So It's Come to This... (In Which I am Appalled)

Since you insist, well, alright: here's the letter I'm sending to The New York Times in response to Christopher Caldwell's article "The Post-8/10 World," an opinion piece that bears the chillingly non-ironic subtitle "Are You Still a Civil Liberties Absolutist?":


Are you still a civil liberties absolutist?
Are you still wild-eyed and gooned-up on the headiness of habeus corpus?
Does the quaint idea of privacy awaken your inner jihadi?
Are you still writing the truth in your diary?
Why don’t you open the door a crack, and let the nice man from the secret police look in?

The Prescience of Ann Lauterbach

Having stuffed a fourteen-year-old issue of Global City Review in his pocket (it being the only truly pocket-sized journal), that he may have something to read on the train, the poet-as-professor saw that Ann Lauterbach had anticipated the beginning of fall semester in the year 2006:

on the bateau, in wild heat
children laughed through the history lesson
through the great facades in the Year of Friendly Fire

(from "Arm's Reach, Harm's Way")

Poetry Readings: Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?

1. In Which I Consider the Words of Johnny Rotten

Would I sound too much like the kind of guy who spends several hours each week cross-indexing his mint-condition collection of punk, ska, and indie rock vinyl if I began a post by saying something like "The other day I was thinking about what is arguably the second-greatest public statement by a member of the Sex Pistols..." Probably. But at least I wasn't cross-indexing my vinyl when I thought about Johnny Rotten's famous quip from the stage of the last Sex Pistols concert: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" The show at the Winterland in San Francisco had been a real train-wreck, and Rotten meant, in his own way, to sort of apologize to the crowd by laying down that question and walking out. No, I wasn't checking my reference files for some arcane detail about how to organize the "American Punk, 1975-1979" subsection by record producer (though far be it from me to sneer at such a nobly geeked-out project) when I thought of Rotten's question. Instead, I was looking at the lineup for this fall's On the Run Reading Series, which I co-ordinate with my colleague Davis Schneiderman.

It isn't that I think Davis and I are working some poetic/academic version of the Great Rock and Roll Swindle (though I've always thought Davis has a little whiff of Malcom McLaren about him). No indeed. I mean, I think we've got a pretty sharp lineup, even a kind of edgy one for our leafy corner of the liberal arts. It's that I've never really been happy with the format for poetry readings, and have rarely met anyone who has been. And when I give them myself, I sometimes feel (I know, I know, delusions of grandeur) an emotion like Johnny Rotten's at the end of the Winterland concert. Looking out over the eager-to-split-and-get-a-drink crowd, I sometimes feel like saying "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

2. The Trouble With Poetry Readings

And I'm not alone in feeling that most poetry readings can be kind of a drag. (A note to the inevitable reader who's going to send me blistering email saying, "My readings are different, because they're special and I really care about the audience experience": yeah, okay, you're different. And so's your favorite poet who gave that immortal reading in South Beach. You're both alright. You have beautiful souls and it shows, man). I mean, I hear polite complaints from all quarters: my pals in the freakstream of poetry as well as my acquaintances from what passes for the mainstream big-league of the art. Sometimes someone comes up with some ideas for how to reshape the format for poetry readings, too. Remember Dana Gioia's little checklist at the end of Can Poetry Matter?, where he suggested interspersing poetry with music, and having poets read famous poems by the late great versifiers? There may be something to this idea that the performances could be different. I mean, the most crowd-pleasing poets I've seen have been those who depart from the usual "I'm reading some poems from my book" format: at Lake Forest I recall Andrei Codrescu knocking 'em dead by sort of projecting persona for an hour, with the occasional poem thrown in, or Michael Donaghy impressing with virtuosity, reciting all of his poems from memory. So maybe there's something to be done with changing what we do at the lectern. Getting rid of the lectern might be a big part of it.

But what if a big part of the problem with poetry readings isn't a matter of what's up on stage, but a matter of what's down in the seats? (And no, I'm not referring to the butt-punishing chairs devised by the enemies of aesthetic experience and fiendishly distributed to bookstores, universities, and art galleries worldwide). What if part of the problem is the audience -- or, rather, the expectations and goals of the audience? What if they come for motives that are bound to generate dissatisfaction?

