Illinois Primary Voting Irregularities: Argh!

So here's a press release from the Illinois Green Party, which won 10.4% of the vote in the 2006 gubernatorial election, and the right to be treated on par with the Republican and Democratic Parties. Sadly, this right has been denied, as I found out today at my polling place, where I was told on multiple occasions by multiple officials that there were no Green ballots on offer (that's precinct 218, Moraine Township, the Edgewater School polling place). When I insisted, and told them they were in violation of the law, they finally found one for me, but they hadn't offered them to anyone all day. Oy.

GREEN PARTY FIELDS NUMEROUS REPORTS OF VOTING IRREGULARITIES IN CHICAGO, ELSEWHERE

Voters who hoped to participate in the Illinois' first ever statewide Green Party primary are receiving a very rude reception at many polling places, especially in Chicago.

In the early hours of voting, Green Party officials began receiving reports from frustrated voters across the state who, in many cases, had been told by pollworkers that there are no Green Party ballots available at their polling places, or that they had to vote on suspect electronic voting machines, even while other parties use paper ballots.

Some of the most outrageous incidents, however, occurred across the wards of Chicago, where Green Party ballots have been apparently tampered with so they can't be read and accepted by voting machines, voters are given Democratic ballots despite requesting Green ballots.

Check ilgp.org for more reports as they are received. More information will also be available at the Green Party gathering tonight at Decima Musa Restaurant, 1901 S. Loomis, Chicago (in Pilsen).

If you're in Illinois and weren't offered a Green ballot along with the Republican and Democratic ballots, shoot a note off to election-problems@ilgp.org — even if you hadn't planned to vote for the Greens, the officials were required to offer the ballot, and in bringing violations to public attention you'll be helping everyone who thinks the two-party system has failed us.

Okay. Enough with the Righteous Indignation (for now). I think I need a scotch.

Baby Remember My Name: Poets and Posterity

About mid-way through reading fellow Canadian expat Todd Swift's essay "Canons to the Right," I caught myself humming the theme song to that classic of slightly-embarasing 1980s television, Fame (based on a movie of the same name, with a Broadway musical tie-in). For those of you wise or fortunate enough to have been doing something better with your lives in the mid-eighties, here's the 411 on the show: a bunch of kids attend a New York high school for the performing arts and aspire to fame, singing and dancing their way across the screen as maudlin melodrama and broad comedy ensue. The lyrics to the theme song go something like this:

Fame!
I'm gonna live forever.
I'm gonna learn how to fly,
High!
I feel it coming together,
People will see me and cry
Fame!
I'm going to make it to heaven,
Light up the sky like a flame,
Fame!
I'm gonna live forever,
Baby remember my name,
Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember...(slow fade out)

I inflict this on you only because I think the theme from Fame actually gets at the unspoken motivation behind Todd's generally very incisive essay on literary reputation and the deeply suspect process of canon formation. Bear with me, and try to keep the theme song from getting stuck too deeply in your head. It's a real earworm, and hard to shake without massive doses of Funkadelic or perhaps the Carmina Burana on the iPod.

Todd begins by casting a cold eye on what most poets want, and on what it is they tend to end up with:

Let us stop for a moment and ask ourselves, as a thought experiment, what the poet might wish for, might dream of... Well, a poet might want, in this order: to write a good poem; to get the poem published in a good magazine; to have that poem, and others like it, collected and published by a good press; to receive some good reviews; to maybe be listed for, or win, a prize; and, either before, or after death, to be respected, or at least enjoyed, by either their peers, or poetry readers, or both. Now, all but the most hardened Dadaist would at least grant that this trajectory might accurately model the desires of most poets (I have yet to meet any who do not want to be published, or read).

These poets, who want these things, then enter into situations with other poets, and persons, to achieve these ends. However, here is where something very significant happens, which most poets do not accept. At the point where they enter into the world of publication, two roads diverge. One of those roads is marked The Canon; the other is marked Oblivion.

After acknowledging that there are, at this late date, several kinds of poetic canon, he claims that only being enshrined in the mainstream canon offers poets any realistic hope of being remembered after death. Sadly, though, such enshrinement doesn't seem to have as much to do with the quality of the poetry as it does with the relative heft of the poet's publisher (Todd ran away from Canada to England, not America, so his points of reference are mostly UK-ish):

Now, the general, naturalist position (which is basically a capitalist one) suggests that the forgotten are bad poets, the remembered are good poets. This in turn plays into the idea of the market deciding value. The problem with this position, is that it almost entirely positions evaluation into the hands of the editors for large publishers, and larger poetry imprints.

The mistake that most poets make, is that they think that, even if they publish with a small, well-meaning press, they have a chance, at perhaps winning a prize, or being reviewed in the TLS or The New York Times, say, of being "discovered". Far from it. The "tap on the shoulder" system of quiet approval and promotion, among the ranks of most contemporary-canonical poets in the US, and UK, occurs prior to publication - during, and before, the editorial process. That is, the business of criticism is mainly now the business of editorial approval, or rejection.

It is not quite true, but almost true, that to have a collection published by a small, marginal press, in the UK (or Canada, for example) is the same as having no book out at all.... The sad truth is, almost all the ground for canonization is laid during the lifetime of the poet - as in the church, with future Saints. We do not know who the "major" poets of our time will be, exactly, but we can rest assured they are currently being published, somewhere in the Anglo-American world, by larger presses... There will always be small, pleasing surprises... but the for the main part, if you find yourself out while alive, your work is mainly out forever. That's a long time.

