrong turn, in exploiting insecurity and appealing to authoritarian sentiment (the need for certainty, the fear of the alien, etc.). In a time of great uncertainty, the party rode a wave of fear by appealing to and cultivating the kind of authoritarian personality Adorno described, building a Republican coalition based on such people. (Dean draws on the research of Robert Altemeyer, who updates Adorno’s work with new data).

Other new research points in the same direction. In fact, a recent article by Jack Block in the Journal of Research in Personality traced the political evolution of a group of 95 children over several decades, and came to the conclusion that the kids who grew up to be conservative had more authoritarian personality traits from the get-go. As Block put it in the Toronto Star, "the whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity” while "the confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests." The research seems to indicate, however preliminarily, a correlation between the right wing and a yearning for authority.

So okay. If we buy the Bakhtinian argument about comedy as subversive of authority, and if we find the sociological and psychological research on a correlation between the contemporary American right wing and authoritarianism convincing, then we’ve got an answer as to why the right can’t seem to do comedy: it runs contrary to their nature. Asking them to do comedy is like asking a bunch of sumo wrestlers to excel at basketball. Whatever their other virtues, they’re just not going to be good at it, at least not very often.

The authoritarian thesis also helps explain why the left does so poorly at talk radio and at O’Reilly Factor style television (listening to Al Franken on Air America was like watching a great sumo champion struggle to shoot a basket; watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is like watching a sumo wrestler somehow, amazingly, dunk and hang off the rim, which even more amazingly supports his bulk). Lefty-types don't work well in those formats, but the fit between those formats and authoritarian thinking is natural. I mean, if what you’re into is all that authoritarian stuff — submitting to a strong personality, being told that people unlike you are not only wrong but bad — you’re going to gravitate to talk radio and O'Reilly-esque TV. The authoritarian imagination teems with monsters (in the form of illegal immigrants, shadowy terrorists, and treacherous ivory-tower liberals). As Joseph Addison said centuries ago, such an imagination isn’t going to be good at playing for laughs.

Liam Rector, 1949-2007

Very sad to hear that Liam Rector has died, apparently by his own hand. Looking at this 2001 poem of his from The Cortland Review, I suppose we can't say we weren't warned.

So We'll Go No More

So it's fare thee well, my own true love;
I'm leaving you behind. And not
For the early, for the young reasons, but

For these late, last, ill reasons. I'm almost
Kaput! Yea, you'll get no more of me....
Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all

In the same year? My chances
Are one out of two! And I'm fucking well
Ready, ready to go. To go!—how often

I've operated that way. That way
Almost the entire caper, the way
For people, places, things:

Abandon, abandon, nay abandon before
Being abandoned. But we've, we've
Stayed. You the third wife for me, I

The second such boy for you, and I love
Looking directly into you, as we look
Directly into this last get-go. We all

Have the talent for leaving, like it
Or no. And oh, how rich it is, how fine
To finally inherit!: the final thing

I was looking for, as it turns out,
The great power of leaving
All the breathtakingly brief all along.

A Ruined Colonnade

James Matthew Wilson is critical of my work in deeply intelligent ways in his article "Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade: Contemporary Poetry and the Academy" in the Contemporary Poetry Review. He also does me the honor of discussing my writing in the context of John Matthias.

Hear the Voice of the Bard!

What is it Blake says in the introduction to the Songs of Experience?

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who present, past, and future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word,
That walked among the ancient trees...

Well, I haven't walked among many ancient trees lately, though I did just get back from an outdoor wedding in Philadelphia, where I learned that black suit plus big Canadian poet plus 95 degree heat equals one hell of a schvitz. Had I been bardic enough to see the future, I'd have gone in flip-flops and my best Michael Franti tee-shirt. But you didn't stop by the blog to hear about my travails in Philly. You stopped by to know where you could find one of my old poems in audio form. Wait no more! Check out "The People's Republic of Sleepless Nights", from the Summer '04 issue of Rattle. It's part of an ever-growing Rattle audio archive put together by Tim Green, so if you check in from time to time you're in for an inexhaustible earful.

