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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>Jennifer Moxley</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Jennifer Moxley</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, December 09, 2014</span></h2>

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<a href="http://markbibbins.com/"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Mark</span></a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Bibbins"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Bibbins</span></a><br />
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, April 18, 2013</span></h2>

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<a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/moxley/"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Moxley</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: red; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/Boise-State/Moxley-Jennifer_Complete-Reading_BSU-MFA-Series_Boise_10-21-11.mp3"><span style="color: red;">reading</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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State University</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, April 06, 2013</span></h2>

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<b><span style="color: #002060; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">A <i><a href="http://www.belladonnaseries.org/index.html"><span style="color: #002060;">Belladonna</span></a>*</i> <a href="https://jacket2.org/podcasts/belladonna-anthology"><span style="color: #002060;">anthology</span></a></span></b><span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: red; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/podcasts/PennSound-Podcast_28_Belladonna.mp3"><span style="color: red;">reading</span></a></span></b><span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;"><a href="http://electiveaffinitiesusa.blogspot.com/2010/06/erica-kaufman.html"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Erica</span></a>
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Kaufman.html"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Kaufman</span></a>,
<a href="http://coldfrontmag.com/poets-off-poetry/popular-music-and-me-by-rae-armantrout"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Rae</span></a>
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Armantrout.php"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Armantrout</span></a>,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;"><a href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/200801/?read=interview_davis"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Lydia</span></a>
<a href="http://bombsite.com/issues/60/articles/2086"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Davis</span></a>,
<a href="http://www.esquemag.org/2012/02/05/rachel-levitsky/"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Rachel</span></a>
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Levitsky.php"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Levitsky</span></a>,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Mesmer"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Sharon</span></a>
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Mesmer.php"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Mesmer</span></a>,
<a href="http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/issue15_Peterson.html"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Tim</span></a>
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Peterson.php"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Trace</span></a>
<a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/peterson/"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Peterson</span></a>,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0d0d0d; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">&amp; <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/moxley/"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Jennifer</span></a>
<a href="http://english.umaine.edu/faculty/jennifer-moxley/"><span style="color: #0d0d0d; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: &quot;lumm=95000 lumo=5000&quot;; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">Moxley</span></a></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of the 16 other books from Poetry Society of America entrants that I feel all deserve awards, hoopla, and great notice, three are books that I&#8217;ve already reviewed here on the blog: Jean Valentine&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/11/when-jean-valentines-dream-barker-won.html"><span style='color:black'>Little Boat</span></a>, </i>Jennifer Moxley&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/07/no-two-books-of-jennifer-moxleys-really.html"><span style='color:black'>The Line</span></a> </i>&amp; <span class=SpellE>Laynie</span> Browne&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2007/04/ive-arrived-at-that-stage-in-life-when.html"><span style='color:black'>Daily Sonnets</span></a></i>. It has now been five months, nine months &amp; a year respectively since I first read &amp; reviewed each of these volumes, and one of the substantial pleasures of judging the William Carlos Williams Award lies in seeing just how very well each stands up. It gives me great confidence that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>when</i> (not <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>if</i>) I return to these books ten, maybe even twenty years from now, they will continue to shine just as brightly. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;m not going to re-review <span class=GramE>these work</span> here &#8211; you can click on the links above &amp; go back to my original notes as well as get to further links through which each can be ordered. And you should &#8211; these are books that deserve to be in everybody&#8217;s library. But I want to note here one of the telling facets of this contest for me. Of the nineteen books that totally convinced me they deserve such kudos as these, 13 are by women. Just stacking the books from the next layer, the male pile is almost identical to the stack of books by women (I note however that more guys have &#8220;fat&#8221; books than gals). The implication is obvious: we have arrived at a moment when women have reached <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>at least parity </i>when it comes to the production of poetry &#8211; and at the highest levels it may be much more than just parity. Yet if I go back to the hoopla that surrounded the &#8220;numbers trouble&#8221; (<a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/CR_532_Spahr_Young.pdf"><span style='color:black'>PDF</span></a>) debate several months back, I recall that Juliana Spahr &amp; Stephanie Young had tracked reviews in this here blog o&#8217; mine and noted that I too skewed male, noticeably so, when it came to reviewing books of poetry. Yet even I&#8217;m willing to concede that of the 19 best books of last year, at least 13 are by female authors, a ratio of better than two to one. What gives?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I think there are a couple of things going on here. The most significant I think is my age: 61. I first came into the world of writing when the Donald Allen anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry, </i>was at its height at defining the New American canon &#8211; and that book had just four female contributors among its 44 poets. Also hot news there in the mid-1960s was the Totem / </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Corinth</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> mini-anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Four Young Lady Poets, </i>edited by the notable feminist LeRoi Jones. The young ladies included Carol Bergé, Rochelle Owens, Barbara <span class=SpellE>Moraff</span> &amp; Diane Wakoski. Today, that title &#8211; and all the attitudes it projects &#8211; sounds as dated as an episode of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Twilight Zone. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My generation really came of age as poets in the early 1970s, and while women were starting to write in great numbers in that decade, what Judy Grahn has called the &#8220;strategic decision&#8221; of separatism on the part of many women poets actually reduced the number who were participating in scenes that included the likes of me. If nothing else, this had the short-term impact of reinforcing the maleness of some scenes. When, in 1981 &amp; &#8217;82, I put together <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In the American Tree </i>as an anthology of what had become known as language poetry, I had the opportunity to decide whether to stick to the historical record of who published what &amp; where, or of puffing the book up in the name of a better political balance. As I&#8217;ve noted here before, there were just three poets who fit the objective qualifications for the anthology who were not included. Two were male &#8211; Curtis Faville &amp; David Gitin &#8211; both of whom had at that point stopped publishing. But the omission of Abigail Child was, <span class=GramE>in<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>retrospect</span>, a flat out blunder on my part. Still, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In the American Tree </i>was 75 percent male &amp; Abby&#8217;s inclusion would not have radically revised those numbers. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you factor in the number of women on the scene who were obviously post-avant, but who consciously distanced themselves from langpo &#8211; the writers who would make up the core of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>(HOW<span class=GramE>)ever</span>, </i>for example &#8211; you can see that the overall balance in the 1970s was clearly changing, but it was still a far cry from what we have today. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>To the degree that I am a creature of my generation, focusing on my own age cohort and those immediately older, say up to the age of my parents, the numbers you see here on the blog are, I think, pretty predictable. When I focus on writers who are older than I, the numbers will be a little worse, and on my own generation, a little better, tho still a far cry from parity. But to the degree that I focus on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>what is going on in poetry right now</i>, recognizing that the real changes in contemporary writing are now being done by a group of writers all quite a bit younger than I, <span class=GramE>then</span> I think it&#8217;s apparent that these figures have to change. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This isn&#8217;t easy. Of the poets of my parents&#8217; generation, the one who really took an interest in younger writers, reading them, promoting them, actively engaging their concerns, was Robert Creeley. Of the poets from the intervening generation, between my parents &amp; my own, the poets who have done this have been Jerry Rothenberg &amp; the <span class=SpellE>Waldrops</span>. That&#8217;s not exactly a long list. Most poets as they age tend to stay fixed right where they focused when they first matured as writers &amp; readers. And as the writers in whom they are interested die or go silent, most poets as readers find their world contracting, rather than shifting down to the next generation(s). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I have an active interest in trying to get to that next generation (or three) of younger poets &#8211; I want to see how the story of poetry itself continues to evolve, even as I have an increasingly complicated relationship to the question of &#8220;now.