It comes down to marketing budgets, says Todd: while we may cling to the polite fiction that there's no glass ceiling, there really is: you either hook up with a big publisher, and get marketed and networked into the big prizes, or there's little hope for your posterity. He's got a point. I mean, I think about how I recently cast my votes for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards, and was unsurprised to see that none of my picks made it to the final list of prizewinners. The prizes all fell to people who published with bigger, more visible houses than my (admittedly idiosyncratic) nominees. I can't help but think that most of the critics who voted for poetry books went with the books they'd heard the most about, and I wondered how far beyond the bigger publishers lists they'd really read. Or I think about how a prominent young poet-critic I know once told me that an older poet we both know should really stop complaining about his merely moderate degree of fame. "He's as famous as he can be, without a New York publisher, or elite grad students," said the young poet-critic, and I couldn't really disagree.

Todd suggests that an alternative series of awards and prizes may help remedy the situation, but not by much. Again, I've got to agree, and I'm semi-happy about how the NBCC is going to supplement its prizes with seasonal lists of recommended books. I'm even trying to do my bit, and am working with some colleagues from the &NOW Festival to set up a series of anthologies as a kind of anti-Pushcart Prize. But I don't suffer under the illusion that any of this is going to bust the doors of the Norton Anthology open to any of my poetic heroes.

There are a lot of directions one could go in responding to Todd's points. One could talk about the long game of canonicity, and invoke all the big ideas about how some reputations rise from near-oblivion (William Blake, say), while others fall (W.D. Snodgrass, anyone?) and still others go up and down (Felicia Hemans, for example). There's the idea that over time the best will out (thank you, David Hume), and the idea that each generation will find a past to suit its own needs (Gertrude Stein believed this as did a boatload of others). Or one could talk about the value of fame in one's own lifetime — how some of its rewards are intrinsic (recognition feels good, like a deep-tissue backrub for the ego) and others are extrinsic (fame — even in the junior-varsity form of poetic fame — can get you money, sex, illicit pharmaceuticals, and an appearance on The Daily Show). But I'm most interested in the question of posthumous posterity, which seems core to Todd's thinking. It really seems to bother him that posthumous fame goes to the well-marketed and well-hooked-up rather than to the well-deserving.

And this brings me to the Big Questions Todd's essay raises: why should we care about how people view us after we die? What benefit do we hope to derive from posthumous acclaim? I mean, there's a staggeringly obvious fact to deal with here: we won't be around to see if we're remembered or not. So why should we — why do so many of us — care? In addressing this issue, I thought I'd take the radical step of checking in with some people who actually know what they're talking about vis-a-vis the psychology of fame. Here's what I found out.

1. The notion of fame has been with us for a good long while, but not as consistently as we might think.

David Giles, a pyschologist who used to have a gig interviewing rock stars, is perhaps uniquely qualified to talk about the psychology of fame. He's got a good historical sense, too, and takes his investigations back beyond the invention of modern pop celebrity. Here's a big picture zoom-out on fame, from his book Illusions of Immortality:

The history of fame is about nothing less than the history of Western civilization. It is also about the history of the individual, and therefore it is about the history of human psychology too. I make these grandiose claims not simply to sensationalize the material … but also in an attempt to step backwards and rearrange one’s perspective from a time when individual humans did not even have names.

Giles then gives a nod to Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

Jaynes’ basic premise is that what we today call individual consciousness emerged as an experiential phenomenon only in modern times – previously, phenomena such as forward planning were attributed to divine intervention....The birth of individual consciousness, according to Jaynes, can be traced back to the advent of names. He estimates it as being during the Mesolithic era, some time between 10,000 and 8,000 BC. At this point the ice sheet that covered most of the planet retreated … leading to the development of more static communities. Giving individuals names intensified relationships, leading to the practices of burial and mourning of the dead. The first tomb, that of a king, has been dated at around 9000 BC, at Eynam, just north of the Sea of Galilee. The dead king appears to have been worshipped as a god, and Jaynes argues that this point marks the beginning of civilization.

So posthumous fame of a sort has been with us for a while, but as it turns out the idea of individual fame takes quite a while to get off the ground. According to Giles and others, Alexander the Great is in some meaningful sense the first famous individual. According to Leo Braudy (in his book The Frenzy of Renown, which is the great go-to text on the history of fame) it's not that others weren't famous before Alexander, but they were famous in different ways. Alexander was different because he sought to be famous not as a part of a dynasty but as an individual. Check out visual representations of him as compared to his great rival the Persian Darius – only the representations of Alexander attempt to show a portrait of an individual, rather than an image of a social role:

Alexander's presented as someone in particular; Darius is really just a stylized leader, an embodiment of the Persian dynasty.

After Alexander, you get a huge emphasis on individual fame in classical civilization. As Giles points out, it's Rome, after all, that gives us the words fama and celebritas. But the emphasis on individual fame waxes and wanes historically. The middle ages, for example (with numerous exceptions) tends to place less emphasis on fame than the classical civilization that preceded it. Think of all the aesthetic anonymity of the Middle Ages, for example: all the unsigned poems, all the catherdral sculpture from unknown hands. So the need for fame in posterity is a deep-seated phenomenon, but by no means a constant in history.

2. The idea of posthumous fame is generally experienced as an imagined extention of life

Giles is really good on the particulars of this:

There are historical cases of childless individuals who have craved fame as compensation for not being able to reproduce, such as Elizabeth I, who took great pains to ensure that her official portrait followed strict guidelines … or even John Lord Lumley, an early art collector of no note until all three of his children died, and he set about creating his legend accordingly.

Braudy takes things further, and argues that there’s an inverse relationship between how strong a culture’s interest in fame is and how strong its religious idea of the afterlife is. Giles picks up on this, citing Braudy when he points out that, while Classical Rome had a fairly weak interest in the afterlife (and a vigorous culture of fame and celebrity) the ideal of celebrity “was certainly less popular in Medieval times when the Church had such a strong influence on Western society.”

What’s astonishing to me is how powerful this notion of posterity as an extention of life remains. It seems terribly primitive — "me get fame, me make others sing praises of me after me dead, me not all dead, me live!" There's a ghost of this kind of thinking in Todd Swift's essay: we can see it glimmer into view in, say, sentences like these: "What is oblivion, and why does it matter? Oblivion is a concept ... that suggests that most poets, after death, become basically extinct." Of course Todd knows we're literally extinct at death, but still, the language is telling.