Fourth of July

Hot damn! The fourth of July! Life, liberty, and the pursuit of high cholesterol snack foods! But before I run outside to awaken my neighbors with an early morning barrage of quasi-legal Chinese fireworks, I thought I'd put my tenured shoulder to the wheel and push a little for the kind of democratic sentiment for which this country is meant to stand.

So here's the thing. The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution (the one that guarantees due process and equal protection) is looking about as besmirched as my Uncle Eddie's post-barbeque napkin. You know the drill at least as well as I do: Guantanamo Bay, the shredding of habeus corpus, and all the rest of it. But there's one relatively small infraction of that amendment that irks me today, given how it came to light of the eve of what should be a celebration of democracy.

What's this infraction that sticks in my throat like a splintered corndog stick, you ask? It's this. When the Supreme Court appointed Bush president in 2000, they did so in large part through the invocation of the fourteenth amendment's "equal protection" clause. For reasons still a bit murky, they felt that a recount of ballots in Florida wouldn't be fair to Bush, that it would violate his right to equal protection under the law. So you'd think equal protection would mean something to Bush. But when he commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, giving Libby clemency and claiming that he felt the punishment was too harsh, you had to wonder: was this equal protection? Did the 3,000 other citizens seeking clemency get the same consideration? When asked about this, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said he "didn't know," which is, of course, a lie. We all know that people who aren't cronies of the president don't get equal protection under the law in the current administration.

Anyway. Here's something worth a look before running out to throw firecrackers into the potato salad (click for a larger view):

The (Charles) Olson Twins

Way back in 2000, Eliot Weinberger wrote a short, sharp, ever-so-slightly snarky piece called Canonizing the Sixties about the University of Maine's at Orono's conference on the poetry of the 1960s. Well, not about the conference per se, since it had yet to happen at the time Weinberger published his essay in Exquisite Corpse: the essay was really about the catalog listing the various panels, papers, and symposia. Looking over the events listed in the catalog, Weinberger came to the following conclusion:

According to the Oronists, there were 151 US poets in the 1960's who are now worthy of study. 27 are the subjects of multiple papers.

The Most Significant Poets of the 60's:
Duncan (9 papers)
Baraka, Zukofsky (7 each)
Creeley, Levertov, Oppen (6 each)
Ashbery, Ginsberg, Ron Johnson (5 each)
Plath (4)
Berryman, Bishop, Bronk, DiPrima, Guest, Lowell, Niedecker, Spicer, Wieners, Jay Wright (3 each)
Dorn, L. Hughes, Pound, Rukeyser, Scalapino, Sexton, Whalen (2 each)...

124 poets are the subject of one paper each. They range from establishment figures (Snodgrass, Dickey, Jarrell) to avant-gardists (Antin, Samperi, R. Waldrop) to poets who were barely published at the time (K. Fraser, F. Howe, Bromige) to pop stars (Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Leonore Kandel) to forgotten figures (Ruth Weiss, Judith Johnson, Robert Lax, Frederick Eckman) to micro-press regulars (d.a. levy, Doug Blazek).

Significant poets of the 60's now apparently of little interest: Berrigan, Blackburn, Eigner, Olson, Rexroth, Schuyler, Snyder (1 paper each)