(Observe me duck beneath my desk, fearing a barrage of incoming hatred. Watch as I wait a moment, then sheepishly poke my head back up from behind desk and laptop, look cautiously around, and resume typing).

3. Cautious Disclaimers: An Incomplete List

First cautious disclaimer: No, I don't mean that poets inevitably put on a great show, and the philistines fail to appreciate it. Believe it or not, oh adoring multitudes, I myself have sucked tremendously at times (uh, sorry, crowd at The Hideout, for that one time. Those of you that know, know, and those of you who weren't there, well, count yourselves lucky). Oyez.

Second cautious disclaimer: I am always grateful and happy when people come to my readings.

Third cautious disclaimer: No, I don't think I've figured out how to do a better reading than you have.

Fourth cautious disclaimer: No, I don't want to blame the audience, or not exactly. I want to say that, in many instances, there's a disconnect between what audiences come to readings for, and what readings actually provide. And I'm not sure that the readers can actually provide what the audiences are looking for.

4. In Which are Disclosed the Several Varieties of Audiences for Poetry Readings

So check this out. Years of lurking around colleges, bookstores, and various venues of an arty ilk have led me to categorize the varieties of poetry reading audiences into five main categories. (Audiences can be hybrid, but in their distilled form here are the basic types of audience, the constituent sources of any such hybrids):

4.A. The Dragooned Student Audience. You know who these people are. You were one of these guys the first time you went to a reading. You may have press-ganged a few of these audiences together on your own, oh my colleagues. And what do such audiences want? Well, lots of things. Sometimes they really want to hear poetry. Some of the time, though, what some of the people want it is extrinsic to the whole "poetry, delivered orally" prescripton we've written out for them. Sometimes they want to know they'll pass the test, or get a chance to sign the sheet, or hook themselves up with the extra credit (not unreasonably, and not always -- but this is a function of the system we set up when we dragoon people into an event). So sometimes people come thinking of the reading as a chore, and end up enjoying the reading about as much as they'd enjoy an annual check-up at the dentist's office. I was one of these guys, even when I went to readings by poets I'd have enjoyed under other circumstances -- there's something about being told to do something that sucks all of the fun out of the event. (Even as I type this, I gird my loins for battle at my home institution, where some faculty are pressing for a system in which students are to be required to attend a certain number of intellectual events every semester. Every bone in my body cries out against such institutionalized infantalizing of the students...uh, except the one bone that's connected to the part of me that sometimes gives extra credit for hitting the reading...)

4.B. Cultivated Professionals Lured By the Aura of Something Connected to the Poet or the Venue. This isn't so much a campus poetry audience as it is an uptown kind of crew. You find them at museum readings, or at other big city venues. They're generally affluent, skew middle-aged, and show up because of some mojo associated with the poet (he or she is the current laureate, say) or some mojo associated with the institution (to which they have probably written a check at some point) -- they're not there to see the poet so much as they're there to be a part of the 92nd Street Y or whatever similar institution graces their city. This may be one of the more satisfied kinds of audience, in part because advanced age has extended their attention spans and raised their thresholds for boredom, and in part because much of what they're after (the idea of participation in something respectable among the high-cultural-capital-and-high-economic-capital set) is on offer. But the poetry part can seem a bit extraneous to the real reasons for showing up, experienced the way one experiences a fund-drive on PBS, as a necessary and well-meaning interlude to be endured.

4.C. Celebrants of their Own Ethnic, Sexual, or Regional Identity. Ever been to a Seamus Heaney reading at Notre Dame? What, no, really? Well, I'll tell you about it, man. There I was, at a Seamus Double Bill, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. Along with the dragooned students (self included) and the cultivated professionals and the local poetry producers (more of which anon) was the Irish American community out in full erin-go-bragh force. I mean, they seemed to appreciate the reading, but part of me thinks that there were some who were disappointed that the two Seamuses didn't come out on stage wearing emerald suits and the kind of plastic kelley-green bowler hat one sees in Southie on St. Patrick's day. What was desired was a pure injection of eau d'Irelande, and it was inconveniently cut with a large dose of poetry. Nothing wrong with the readers or the audience, but each was about a very different thing.