I get Todd's point that it's sad for future readers to lose out on the opportunity of getting to know most poets of the past, and to know only those few poets who've been enshrined by the very suspect test of time. But I don't really get the urge for posthumous fame I've seen in so many people (I grew up as an art-school brat, and believe me, there were times when you could just about taste the ambition in the air, even in the provinces).

Uh, wait. No. Who am I kidding? I do get it. I get the hunger for posterity the way I get the hunger for cheesecake or salty snacks. None of those hungers is going to do much good for me, and at a fundamental level they are futile and superfluous. But it isn't like the urges go away (although as my man Josh Corey points out, other priorities can act as trump cards). The reason the notion of posterity as a life-beyond-life has endured so long seems to be that the will to extend life, even in irrational ways, endures, hard-wired into us. It may be modified by cultural context (the Augustans tried to throw cold water on the flames, the Romantics dumped gasoline on them instead), but it's still there. How else to explain how happy I was when the tiniest of unexpected recognition-crumbs recently fell onto my plate?

Right, then. Off to rehearse my dance routine and see if I can't audition for a local theatrical revival of Fame.

Sheena is a Punk Rocker: Notes on Poetry and Rock

Prepare to rejoice, poetry people: the next issue of Zach Barocas' Cultural Society is about to go live online. Incidentally, you may find hidden among all the fabulous joy-worthy things Z will offer us from his secret base Minneapolis ice-fortress my own humble contribution, "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", a poem I read at the big MLA off-site poetry blowout about a month ago. The poem isn't my first attempt at a rock-and-roll poem — I've tried my hand at the form, with mixed results, ever since I first read David Wojahn's Mystery Train, which still tops the charts of rock poem efforts as far as I'm concerned. But it is my first Ramones poem, and it shamelessly (and unsurprisingly) riffs on this song:



I suppose what attracted me to this particular Ramones song was the way it dealt with transformation: Sheena's on her way to the discotheque, but then suddenly ditches her whole identity as disco club kid and reinvents herself as a punk rocker, to the infinite sorrow, one supposes, of the louche and coked-out roués at Studio 54 (the song was written in 1977, the year that club first oozed its way into Manhattan). I always loved the way the Ramones captured the kind of fizzily cool weightlessless of youth: switching who you are is as easy as ripping a hole in your jeans getting a wonderfully ill-advised piercing in an unpredictable location. There's a lot of freedom (and a lot of angst) in not yet having much personal past as ballast. And the Ramones ought to know about transformation, strutting around in street-tough drag and pretending to be New York Italian brothers.

I also liked what I knew (or maybe I should say "what I thought I know" — this could just apocryphal, which is cool by me) about the origins of the song. Joey Ramone came up with the idea, I'd heard, after he's seen a movie theater matinee composed of old episodes of this show from the fifties, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, which is pretty lame pop-cult stuff, unless you accept it on its own terms, which seem to involve an aesthetic program best paraphrased as "How about seeing a big blonde bombshell in a tiny leopardskin minidress?" (The politics of the show, by the way, make Uncle Tom's Cabin look like Soul on Ice). But I liked the idea of one pop artifact being transformed into another. And the chain of transformations goes back and back, all the way to Rider Haggard's She, with a few stops via American comics and the British pulp press along the way.

So anyway, I thought I was writing a poem about transformation. When I was done, I noticed that the driving forces behind the transformations (as I'd depicted them), were lust and profit. Maybe my subconscious was biting me in the ass for spending my sabbatical working on a book about aesthetic autonomy. After all, creativity has sweated away in the service of greed and desire far more often than it's lit the pale candle of l'art pour l'art. But just as I was patting myself on the back for finally peeping out what my own poem was about, I ran across this, from Steve Burt's new book of lit-crit, The Forms of Youth: 20th Century Poetry and Adolescence. A propos a sonnet by Ronald Wallace called "Sound System," Steve says:

... rock means youth, innocence, sex, rebellion, hope, and immediacy. Poetry, by contrast, frames those qualities and compares them to a disappointing present; poetry, unlike rock, makes us notice loss...

Later, Steve tells us this:

Rock music brings with it a far stronger claim to signify adolescence and to convey immediate, authentic feeling than any claims that literary poetry can now make. In asking readers to compare poems about rock songs to the songs that these poems describe, poems about rock admit their own failure to find or keep the inner autonomy that we often hope poems can give — and that we associate with youth.

And there's more! Poems about rock songs, Steve says, sound

..."sentimental" (or "reflective," sentimentalisch), in Friedrich Schiller's special sense. Modern poets, Schiller wrote in 1795, "will either be nature or they will look for lost nature"; the first are naive and need only "feel" to create, the second sentimentalisch and self-conscious. Poets who put rock into their poems cast rock as "naive," natural, authentic, youthful, and their own poetry as "sentimental," reflective, artificial, grown-up.

I mean, egad! Could this be it? Have I been pining like some not-so-young Werther or no-longer-childlike Childe Harold for the unattainable and the lost? Against such knowledge, what defense? Ah, I know! Quick! To the stereo! Crank it up, up I say! Ah, that's it — Gabba Gabba Hey!

