Quotes: Will Alexander

Will Alexander, Celebration for Bob Kaufman,
San Francisco Public Library, April 11, 2016

Living art can withstand the peril of the vitriolic via the extrinsic as propaganda, of the masses condoned as they are by critical misperception.

*

I am a spirit who exposes his mandibles in order to appear and disappear. This being a kinetics that spontaneously arranges ghostly collapse to appear as simultaneous visibility. The latter being an apparition that allows the mind to ruminate upon its circuitous connecting traces.

*

I work always knowing that one must resist carking exhaustion, always resisting its a priori inclination as did Alhazen, and in later times Rimbaud. One gains from this resistance impalpable nths of stamina so as to enact prolific creativity rife with palpable transmutation.

*

I think of Desnos rife with oneiric eruption, verbally fishing for oquassa. This being the inner work of extending lightning bolts from stark extremities of sleep. What follows are vocables that mimic proto-fires that condense in the shape of burgeoning aural seed. What then emerges are slivers from uncanny aural scarps that magnify and extend into strangeness.

*

I speak Gullah and cater to stored rats. As for me, there always exists abominable increase, dazed lepers, arachnids crawling through hair. As for hunting migrating forms from the inferno, I scour its satanic region, I take into account forms of unleashed fever, creating from my presence a brackish type of moth, soaring, yet all the while cadenced by telepathic inherence.

-- five selections from Will Alexander's Across the Vapour Gulf, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #22, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017. Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.

RIP Mari Evans & Derek Walcott

Within the last few weeks, two major Black poets, Mari Evans (1919/1923?-2017) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017), have passed. Unsurprisingly, there has been much more coverage of Walcott, an internationally renown poet and playwright, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, than of Evans, who probably is best known among afficionados of 20th century Black Women's writing and the Black Arts Movement. In both she was an invaluable voice. As I have come to do when thinking about the rich constellations of Black poetries throughout history, I see them as part of a continuum, a point I doubt will be mentioned in obituaries of either. Both poets probed their intersectional identities in part through an investigation of history and contemporary society, and both drew upon the oral traditions in which they had grown up, to different but parallel ends. With their passing, the poetry world has lost two significant voices.

Evans was the older poet, an African American, a native of Toledo, Ohio, and did not publish her first book until she was already 40 years old. It was around this time, in the late 1960s, which marked the rise of the Black Arts Movement, that she began teaching, a profession in which she made her mark. In 1970, she issued her second volume, I Am a Black Woman, which stands alongside early books by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, and Carolyn Rodgers as exemplars of the new Black women's poetry that still continues to influence Black poets writing in the US and globally today. In this collection's poems you can see the themes, the style, the fierceness that would appear in all of Evans's later work, and you can also see how it serves and continues to function as an important counterweight to the sometimes masculinist, misogynistic discourse that marked some--but not all--poetry by Black Arts male poets.

A feminist, politically progressive, a poet drawing from vernacular traditions but possessing a keen sense of the line, and of humor, Evans would go on to publish four more books of poetry, as well as writings for children and plays, while also pursuing a career as a poetry professor at a number of institutions. I had the pleasure of hearing Mari Evans read a few times, though I never got an opportunity to speak with her at length. A longtime resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, she died there on March 10, 2017. Here is one of her most famous poems, "I Am a Black Woman," from the AfroPoets website, and I hear echoes of it in so many poems being written today, even as they take different approaches to the themes Evans so movingly articulated in her work:

I Am a Black Woman

I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night


I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea
and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in the canebrake
I lost Nat's swinging body in a rain of tears
and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio
for Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard


I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed 

Copyright © Mari Evans, 2017. All rights reserved.

I have written about and posted a few poems by Derek Walcott over the years, including back in 2006, when I ran into him at a New York bank branch, spoke with and snapped a photo of him, upsetting the customer assistant who was handling his business. (A subsequent encounter at Sea Grape--which nearly shares the name of his 1976 collection--a wine store on Hudson Street, was without incident, and he was warm and gregarious, though I still think he really had no idea who I was beyond a vag with Boston.) I wrote about him again in 2008, when I posted "As John to Patmos," the first poem by him I ever read, when I was in junior high and I happened upon it in a poetry anthology my class was using. If I remember correctly,  we were not assigned Walcott's poem but the poem's final lines immediately drew me to it. I did have the pleasure of meeting Walcott a few times over the years, including all the way back to the early Dark Room Writers Collective days, when he read with Martín Espada. His delivery of his poems that night was as unforgettable as the lead up to the event, when several Dark Room members had to go fetch him, I think, and later, as his inimitable entrance into the Dark Room house, with a little entourage. Every reading thereafter I always measured by that first one, and he rarely disappointed.

Even before I'd met him in person, I'd heard about him as a teacher, including the good--his brilliance in finding ways to help poets reshape and perfect their poems, his many nuggets of wisdom, his sharp eye--and the bad; the year before I started college, he was called out for having sexually harassed an undergraduate student, and he was called out again a few years later for the same behavior. His life's complexities and complications are there in the work, which drew upon a range of traditions, including English formalism and Caribbean orality and its trove of storytelling and myth-making. The rich fusion of this poetics is apparent from the very beginning; Walcott's first book, In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, was more accomplished than the second or third books of highly praised poets. It reaches its apogee, I think, in the later work, particularly his masterpiece Omeros (1990), which stands as one of the great long poems of all time in English, and a landmark in Anglophone, Caribbean and Black Diasporic literature.

Here is the 1lth section of "The Schooner Flight," another of my favorite Walcott poems. You can find the entire poem here, on the Poetry Foundation's website.

From "The Schooner Flight"

11 After the Storm

There’s a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake   
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion   
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.   
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,   
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face   
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh   
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,   
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press   
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;   
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,   
is clothes enough for my nakedness.   
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide   
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs   
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied   
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.   
Open the map. More islands there, man,   
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,   
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,   
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,   
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,   
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,   
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor   
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow   
doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!   
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.   
But things must fall, and so it always was,   
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;   
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one   
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.   
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,   
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.   
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.   
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam   
as the deck turn white and the moon open   
a cloud like a door, and the light over me   
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.   
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” from Collected Poems 1948-1984. Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved. Source: Poems 1965-1980 (Jonathan Cape, 1980)

Counternarratives Featured on Howard Rambsy's Culture Front

Photo from Cultural Front (© Howard Rambsy II)

UPDATED: Cultural Front has added two new posts, "John Keene's 'Acrobatique' and the poet as short story writer" and, bestowing me what I consider to be one of highest possible honors, he places the remarkable Elizabeth Alexander and her foundation poem "The Venus Hottentot" in conversation with "Acrobatique." (This is particularly important to me because Elizabeth has been a huge inspiration since I first saw her read, from The Venus Hottentot no less, at the Dark Room in Cambridge, Massachusetts many moons ago. I hold her and her art--her poetry, her criticism, her nonfiction--in the highest esteem. She is for me one of essential poets of her generation.)

The reviews of Counternarratives continue to trickle in now that we're a few weeks into 2016. One by Daniel Green is forthcoming on Kenyon Review's online, and I think it will be positive, given that he selected it as the best book of 2015. Currently online but inaccessible--to me, since neither the Rutgers or New York Public Library systems subscribe to the journal--is Alex McElroy's review, at Georgia Review. (We currently are conversing by email about the book and hope to see a copy of the review one of these says soon.) Just before the new year arrived, another online site, Wuthering Heights blog, which had previously wrestled with the book, named it to its "Best of 2015" list (you can read the prior review at the link). Lastly James Crossley of Mercer Island Books selected Counternarratives as one of his 2015 "Books to Give At the Holidays."

In the meantime, it has been encouraging to have an African American scholar, Howard Rambsy II, who teaches at Southern Illinois University and writes about black poetry and poetics, book history and textual studies, to write a bit about the book on his blog Cultural Front. Rambsy is the author of The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), and is involved with several important scholarly and critical projects involving black literature, among them the Project on History of Black Writing, based at University of Kansas. He also served as faculty member for the Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement Institute, about which I heard extensive praise, this past summer at KU. As Rambsy's archive list will show, he has been blogging about poetry and black writing more generally since 2008, so make sure to scroll through the trove of posts.

Howard has now posted three entries about Counternarratives. The first provides a list of some of the online coverage of the collection, helpfully aggregating many of the book's reviews. The second does something that I think is a first for this collection and which has not popped up in most of the reviews, which is to explore how the Counternarratives fits, extends and exceeds--I guess that's the right word--the African American short story tradition. As Rambsy notes, there are aesthetic links to prior black writers, some of them like Charles Chestnut and Zora Neale Hurston (though I love their work) whom I was not thinking of, and some of whom, like Richard Wright and Charles Johnson, that I was. (I would add that other black short story writers who have strongly influenced my work include James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Ernest J. Gaines, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Reginald McKnight, James Alan McPherson, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman, to name just a few from preceding generations.)