4.D. Production for Producers: The Poetry Crowd Consisting of Poets. This is more of a downtown groove, though you get it at big universities too, and during literary conferences. Sometimes these people are really into the poetry, just as some dragooned students are, and some members of other kinds of crowds. But if the hoots of laughter at not really very funny stage banter and the craning of necks to look around and see who is there looking at you are any indication, there are ulterior motives afoot too. Some people go to be seen as members of the community, or to network furiously, seeking the kinds of face-to-face interaction that may lead to publications or readings or jobs or the like (not that that's a always bad thing -- every profession this side of hermit has some need for this stuff, and poetry has become a kind of profession, which is a whole other topic, and one that causeth the good-hearted to wring their pallid romantic hands). Some come for the opportunity to socialize post-reading with likeminded people, who may be thin on the ground at bars other than the one next to the reading -- again, nothing wrong with this, but it doesn't have a lot to do with listening to poetry at the reading.

4.E. The Slam Crowd. Like 4.D., above, but, you know... drunk.

So there you have it, class: the five elemental types of audiences, which can of course be mixed into various compounds. Did I leave anyone out? Probably. Let me know. But I think there's enough coverage here for the general point to be made: most poets aren't selling, and can't reasonably be expected to want to sell, what most audiences came to buy. Dissatisfaction seems inherent in the system.

5. The Big Solution

Uh...well... check back with me later. I gotta go somewhere and, uh, do something...

(Exit the blogger, pursued by his doubts and insufficiencies)

6. Why We Go To Readings Despite The Misery of it All

(Enter the blogger, accompanied by sentimental melodies from the string section. Emanating from his person is a Garrison-Keillor like folksy warmth redolent of hope and positivity etc.)

On a good day, I can think about poetry readings the way Marianne Moore thought about poetry when she wrote:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

On other days, I think of readings not so much as things I like to attend, but as things that I'm glad to have attended. In this they're a lot like travel: I dig it ahead of time, when I'm pawing through the Rough Guide and thinking about how clever I'm going to be when I pack three jackets, four pairs of shoes, a gallon of hair-care product, and three volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into my carry-on for that long-awaited week in beautiful Kraplachistan. And I enjoy travel post-facto, when I see that it actually has Enriched Life. It's just the middle bit that's problematic, consisting of aching feet, misread train schedules, getting lost on the local metro, trying to find someplace to sit that isn't covered in pigeon shit, sneering with contempt at my demographic doppelgangers, the other tourists from Chicago, or somehow managing to lose part of a Q-tip in my ear and, due to language barriers, being unable to explain the problem to the bemused locals.

So anyway. What was my point? Oh yeah, check out this year's readings at Lake Forest. Eventually, you'll feel good about it.

Samizdat Blog: The Lost Sessions

Okay, peeps, I've been furiously writing away on a number of projects all month long -- none of which, as the date of my last post makes clear, include any entries for this blog. No indeed. I have slaved over a piece on John Peck for the Chicago Review, I have labored over an essay on Peck, John Matthias and Allen Fisher for Pleiades, I have conducted a ruthless campaign to devise an article on James McMichael, Ken Fields, and Laton Carter for the Notre Dame Review, I have worked my mojo in my dojo to prepare for a talk at Northwestern on this very blog (ironically allowing the blog to lie fallow in the process), and I have devised various revisions and edits for an essay called "The Aesthetic Anxiety" (the gist of which is described by Dave Park over at his blog). But that's almost all behind me, so I turn to my much-battered Moleskine and have a look at the notes I took for the entries I'd planned to write this July. Here, in brief form, then, are The Entries I Never Wrote:

1. Distubing Disinterest

So there I was, pawing through the back-pages of the Chicago Review, thinking about writing a blog entry on why I always turn to the back pages of any journal or magazine first (whatever ilk it may be: The Nation, The New Yorker or ACM, whathaveya) when I ran across Martin Riker's review of Patrick Ourednik's Europeana, which seems to be getting more play than most of the Dalkey Archive list. I've sort of had my say on Ourednik, but I was less interested in writing about Europeana than in writing about Riker's reaction to it, and the way that Riker's reaction struck a chord with some other critical reactions to a very different text. Riker (a sharp guy who came up to Lake Forest to give a good paper on David Antin for the &NOW Festival this spring) was put off by the deadpan tone of Ourednik's book: you just can't get a read on how Ourednik feels about the European history he describes. It's as if he's somehow turned off his ability to feel anything for his subject -- no positive or negative emotions, no cues on how we should assess the subject. This disinterested perspective is quite rare in art, and we tend to be bothered by it: we just don't know what to make of a purely disinterested take on things. A similar situation came about earlier this summer, when the movie The Notorious Bettie Page came out. I remember seeing it, and being struck by how the movie refuses to make moralizing statements about the two lives of Bettie Page -- first as fetish icon, then as Christian fundamentalist. The movie didn't do a typical Hollywood thing, giving us a frisson of the forbidden, then reassuring the squares by telling us that conventional morality is in the end best (CSI, anyone?). Neither did it take the kind of rebellious stance I'd kind of hoped it would take, championing the liberating forces of creative perversity against the repressive forces of uptight moralizing. It gave you Page's two sides and didn't choose between them (interestingly, it did explore the psychological similarities between freaky fetishistic power games and the power games of religious conversion -- the main difference between the two being that while the former knows it is a game, the latter thinks it is true and real). Anyway, the film's critics kept remarking on the odd way that it just didn't take sides or give you something to cheer for. No heroics in the conversion from perv to prude, and no fall from grace either. So I'd hoped to blog a little on our poorly developed ability to deal with disinterest. But sadly, it was not to be.

2. What We Talked About at the Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference

So there I was, on a panel down in Evanston with Claire Zulkey, Wendy McClure, and Kevin Guilfoile, talking about blogging. It was interesting to be there in that I got a sense of what people who write books of a kind very different from the kind I write (that is to say: books that large numbers of people read) talk about when they talk about blogs. What they want to talk about, it seems, is how to promote your book with a blog (which is possible though fraught with peril, I learned), or how to turn your blog into a book (which is hard to do, but possible). They're also interested in how to get people to read your blog (don't take month-long hiatuses) and in how many hits a blog gets (theirs get more than mine, though on a top day I get to about the level of a slowish day for some of them). My summer was bookended with two very different talks: a University of Chicago faculty and grad student seminar where the names dropped were those of philosophers, and a Northwestern writers' conference where the names dropped were those of literary agents. I'd planned to riff more on that cultural difference, and two different kinds of prestige, but sadly, it was not to be.

3. Series A

I made the scene down in Chicago at Bill Allegrezza's new poetry show, Series A at the very austere and Bauhausish Hyde Park Art Center, where Chris Glomski and Kerri Sonnenberg read for the inaugural session. What scene, you ask, and how exactly did you "make" it? Excellent questions! And I would have answered them, too, had I written a real blog entry (which was, sadly, not to be). That entry would have contrasted the reading with the two seminars I gave this summer. In the end, the scene at Series A was much more like the U of C seminar than the Northwesten Writers' Conference. It was clearly an instance of "production for producers" since most of the audience consisted or poets -- although the Chicago Review guys were there, sitting in their own row in the back, as were a few other non-poets. As with the U of C seminar, the social element was important -- much more gemeinschaft than gesselschaft: I think almost half of the people at the reading ended up drinking together at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap afterwards, talking poetry and bullshitting merrily on into the night. So there was a tight-knit feel to it, very different from the "how do I broadcast to a wide audience" ethos of the Northwestern gig. Also of interest was a strange manifestation of blog pseudo-fame. I ran into Timothy Yu (whom I'd never met), who asked, when I was introduced, if I had a blog. I said that I did, and mentioned the name, at which point another guy I'd never met swivelled around and introduced himself as Sam Jones, one the the most dedicated poetry bloggers in our fair city. So there was a kind of secondary community, a blog scene laid out on top of the poetry scene. I'd have meditated on all this for you, folks, but was busy with other matters, so it was not to be.

4. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry

This is an entry I never wrote because it grew into a real article before it ever had a chance to be a blog entry. I'd been thinking about Max Weber, and how in his thinking the Protestant ethic of rigid self-control, asceticism, and denial leads (somewhat ironically) to Big Worldly Rewards. Then I thought of how the world of artistic production is always (in Bourdieu's phrase) "an economic world turned upside down." And it occurred to me that this was entirely true with regard to poetry that works the Protestant virtues: if you write a poetry that is emotionally restrained, you don't get such fame and worldly rewards as the poetry world offers, or at least you're not likely to. Lowell hit it big with Life Studies, folks, not Lord Weary's Castle. Anyway, this idea got kidnapped into a bigger project (look for it from my pals at the Notre Dame Review) and was sadly not to be in its blog form.