The Great Chicago MLA Poetry Marathon of 2007

So, this happened Friday:

There it is: the great Chicago Poetry Marathon of '07, held during the Modern Language Association's annual calling together of the professorial tribes. During one of my darker moments in the process of organizing this shindig, I'd written to John Matthias, saying "the whole thing will be demeaning to all concened, I'm sure. I plan to fake a stroke in the first five minutes and be carried out by my minions so as to avoid the inevitable disaster." But my melodramatic acting chops were never called for: everything went off without a hitch. No bar mitzvah or charity fundraiser was in progress when we arrived; the booksellers didn't fall into turf wars at the tables, the caterers didn't drop an urn of steaming decaf onto the PA system, and despite Ray Bianchi and Garin Cycholl's threats, the Chicago poetry mafia decided not to deliver any kind of beat-down to the peace-loving Bay Area types. The guys who arrived with video cameras weren't a poetry-suspicious crew from Homeland Security monitoring us for future deportation to Gitmo, but archivists recording it all for the Chicago Public Libraries. Or so they said. And despite the snow, the crowd turned out in force. From my perch in one of the balconies (where I felt like Evita Peron) I estimated somewhere between two and three hundred people were there, which is, I think, a record. The readers showed up in force too, although Orlando Ricardo Menes was a no-show and Petra Kuppers was delayed (though she's since sent me a link to a video-version of the piece she was going to perform).

Some highlights for me included:

Joe Amato and Kass Fleisher delivering pieces written specifically for poetry readings like this. Joe's piece, a stuttering-sort of poem that worked the phrase "this next one is about..." around in different word-jazzy improvisations was a great way to begin the reading; while Kass' piece about the importance of content in writing, with its aggressive bit about "what do they want to reform anyway, except syntax?" drew roars of approval and disapproval in equal proportion.

Pierre Joris reading "This Afternoon Dante Will Be Expelled," a poem we published in Samizdat's Rothenberg-Joris issue a few years back. I meant to say tell him how happy this made me, but at exactly the moment he came near me through the crowd I (cold-ridden as I am) was trying too hard not to sneeze.

Barret Watten reading a piece written-through William Carlos Williams' poetry, which I'd heard some of a year ago in Tulsa. Can't wait to see this in book form.

Don Share reading a poem about his child as a "dependent now sitting in the chair where ambition once sat" (I'm paraphrasing). I saw looks of deep recognition on the faces of my colleagues Davis Schneiderman (a new parent) and Josh Corey (a parent soon-to-be).

Philip Metres not reading, exactly, but holding up a series of signs while music played -- surely a shout-out to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues".

Simone Muench beginning her poem about horror movies with the line "Dear Leatherface..." (Simone really understands all this horror movie stuff, and I'm convinced it plays into the big theme of her latest book Orange Girl, which I really should review or blog about soon, given that I've taken probably 2,000 words worth of notes on its narrow margins).

Tim Yu, the final reader, letting me and Patrick Durgin have it for organizing the reading along alphabetical lines.

When it was all over and time to clear out, I finally got to fulfill a fantasy I've had since I first saw The Blues Brothers back in the eighties: I was able to stand in front of a group of people and shout "you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

UPDATE: Philip Metres now has a post up with notes on each of the readers. Ahoy!

Chicago Poetry Marathon

Here's an offical-looking ad for the reading during the Chicago MLA. Please click on the image for a larger version, print out copies, and plaster them on the walls of your city like rock concert posters. Alternately, these can be dropped from your vintage biplanes over likely-looking crowds, like the political pamphlets of yore. Or, if you're feeling up to it, you could hand out copies on the side of the road, preferably while wearing a gorilla suit or one of those novelty costumes — giant hot dog, pirate (I'm talking to you, Scroggins!), Aquaman, or Phillie Phanatic. Your call!



By the way: the School of the Art Institute isn't inside the Art Institute of Chicago, but across the street at 112 S. Michigan Ave., which looks like this:

Gigantic Poetry Reading During the Chicago MLA

At last it can be told: Patrick Durgin, Jen Karmin, and your present humble blogger have cooked up a gargantuan poetry reading to take place during the Chicago MLA Convention this year. Though my phalanx of lawyers advises me with quaking knees to mention that the event is in no way affiliated with the MLA, there's been a long tradition of off-site, unofficial group poetry readings during the MLA, dating back at least to 1989, when Rod Smith dreamed it up as a necessary escape from the convention itself. Aldon Nielson has called the tradition a "floating Burning Man of verse." Since Aldon's going to be one of the readers, he can judge how well this year's iteration measures up.

The event will be held in the very swank ballroom of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, starting at 7:00 pm on Friday, December 28, and continuing until we all pass out from an excess of joy. Light refreshments provided, and we're working on a book table.

What what? You don't believe me about the swankness of the room? Well, check it out, bubs:



It'll be cold outside, so come on in and warm up with the poetry of:

Joe Amato
Robert Archambeau
Dodie Bellamy
Ray Bianchi
Tisa Bryant
Charles Cantolupo
Stephen Cope
Josh Corey
Joel Craig
Elizabeth Cross
Garin Cycholl
Michael Davidson
Patrick Durgin
Joel Felix
Kass Fleisher
C. S. Giscombe
Renee Gladman
Chris Glomski
Steve Halle
Duriel Harris
Carla Harryman
William R. Howe
Pierre Joris
Jennifer Karmin
Kevin Killian
Petra Kuppers
Quraysh Ali Lansana
David Lloyd
Nicole Markotic
Cate Marvin
Philip Metres
Laura Moriarty
Simone Muench
Aldon Nielsen
Mark Nowak
Orlando Ricardo Menes
Kristy Odelius
Bob Perelman
Kristen Prevallet
Jen Scappettone
Robyn Schiff
Susan Schultz
Don Share
Ed Skoog
Chuck Stebelton
Mark Tardi
Catherine Taylor
Tony Trigilio
Nick Twemlow
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Barrett Watten
Tyrone Williams, and (last but never least)
Tim Yu

We owe all this to the good people at the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute, the Poetry Foundation, and Poetry magazine — many thanks to all Medicis everywhere!

Joe Francis Doerr is Cooler than We Are

My life and that of Joe Francis Doerr have run in parallel tracks in several respects: we both grew up in the west; we went to grad school at Notre Dame together; I hear he may soon be editing a book on John Matthias, just like I did; and we've both been fortunate enough to have collections of our poetry published by Salt. But the similarities end when it comes to music, and I bow to Joe's formidable rockabilly firepower. Behold him and his fabulous Austin, Texas band The LeRoi brothers in this 1984 clip from the CBS Morning News. Behold, and wonder.