When I first saw this, I was intrigued. Like a lot of my fellow humanists, I tremble with fear and awe before anything that looks even vaguely like a statistic or quantification. On the one hand, I was a bit ticked at Weinberger for what seemed like a bit of a disengenuous move on his part: pretending that the conference was meant to be representative of the true shape of poetry in the sixties, the way a decent reference book on the topic would be. Surely the conference reflected the personal interests of the participants, and wasn't meant to enshrine or canonize anyone. On the other hand, I was even more ticked off at the lack of interest among my tribe (that is: poets and critics more-or-less into the experimental wing of things) in some of the poets Weinberger mentioned. I was particularly stunned by the lack of interest in Olson. I'd always thought of Olson and Duncan as figures of similar import, and while I was glad to see nine papers on Duncan, I was flummoxed by how Olson had slipped so low. Maybe this was a fluke, I thought (perhaps the leading Olson scholars had all fallen ill from bad tuna at a recent luncheon meeting at the Glouster, Massachussetts Red Lobster). Maybe this was a reaction to Olson's swaggering heterosexual masculinity. Maybe it was a reaction, at long last, to the over-representation of his work in The New American Poetry anthology. Whatever the reason, it didn't seem right, and I was grateful to Weinberger for bringing it to light.

So I'm glad to say that two fairly recent books, Garin Cycholl's Blue Mound to 161 and Henry Gould's In RI make it clear that poets are still interested in Olson and the geo-historical poetics he professed. Garin and Henry each take a specific geography (downstate Illinois and Rhode Island, respectively), and work from geography into history. Garin's book is a kind of collage of disparate elements — songs, historical anecdotes, police reports and the like — while Henry's is held together by a lyrical, gently melancholy voice, punctuated occasionally by reworkings of old texts, notably Roger Williams' seventeenth-century dictionary of the Narragansett language, Key into the Language of America (a book that has inspired works by at least two other poets, Rosmarie Waldrop and Jeffrey Roessner). I love this kind of thing. And I especially love this kind of thing at a time when much poetry seems to be written under the auspices of a kind of James Tate/Dean Young elliptical referencelessness — not that there's anything wrong with that kind of thing, but it's good to find some books that are about something as concrete as geography and history. And good to see that Olson (for all his many flaws) hasn't been as thoroughly sidelined as he seemed to be seven years ago.

Punk In Theory, Part One: Pierre Bourdieu and Loud Fast Rules

So let's say you're on sabbatical, and you've been drinking coffee by the quart and reading stacks and stacks of French cultural theory to get your chops up for the book you want to write, and you realize you need a break from all this reading or you'll end up in some kind of under-the-table jittery fetal position fit. What do you do? Hop on your bike and bee-line it to the bookstore, of course! A moth to the flame, I know, I know. But that's what I did the other day, inelegantly dismounting and chaining the bike outside the local Borders before hitting the magazine rack, where, after a few minutes of general moping and browsing, I shooed a pack of loitering and malingering fifteen-year old black-clad mohawk and fauxhawk-having kids away from the music magazines (when did the kids start in with the mohawks again? They've been popping up in bristly abundance around Chicago lately, like the aggressive foliage of some kind of tropical fruit...). I dove in and fished around a bit in the shelves until I came up with the latest issue of Loud Fast Rules!, a punk music mag, clutched between my teeth. "Ah!" I cried, shaking the seaweed from my hair and brandishing my mag aloft, "the very thing!"

I couldn't quite figure out the nature of the strange frisson I got from leafing through the magazine there, by the resentful teenagers I'd elbowed aside. Then it hit me: the pages of Loud Fast Rules! looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like the pages of the crappy photocopied punk zines I'd read in high school back in the mid-eighties. There were the same typewritten sheets in the universal font of cheap manual typewriters (courier). There were the same irregular black areas around the edges of the magazines pages, the kind of dead-space you get when you photocopy an imperfectly-aligned page without putting the copier lid down. There were the same oddly-aligned images, looking like concert polaroids taped to sheets of type and then badly photocopied. Even the ads for bands (and there were plenty of these) had this low-tech, el-cheapo look to them.