5. Memories of the Aspidistra Bookshop

I'd meant to rhapsodize about the much-missed Aspidistra Bookshop, a used book store and bohemian hangout that held down a slice of Clark Street real estate in Chicago for a few decades before closing. I'd worked there during grad school for a few years, my job usually consisting of coming in around 1:00 pm and being handed a wad of bills from the till by Ron Ellingson, the owner and a man of letters in his own pissed-off-Vietnam-vet way. He'd send me across the street to pick up a six pack of Guinness and two fried chickens, then I'd come back and distribute beer and chicken to Ron, his sons, his other employees (filmmakers, philosophy students, and others of our tribe), and the crowd of regulars (Startouch the astrologer, who had of an amazing afro, an amazing string of girlfriends, and a 900 number you could call for astrological advice infused with R & B music); Snowman the street musician/preacher/tuckpointing guy; Bungalow Bill the mysterious hustler; Ron's hippie lawyer Freeman; the awe-inspiring Fred Burkhart and a host of similar Saints of All-American Weirdness). We'd all watch the O.J. Simpson trial on a tiny black and white T.V. and wait for the inevitable moment when Ron would throw some hapless customer out of the store for saying something that fell beneath the standards of intellectual integrity, literary zeal, or boho cool. Anyway, I wanted to riff on the vibe of the place for a while, then ask why Aspidistra never acheived the status of such legendary bookstores as Cody's or George Whitman's Shakespeare and Company or even the old Peace Eye in the Village. My suspicion is that the second-city thing plays into it: Chicago's insufficient glamour strikes again. But I never got round to it, and sadly, I suspect the entry is not to be.

So there they are, class: the lost sessions of Samizdat blog. Treasure them like the rare Factory Records EP they wish they were.

July Fourth State of the Union

The Poet Opines, Among Illustrious Peers

I've been interviewed by Chicago Postmodern Poetry, Ray Bianchi's very sharp website. If you've tired of me, check out the index of interviewees: there are some Big Names (Andrei Codrescu, Robert Creeley), some Giants of Old-School Langpo (Ray Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman), some of the Mighty and Unclassifiable (Pierre Joris, Eliot Weinberger, Paul Hoover), some of the most interesting newer poets around (Mairead Byrne, Catherine Daly, Arielle Greenberg, Simone Muench, Gabriel Gudding), and more worthies of many stripes.

I'm glad to see, too, that there's an interview with Joyelle McSweeney, who has just entered the outermost orbits of Chicago as the new poet at Notre Dame. Go Irish!

I should add that in the interview I include one of my proudest inventions, the phrase "language poetry fundamentalism." You know what I'm talking about.

By Popular Demand...

I've been getting a lot of emails asking me about "Poem for a War Poet, Poem for a War," the poem that won the Illinois Arts Council Literary Award this year. I've also, surprisingly, had a few messages about the image of a town crier I posted with my note about our new poet laureate. Apparently word has gotten around that I've been known to dress like that myself. This isn't quite true. I've never felt the urge to dress as a town crier. But I have been known to swan around in one or another version of a pirate outfit (only when appropriate: you know, on Halloween, or at weddings and funerals), and I can see why the more Captain Morgan-looking version of the pirate gear could confuse people.

So. By popular demand, two items that don't sit that well together: my poem and a photo of me in pirate drag. Do with them what you will.

I should note that the poem appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, and in my book Home and Variations. Also, in a desperate attempt to link poem and image, let me make the following offer: anyone who can identify all the poems from which I've pillaged lines for my own poem will win a valuable prize -- a map to the lost treasure of Dread Pirate Archambeau).


Poem for a War Poet, Poem for a War

1.

The lines inked on the map are railways and roads.
The lines on the roads are refugees, and moving.
The lines inked on the page are a poem, your poem.
While you are singing, who will carry your burden?

The lines on the page are a poem, words
that move toward the refugees, their tattered world
of hurt and proper names, their lost, their staggering.
While you are singing, while you are singing.

The lines are helpless in this time of war. They survive,
if they are a poem, in valleys of their saying, they survive
and reach for valleys where bodies cough, bleed or stumble blind.

They survive while you are singing,
While you are singing.

2.