&#8221; So here&#8217;s to the idea that, over time, the percentages here of male to female will have to change, just to reflect the real world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>No two books of Jennifer Moxley&#8217;s really seem remotely alike, so it&#8217;s no surprise that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.postapollopress.com/TheLine.html"><span style='color:black'>The Line</span></a> </i>feels like a radical departure not just from her last book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.floodeditions.com/new/moxley.html"><span style='color:black'>Often Capital</span></a> </i>&#8211; which is a &#8220;last book&#8221; only in terms of its publication date, having been written in 1991 prior to her &#8220;first&#8221; volume, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1876857943.htm"><span style='color:black'>Imagination Verses</span></a></i> &#8211; but from every book she&#8217;s written. It&#8217;s as if Moxley decides to become, in some sense, a different person between each major writing project, so that the work that comes forward feels inevitable &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Line </i>certainly does &#8211; but that the connections that come to mind for a reader aren&#8217;t necessarily back to her work as a historical record, but rather to the whole of literature itself, which is now being invaded &amp; rendered problematic in some altogether new fashion. I can&#8217;t think of another writer who manages this sort of effect from book to book beyond, say, the later publications of Jack Spicer. But Moxley goes much further &#8211; there are continuities between, say, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Language </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Book of Magazine Verse </i>that I think Moxley would reject on principle. <span class=GramE>Which is not to say that there aren&#8217;t continuities, but that you&#8217;ll have to read much deeper than a proclivity for a certain type of line break or sentence style to find them.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The names that kept coming to me as I read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Line </i>over the past five days were Lydia Davis, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, <span class=GramE>Kafka</span> &amp; Borges. There is a revealing interview with </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Lydia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in the new <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poets &amp; Writers </i>that I&#8217;m not entirely done with yet &amp; this weekend saw not one, but two reasonably fawning reviews of the new Merwin collection of short prose, a book that my first thumb-through invoked words like &#8220;flaccid&#8221; &amp; &#8220;lifeless.&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Line </i>plays with this same form of the self-contained prose work, often the apparent recounting of a <span class=GramE>dream, that one associates with several of these writers,</span> but it does with a buzz-saw attitude that is unlike any of the above:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Periodic Table<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>   </span><br>
</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br> She was wearing a dress that looked like a book but actually was a baby. All of the letters were on her back to make room for her bulging stomach. I climbed through many foreign backyards in search of my bedroom window. I lived on </span><st1:Street><st1:address><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Ire Street</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> off of Sport in room one hundred and ten. The mailbox was filled with paychecks or grade sheets, I couldn&#8217;t tell the difference. Is this my name or isn&#8217;t it? <span class=GramE>Pink, yellow, and white, a temporary carbon-based witness.</span><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>    </span><br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp; &nbsp;  </span>I sleep with approximately 14,000 days sitting on my chest. A slow hour many years old pushes aside yesterday&#8217;s appetites and enters as a whisper through an <span class=SpellE>unmuffled</span> ear: &#8220;remember me, remember me, <span class=GramE>remember</span> me!&#8221; And so the incantation continues until I open my eyes to find that I am changed into a patient on a table. Wait, it&#8217;s not me, it&#8217;s my mother. Men are taking her out on a stretcher. Oh no. Blood, blood, everywhere!<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That&#8217;s not a poem I will forget anytime soon. It raises so many questions, starting with its very first word, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>She. </i>Everything here makes me want to pull this imagery &#8211; part Alfred Hitchcock, part David Lynch &#8211; into a coherent whole, which is possible only if (as) <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>She </i>becomes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>becomes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>my mother. </i>The poem even asks the question: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Is this my name or isn&#8217;t it? </i>In doing so, it underscores what we already know, that these associations are superimposed &amp; not at all &#8220;inherent&#8221; in the text itself. It&#8217;s as if Moxley knows exactly how to identify that razor-thin edge between what is in the language &amp; what we bring to it. Again, Moxley knows we can&#8217;t read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>patient on a table </i>without hearing <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Prufrock</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>but excising the <span class=SpellE>aestheticized</span> <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>etherised</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style: ormal'> </i>from Eliot&#8217;s poem renders the present reader guilty at having imported the association. That <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Prufrock</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>is, in addition to being brilliant, one of the most egregious uses of persona as appropriation only sharpens our sense of reading as complicity.