Just as all of these eighties-looking production values were about to throw me into one of those Proust's-madeline fits of reverie ("Oh Jenny from bio lab! If only they hadn't moved your locker down to the other end of the hall senior year! Oh, 1974 Fiat Spider! If only your alternator hadn't crapped out on the way to the General Public concert!) I did a bit of a mental double-take: I realized I wasn't holding a photocopied zine, but a carefully constructed replica of a photocopied zine. When kids threw their zines together in the eighties using photocopies of typed pages and polaroids, they were on the cutting edge of do-it-yourself, no-budget publishing. But nowadays, anyone with a computer and a printer can make something much more professional looking, and an outfit like Loud Fast Rules! could certainly make something slicker if they wanted to. Little signs indicated they had considerable resources at their command (color on the semi-glossy cover, a UPC code, loads of advertisements, etc). So the question presented itself: what gives with these lousy production values?

And here's where all my pumping sociological iron with French cultural theory came in handy, kids. I'd been reading over Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production (a kind of ragbag of disparate essays), and remembered a short passage about what happens to fields of restricted cultural production (those are the fields of cultural production that aren't governed by some larger external force, like the church, the state, or the market) as those fields age. Check it out:

What happens in the field is more and more dependent on the specific history of the field, and more and more independent of external history; it is therefore more and more difficult to infer or to anticipate from the knowledge of the state of the social world (economic, political situation, etc.) at any given moment.

If field of cultural production isn't governed by external forces like the state (think of those crazy-ass North Korean festivals where people gather in arenas to put on patriotic pageants) or the market (think Hollywood), it tends, over time, to become governed by its own past. This is most evident when it sort of replicates that past (think Robert Frost) or references it (think T.S. Eliot). But according to Bourdieu this is also true when we seem to innovate within the field: often we're innovating not in response to external stimuli so much as we're innovating in order to displace the authority of earlier producers in the field, and to claim authority within the field for ourselves (remember how Harold Bloom cobbled together a crackpot-ish theory of all this kind of Oedipal struggle in The Anxiety of Influence?).

Looking at Loud Fast Rules!, we can really see Bourdieu's ideas at work. I mean, when punk was young, the production values of its zine literature were determined by the material and economic conditions of the relatively broke-ass kids who were into it. Now, with punk being a established, nay venerable, sub-field of music (one that, for the most part, pretty deliberately shuns the market) we see the production values of one of its journals determined not by economics so much as by the prior history of the field. And the position that Loud Fast Rules! takes — one of hommage — is actually a kind of conservative position within that field. This isn't to say that Loud Fast Rules! is conservative in the political sense, though: in fact, it reads a little lefty. You get a good sense of how the mag is conservative within the field of punk, and lefty in the field of politics, just by looking at the cover, which features The Clash, one of the great left-wing punk bands of the eighties. The message sent by the cover is politically leftist, but it also sends off an "honor thy fathers, young punks, for yea, their authority is great, and their ancient wisdom to be honored" kind of vibe.

But more important than the presence of The Clash is the replication of old-school production values. A magazine that looks like Loud Fast Rules! today means something very different than a magazine that looked that way twenty years ago. Back then, it said "hey! whoa! we can do this ourselves, even if we do kind of suck!" (a message much like that of the punk music genre itself). Now, it says "remember when..." I was reminded of some of my favorite lines from Peter Gizzi's (fabulous) new book of poems, The Outernationale:

When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.

Such were my thoughts as I stood there, displacing those teenage punks in Borders. Knocked loose from my reverie when one of the kids muscled in front of me to grab an issue of Mojo, I assessed my potential purchase. Deliberatley un-slick, obsessed with the past, weirdly nostalgic for the eighties, and showing signs of irrelevance? Loud Fast Rules! seemed, for better or for worse, like a good fit for me. I threw it down on the check-out counter with my copy of The Economist.

***

Coming soon: Punk Theory Part Two: TV Eye (or, what happens when you listen to Iggy Pop while reading Guy Debord).

Laureate du Jour

You know who's a good poet? Joel Felix. That's who.

Poetry and the Nation State

So here's the first thing I learned this weekend: when you want opposition from a group, there's no response more unnerving than a kind of bored acquiesence. Let me explain.