The lines on the roads are refugees,
Their paths are marked with ink, charted
on a General’s table. Your lines are a poem.
While you are singing, who will carry your burden?

A woman bends beneath her load, a young man stutters in his fear,
A guard at the valley’s border lets them through,
or not. Your lines are a poem.
Who will carry your burden?

And That Was The And Now That Was

Those of you who missed Shelley Jackson (pictured above with quotation marks) and the other fantastic people at the &NOW Festival, and those of you who want to relive the vortex of avantness, may want to check out Grant Jenkin's blog,, which has commentary and pictures, including one of a tipsy, sweaty Archambeau lurching along with Catherine Daly, and one in which Steve Tomasula's Mighty Dome of Intellect shineth forth.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

Errata for the title of this post:

For "King" read "Poet Laureate of the United States of America" -- or, rather, "The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress," to use the whole, flat-footed, committee-designed designation.

For "is dead" read "has seen his term expire, without the kind of renewal that is rarely granted in these cases."

For "long live" read "good luck in this thankless job to..."

The corrected version of this post's title lacks panache, but the point is, at least, clear: we've got a new poet laureate. I'm not sure why I'm surprised that it's Donald Hall. He's deeply committed to his art, and, as a friend pointed out this morning, will be good on television. And, you know, chicks dig him, or so I hear. But there seems to be some deeper force at work. No, not some conspiracy run by Helen Vendler from her secret fortress beneath the Widener Library (though it's tough to rule out). I think what's happening is this: the ghost of Yvor Winters is guiding the deminmonde of American poetry from beyond the grave.

Sure, you're skeptical, and who wouldn't be skeptical of me, ever since my purported photos of bigfoot turned out to be discarded glossies of Charles Olson, taken for the cover of Poetry and Truth?

But the evidence piles up in favor of my thesis. Consider this: even if Hall serves for only a single year, it would mean that for five of the last twelve years the poet laureate will have been a former student of Yvor Winters (Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, each for multiple terms, now Hall). What else could it be but the spirit of the old poet moving among us, working for unknown ends? It's not like the man didn't have an animus toward the eastern establishment, either: he once told Hall that the people at Harvard thought he was "lower than the carpet." Maybe that's the key -- maybe Winters has worked his posthumous mojo and lined up a series of his former students as laureates just to get back at Harvard by blocking Jorie Graham from assuming the august office.

Of course the success of Winters' mission is by no means assured. Even now I hear ominous clankings and groanings, the firing of unknown engines, the shrieks of demon-wolves and the muttering of underpaid graduate student assistants from Vendler's secret caverns. What sorcery awaits us? What wizardry shall rule the land? Ask not! We be but pawns in this war of mighty forces, our fates yet to be revealed! Bwaaahaaaaa --haaaahaaaahaaaa! Ahaaaaaahaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!! What? Oh! Right. Deep breaths, and my medications. Serenity. Yes, much better now, so much better...

As if We Were Not Surrounded: Irish Matters

Many, many are the ignominious humiliations. There are, in fact, two points of ignominy for me to acknowledge. Firstly, it is my sad duty to report that the Philadelphia Traveling Team trounced the Chicago and North Shore Croquet Association, sweeping us in this weekend's tournament, despite our home-field advantage. Let sackcloth and ashes be my fate this day.

Also, Mike Begnal writes in from Ireland to point out that my open letter to Stephen Burt on British experimental poetry seems to imply that Begnal has perpetuated the myth that there is no Irish experiemtal poetry. What I'd hoped to do, in citing an article by Begnal, was to show how Begnal was one of a very few critics willing to break the news about Ireland's experimental poetry. Back in the 90s, almost no one wrote about poets like Trevor Joyce, Billy Mills, Randolph Healy, Catherine Walsh, and Geoffrey Squires. Things have started to change, and Begnal's had something to do with it. Begnal's got an interesting piece on this up on his blog, B’Fhiú an Braon Fola.

In other Irish experimental poetry news, Geoffrey Squires has a new book, Lines, out from Shearsman. In a gesture of great generosity and practicality (given the difficulties in getting small press books across the Atlantic), Shearsman has made it available as a free download. Lines is of a piece with Squires' earlier work, which means it is lean, abstract, informed by phenomenology, and that it sounds a lot like Beckett's sparer writing.