Perloff, Eagleton, and the Contradictions of the Avant-Garde, with a Totally Unrelated Response to Mark Scroggins

Fret not, gentle reader: I'm not here to lay some heavy, heady theory on you. Instead of wrenching hefty notions down from the Olympian heights of 21st Century Modernism or The Ideology of the Aesthetic, I've been thinking about lesser works by Marjorie Perloff and Terry Eagleton. "Lesser" might not even be the word. My texts du jour are among the least hefty and durable of works: specifically, I've been thinking about the 200 word or so pieces Perloff and Eagleton contributed (along with a few dozen other notable writers) to the new "Books of the Year" issue of the TLS. These pieces are pretty much what you'd think they'd be — contributors are asked for quick descriptions of a couple of books from 2007 they think worth noting. There's not much elbow-room for analysis or contextualization, but even so, the nature of what each writer chooses, and the quick comments they lay down on the broad, oyster-gray pages of Britain's most venerable book-rag can be telling. And here's what the picks of Eagleton and Perloff tell me: those of us into formally adventurous literature are still trying to square the same old circle. Like our modernist grandparents down on the old avant-farmstead, we still long for both form-turning-in-upon form in limitless innovation, and, at the same time, for a broad public reach, even a political presence.

Eagleton picks two books, one an semi-experimental novel by Joseph O'Conner called Redemption Falls. "Stuffed with ads, documents, news reports and narratives-within-narratives," writes Eagleton, "this sprawling carnival of a historical novel has a proper indifference to the demands of organic form, and is all the richer for it." I haven't read the book, but it sounds for all the word like a kind of Dos Passos trip, a broad historical narrative cut through with all of the mediating uh, media through which we experience history. Eagleton's other pick is Paul Mason's Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, an analysis of working class struggle through the industrial and post-industrial era. For me, Eagleton's two choices represent in miniature the dual loyalties held by so many of the people I know, loyalty to formal innovation on the one hand, and to leftist political ideals on the other. Trying to put those two loyalties together can be exhausting. Here, Eagleton simply lays them side by side, the twin badges of his (and your, and my) disposition.

Perloff's picks are Daniil Kharms' Today I did Nothing — a selection of poetry and prose by the unpublished-in-his-lifetime Russian absurdist written while cooped up in a psych ward in Leningrad — and Susan Howe's latest collection of poems, Souls of the Labadie Tract. What's really interesting to me here, though, aren't the picks per se but the hope Perloff attaches to them. The books, says Perloff, give her "hope for an avant-garde writing that speaks to a larger audience." Most of us have had moments of yearning for bigger sales and bigger reading audiences for the books we write/care about. But there's a strange contradiction in wishing for such things for avant-garde writing. I mean, writing that constantly challenges the normative methods or reading, and the logic of the literary marketplace, and even the media of writing and the dissemination of writing, is often thrilling stuff. But you can hardly ask for it to succeed on the terms of those markets and media it eschews. I don't mean to say that the experimental writing club should put up a velvet rope and station someone to act as a bouncer to keep the undesirables out (chris cheek seems like the right sort of guy — I can imagine him tossing Billy Collins out into a snowbank). I just don't know if it's possible, barring some strange alignment in the heavens, to be both pop and avant at the same time. If you know how, good luck to you! I hope you'll invite me to the after-parties in Hollywood: I've always wanted to hang with Snoop Dogg in his Hummer limousine.

***

My man Mark Scroggins has tagged me to write up seven previously unknown facts about myself. I find it a bit disconcerting. I mean, while I do a lot of blustery me-oriented stuff on this blog, I'm pretty choosy about which sides of myself I put out in public, and I imagine that most of what I want known is out there somewhere, online or in obscure journals or in the occasional book. But okay. Here goes (anyone with anything better to do is hereby excused from class, and those of you without something better to do have my pity: you're obviously sitting out a slow and oppressive day at the office. Or maybe you're in grad school, which amounts to the same thing).

1. Mark begins with a musical revelation, about seeing Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck in Florence, so I'll start with an image of myself as a junior in high school, armed with fake ID and down in the all-but-unbelievably skanky punk club in Winnipeg called (check this out for the whiff of the Commonweath) The Royal Albert Arms. Bob Mould and his band Husker Dü are up on stage, Bob's got a 12-string guitar and wants to play acoustic. The punked-out fans are spitting and yelling and throwing beer around and demanding a harder sound and Bob shouts back "fuck you, I wrote those songs on this guitar!" I liked that, I think because it showed me A) that alterno-conformity could be as stifling as the turned-up collar on a 1980s preppy polo shirt and B) that you didn't have to let that bother you.

2. Mark goes medical in his next revelation, commenting on his crappy dental work, so I'll mention the freakish lack of toenails on my big toes. Yep.
No, this wasn't some Archambeau-as-Elephant-Man weirdness at birth. The nails were perpetually becoming ingrown, and I finally went to the guy who keeps the feet of the Chicago Bears in working order. He pulled the nails out with what seemed to me like a pair of medieval torture implements and told me I had a remarkable tolerance for pain. Not true! I just have a remarkable ability to hold a scream in until I can release it in private. Later, he performed surgery to remove whatever it is that causes nails to grow in the first place. Pumped full of space-age pain relievers I overrode the objections of the medical professionals and checked myself out of Northwestern University Hospital, and hoofed it home to my apartment in what looked like giant, hospital-logo-havin' clown shoes, feeling no pain. Until the wonder-drugs wore off. Oy.