So I found myself, through a process too strange and hush-hush and picayune to dwell on, seated with a cluster of literati in a Chicago office tower overlooking Millenniun Park, evaluating a group of contemporary American poems. Like the others in the room, I'd been asked to bring in a few American poems I admired. Since I'm still Canadian enough at heart to resent the exclusion of poems from any kind of consideration based on their country of origin, I'd decided to mess with the system a bit and bring in poems by people from other countries. "Ha-ha!" I'd said over my waffles that morning, before heading off to the meeting, "surely these poems will win the acclaim of the group! And then, when we've all agreed that they ought to be praised, I'll spring it on the unsuspecting literati, assembled in all their learned glory! These poems have to be excluded on the basis of their national origin! They're illegal immigrants in the groves of Parnassus!" Oh indeed. The syrup bottle shook in my hands, such was the anticipation. "Oh, the shame they'll all feel at the unexamined nationalist jingoism of their assumptions! Oh, what a frisson I'll have!" I may even have startled the ever-indulgent Valerie as I sprung from my chair, shouting "Epater les bien-pensants! Vive la revolution!" But then again, she's used to my mouth-frothing inexplicabilites, and was probably just happy to see me awake and functional at a respectable hour, what with me being on sabbatical.

Things went as planned at the meeting, and one of my ringers, a poem by an English guy, was singled out for praise by the assembled cogniscenti. But when I raised my trembling hand and, with all the sanctimoniousness of a semi-Canadian, intoned my bit about how we'd either have to drop the American exclusivity of our process, or eliminate this fine and deserving poem from consideration on the basis of an accident of geography, I faced no withering barrage of opposition. Nor did I face any shame-faced liberal guilt. I think the response is best described as a kind of collective "whatever." And the poem was not deported from our proceedings. The idea of a national literature fell without so much as a fourth of July bottle rocket fired in opposition.

And this, I suppose, is the second thing I learned this weekend: the nation state as a category for poetry lives on by mere inertia. Few believe in it enough to defend it, but fewer still are bothered by it enough to get rid of it.

The idea of a national literature seems to have reached its high point in the nineteenth century, but even then it was being undermined by a sense that literature was not entirely compatible with collective national representation. Here's what the sociologist César Graña had to say about this in Bohemian vs. Bourgeois, his study of the nineteenth-century's growing division between literary values and the dominant values of bourgeois society (here he's talking specifically about Flaubert's views on the matter):

There were two kinds of literature, "national" and "individual." The first required a form of mass solidarity based on a common fund of ideas which no longer existed in modern society. The second could only be sustained by intellectual diversity. Flaubert looked at national literature in the way that the romantics looked at national history, as the expression of a unique spiritual collectivity. In a national literature the problem of freedom did not really exist. There was no opposition between the work of art and cultural reality because national life was a human architecture radiating a unified inner principle which had in itself the characteristics of a work of art.

For the idea of a national literature to have any real meaning, there has to be some kind of congruence of (somewhat unified) national values and the literature that expresses them. While the idea of a national literature had a lot of appeal for some Romantics, and for elements of the ever-rising middle classes (who rejected the aristocracy's internationalism), it became problematic for a number of reasons. One of these was the increasing heterogeneity of modern nations. The other was the increasing alienation of cultural-producers from the values of the bulk of the population (Graña has a lot to say about why this occurred -- his book is well worth checking out). So the steam started to go out of the idea, even as it was picked up and institutionalized by the educational systems of many countries.