His third post concerns the character "Zion" from my story "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," and focuses as this protagonist as an example of the "bad man," akin to similar figures in African American folklore and popular culture, and in books by writers I deeply admire, including Tyehimba Jess, Adrian Matejka, Tony Medina, Cornelius Eady, and Rita Dove. Rambsy points out that Zion is in some ways linked to the mythical figure (High) John the Conqueror, and like him he continually eludes attempts to keep him in bondage. Yet Zion also operates on the plane of realism in that he moves through his world attempting always to experience and embody freedom, but as an enslaved black person, is denied the option, in part because he is not recognized with in the larger discursive space, as Bernard Bailyn so artfully describes in his landmark 1967 book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, that would permit him to realize freedom as the unfolding social and political systems and practices of the society around him. His revolution is internal and considered lawless, even as it mirrors that of the larger society and of black people across the northern states. 

I imagined Zion as a fictional counterpoint to figures like Phillis Wheatley, Prince Hall, Wentworth Cheswell, and Lucy Terry, to give just a few examples of real 18th century African American pioneers. Zion, as the story makes clear, refuses to play by any rules, unlike his fellow enslaved person Jubal, because he senses that the entire system disregards and oppresses him. Moreover, there is the fact that much of his behavior parallels that of his white master and others whose actions are rationalized and permitted by the society's racialized legal, political, cultural, and social structures.  One need only look at the contemporary prison-industrial complex, the ties between capital and criminalization, and the unequal application of justice and incarceration to see that we are still living with these same systems and institutional mechanisms. I'll stop there, but I offer my deep thanks to Howard for highlighting the book, and welcome any comments from readers of his blog or this one about the book (or anything else).

The Volta / Evening Will Come's Poetry Translation Issue

It has been a while since I've posted a translation on this site or written about the topic here, so I am happy to link to a special Poetry Translation Issue that poet, critic and translator Rosa Alcalá has edited at The Volta's site Evening Will Come. The issue features essays on translation and translations by Kazim Ali, Don Mee Choi (translating Kim Hyesoon, from Korean), Kristin Dykstra (translating Ángel Escobar from Spanish), Forrest Gander (translating Gozo Yoshimasu from Japanese), Johannes Göransson, Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, Erin Moure (translating Wilson Bueno from Portuñol/Portunhol), Jeffrey Pethybridge (on radical imaginings of Homer's The Iliad), Molly Weigel (translating Oliverio Girondo from Spanish), and me, translating the poetry of Claudia Roquette-Pinto from Portuguese.

The focus of the Modern Language Association's annual conference a few years ago, and still salient in comparative literary studies circles, translation as the contributors here make clear is far more than the rendering of literary texts from one language into another, but a social, political, economic, and ethical set of actions that is increasingly important both within national contexts and globally. As Rosa notes in her introduction,

Translation is seen not as something simply cloistered in the realm of the literary, but as a civil act, a means of justice. It is often intimate, playful, transgressive, both faithful and radical. The work included here also reminds us that translation has the potential to disrupt, re-dress, and reconfigure the simplistic aesthetic divides of contemporary poetry in the U.S. It isn’t just a window outward to another culture or literary tradition, but a two-way mirror that reflects back on our own, as Jen Hofer writes in her introduction to Sin Puertas Visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women.

As scholars like two of my former colleagues (to name a few of many) Harris Feinsod and Andrew Leong argue persuasively in their work, translation and non-English language literature has played a profound role on American poetry, though this I would argue that this is not acknowledged enough. American literature's debt to British literature, to non-white literary cultures and systems, including African American, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and immigrant literatures, is increasingly part of the conversation, but outside of specific writers' (like Ezra Pound's (mis-) translations, to give just one example) engagement in and with translation, I would argue that even today in undergraduate and graduate literature programs in American literary studies, there probably still is not enough discussion of the role of translation in the ongoing development of American literatures. (And to be fair, the further one goes in this direction, the more complicated the designation "American" becomes.)

Returning to this translation issue, I am ever grateful to Rosa for including me, not least because I had originally considered contributing either an essay on race and translation, a topic that has not received enough treatment, as far as I can tell from research on the topic (but for a number of reasons, I was not able to complete my essay in time), or my translations of Claudia's poems, and Rosa felt the poems worked fine. I originally undertook these translations in the fall of 2011, when Claudia came to Northwestern University as a guest of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, which I had the great pleasure of being a part of. The four poems in this issue, "Space Writing," "Chair in Mykonos," "In Sarajevo," and "Pirate Heart," were among a handful that I worked on, and presented in English as part of Claudia's visit, which included her reading in Portuguese. Afterwards, she participated in a seminar on her work that helped elucidate the work even more--and I thank my colleague Reg Gibbons in particular for asking about the word "obdurator"--and I returned to each of the poems to refine them further.

Before I submitted these translations to Rosa, I shared them with Claudia, who felt they worked well. I can say that some of my more recent changes did bring out even more of the subtlety, I think, of Claudia's Portuguese. In the case of "Space Writing," those final three lines have a powerful rhythm and sonorous quality in Portuguese that a literal English translation cannot convey:

espasmo    o “olho armado” o
rapto
do obturador

In the original the final word both echoes (obdu/rapt) and reconfigures (rapto / odura) the prior line's term "rapto" ("capture", which I'd originally translated as "rapture"), and in all three lines, there is the echo of that "o" ("oo" in Portuguese), as well as repeating "r" and "d" sounds , like the camera's eye or shutter. So I realized that if I made "spasm" in English "shudder" it would carry forward something akin to the "u," "r" and "d" sonic landscape--"shudder"/"shutter"/"capture"--while also embodying the sound of that shutter opening and closing, and bearing the sense of Claudia's poem here.

An excerpt from Gozo
Yoshimasu's "A Whistle
from the other shore, translated
by Forrest Gander

Two of the poems I translated have overt political subject matter; resolving the difficulties posed by the ending of "In Sarajevo," that "hole" Claudia writes of whose multiplicity of meaning is key to the entire poem's argument, was a challenge, but I think what results in the English carries forward the poetic force of the original. All four together give a glimpse of the range of her work, though it truly would take an entire selected volume to truly mirror the richness of her poetic output.

In the translations by the other poets, as well as in the rich array of essays, any reader will get a sense of critically dynamic approaches contemporary US writers are taking toward translation, particularly poetry, and the importance they believe it holds not only for American literature, but for literatures across the globe.

Motion of Light: Samuel R. Delany Tribute at Jacket2

Last April 11 in Philadelphia, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania organized a tribute to Samuel R. Delany (1942-), "Motion of Light," honoring his "performative poetics."

Though I always associate Chip Delany with his native New York City, he has taught at Temple University for over a decade (and will be retiring this year), and has become an integral member of that city's literary communities, so it was fitting that he was honored there. A number of admirers of Delany's work were present; though invited I was already booked at a conference (&Now) in Colorado, so I sent my contribution, "Paean," to Tracie Morris, one of the organizers, to present in my absence. The original event was archived at PennSound.

Now Tracie has edited a special section at Jacket2 featuring some of the events' tributes, including work by Kenneth R. James, Ira Livingston, Sarah Micklem, Fred Moten, Jena Osman, Frank Sherlock, Anne Waldman, Tracie herself I, and, as well as Chip offering his own contribution to the event through a concluding conversation with Charles Bernstein. Although Chip needs no introduction and his work as a creative writing, critic and intellectual could fill a month-long conference, if you're interested in seeing others speak (or create Möbius strips in response) to his poetics, the Jacket2 features offers a fine introduction.

Here's a snippet from Tracie's warm introduction to the special section:

The magnitude of Chip’s impact in a variety of fields is impossible to calculate, much less organize into one volume. Here’s hoping for more and more celebrations, compilations, cheers, toasts, and discussions on his monumental work and importance to so many people and at so many stages of their lives. Chip is a constellation that continues to be fixed, yet revolves, for me and for so many lovers of poetry, of resonant words. I’m eternally grateful to be part of bringing these many hands together that have lifted a glass in Samuel R. Delany’s honor during his birth month in 2014, a microcosm of his worlds-full of admirers. As this is coming out in February, a month, in the US, given to emphasizing the experiences of Black people and Black culture, I’m especially glad to share this celebration of one of the world’s great Black thinkers, writers, creators. A maker of many worlds. Worlds for everyo

Here's a snippet from Fred Moten's perfectly titled "Amuse-Bouche":

Moved movers amid the intensity of the pas de deux my offering asks you to imagine, Delany and Taylor are bound in what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call the affectability of no-bodies.[4] Bound for that embrace, they hold, in their openness, to its general, generative pattern. Openness to the embrace moves against the backdrop of exclusion and the history of exclusion, which is a series of incorporative operations. This is how openness to being affected is inseparable from the resistance to being affected. Dance writes this push and pull into the air and onto the ground and all over the skin of the earth and flesh that form the city. The words of these moved movers have something specific to do with dance and I want to talk about that specificity as an interplay between walking and talking, between crossing and tasting, between quickness and flavor. Their words and work form part of the aesthetic and philosophical atmosphere that attends the various flows and steps that have taken place in and as New York City over the last fifty years, especially downtown in the serially and simultaneously emergent and submergent dance space between two churches, Judson and St. Mark’s.