3 & 4 (Special double issue!). For his third and fourth revelation, Mark tells us about his obsessive habits with books. So I'll mention my own book habits. Firstly, until grad school, I treated books as if they were all rare and fragile manuscripts from the bowels of the Bodleian, even, at one point, doing up a card catalog of my precious archives. Secondly: during grad school I worked in Chicago's old Aspidistra Bookshop, where used books were piled in great post-apocalyptic heaps. I remember them as smoking heaps, but that can't be right. Anyway, I unlearned all of my careful habits, and now when I read a book I practically consume it, bending the cover backwards, writing copious notes, dog-earing it at will, and otherwise behaving like the Cookie Monster, only, you know, with books.

5. Mark next confesses to singing poems in ballad meter to himself to the tune of Joan Baez's "Mary Hamilton." I'd like to say I always sing Ezra Pound's "The Seafarer" as if I were Geddy Lee of Rush, or perhaps System of a Down's Serj Tankian, but it just ain't true. I do, however, mentally sing the words of Emily Dickinson's poems to the tune of both "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and the theme to Gilligan's Island. But I think everyone does that.

6. Mark goes next to religion, confessing that, while a black-hearted atheist, he does own nine Bibles. When people ask me about religion, though, I get deeply reticent and vaguely pretentious, quoting Wittgenstein's quip "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I then tend to look for a polite way to leave the room.

7. Mark ends by saying he wishes he'd had the perserverence to stick with music as a career. I'll admit that, when my degenerate friends signed up for the percussion section in ninth grade band, I took a different route. Much to their initial mirth at my apparent emasculation, I took up the flute. I theorized that sitting in a section of girls would prove convenient for meeting, and therefore potentially hooking up with, said girls. Music, sadly, didn't really enter into it.



Those of you who sat through all that are entitled to the same kind of lollipop you get on the way out of the dentist's office. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope and I'll try to get round to sending one your way.

A Test of Poetry Bookstores

No, peeps, no, you've got me all wrong. I admit the image above might lead you to believe I consider the availability of Old Milwaukee a significant criterion in the assessment of a bookstore's quality. But that's not why the image is up there: it's there to commemorate my recent trip to the Woodland Pattern Book Center up in Milwaukee, where I read with a group of poets from The City Visible anthology of Chicago poetry. Not that I'm against the bookstore/bar fusion, which is surprisingly hard to come by. About the closest thing I can think of in my neck of the woods is The Heartland Cafe, which is a kind of vegetarian-friendly cafe with a theater and a bar attached and a big outdoor terrace and live music, and a kind of hippy general store which includes a few books and a really good periodicals section, especially if your politics skew toward the Z Magazine world-view. But it's really more of a good place to hang with your former students than to buy things to read.

But I digress. We're here to address that ever-new question, "how do I know the bookstore I'm about to enter is going to be worthwhile, poetry-wise?" Ah. I propose a simple test:

1. As you walk in the door, do you see a big stack of free issues of Rain Taxi? If so, give the joint 2 points.

2. Is there more than a single shelf of poetry? That's worth another 5.

3. In fact, add 1 point per shelf of poetry, and an additional 2 points per shelf if that shelf is devoted to local poetry.

4. If there's a section devoted to chapbooks, that's worth 10 points. I mean, come on — how often do you see that?

5. If there's a large color photo of Lorine Niedecker over the cash register, add 2 points. Add an additional three if the clerk knows can name one of Niedecker's books.

6. Are there more titles by Clark Coolidge than there are by Khahil Gibran? Add one point per copy.

7. Deduct one point for every copy of Jewel's A Night Without Armor. Ah, hell. Make that two points per copy.

8. Add five points for any of these three volumes (my test books for any promising looking poetry section): John Matthias' Pages New Poems and Cuttings, Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack, and Mark Scroggins' Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (no, not Louis Zukovsky: The Poem of a Life — you can get that one at Borders, or Barnes and Nobel. I hear it's going to be one of Oprah's picks in '08, too).

9. And throw in another couple of points if they stock titles from Salt or Bookthug.

10. If you're giving a reading there and you blow the majority of your fee on books before you leave, add another 5 points.

Okay. By this reckoning I figure Woodland Pattern, with 66 points, has got to be one of the all-time great poetry bookstores. There's nothing like it in Chicago, and it leaves the Grolier bookshop in its dust (it has all the Helen-Vendlerized content of the Grolier, and a whole phalanx of Marjorie-Perloffery too).

It's got to be the best bookstore for poetry in ... well, let's see. In Milwaukee? For sure. In Wisconsin? No doubt. In the Midwest? Yeah. I can say that with certainty. In fact, we can extend that to "between the coasts," and I'd say that, unlike the hapless Milwaukee Brewers, it has a fair shot at a national title. If you know a place that rates higher, let me know and I'll cash in my frequent flyer miles in two shakes of a performance artists' prosethetic tail.

Did I mention I had a great time reading at the WP? (I'm hoping that'll stick as a way of talking about Woodand Pattern). Roberto Harrison's ink drawings in the attached gallery were a revelation, and talking about Nigeria and Brazil with Ed Roberson on the way home was a blast.

The WP's a ninety minute train ride from Chicago, and worth the trip if you're in town for the MLA.

Archambeau World Tour, December 2007

The army of high-powered agents, dodgy promoters, sycophantic managers, and assorted poetry-biz hangers-on who handle my bookings are still working on hooking up the big MLA reading, but through a series of power lunches and top-of-the-lungs cell phone conversations carried out as they cruise around L.A. and in their BMW convertibles they've managed to put a couple of appearances together for the month ahead. (Forgive the delusions of glitz and grandeur: I've been weathering the T.V. writers' strike by watching TiVo's seemingly endless supply of old episodes of Entourage).

The gigs in question are:

At 1:00 in the afternoon on Sunday, December 2 I'll be reading at the Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee with Ed Roberson, Jen Scappettone, Mark Tardi, Kerri Sonnenberg and other people from The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. It'll be like when the Cubs come up to Wisconsin to play the Brewers, except without the sausage races we've come to love at Miller Park. Unless I can convince Mark that we should suit up in our bratwurst costumes and do laps around the building.