Squires gives you only a few words per page, and the experience of moving slowly, page to page, looking at all that white space, is important because much of Squires' work is about the large proportion of our being that isn't conscious or verbal -- the white spaces surrounding our verbal, conscious core. My favorite moments in his poetry are those in which we suddenly sense that there has, all along, been more going on around us than we have noticed -- when we understand, retrospectively, what we've been unconsciously registering all along. In Lines, for example, we proceed along with some Becketting stammering, never quite making a full statement, until we turn the page and come to the following line:"as if we were not surrounded." It sits there alone on the page, just radiating a kind of unheimlich sensation. All of our introverted Beckettian brooding over the previous pages, we feel, has been going on while we didn't notice the forces gathering around us.

Another Chicago Magazine on Home and Variations

Summer's here, teaching is over and done, and for the last couple of weeks I've been dividing my time between representing the Chicago and North Shore Croquet Association with no great distinction (Curse you, Chad Kainz, with your third wicket sucker-punch! Curse you to hell!), and scribbling away furiously at an article about poets wanting to have their cake and eat it too — wanting, that is, both total artistic autonomy and the kind of political efficacity you normally only get when you adapt to the needs of a cause or an audience (no yawning, class!). But I was torn from my navel-gazing by a 3:00 AM email from my former student Caitlin Meeter, who, among other things, informed me that the new issue of Another Chicago Magazine was out, and that there was a review of my book Home and Variations in it (Caitlin interned at ACM, so she's got the inside scoop on these things). Ever eager to read about myself, I checked it out. It's by Mike Puican, whom I met once when I was speaking at a John Matthias conference at Notre Dame, and whose sharp poems I've seen here and there, and it goes like this:

*

Repetition in modern poetry is generally used very sparingly. Repeated words or phrases can effectively underscore a point or intensify an emotion, and forms like villanelles and sestinas have been exploiting this rhetorical device for hundreds of years. In poetry’s quest for freshness and inventiveness, however, repetition is largely viewed as an outmoded device.

But if anyone told Robert Archambeau he has decided to ignore it. The approach of many poems in his inventive, first collection of poems, Home and Variations, is to take a phrase, a quote, or historical fact and disassemble it into fragments that are continually repeated and reworked throughout the poem. In this process the original material is examined, extended, and in some cases completely refuted. Archambeau not only bucks convention, he embraces an inventive use of repetition and as a result has created a form of discourse that is compelling and feels very new.

“Citation Suite,” the 27-page centerpiece poem of Home and Variations, starts with a quote from Robert Duncan: “The poem is not a stream of consciousness, but an area of composition in which I work with whatever comes into it.” This is the guiding principle not only for the poem but for the entire book. “Citation Suite” is in four parts, with each part broken into seven sections. Each part begins with two quotes — unrelated fragments of novels, philosophical discourse, observations on the disintegration of culture, thoughts on the future, and the like — from a diverse collection of writers including Virginia Woolf, Plato, E.M. Forster, V.S. Naipaul, Richard Rorty, Shelley, and William Morris.

Part I, for example, begins with a Virginia Woolf quote from the novel To the Lighthouse, where one of the characters, Mr. Ramsey, suggests that all thought could be arranged into the 26 letters of the alphabet. The next quote is from Plato’s allegory of men who have been chained to the wall of a cave their whole lives. One of them is freed from his chains and is given the chance to reflect on his life as he walks to the surface. Then Plato is considering that all thought can be broken into the letters of the alphabet. Later Mr. Ramsey and Plato are wandering the halls of the same hotel searching letters on the doors of the rooms. What begins, and continues throughout the poem, is a dizzying combination of lines and fragments from various quotes that both reinforce the points made by the various authors and contradict them. Along the way Archambeau inserts his own characters and ideas. Each time a new quote is introduced new material is added to the jumble. Here is one complete section toward the end of the poem. I’ve inserted the names of the authors who originally supplied the material:

Imagine that the cities that make up what we call “The West” (Rorty) vanish tomorrow, gone past recovery (Morris), and we are welcomed with intense and overweening love by the very skin and surface of the earth (Forster) as a lover welcomed to the fair flesh of a woman that he loves (Morris).

Imagine then our dwelling place — sun, pine, the sound of birds (Nathaniel Tarn).

I would tell this story (Archambeau).