MLA 2013 Panel on Black Poetics

The Black Poetics panel audience, before the room filled to capacity

So the 2013 Modern Language Association conference, held this year in Boston, has come and gone, and though I have more than once felt not just MLAlienation but also that sensation that those of us who write criticism and are conversant in and with theory, but who primarily live and work as creative writers also feel, I nevertheless headed north, was able to meet up with wonderful students and former colleagues, participated on a great panel on Black Poetics, chaired by Jennifer DeVere Brody (Stanford University), and comprising Marcellus Blount (Columbia University) and Meta DuEwa Jones (University of Texas), all superlative scholars, thus making me a bit of an interloper, and in the end I think all in all it went well. (There was even positive real-time Twitter commentary on the panel, and on my paper.) The topic of Black Poetics is vast; many are the byways down which you might travel in discussing the very concept, which would in part begin with definitions of "black" and "poetics." Jennifer's focus was on form, and both Marcellus and Meta spoke specifically on questions of "form" and "formalism," in contemporary black poetics.

Last year, as Jennifer was assembling the panel, I asked if I might steer my talk more to the issue of black digital poetics, or black digital literature, and Jennifer agreed that that would be interesting, so that's where I went, giving a refined version of the paper, "The Work of Black Poetry in the Age of Digital Reproducibility," that I first presented at MESEA in Barcelona this past June. The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern's excellent conversations only reinforced my desire to pursue the paper, and some of the many excellent exchanges led or sustained by Keguro Macharia also got me thinking hard about the topic. I attempted to contextualize the topic, historicize it, theorize it a bit, and then present one example of it, Mendi Lewis Obadike's online digital work from the late 1990s. The panel's audience was packed, with many amazing poets and scholars (including Keguro, January Gill O'Neill, Maryemma Graham, and many more) I knew, some senior, some junior, but so many really smart people, so I was a bit dazed even before I took the podium. But I finished, and when I finished, I felt clear-headed enough to respond to some of the questions directed my way, among them Aldon Nielsen's, which zeroed in on the fact of funding for an online archive of black digital poetry and poetics. Where would it come from? I urged (some in) the audience to consider setting one up, and as I also exhorted in my paper, it must be easily accessible and free, which would, I think, have the effect of both making available and visible some of the fascinating online poetic work people are undertaking, and jumpstarting a range of projects from here on out.

Another questioner, Robin Coste Lewis, I think, inquired about teaching the work of a poet like Douglas Kearney, and it struck me even as I was preparing the paper--and I answered along these lines to Robin--that an app like Faber & Faber's The Waste Land offered one possible vision of what a poet like Doug, whose texts, as poetic objects, possess tremendous vitality, but whose performances add to, expand and transform those texts dynamically, might consider. An tablet-ready or mobile app could include versions of the poem, but also a digital version of the poem, programmed by Doug and someone deeply knowledgeable about code, which could "eventilize" (to use scholar Nathan Brown's term) some of the poems in ways neither the text nor the video of the performance exactly can, since each represents a distinct and different medium. Instead, we might now think about the digital as making available a new format, to use David Joselit's concept, which would both present the existing media in which Doug's poetry exists while also expanding its possibilities and his (and black) poetics.

I unfortunately had to run--I mean, I really had to run!--out before the session had fully ended, to catch a train back to New York, so as to get home in time (MANY thanks to Evie Shockley and Stephane Robolin, who rode back from MLA with me, since the PATH was not running past 10 pm and C wasn't feeling well) to catch another train from New York to another destination first thing the next morning, as the possibility of traveling from Boston to my destination by any means other than car was nonexistent, but I was glad to have been able to present at this year's MLA, see that Boston has not changed all that much (except for more pleasant people in its Copley Square restaurants), and not wonder, as I have done more than once at past conferences, what on earth am I doing here?

(PS: As William Pannapacker also notes on the Chronicle of Higher Education's site, this was the year the Digital Humanities really broke out at MLA, as did recognition of the importance of Tweeting and blogging, so....)

Yours truly, photographed by January Gill O'Neill

Two Draft Poems (Spring 2012)

Back in April in several blog posts on the Northwestern University's annual spring Writing Festival, I mentioned my participation in a related program, sponsored by NU's undergraduate Creative Writing Program and the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, that involved working with the excellent young undergraduate creative writing poetry students, who were in turn serving as mentors and teachers for talented, enthusiastic high school poets at Evanston Township High School, the main public school in the suburban city, just north of Chicago, where Northwestern's main campus sits. 

As part of that program, a half dozen NU faculty members, I included, all affiliated with the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium or the undergraduate Creative Writing program, attended several sessions at the high school, and during those, some of us actually wrote drafts of poems with the students. Yesterday I was reading through my current Moleskin notebook, which I began late last year, and came across my drafts of two poems I wrote based on prompts that my faculty colleagues gave to the high school students. I wrote them while sitting with the undergraduates and high schools, even reading the first aloud to them when they pressed me to hear it, and thought I'd post them here, instead of letting the blog remain in radio silence.

I did not write down and cannot recall the prompts, although I believe that in relation to my first piece, one of the high school students wrote and then later revised a poem about finding money on the street. Perhaps that was the source of the "million dollars." With the second I believe a colleague had the students reading poems by Louise Bogan and Melvin Dixon, and it may have been their prosody and rhyme schemes I was following. At any rate these were a nice reminder of last spring, and are but drafts resulting from prompts, so take them as you will.

PEOPLE SAY

People say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
People say that the cows will eventually come home.
People say that the child will do better than her parents.
People say that the child who has her own is blessed.
People say there are more stars in the heavens than moons.
People say if you hear songs in your dreams you'll win a million dollars.
People say if you hear don't hear songs in your dreams you'll win a million dollars.
People say that a lover's kiss is worth more than a million dollars.
People say you can buy a kiss from anyone you dream of for a million dollars.
People say it's better to give than receive, whether it's one kiss, one dollar or a million.
People give a million reasons why they call you or do not call you.
People say they're telling you the truth when they're giving you these reasons.
People say if you listen to the earth you might hear things you need to hear.
People say if you listen to the earth you might hear things you don't want to hear.
People say that if you play your cards right they could still go very wrong.
People say that if you play your cards wrong things could still turn out alright.
People say there's a right way and a wrong way to hear the things people say.

People say there's a right way and a wrong way to understand the things people say.

People say it's often better not to pay close attention to what people say.

People say it's always a good idea to pay close attention to what people say.

People say if you pay close or even a little attention you can learn a great deal about not just what's being said about but about who is saying it.
People say so many things it's almost impossible to remember them.
People say nevertheless it's a good idea to remember the basics, like the sun rising in the east, et cetera.
People sometimes say these things in such a whisper though, you can't can be sure what people say.

EVANSTON

Gold sun green lawns
black yards white dawn
steel tracks fast trains
station wagons

brick homes stone manors

silver lake bronze sand
wide streets polite manners
snow caps mittened hands

tall poles long wires
school songs home choirs
ascending sparrows
alighting crows

Copyright © John Keene, 2012.

What Is Metarealism?

As I noted in a previous post, yesterday I attended a Poetry and Poetics Colloquium-sponsored discussion about--it was more of a conversation, with a very brief reading sandwiched in between, in whispered Russian, by--author Andrei Levkin (1954-).

Two of my Northwestern colleagues, Reginald Gibbons and Ilya Kutik, both poets and scholars, and both long involved in bringing a trove of Russian literature into English, introduced him and are current translating Revkin's and other Russian poets' texts. Reg I have written about extensively on here, but he is, for those unacquainted with his work, an award-winning poet, novelist and short-story writer, and an equally regarded translator from Spanish and Ancient Greek. Among his many honors, his collection Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008), was nominated for the 2009 National Book Award. He cofounded and codirects Northwestern's MA/MFA program, and was formerly chaired the English department.  Ilya, a native of Lvov (Lviv), and graduate of the Gorky School of Literature, teaches in Northwestern's Slavic department and is one of the founders of the "meta-realist" or "meta-metaphorist" school of Russian poetry, and was close to Allen Ginsberg and Joseph Brodsky, among other major poets.  He has published a number of volumes, several translated into English, and his most recent critical studies include Writing as Exorcism: The Personal Codes of Pushkin Lermontov, and Gogol (Northwestern University Press, 2005), and Hieroglyphs of Another World: On Poetry, Swedenborg, and Other Matters (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

The writeup of the event read as follows:

Andrei Levkin (who will be visiting from Moscow) is a writer of "poetic prose" related in style and stance to the contemporary Russian poetic school known as "metarealism." The latter is centered on a particular mode of thought--unfamiliar in English-language poetry and prose--that is highly metaphorical, often apophatic, and fast-moving. Metarealism began in the 1980s (Ilya Kutik was a founder and remains one of the primary figures) and has produced a number of very widely known and highly honored poets, including Alexander Eremenko, Aleksandr Chernov, Elena Schwarts, Olga Sedakova, the late Alexei Parshchikov. It is also poetically affiliated in spirit and approach with such predecessors as Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelshtam, as well as more recent luminaries like Bella Akhmadulina, Victor Krivulin, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (translated in the US by Lyn Hejinian).