At 5:15 on Thursday, December 27 I'll be joining Patrick Durgin, Kass Fleisher, Tim Yu and Bill Allegrezza on a panel about midwestern experimental writing at the Chicago MLA (that's panel 51 in the Field room at the Hyatt Regency). I don't think there will be any sausage races in the offing, but this is the MLA, the home of the prof, so there will be plenty of opportunities to see costumes as weird as anything worn by the mascots of Miller Park. In fact, I'll probably end up in the Hyatt bar, wearing some deeply compromised combo of threadbare corduroy blazer and stained-yet-beloved hockey t-shirt, perhaps with a french fry in my beard.

British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Prague

While we here in the United States were gathered round our Thanksgiving turkeys for our annual family re-enactments of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, strange doings were afoot across the Atlantic, doings in the form of a dust-up among the more experimentally oriented British poetry crowd. Lest we vulgar, hostile, petty, fame-obsessed Yanks feel we're alone in our many vices, your present humble blogger offers this fragmentary account of the latest Britpo contretemps.

Toward the end of the scuffle, one of the participants claimed that the whole affair was a sign of the increasing Americanization and academicization of British poetry. In a sense, I think that's true. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's begin where the battle began: in Prague, where the always-interesting — nay cutting-edge — press Litteraria Pragensia issued a collection of essays called Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, edited by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin.

While the book has an essay on W.S. Graham and another on Seamus Heaney, overall the book takes a pretty strongly Cambridge-centric look at the poetic landscape. Of the nineteen essays, at least four are either on or by Jeremy Prynne, two are on Andrea Brady, one's on Keston Sutherland (who wrote one of the Prynne pieces), two are on Chris Goode, and there's another on Peter Monson.

When I first received a publicity email blast about the book, I was a bit stoked: whatever else you may say about the Cambridge crew, they're not that well known in the U.S. — miraculous polymaths like John Matthias know about them, as do a few hard-core alt-Britpo types like Keith Tuma, Devin Johnston, and Romana Huk, and the current Chicago Review gang takes an interest, but it doesn't seem to extend too much further. Here, I thought, gazing at the email I'd rescued from my spam-filter, was a chance to delve deeper into what seems to be some fertile terrain.

But seen from another perspective — specifically that of Geraldine Monk — the book was a bit of an insult. Monk, writing in to Keith Tuma's British poetry discussion list, took issue with the the subtitle "British Poetry, 1945-2007." The subtitle claimed a representative status for the book that was manifestly false, she said, and the contents skewed to a younger crowd of poets who hadn't yet "earned their stripes," while neglecting poets who'd been working away in obscurity for years. (Monk, by the way, was recently the subject of what looks like a good, and well-deserved, collection of critical appreciations: The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk).

Monks' criticisms did not sit well with Keston Sutherland, who fired back a broadside worthy of one of Admiral Nelson's ships of the line. "Seniority be damned! Bah! Yargh! Fire all carronades and batten down the bosun's quindledeck! Bring me grog and a flaming spar-smutter!" quoth Captain Keston (I'm paraphrasing here), before launching into a very plausible explanation of the subtitle as a necessary evil, a publisher's ploy to lure librarians and profs into having their institutions order copies. After reading Bill Allegrezza's grim description of the economics of small press publishing I'm inclined to sympathy for this kind of concession to the logic of the market, even if it involves a bit of misrepresentation. Then again, I'm not a British poet who's worked in obscurity for decades only to find myself left out of a book that purports in its subitle to cover the field in which I've labored. Ask me how I feel about the issue again, after a book called Poet-Critic-Bloggers of the American Midwest, 1999-2015 comes out without so much of a mention of my tireless efforts, and you'll likely hear some grumbling. I'm steamed about it already!

Anyway. Après Keston, le déluge, avec un grand kaboom. Many people chimed in, some with sage advice and level heads, some sounding more hostile notes. It got nasty and weird, there was some name-calling, some ugly misogyny, and some sidetracking into bickering about who got, and didn't get, invited to participate in a poetry reading. Change the names and it might have been the Buffalo POETICS list back in the mid-1990s. The ever-even-keeled Mairéad Byrne did what she could to convert anger into wit by a clever bit of verbal alchemy, but it took a while before things settled down. At one point one discussant suggested that she and the other women of the list secede and form their own discussion list. In part this was to be a withdrawal to "a safe place" away from male chest-thumping, and in part it was to be a continuation of the war-for-turf: the proposed topic for the list was the formulation of a strategy to get into the male-dominated anthologies. (By the way: the rhetorical move in which men are condemned for their overly emotional discourse really should have a name: I propose "The Reverse-Victorian Tongue Hold," since it quite effectively reverses the patriarchal move of dismissing women's discourse as emotionally motivated hysterics). Geraldine Monk wasn't enthusiastic about the idea, though, so I don't know if it will go anywhere.

That's about where things stood when the smoke started to clear and the clamor faded. Maybe the negative energy needed to be expelled. Anyway, it doesn't look like much has changed after all of the pushing and shoving and, of course, this tempest in the avant-teacup hasn't even registered in the world of laureateships and the TLS, where the experimental poets continue to be pretty thoroughly shut out.

The best thing to emerge from the whole affair, I think, has been Stephen Rodefer's reflections on the nature of literary reputation. In what I take to be a kind of valedictory address as the wounded limp away from the battlefield, Rodefer asked whether early recognition (the critical praise of young poets who hadn't yet "earned their stripes") was always a good thing; and whether critical neglect through a long career was always bad. While early recognition can be good for a poet (as it was for Robert Hass), it can also be as debilitating as the lack of recognition. I admire Rodefer's philosophical distance here.