Unlike the direct approach of traditional Western logic (If A = B and B ≠ C, then A ≠ C), Archambeau’s approach is more the way a bee flies — indirect, unintentional-seeming, and more emotionally authentic. The key thesis of “Citation Suite” is that there is vast knowledge outside the traditional, academic (Western) approach to learning. Stepping outside of it opens the opportunity for new understandings of the world. The indirect rhetorical approach of the poem seems to underscore Archambeau’s point perfectly.

Not all the work is completely serious. While his references are largely from the canon of great literature, Archambeau also uses irreverent references from popular culture. In “Major Thel: A Space Oddity” he reinvents the main character from the Blake poem “The Book of Thel” as the astronaut in the David Bowie poem “Major Tom.” In the Blake version, the character Thel talks to a lily, a cloud, and a clump of dirt, arguing against the need to accept one’s insignificance in the world. In the reworked version, Thel the astronaut floating to the David Bowie tune argues with a meteor, a cloud, and an instrument needle that is hallucinated into a worm. As Major Thel is faced with the reality of crashing into the ocean, the various interlopers respond with hip jargon that condenses the lyric persuasion of the original into “it’s all good.” This would all be dismissed as a joke if the poem did not end with the notion that outdated styles of art can be resurrected and can effectively work their way into and inform new, modern artistic versions. Throughout the collection Archambeau takes on, updates, extends, and turns upside-down works from a wide variety of authors including Sylvia Plath, C.P. Cavafy, Jules Supervielle, Blas De Otero, Wislawa Szymbourska, and Robert Hass — not to mention historical figures like Annie Oakley, Jan Vermeer, and events like the Fututists’ convention of 1913 and the fair held on the Thames river in 1693, the year the entire river froze solid. Despite the title, a number of poems stray from the home-and-variations premise of the book, and, for my taste, not all are successful ( a six-section poem at the end of the book parodying the tenure process at American universities seems more suited for a college graduation skit). However, with the majority of the poems, the author directs his considerable modernist talents to disrupt expectations and extend meanings.

At a time when the ethic is to avoid anything that comes close to repeating a word or idea, Archambeau embraces the act of going back, reworking and retracing one’s steps. In doing so he makes unexpected use of repetition and finds a way of expressing something new. Even if the final point of the poem is sometimes one that is familiar, the presentation of ideas and the rhetoric of the poems in this collection is fresh, inventive and very exciting.
— Mike Puican, ACM #46, 242-245


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In other news, Dave Park, an evil genius, colleague, pal, and good guy to have around when the basketball gets stuck behind the net, has launched his new blog, Pravda Kid. Dave's a communications and media theory guy, among other things, and has taught me a lot about how art and literature function in the world. His blog will be worth watching.

&NOW...Now What

Can we have a drumroll please? Thank you! Steve Gadd, everyone, the Samizdat Blog in-house drummer!

And to what do we owe Mr. Gadd's musical stylings? The official addition to the blogroll of: The Now What Blog, a place for some of the prose writers affiliated with the &NOW Festival of Innovative Art and Writing to hang out, complain, argue, and endlessly opine. Sort of like a grubby left-bank cafe of the twenties, only available right on your lap-top, in a bring-your-own-absinthe environment.

Contributors include:

Ted Pelton

Laird Hunt

Lance Olsen, third nicest guy in all of alt-fiction land.

Davis Schneiderman, my colleague at Lake Forest, last seen stapling sandpaper to the covers of the limited edition of his new book.

Dimitri Anastasopoulos, who sports what is arguably the best hair in alt-fiction.

Christina Milletti, who deals patiently with Dimitri's hair-care needs and crises.

The omnipresent Joe Amato

The omnipresent Kass Fleisher

Michael Mejia

Steve Tomasula, who knows how to hunch over a plate of caprese with William Gass in deep conclave, from which the only audible words are "Kafka...Kafka...Kafka..."

And many more...

Even though the contributors are all writers or publishers of prose, there's been some interest in poetry at Now What: recent posts include thoughts on Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, as well as a few good words about Christian Bök's Eunoia, which seems likely to create as much of a stir in American avant circles as it did on the other side of the 49th parallel, now that Soft Skull is putting out an American edition of the Canadian Coach House book.

Check it out, and remember to bring your own absinthe and clove cigarettes. Bear in mind: on the internet, no one can see how silly you look in a beret...