I was curious both to hear what Levkin, as well as Ilya and Reg had to say about "meta-realism" and to hear Levkin reading his prose. But as I said, there was only a tiny bit of reading, and a great deal of trying to unpack what "metarealism" is. Here's what I took away: metarealism (meta = something setting beside or with + realism) entails heavy use of a figure, apophasis, traditionally understood as "mentioning without mentioning," that is not exactly metaphor (or simile), nor metonymy, but involves a bit of both. In it, an absence becomes a presence, and figuration proceeds from that absent presence. Thus, a chain of figures can unfold from a metaphor (or metonym, depending) signifying an absent object, or person, or anything, and thus a signifying chain is set in motion that a Russian reader can and will pick up, but which not click for non-Russians.

The idea of a negative space, or absence, as the starting point, seems key, as opposed to the way metaphor (and metonymy) work in English, whereby the presence of something stands in for something else (or in contiguous relation to it). A "double-saying," to use Reg's term. Thus apophasis, even as a figure, is far less common in English, though certain poets (George Herbert, Wallace Stevens, etc.) do utilize apophatic figures. In Russian as in English, the apophatic carries mystical (metaphysical?) resonances that English translations cannot capture, and extends beyond literature to visual arts as well. In apophatic theology, the ineffability of God requires that rather than describing Him or Her or Them in positive terms (immanence, which is to say, presence), that the description proceed by what S/He or They are not (transcendence, which is to say, presence).

I should note that there is a form of apophasis that isn't uncommon in English, and it's known as paralipsis, praeteritio, preterition, parasiopesis, or cataphasis, and was a favorite of Richard Nixon's, among other politicians (keep your ear ready to see if and when it appears during this election cycle). It involves saying something while denying you're saying it. So (and these my versions, not Nixon's actual words), "I will not question the motives of those on the other side pressing for my impeachment," or "My opponent is a lying thief who hates babies and puppies, but I'm not going to say a bad words about him." Other related figures include epanorthosis (accumulation and statement by negation) and occultatio (statement of something by not stating it). And so forth. It is clearly related to the rhetorical figure of irony, and as such can be quite effective. Apophasis, though, as the metarealists use it, is more subtle.

Ilya Kutik (l) and Andrei Levkin (r)

A clearer example: Reg and Ilya discussed translating a poem by Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010), a homage to Robert Lowell (1917-1977), in which Voznesensky notes the angle of Lowell's head, tilted as if there were an invisible violin there. But there is no violin. Yet by the end of the poem that Voznesensky hopes to hear the music of that absent violin. Or, in the same poem, Voznesensky notes a notch, cut by Peter the Great (1672-1725) in a hut, and how Lowell was tall enough to touch the notch. In the poem the apophatic figure involves Lowell not becoming that notch or in some connective relation to it, and thus becoming the Czar, but fitting into the space of that notch, the absent space that notch creates, which thus invokes Lowell's presence. Lastly, in the same poem, Reg pointed out, Voznesensky mentions how tombstones in a grave are like Post-It notes. One can imagine this metaphor with ease, and a grave metonymically links to the dead, and death itself.  So Voznesensky goes searching among them for Lowell, now buried in a grave, and the absent Lowell and the Post-it notes, in aggregate, transpose  into the book of Lowell, the books of Lowell, that Voznesensky can read.

Hmm.  I think I get it, sort of. Ilya also spoke about the iconostasis, and how in a Russian Orthodox Church, a wall stood between the altar and the congregation, unlike in Roman Catholic or Protestant churches, and how the presence of this wall of icons made active the presence of the hidden altar.A senior colleague, Larry Lipking, asked whether in all this there was not the residue of the theological, of Orthodox traces, and Ilya averred, saying that in fact there were. He also pointed out how the idea of "the word made flesh," a theological idea that also carries back to orality, of course, still remained active for Russian poets and readers, and noted how Kasimir Malevich's (1879-1935) famous black square painting was also called "The New Icon," not simply to be provocative or blasphemous, but because, in an apophatic gesture, the black square represented the absence of the icon, so central to Orthodoxy, only the (white gessoed) canvas frame remaining. Double hmm.

Finally Andrei Levkin, who is a very highly regarded journalist and experimental author, and editor-in-chief of the political ezine www.polit.ru, read from his text, which, as I said, Ilya and Reg have been translating. He read so softly, in Russian, I had to lean forward in my chair just to hear the words. He noted how he was interested in a kind of installation of words to create his prose works, almost as if he were talking about an art installation as opposed to a narrative. This got me thinking about the various Russian prose--fiction--writers I know of, all of whom do not stint on plot or characterization, and how different his work sounded and felt. Levkin pointed out that most of the people I was probably thinking about were carrying on a specifically Russian tradition, while he, a native of Riga, Latvia, though part of that larger tradition, took a different approach.

As he was speaking and Reg, I believe was responding to him, I thought about his comments about the relationship between his work and contemporary art, and about how Jean-François Lyotard, in his famous essay on Barnett Newman and the idea of the "contemporary sublime," noted that one of the most important shifts to take place among the 40s and 50s generation of artists, the Abstract Expressionists and their peers, was to ask the question not of "what is it?" or "why is it?" but rather, "Is it there?" which is also to say, "what is there?"  The idea of filling space, as opposed to filling it with an image or a particular kind of composition or color, to question pictorial space itself as presence and negation, seemed to be operating, in some way, with Levkin, in contrast to the other Russian prose writers, like Tatyana Tolstaya say, or Vladimir Sorokin, of whom I've written some on here. Thus for Levkin "what is there?" and "is it there?" perhaps functioned apophatically instead of the more usually prose fictional question, from which narrative proceeds: what is happening, and who is doing what in relation to what's happening. That of course is the ground of fiction across the globe.

I still must say I'm not sure I fully grasp "metarealism" or apophasis, and I also thought about the widespread presence of the negative--down to actually statements, as in "Analysis III," questioning what absence itself reveals--in Seismosis, not that I knew then or now that much about negation, apophasis, or so on, but all of that's for another discussion. I will raise my antennae when I'm reading Levkin's work in translation, or that of any of the many Russian poets of the 20th century, especially those in the metarealist school, linked to it or inspired by it, trying to be aware of how the apophatic works.

Excerpt: Frank O'Hara

Kenneth Koch, Patsy Southgate, Frank O'Hara

Here is a snippet from one of the Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative chapbooks I picked up last weekend, a letter circa Spring 1955, from Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) to Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), during the years when they were consolidating their friendship, and just beginning to publish the poetry that subsequent generations of readers now know as the earliest examples of New York School writing. I like this letter because it gives a clear sense of O'Hara's jaunty and campy sensibility and style, as well as little hints of what he (then toiling at the front desk at the Museum of Modern Art) and Koch (then traveling in Europe with his wife, Janice Elwood Koch) were up to. It mentions one of the famous episodes in American mid-century poetry history, the initial rejection of both O'Hara's and John Ashbery's (1927-) [called "John Ash" and "J A" below] first collections of poetry by the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1955, a situation that the judge, W. H. Auden (1907-1973), later rectified when he asked that O'Hara and Ashbery send their collections to him directly, and he chose--though not enthusiastically, according both to his then assistant and eventual close friend and associate of O'Hara, Koch and Ashbery, James Schuyler (1923-1991), and to his somewhat disaffected introduction--Ashbery's volume, which was published the next year, in 1956, as Some Trees. The CUNY chapbook includes notes to all the references, but here are some clues if you're not familiar with these names: Larry [Rivers] (1923-2002), Grace [Hartigan] (1922-2008), and [Jean-Paul] Riopelle (1923-2002) were visual and plastic artists; Joe [Brainerd] (1941-1994) was an author, collagist, cartoonist and painter; Wystan is W. H. Auden; and Koch's two versions of "The Circus," the first one praised here, are among his best and most famous single poems). I highly recommend them.

***

May 9, 1955
New York

Dear Kenny,

Not knowing where you are, I'm writing you back in Paris. Doubtless you two have gone to Labrador or Aden, there's no way of guessing.

Have you see the art show we sent to the Orangerie?  and have you seen the Musée d'Art Moderne show, which has a Hartigan in it? Write me your impressions.

I'm sending you my first poem in French. If you find any mistakes please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you'll be able to get it printed in the French Vogue with a suitable decoration by Riopelle. Does it sound French, I wonder?

How is Janice? Would she like to sell me her painting of Joe by Larry I have grown passionately fond of it and would buy it at whatever price (but I know she only paid $25, honey, and ten years have not yet passed), but couldn't afford anything over $50, I don't think unless it were long-range. The money might come in handy, however, as your stay continues so let me know.

John Ash has writen a miraculous new 3 act play which takes place in the Canadian Northwest and is full of Mounties and Indians. It is more or less of an homage à Rin Tin Tin, with Pirandelloesque touches. It is full of something like fresh mountain air and has a simplicity like quicksand. You'll adore it.