So what about this business of the recent battle as a sign of the Americanization and academization of Britpo? Well, one of the sad characteristics of American academe is captured in the quip, attributed to Henry Kissinger, that "university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." In the end, I think this applies to the outpouring of anger about what boils down to little more than a questionable subtitle. In a world like alt-Britpo, there's so little recognition to go around, and so much deserving talent, that when the little dribs and drabs of recognition are thrown out into the world, it can all look a bit like monkey feeding time at the Kyoto zoo. Which is sad, really.

All I can offer as an antidote to the Americanization/academicizing/hungry-monkey-ization witnessed over the weekend is this bit of very English wisdom, from Samuel Johnson's blog entry (sorry, I mean his Rambler essay) of May 29, 1750. Johnson begins with a cold hard look at writers and their self-satisfaction:

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine, that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or in degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour.

The studious and speculative part of mankind always seem to consider their fraternity as placed in a state of opposition to those who are engaged in the tumult of publick business; and have pleased themselves, from age to age, with celebrating the felicity of their own condition, and with recounting the perplexity of politicks, the dangers of greatness, the anxieties of ambition, and the miseries of riches.

But no such superiority exists, really:

It was well known by experience to the nations which employed elephants in war, that though by the terrour of their bulk, and the violence of their impression, they often threw the enemy into disorder, yet there was always danger in the use of them, very nearly equivalent to the advantage; for if their first charge could be supported, they were easily driven back upon their confederates; they then broke through the troops behind them, and made no less havock in the precipitation of their retreat, than in the fury of their onset.

....The garlands gained by the heroes of literature must be gathered from summits equally difficult to climb with those that bear the civick or triumphal wreaths, they must be worn with equal envy, and guarded with equal care from those hands that are always employed in efforts to tear them away; the only remaining hope is, that their verdure is more lasting, and that they are less likely to fade by time, or less obnoxious to the blasts of accident.... [But] if we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed. If we consider the distribution of literary fame in our own time, we shall find it a possession of very uncertain tenure; sometimes bestowed by a sudden caprice of the publick, and again transferred to a new favourite, for no other reason than that he is new; sometimes refused to long labour and eminent desert, and sometimes granted to very slight pretentions; lost sometimes by security and negligence, and sometimes by too diligent endeavours to retain it.

Against the uncertainties and inequities of ever-fickle fame, Johnson offers a kind of stoic distance, a resolution to labor on regardless, and to care a little less, if possible, about the laurels, and on whose heads they momentarily rest. You've got to love Johnson for that. And for the elephant analogy. That was good too.

Chicago Review: The Complicity Issue?

I've had my head stuck way, way too deep into the murky mists of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria to think straight lately, but now that I think I may just be able to blog a bit, given that I'm currently jacked up on a heady three-part combo consisting of:

the leftover adreneline from a 16 mile bike ride through a Chicago-area November that feels like a frozen outtake from Dr. Zhivago

a giant tub of coffee from the corner Vietnamese coffee joint

Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

Since it's been a topic of recent discussion by my sharp new colleague and my subtropical intellectual hero, let me start with an observation or two about the latest Chicago Review. Though I haven't read the whole thing yet, here's my preliminary hypothesis: the current issue (vol. 53, nos. 2&3) is the complicity issue. There isn't an official theme, and I don't think there's been any deliberate attempt to set the content of the issue in orbit around any particular sun, but through some fluke of the zeitgeist (or some mammoth act of projection on my part), everything I read seems to come on as some kind of riff on complicity.

When I saw John Peck's name in the table of contents, I turned immediately to his poem. Hell, I may even have yelped slightly for joy, alarming the good people standing near me at 57th Street Books (I don't know why I don't subscribe to Chicago Review, since I make a point of buying every issue). Peck's poem, "Book of the Dead? We Have No Book of the Dead" begins with a quote from the "Declaration of Innocence" from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Google makes reading John Peck about 85% easier than it used to be): "I have done no evil ... I have not caused pain ..." etc., then works its way elegantly around a few central images, taking us through scenes of mischief and calamity, even to Hiroshima, all the while working over phrases of denial: "No, no, we didn't do that" or "no, not us," until we come to the end where, after a clear demonstration of human guilt and hypocrisy we hear "...it is human to say, No, I have never sinned, no, not barefaced to the powers." So: complicity is our theme here.

I next flipped to the second part of C.D. Wright's "Rising, Falling, Hovering," but seeing how long it was I left it for later and dove into some of Larissa Szporluk's poems, including "Adoration," which somehow manages to use its odd, even goofy, sound-echoes to devastatingly skewer our complicity in, and hypocrisy about, violence. Here's the ending:

Truth is that cowards

are bung, cowards are bung,
and when the gold light

of eternal life
pours through the ham

of the done deal,
we hang in the sagging bum,

a pendulum of bowel
walls, tied to the dark

with a stout string
and pass our lilies out

on the spot where the boy was slain
and would be slain again

because bung's own bung
is the only sacred thing.

That's an odd kind of ouch, but it does sting, the way it indicts our self-concern in a world of violence.

Other complicity-oriented items I've read in the issue include:

Michael Robbins' review of Frederick Seidel's wonderfully creepy Ooga-Booga. The complicity is Seidel's, not Robbins' — though Seidel is all about celebrating his rich white guy complicity in a world of privilege and inequity.

"Poetry Magazines and Women Poets," Bobby Baird and Josh Kotin's article on the degree of inclusion of women poets in major literary magazines. I love anything that looks like empirical data about Our Vague and Misty Art, so this was a particular favorite of mine, although the statistics are as grim as you'd expect. What makes this an examination of complicity is the inclusion of stats for women poets in Chicago Review itself: 37% of contributors, a point below the sad average of all magazines surveyed.

And now for a moment of personal complicity of another kind: as a guy who has moaned about the institution of the poetry reading, it now looks like I may find myself in the ironic position of being one of the guys (along with Patrick Durgin) who ends up organizing the massive group reading at this year's MLA. More on that as, and if, it develops.