Sure, some poets actually think of themselves as speaking for a nation. Walt Whitman did — but even he's an odd duck, as a national poet. You could say his Leaves of Grass embodies the tension between a national literature and an individual literature, picking up the dissonance between those two great Romantic ideas, nationalism and individualism. In our own time, you could say Robert Pinsky thought of himself as a national poet when he wrote An Explanation of America. But he's sort of out of joint with the literary community in doing this (in fact, at a recent dinner I attended at which he was a guest of honor, he seemed much more at home with the college trustee types than he did with the literary crowd, but that's another story). The great Modernists like Pound and Eliot were conspicuously Europhile in their sense of literature, and of their place in literature — Comp Lit majors avant la lettre, in a way. A lot of poets think of themselves as part of identity-groups based in non-national bases (Adrienne Rich, say). And at the level of style, we've got to ask whether the nation is really a useful tool of analysis. Can we speak of an "American-style" poem, or a "British-style" poem, when those two nations' laureates, Donald Hall and Andrew Motion, have more in common with each other (in terms of style, and the literary traditions with which they affiliate themselves) than they have with the experimental poets on either side of the Atlantic?

So the idea of a national poetry seems, at least in an American context, a bit empty, a kind of holdover from another time. No wonder no one cared when I tried, in my small way, to sabotage the paradigm. No one seems to have much invested in it. I suppose the idea of a national literature is a bit like the body's appendix: we don't need it, and it is easy enough to remove. But no one bothers to take it out unless there's some urgent need. And we don't seem to feel that need, at least not yet.

(Artwork above copyright Matt Chisholm.)

The Kafka Sutra

No doubt you're well aware of the mysterious process by which Franz Kafka wrote certain passages of the Kama Sutra. But did you know those long-lost texts have been recovered and meticulously translated by the present humble blogger, and had their original illustrations restored to pristine conditions by Sarah Conner? No? Well, wallow in ignorance no more! Check out sections from that most evasive of texts, The Kafka Sutra, now available for viewing at The Cultural Society. Just click on "texts" and scroll down to the prose section.

Other contributors to the latest issue of Zach Barocas' Cultural Society include Michael Heller, Dan Beachy-Quick, Janet Holmes, Graham Foust, and many more.

The City Visible

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century is so hand-searingly hot off the presses that you can't get it from Amazon.com yet, but you can order a copy directly from the publisher. [UPDATE: you can now score a copy on Amazon!]

The orginal title for the collection was (if my memory of a particularly louche night with the editors and sundry poets at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap serves) Alive with a Broken Nose: New Chicago Poetry, but the book was saved from such misconstitution by the intervention of Simone Muench, who proved yet again that she is our miglior fabbro (or should that be "fabbra"?).

So if you're interested in a taste of what's been cooking in Chicago poetry (and something's definitely started to bubble in our particular cauldron over the last few years), this is absolutely the place to dig in. Bill Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi have put together a striking list of contributors. I'm honored to be in such company:

Jennifer Scappettone
Suzanne Buffam
Srikanth Reddy
John Tipton
Eric Elshtain
David Pavelich
Peter O’Leary
William Fuller
Michael O’Leary
Mark Tardi
Erica Bernheim
Michael Antonucci
Chris Glomski
Garin Cycholl
Luis Urrea
Kristy Odelius
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Simone Muench
Lea Graham
Ed Roberson
Arielle Greenberg
Tony Trigilio
Shin Yu Pai
Dan Beachy-Quick
Maxine Chernoff
Kerri Sonnenberg
Jesse Seldess
Paul Hoover
Michelle Taransky
Robert Archambeau
Bill Marsh
Larry Sawyer
Cecilia Pinto
Johanny Vázquez Paz
Ela Kotkowska
Jorge Sanchez
Joel Craig
Daniel Borzutzk
Joel Felix
Raymond Bianchi
Cynthia Bond
William Allegrezza
Jennifer Karmin
Tim Yu
Laura Sims
Roberto Harrison
Brenda Cárdenas
Stacy Szymaszek
Chuck Stebelton

There will be readings around the country by select groups from this list. The New York reading (featuring Kristy Odelius, Simone Muench, Bill Allegrezza and Joel Felix) will take place on Monday, May 14th, at the Poetry Project at St. Marks. Not since the days when Michael Jordan would effortlessly float above the bewildered Knicks defense has our big-shouldered city sent such a team New York's way. Be there if you can!