We both sent books to Yale with disastrous results. Mine was returned because it arrived too late and then John's was returned because they are so stupid. And now Wystan will not see either of them. That preliminary screening gimmick is a crime--there can't be so many each year. You'd think he'd realize that no lesser person than himself should be allowed to make even the first rejections--what's the sense of his being editor if his choice is limited to the final 15 manuscripts and they are weeded out by a perfectly ordinary commercial publishing system? He was complaining before he left that there were so few interesting ones, and this certainly explains that. Oh well, who cares? But he might have liked John's enough to do it...

Are you too busy traveling to write? or writing to travel? Send me another delicious postcard, a note, some poems (I loved the ones you sent J A, especially Geography and the Circus). As you always do, give me the feeling about your works that "Alps on Alps arise" or whatever that line is.

Love to both,
Frank

From "this pertains to me which mean to you": The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O'Hara 1955-1956 PART 1. Josh Schneiderman, editor. New York: Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series 1, Number 2, Winter 2009.

Quarter's Over + Neuroaesthetics, Part 1: Eric Kandel

At 3 pm today, all grades had to be in, and mine were, so I officially have concluded the winter quarter! And what did winter quarter comprise, in addition to committee work: three fully enrolled (or two-and-one-half) courses, two with undergraduate (introductory and advanced theory and practice) fiction writers, the other with undergraduate (and graduate) literature and theory students; three honors theses (one I was advising, which was recommended for departmental honors!--congratulations, Steve!); one MFA thesis (that I advised, and which is now approved!--congratulations, Libby!); supervising, with colleagues in the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, a group of of excellent undergraduate poetry students who were working with high school poetry students; and guiding three brilliant undergraduate researchers whose summer projects I hope get funded. In ten weeks. I almost cannot believe that the quarter is now over, but this is spring break week, so I'll be trying to read a little for pleasure, watch not too much TV, get out and about, and prepare for the quarter that rolls in next Monday and other great things to come, about which I'll say more soon. I also am going to try to blog a bit more, so I hope I can manage a few more posts than 1-2 per week. We'll see.

***

Several times over the past few years I've blogged about neuroscience and literature, and so two recent articles I came across snared my attention. In this post, I'll talk about the first, Alexander Kafka's Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Eric Kandel's Visions," used a review of a new book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House), by Kandel, the Nobel Laureate brain scientist and Columbia University professor, to discuss his contributions the burgeoning field of "neuroaesthetics," or the disciplinary nexus where brain and cognitive sciences and aesthetics, or theories of art, intersect. Kafka's piece opens with a snippet of Kandel's study--and let me state for the record that I do not agree with Kandel's essentializing view of women's affect, as expressed in this initial excerpt--to introduce the neuroscientist's attempt to read an image by the fin de siècle, Vienna Secessionist plastic artist Gustav Klimt, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1901, oil on canvas, Austrian Gallery Belvedere, above right), via certain formal and expressive features that connect to the "neurochemical cognitive circuitry" of you, the viewer. What do I mean? Quoth Kandel:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

Kandel's reading is full of speculation, but Kafka goes on to point out that cognitive scientists like Kandel, who began his career as a clinical psychologist before shifting into research on the vertebrate brain of the snail Aplysia, work for which he received his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, have increasingly been looking at the connections between aesthetics and the brain, through experimental testing methods like brain imaging and cognitive tests, in some key ways underpinning what artists have always known and argued--art matters, works in certain ways, and should not be taken or dismissed lightly, as it still too often is.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, oil on canvas, Neue Galerie)

Kandel is not the first brain scientist to write on what is becoming known as neuroaesthetics, but, Kafka says, he did set forth a research agenda of sorts in his 2006 memoir, In Search of Memory (W. W. Norton & Co.), asking, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?" His pursuit of answers to these questions over the last decade has resulted in his new study, which addresses these questions in relation to the work of three major Viennese Expressionist visual artists, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. (How covenient it must have been for his research to have the Neue Galerie so close!) Klimt's ornately patterned, carefully composed and exquisitely colored canvases, which I admit I find transfixing, serve as the means for Kandel to talk about a constellation of issues, from the historical to the discursive to the formal. Among Kandel's foci are the influence the anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl and similar figures from the Vienese and Central European world of this epoch had on all these artists, the circulation of ideas put into play by figures in the circle around Sigmund Freud, and the rich background of contemporary research on perception.  Importantly, Kandel also, Kafka says, makes a case for a negative-capability approach to scientific "reductionism," arguing that it does not diminish the power or beauty of the artworks to identify the neural foundations of how artworks work in and on our brains, but enriches our understanding of them.  Yet he is not attempting to collapse art and science into each other; according to the article, he cites the late biologist and author Stephen Jay Gould's desire for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."

Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest/Beech Forest
(1903, oil on canvas, Private Collection.)

Thus a newly developing field: neuroaesthetics, which is about a decade and half old, though its origins lie in the work of figures like Freud who, Kandel notes, did recognize a deep relationship between perception and affect but who not have the benefit of advanced experimental techniques we now do. Yet with those new techniques and findings, one of the points that Kandel, and peers like Semir Zeki of University College London appear to be making, is that scholarship in the arts should incorporate more of this material, a suggestion that may raise hackles among some humanities and arts scholars, as well as brain scientists, who find the search for neural correlates to aesthetic--affective, social and other kinds of experiences--to be problematic. In The Age of Insight, Kandel neurology and brain science in relation to visual art alone, but Zeki says that there is a "faculty of beauty" in the brain not dependent upon the "modality" through which its trasmitted, but which can be activated by a music, visuality, or both, as well as by other sources (including language, as I've written about before, and will continue in part 2 of this post) too. Ultimately, though, the implications go beyond aesthetics, towards a deeper understanding about human experience. We may not yet have an answer for the question What is art for? but we increasingly know, at levels artists have intuited but which scientists can now answer with ever greater clarity, at least with regard to our perceptions and emotions, How does art work?

Update: an unsurprising skeptic, the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton, on "The Brain Drain" (i.e., as the tagline says, "Neurosciences wants to be the answer to everything. It isn't"), in The Spectator.

Nathanaël & Ronaldo V. Wilson at "Queer(ing) Poetics"

Nathanaël and Ronaldo V. Wilson

On Monday and Tuesday, under the auspices of the university's Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, writers Nathanaël and Ronaldo V. Wilson came to campus to participate in a two-day event, entitled "Queer(ing) Poetics." On Monday evening they gave dynamic readings before a full audience, and on Tuesday afternoon, they offered statements on their poetics and participated in a conversation with faculty members and students on a range of topics, including translation, phenomenology, autobiography, filiation, and their relation to the term queer itself. I have heard both of them read many times, but never together, and was delighted finally to be able to see them together in conversation, and to hear and consider the points of intersections between their distinct and amazing bodies of work.

Here is the brief introduction I offered for their reading, which I have altered slightly.

***
I would like to welcome everyone to tonight's reading by Nathanaël and Ronaldo V. Wilson, which is sponsored by the Northwestern University Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, the Gender Studies Program, and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Course Enhancement Program. To all of our sponsors, thank you very much.

I begin with a brief introduction of both writers together, and then will ask each of them take the floor in succession.


"Queer," the scholar, critic and poet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in her landmark essay "Queer and Now," can refer to: "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality are made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically." She continued by noting "the experimental linguistic, epistemological, representation, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves" in many different ways, including as well "people able to learn from, or identify with such." In this essay Sedgwick goes on to decouple "queer" from gender and sexuality per se, to suggest that other concepts and categories of identifications, such as race and class, might be "queer" or "queered," suggesting that "'queer' seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person's undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filitation."


The work of both of today's visitors exemplifies these and many other aspects of what we might term "queer" poetics. In the work of Nathanaël and Ronaldo V. Wilson, we can see an open mesh of possibilities being continuously woven; at the levels of words and syntax, and at the levels of form and genres themselves.  Both writers create texts that function constitutively entre-genre, to use a term of Nathanaël's, which is to say, between genre—and as the French suggests, between gender, queering the concept of genre and forms themselves to engender new forms, new excesses and surpluses of meaning.

Indeed Nathanaël often works in the interstices of language(s) themselves, French and English, translating—and carrying over the living and dead body of—prior discourse, lyric, narrative, her own and others, poetry into essay into philosophy into history into song, pressing forth and producing texts that elude any single language or easy understanding of signification, even as their meanings take shape before our eyes and crystallize. Indeed, in Nathanaël's work one must work to re-orient oneself—for queering the phenomenological is part of Nathanaël's practice and praxis—within and to the text, recalibrating one's eye and ear, to read and listen, carefully: only then can one engage with their insistent spirit of inquiry, and find where their answers lie.


In Ronaldo V. Wilson's work, the desiring and desired brown body, objectified, speaks back. In his first book, which hovers between lyric and narrative, fiction and poem, the reader enters the brown boy's house of thought, of wonders, and wanders around there uneasily, the form, the content, the language itself enstranging one as the boy's own perceptions become enstranged and simultaneously ever more familiar. In his second book, the black object under examination engages in the very kinds of experimental self-perception and self-fashioning, filiation and affiliation, that Sedgwick suggests, improvising what Michel Foucault called an "art of life." In both books Wilson pushes language to its limits—for woven within and beneath his texts are other texts, other languages, black tongues and Tagalog, the discourse of middle-class life and the academy, the discourse of theory and of various poetic traditions, creating a brilliant net from which emerges work like little other, poetic or otherwise: reorient yourself, and enter.


Nathanaël writes l'entre-genre in English and French, with nearly a score of books, including We Press Ourselves Plainly (Nightboat Books, 2010); Absence Where As (Claude Cahun And The Unopened Book) (Nighboat Books, 2009), which received the Prix Alain-Grandbois; At Alberta (BookThug, 2008); The Sorrow And The Fast Of It (Nightboat Books, 2007); Touch To Affliction (Coach House, 2006); Je Nathanaël (l'Hexagone, 2003), which exists in English self-translation (BookThug, 2006); and L'Injure (l'Hexagone, 2004). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene with book-length translations in Bulgarian (Paradox Publishing, 2007) and Portuguese. In addition to self-translation, Nathanaël has translated works by Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, Bhanu Kapil, and Sina Queyras.

Nathanaël

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of Publishing Triangle's 2010 Thom Gunn Award. He has held fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, The Anderson Center for the Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Yaddo Corporation, and has had four poems nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ronaldo V. Wilson (r), being interviewed by a Medill student

A Poem-Report: Rethinking Poetics @ Columbia

I thus voke thy aid
to my adventurous song,
what are "poetics," what
is poetry? Is it
"segmentivity" or "the news
that stays news," is it central
to the nervous system
of poetics?  Between
Columbia and Penn
a poetics conference, con-
versations begun
by Golston and Perelman,
(and Bernstein, behind them,
in minds, so many here,
and elsewhere, inspirited
with memories and ideas
of Leslie Scalapino, Cage,
Wittgenstein, Emerson,
Dickinson, et. al.),
three days, in Philosophy
ten panels, many panelists:
scholars, critics, poets; 41,
none Asian-Americans
if you're counting. Who counts
haunted the proceedings.
Who counts, in or outside
the proceedings, in or out-
side academe, institutions,
aaaarg.org, outside or in Silli-
man's or the Poetry Foundation's
blogs, the journals, net-
works and coteries,
the batteries of chapbooks
and books the oral and dissertation
writers and committees
might be reading, thinking
about and rethinking,
this rethinking and defining, amidst a ghost
horizon of privilege and invisibilities
framing the conversations'
often radiant, expanded fields.
What counts, as poetry, in
poetry, as poetics: relating to the art
of poetry, of making (poetiké, fr.
Gk. poiein) objects,
cf. Aristotle. Accountings:
poetic composition, tools
and materials, history
(but not materialist history per se),
tradition, relation (mostly tradition
of the European kind),
globalism and hybridity (mostly US,
i.e. "us" (we? who are ____), mostly
form), social location and ethics
(grazie Rachel Blau DuPlessis
and Joan Retallack especially),
poetics and the Academy
(which counts most, perhaps,
among most of the attendees), ecologies
of poetry, poetics as a category,
affective economies and prosodies
(but mostly affect as a concept,
so powerful, contemporary),
the end of authentic time and
reading radicalism came after
my attendance ended, on Sunday,
though PennSound was listening
continuously, so the presentations,
challenges, arguments, vocal antagonisms
and their responses--"fuckface"--will be--
"fuckface"--available--"fuckface"--
to the world. So what is or are poetics,
our poetics, and does poetry matter, do poetries
other than the Euro-American
matter, other Others' poetries
matter, and are there poets
not in academe, not critic-theorists,
not doctoral students or soon to be doctoral
students dissertating, who do? They do. Where
were the writers and students
from the School of the Arts
creative writing department but
three blocks north, Perloff asked,
and is creative writing--poetry--
valid, relevant, connected directly
to this thinking, rethinking
an entity (a system
of institutions, a discourse,
a field, expanded),
this poetry that still holds
considerable capital
(Bourdieu), a high place
in the social (if not economic)
imaginary and hierarchy
(publishing, Epstein, Schiffrin, unmentioned),
that some might be seeking then
by rethinking to destroy?
Is it true that most people hate
poetry? Is it true that most
find it difficult, even beyond
the neoliberal prisonhouse
of university classrooms?
Do most people really think of it
when they think of it at all
in relation only to greeting cards
or else inaugural poets
and poems, like some serious
and bitter medicine lacking even
that sickly-sweet cherry flavoring
that starts to taste good when you're
really sick rather than listening to it
daily in songs, hiphop, rock, pop (so far
as I can recall, never uttered, not once,
not even the touchstone Gods
Dylan-Elvis-Leonard Cohen),
in speech, in backs-and-forths,
writing it in journals, on blogs, to loved
ones, reciting it to impress or beguile
or as acts of resistance, eagerly
returning to poets dead and living
who were not mentioned and wouldn't be
mentioned within a mile
of these sometimes exceptional panels?
Whither music, dance, and related
arts? Must poetry be lineated
as this pseudo-poem report is,
rhythmic, prosodic, metrical (not
that word!), use repetitions at all?
(Oh conceptual poetry, writing,
horribile dictu, you and Flarf
burbling up through the drains
of contemporary writing
and causing great anxiety,
delight, joy, annoyance, fright,
confusion, dismissal, because of your refusal
to fit within unstable confines.)

Brent Edwards spoke of Hemphill
(Julius), Tonya Foster of Sarah Vaughan
(and scat and the scatalogical), but
music was only an echo, a trace
amidst the talking (no singing, scatting),
a solo in this hive of dreaming out loud
and hard, hard thinking into being
(the archive of) an archive.

Oh, there is a blessing in this drizzly breeze
that carries the questions, What counts, who counts
what is poetry, what poetics might be
in an age of ever-developing technologies,
what of books too in this digital
age, our dematerialized present, virtual presences,
the vast and powerful neoliberal "software"
we're all running on, whose air we breathe in
every hour of every day? What of books
and what of collaborations, poetics whose ecologies
encompass other disciplines, landfills, oil spills,
wars metaphorical and literal, embodied as dancers,
publics imagined or not yet imagined,
politics imagined or not yet imagined,
archives imagined or not yet imagined,
poetries becoming "something else," counter-
speculation, material disintegration, waste (shit
and its residues), news, new or old, the impure
products of America (Williams another angel
omnipresent, edifying), all gathered together,
breaking apart (fragments, ruins, the specter
of Modernism and post-modernisms), the oral
and the written, discursivities, "choral."
Can poetry look outside itself?
Can we look outside ourselves, collectively?
Can we look outside the neoliberal, collectively?
Can we look outside the human, collectively?
Can we look outside the windows of the packed room,
past the panes to the concrete, the park and its steep
drop down Morningside Heights to the 116th Street
pavements I crossed to enter on Saturday?
Are we looking outside the comfort-
able confines of the pack,
the alphas and betas setting the pace,
do we see the other faces, the others' faces,
the other poet faces, other poetics facing these,
as we (who?) peer closely at and rethink
our (whose?) own? Who owns these poetics,
these poetries? Who remains invisible
and illegible even after the curtain parts?
Can these poetries and poetics be musical in the absence
of music or discussion of music, can they be or
become ontologically plural and is it ethical if there's not even
an active peeking and looking beyond those panes,
is that poethical if there's peaking beyond and none
here see it or hear it? Brent spoke of Ellington,
parallels, proliferations, concretions, can you hear
it, them? Do you listen? Aware, but you care?
"Everything we see could also be otherwise" (Wittgenstein),
other whys (Baraka): Bernstein's pataqueeranormal, -normative,
his "swerve" and "adversive" ("mental fright"),
his "derangement of the senses" (Rimbaud), his "strange,"
his "swish," and "sissy," but to a swish, a sissy, a queer,
this one here who asks with "sincerity" (Reznikoff, via Zukofsky),
is he really listening, aware yes, sure, sitting there, swerving
there, but what are the manifestations of that care? Show me.
Scalapino: "The human is crisis." (Ghost traces.)
In here poetry is in crisis, poetics are in crisis; out there?
Out there poetries are in crisis, poetics are
and....we are for ontological pluralisms (Erica Hunt), we are.
"One world, many minds" (Hunt) Many minds,
so much cleverness, so little time (Clever Clover
and the landmine of the mouth). Is poetics
a limiting frame? Is poetics in friction
with innovation, does it do the not-Princeton rub
with experimentation? Thinking past the limits
(historical and empirical with figural-Edwards), over there
is where the parallels lie.

Ambitious unknowns, collectively sigh
no more sadly. That is where the lie
parallels the--no Plato, long since buried,
under the unspoken green Greek swards
with Socrates or in some other archive.
Collectivity: what is poetry, we ask you?
Collectivity: poetics? Collect-
ivity: how many times can and must we seek
of an archive? Can and must we not speak of the archives?
Whose? Collectivity: can you answer me
without recourse only to the great master
minds and archives of Europe? One world,
so many minds but all from one historicultural mental massing.
Collectivity: are there verbs to express this kind of thinking?
Don't noun, verb. Don't image, think. Don't look, write.
Don't don't, act. Collectivity: what and where are the answers?
Collectivity: are we not always speaking of the body, of bodies,
ours and others? Collectivity--poetry: image: action:
(Laocoön, with Lessing unmentioned as well).
Collectivity: are aesthetics a superseded category, too
limiting to the field of poetics, its possibilities?
Dead as deconstruction, psychoanalytic theories, post-
colonialities, the new historicisms, the new new post-new?
Collectivity: to get beyond the boundaries set by neoliberalism
and its traps, to puncture the market master magus,
the page, or stage, or dais, to enter the frays
of the digital--this is ethical, we are together in this,
at least some of us, in here, whether we see us
or not, we see US or not, a "we" (or not).
Is there a spark, collectivity, and what is its verb?
What lights, illuminations, fires--what's motive?
Choral crowds, genres for action, verbing and swerving
into the now thing, the now-thinking, thinking now
as it enters and blossoms into something, landscape, harbor,
haven, abatgis, slip, hammock, arbor, slope,
sleep, hammer, keyboard, labor, affect, archive,
hope or some other abstraction, the we
in here, inhering, the we of poetry, poetics,
the whee, way, wee pluralizing, waxing
poetic is a form of knowledge-making,
making and taking back the forms
of knowledge, the possibilities,
rhapsodizing, of pleasure, poetics' and others,
that we're phreaking as we're seeing
and speaking thinking, and wreaking
writing: one world, many
minds (Hunt): many worlds,
many mimes: any worlds,
many memes, reres publicae: poetry.

Whose making all that racket
in the archive? Poetics.
Who's making all that racket
in the traditions? Poetics.
In the archives, poetries
or the traditions of poetics,
traditions temporationally, not spatially,
alternatives, to join, though who's
this we making all this racket
and not even leaving
testimony to the eyelands
beginning to appear,
and are we--we?--spatially
in there? Debriscapes, extrascapes,
countertraditions, are they ours
and are we in there? Are you? Nudge,
engage, be against, to be again, to gain
access to, think through.  Ante, up, anti.
Anti-interpretive, an "erotics" of...stop/ /bogging,
start telling the joke without its form, scatting
performative rather than definitive spaces.
Scattering, reconfiguring, transfiguring,
in the silences
                       within silences.
A baratadeeboppaluquivadoop: phatic.
A da daadaaa deeet deeetdeet
dum diddlysquatalicious--phatic.
Get phat, got that? Trawl Jakobson, Abrams.
Shudder, utter, stagger, stutter, still. Troll
the airwaves, fill them. Flarf dem
um, uh, duh, da, doobie, okey dokey, fort-da, say what?
Phatic, haptic, knowwhatimsaying yo?
Get back, for real, fo sho, daswassup, say what, Son?
You alright, stay around, almost mellow, One...Say,
our "boats are open." (Glissant) Say, the multiple
consciousness (nope, no dope DuBois). Say Césaire
and Baudelaire, "more at stake than aesthetics,"
the beautiful, the true, the sublime, disinterested, purposive,
Aufhebung, the autonomous, the aestheticist,
the historicist, the Dionysian and Appollonian, the high
and low and mid-brow, the is it art or is it not or it is
what I say it is, the public coefficient, the aleatory, the Ou-
LiPolean, the formal or formalist, the depersonalized,
the post-aestheticized, the desiring machined, the it-is-there,
the all of that glowering history, his-story.
This is a confab about poetics (and poetry).
Say dehistoricize and rehistoricize (Willis), push poetry up
against those other works, get it popping, into all that biz it's walking into, talking its way into, stammering and shimmying its way to, this important political labor that people are doing and all of sudden it's become this other thing, a political creature with some power in its having no public power at all, so how do you talk about it, yes you, the poet or critic or poet-critic or academic or whatever you fashion yourself as, coming back to this idea and your archive-praxis, knowing that "all you can do is suddenly listen?" (Cage). Poetry, are we into it? Is it into us? Do we mind it, truly, really? Is it not the basis, or one, for memory, no matter what psychologies and biologies may tell us? So I'm sitting at this seminar at the university, this is a month or so back, and we get into this back-and-forth about some theoretical issue, and my colleague, a poet, fiction writer, essayist, translator, scholar, all these things in the same body, tries to bring the discussion back to the language itself, the language of the poems, and I say, it can be both+and, which is at times a problematic formulation, but this came up again at this conversation, in a conversation, around oppositionality, because there's inclusivity as well, "discursive inclusivity," though the language of the poem, our languages and how we use them, shouldn't be forgotten. Are we in them, poetries, poetics?  Once upon a time a great deal of poetry was published for children and adults read it, adults memorized it, my grandparents did, my parents did, there were all these collective forms and forums, form as a collectivity, hymns, worksongs, music (popular), how did we forget all this? Say, how is it we don't look outside the window most of the time, poetries, poetics?

And this is very sooth that I tell you...radical particularities...the SF language school of the...1970s...not everybody was Kung-Fu fighting...some were talking and writing at the Grand Piano...some (the dazzling Mónica de la Torre) were talking of some talking and writing in the 1920s in São Paulo, Paulicéia Desvairada!...some were talking and writing about those Andrades, Miss São Paulo and the other one, not related...some were talking and writing about the Brazilian manifesto (Modernism--open to the world) and the Cannibal manifesto (closing up shop, a self-devouring)...some were talking about Haroldo de Campos and concrete poetry, how exportable it is, the image prevailing over the text (think Smart vs. Campion)...eye over ear...some were talking and writing about how "the longing for modernity led the poets to abstract the location of the future" (so beautiful, a truly poetic thought)...some were talking (and citing Roberto Schwartz) about how de Campos by 1963 had gone onto another project, the Galáxios, known in Brazil and Latin America but not on English tongues...some were talking suddenly in Spanish about the neobarroco and la poesía conceptual y pues porque no dejó de hablar en español many people perhaps didn't understand...and some were asking questions like, what might poetry for export be?...and what might the goal of extending a poetics to include globalisms?...and are you a filterer, relater, or rehearser, poetries and poetics...and it was good to hear about poetries and poetics outside of the Euro-American matrix...because those other poetries exist, those poetics exist...not cut off from the EA matrix but also not totally dependent upon them...they exist, we exist...and them someone was talking about antagonisms and "American hybridity" meaning formal hybridities of a very specific kind and that led to a blowup during the Q&A...that antagonism and blow were wake-up calls...there was the poetry of the expanded field...the charts that lured my eyes like sirens...Smithson, the jetty, the not-sculpture, not-language, the Klein square (not bottle), poetics, the not-poetry...making me think as I type this, am I still writing a poem?...is there segmentivity and rhythm here...repetition...rhyme...how would I describe the poetics of this elliptical passage...ellipsis being a technique and rhetorical figure...and Butler having returned us in the 1990s to the importance of the rhetorical, the gestural, as against the structural, the linguistic (Nealon)...how would and could you speak of the poetics...the poetry...here and now...

Of hermit saints, these words addressed,
much more they said, so many pages I filled,
cursive upon cursive, line by line,
about genre (social) and form (individual),
about Derrida, the negative, social
and ethical locations, about absences
that Blau DuPlessis elegantly touched upon,
ethnicity (RACE?), class, gender (SEXUALITIES?),
disabilities, economics, social positions,
sediments and sedimentation,
memories' traces in the identifications
we daily live and perform,
the scripts and texts we carry
around inside us, imagi-nations,
Toscano's "material
translocative carnicities,"
evidence of things not seen
but discussed, reviewed,
on location, in location,
ego and echo (-location),
Lo: Poetry, said Joan
Retallack, "is a form
of courage," the microclimates
of our poetries affecting
and effecting the larger climates
of our world (Cage),
this necessity, always,
for reciprocal alterity,
alterities this courage,
created by poetry,
this ethical necessity
of relationality,
in Chang (videoing Hughes)
and Tolson, this need
of and for "soul," the word
SOUL, thinking about
the between,
a "textual structure
of feeling," older forms,
vulnerabilities,
rhyme, rhythms
going back
to that black place
--poetries, poetics,
do you hear me,
do you read me,
over and out?

((Freemasonrywise)
I missed it--Delays!--Escarpments!--
Those light-rail tracks and subways
of dishonor!
The panelists' disquisitions
on poetics and the academy,
there is no terminal on the molehill
of ambitions...the most important panel
of the morn....Spahr, Novak, Giscombe,
Evans, Young...at lunch D spelled me....
you start out as a peon and maybe be-
come a classroom star...
Oh, how to think beyond the architecture
of the private or semi-public institution...
Spahr: how to (re)create the kinds
of associations and organizations that existed
not so long ago, the disappearing independents,
journals, zines, collectives (cf. the Dark Room)
that arose outside and beyond
the universities' doors?
Is that outside out there any more? (Yes.)
Is the only desire now to gain entry? (No.)
--Creating those open spaces that defy
the boundaries, the rules, the private, and capital.
That resist the overwhelming neoliberal vacuum.
You began a schoolgirl and now wield your PhD.
You are armed with knowledge but you are not free.
Giscombe avowed teaching writing, creative
writing, taking field trips, leaving to see,
to learn, to come to know in the out-there, the otherwheres.
But what about hierarchies, prestige, the a priori
power of certain names and the potencies they claim,
these institutions and their social capital, their demesnes?
What about the wolfish logic (the genius
of capitalism--Paul O'Neill) that devours us,
poetry too, that makes a college ed and gig necessities
for so many?--Not all are rich, not all entitled,
so few can say I want to write all day or even part of each day
and someone will pay my rent, utilities, clothe me, feed me.
--Even the idea of the open university is a threat here.
--Even the idea of the non-academic is a threat here.
Does this stifle poetry, suffocate it? What would a poetics
of the socially, economically and politically open
sound like, look like, feel like, taste like?
What would a poetics of freedom, a free poetics look like?
We would know it when we were in it, wore it,
wrote into it, would we want it?
BD spoke of cross-university
partnerships, outside registrars,
she and Perelman Penn and Temple,
what the students gained in access,
but what about those not in their classes?
Is there a public forum by which these ideas
can circulate, the poems can circulate, the poets
connect? Is there a public poetic sphere,
not about power and privilege,
reputation making and breaking, the great
men and women, lettering and rubberstamping,
where poets and poetics can
even uneasily set camp?
Write the secret sign, and make it available...
write the open sign, and free it: poetry.)

And went down and rode in a hole
in the ground. To Jersey. And then went up
and climbed a mountain in Harlem.
Saw Schurz, back to the living city,
bronze profile helming the promontory.
Families moving about as embodied poetry.
Asphalted history snaking beneath me.
Three streets, two hills, back in Philosophy.
So different from the spaces Bitsui comes from.
The places a few of my ancestors knew.
Where words still bore their sacred force.
Where capitalism had not yet snowed
over the hard terrain. Where hot rain fell
into the estuaries as they sailed them,
worked them, their own or some others'
dying fields, the blue/black ceilings or skies
repeatedly raised by their plaintive blues: poetry.
What is the message within the message?
What is the message beyond itself?
Occasionally, like yesterday or today
I am permitted to enter, at a premium, a message
like a meadow that doesn't feel mine,
mean or indifferent, at least, where I stumble
and sputter and listen and linger,
where longing pervades me and I spend a long time.
What is the message of the message?
What passes through the meadows
that are not truly ours? Poetry.
Watten: nature's importance "as a site of the not-me."
What do you mean when you tell me
of ecology and poetry?
What is poetic ecology, or an ecology
of poetry? What is an ecological poetics
or ecopoethics, and where does it take us?
Bitsui: these lands, my people's,
are now turning to dust.
Ecologies require multiple
ways and acts of seeing.
Ecopoethics require human trust
in the nonhuman.
Not reducible to a single form.
Sometimes silence is better than doing harm.
Sometimes silence is the way to go.
Sometimes silence carries the power of a charm.
Sometimes in that silence you come to know.

Voyage through death
to life upon these poetic shores,
but does this even address
unending questions of categories?
Why, Dworkin queries,
the category of "poetry" at all?
Why are the other categories
so given to parsimony?
Why pitch your freaky tent
in front of this particular stall?
Why's poetry always stirring
up so much damned trouble?
In the center of the ring,
fists raised, ready to rumble?
Denken ist dichten, or should be
a form of therapy--but not poetry!
Golding: "the production
of poetry and its consumption."
Don't all roads return us
ultimately to this issue
of commodification?
No no no no no no no!
Future anteriors, becoming
the person one is,
the "authentic poetic project,"
pace Dorothea Lasky (where was she?).
Hofer resurrected Aram Saroyan.
Thank you. Voyage through death
to life, or "lighght," as AS
had it, Duncan chose it.
"Minima," "spareness,"
and as Emerson proposes it,
"every word was once a poem,
every word is a new relation."
Pound: "Rhythm is a form cut into time."
Saroyan: "Consonants govern pacing."
Pound: the poem debunks
"by lucidity." LIGHGHT.
Has one come on? Many?
Because we are back to forms
cut into time, to poetry. Perloff:
the public, what's a poem,
Maya Angelou at the podium,
riffing for Clinton (which became
a House song I heard and danced
to--"a Rock, a River, a Tree"--at the Delta Elite,
--"you, Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation"--but I doubt Perloff,
who knows so very much has ever heard that),
poetry, etc.  But really it's all
about poetry. The poem. Place,
Vanessa, Statement of Fact,
sexual crimes, etc. But really it's all about
poetry. More Vanessa Place, career,
fiction, one subgroup but the wrong
one, blurb, what do we call it,
sexually contentious, etc. Poetry.
Goldsmith's (not present)
Traffic "is poetry." Fitterman
UbuWeb Dworkin and Goldsmith's
anthology from Northwestern,
etc. BUT REALLY IT'S ALL
ABOUT POETRY!
A fuzziness today, but...
Clover: prestige, kids know it
it when they spot someone with flow
in basketball, on TV, in movies--
poetic vs. prosaic, no body
wants to be a vast flat lot or lumpy plot
of words and text and movement,
but wants that lyric swagger: poetry.
"Is there a desire to undermine
or destabilize this?"
Perloff: "That which is written
in the language of information
but not in the language game
of giving information,"
i.e., Wittgenstein. Word.
Jakobson said: "poeticity"; Blau DuPlessis:
"chosen segmentivity," "rhythmic
segmentivity," that's poetry.
But really it's all about the poetry,
or should be, according to Marjorie,
lose not sight of that,
as pretty and shiny and exciting
as theory and criticism
and cultural studies and psych
and anthro and socio
and performo and bio and neuro
all are ("hairy star turning
under water"--BD). Po-e-try.

Some hour, in the emergence from this fierce insight,
let me sing--because that was once the source of this gift--
jubilation and praise to the assenting or dissenting angels.
Not real or better angels but people who think deeply,
seriously about affective economies. They may or may not
be poets. They mostly have academic jobs and are very smart.
They know their Derrida like seminarians know the Bible.
And Foucault because he's still important, and Benjamin,
and Deleuze and Guattari, and Butler, and Sedgwick,
and Leo Bersani, with panache and despite the difficulty.
(Once I spent a week trying to figure out
the argument in Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?"
which I pursued because the title intrigued me so.
But that's neither here nor there and I finally untangled
Bersani's argument, or at least convinced myself I did.
It took me longer to grasp Lacan's "Kant with Sade,"
but there's revelation in persistence. Most
of the time, IMHO.) Thence: affect queer theory
before queer theory 1990s affect Butler Bersani
plus a short graphic sexual passage, involving
male-male sex, penis and ass--Nealon. Brilliant.
Williams (Raymond), Structures of Feeling,
affect, neoliberalism, Zukofsky on Reznikoff's
"sincerity,"Peck and Tickle, neoliberalism
as a "software," Harvey, Lefebvre, Ahmed,
neoliberalism, market/structure of capitalism,
sincerity, "of word to thing," to the social,
"sincerity is a software that would allow other forms
of sociability into the poem," still thinking about
what that would look like (the poetry)--Derksen.
Brilliant. "There is a third path and that
is the one we're going to take."
(Shklovsky) and much about
the problems of witnessing
in an encantatory performance.
--Zolf. As always (cf. Adfempo),

super brilliant. Then the much-heralded
Lisa Robertson, who spoke
on M. Henri Meschonnic,
a figure needing to be
translated, prodigious,
who passed last year,
his poetry and theories
and terms so vital,
but also running counter
to the terms so widespread
in the contemporary
American experimental
poetic communities;
pour M. Meschonnic
le truc c'est rhythm
"as a social force
via prosody"--so
many good quotes,
including "the active ethic
of this listening
for which a politics
comes" and "motility,"
and "the poem is
the critique
of the sign,"
his critique
of l'écriture et
les pages blanc
and il y avait tant plus...
until in the Q&A
Golston notes
that he wrote about Meschonnic
in his first book, pointing
to the French figure's
intellectual genealogy
that includes Klages
(a raging anti-Semite)
and Jacques-Dalcroze
(Mr. Eurythmics,
who also believed
rhythm could be a "moral
hygiene" and the basis
for a "new society)," etc.
Questions ensued
and not a lot of answers
and we, who think
of ascending joy,
would feel the emotion,
yet that's not what
all this work on affect
is really about,
that almost dismays
as much as our anxieties
about poetry and activism,
or rather poetics
and activism, though
for some poets
and activists, like those
at Split This Rock,
who were nowhere near
this event, this tension
unfolds as central
to their praxis,
if I'm using the terms
of art correctly,
but nevertheless
these are very smart
people who are training
others through their gifts,
and writing about writing,
and writing, and perhaps
not feeling dismay
or the stultifying angels
of tradition or neoliberalism
or of poetry itself,
when it, a joyful thing
at times, at others
utterly terrifying, into
their laps or laptops
or books or minds
or mine or anyone's,
like this longish
report--I thus invoke
your aid itself
a kind of poetics--
slowly and
inexorably falls.

Copyright © John Keene, 2010