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The tone of horror with which <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Periodic Table </i>&#8211; think of the implications of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that </i>title &#8211; ends is very much a part of this book, tho it appears through a variety of different registers:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Pitiful Ego<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>           </span><br>
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</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Take yourself off of the market before you become an embarrassment. Last night, believing yourself to be the bomb, you stripped him of his T-shirt and kissed every spot on his slim hairless chest as if you were a famished child sucking on a piece of sugarcane in order to drain it of its last drop of sweetness. While you were thinking how grateful he must be he was silently plotting his escape. He lay on his back on the coffee table, feeling the cold touch of your old lips, his head cocked toward the door. A flock of boots and hairdos were giggling as they watched this. He pulled away and, leaving you with a grin of apologetic condescension, joined the youthful group. <span style='mso-tab-count:1'>          </span><br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> &nbsp; &nbsp;  </span>Moving to the end of the plush couch you pulled the flannel throw to your neck and shrunk down in humiliation. How could you be <span class=GramE>so</span> stupid as to mistake deferential attention for ravenous sexual desire?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is not a single word out of place in this piece, including <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sucking </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>cocked. </i>But where the sheer horror of the referent comes through is in the <span class=SpellE>impersonalization</span> of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>boots and hairdos. </i>They&#8217;re <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>youthful </i>because the impersonal can&#8217;t age, not having a body, whereas less than four dozen words separate <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>you </i>as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>famished child </i>from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>you </i>as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>old lips. </i>The delicate balance of this prose pushes back in both directions &#8211; it&#8217;s not <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>he </i>that experiences <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>ravenous sexual desire, </i>the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>before </i>in the first sentence rings a loud bell of denial. We&#8217;re supposed to recognize the askew in each. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is <span class=GramE>a ruthlessness</span> in much great art that is unmistakable here &#8211; Pound&#8217;s despair in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Pisa</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, Spicer&#8217;s love poems between pitcher &amp; catcher, the rawness that Kathy Acker permits, especially in her early books. Tho both began their careers as writers in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San Diego</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, Moxley&#8217;s work differs from Acker&#8217;s in that time or age is the potent condition that appears to trigger everything for Moxley, rather than sex. Each, however, is an arc bracketed by death &amp; desire:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Wrong Turn</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-tab-count:1'>      </span><br>
<br>
Is it true that your memory and senses are enslaved to creative projects? Immaterial textual existence has come to claim your remaining years. <span class=GramE>A Faustian pact?</span> Lay there and think about it. Sleep and worry. You&#8217;ve been taken in by a fast-talking salesman and won&#8217;t see your money again. On the cartography of your aging body a new nodule has suddenly appeared which definitely augurs death. <span class=GramE>A clarion call at the cellular level.</span> Such are the melodramas of </span><st1:time Minute="0" Hour="0"><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>midnight</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>, the punishment for assuming the many your master instead of the missing necessity. Why does this poem exist? Nobody knows. But it seems to be mourning the ideal.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is <span class=GramE>a  wistfulness</span> to the end of this poem that echoes, for me at least, the work both of John Ashbery &amp; Rae Armantrout. <span class=GramE>So often Ashbery&#8217;s works, particularly his best writing, appears to come around almost cyclically to certain themes as if he had a &#8220;catch &amp; release&#8221; policy on meaning.</span> With Moxley, the hooks, once in, stick, so that the &#8220;innocence&#8221; implied in the final sentence, the idea that a poem might aspire to an ideal, comes across much more starkly because the counter terms (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>aging body, death</i>) have so many heavier connotations lumped upon them over the course of this book. Where Ashbery always seems to deflect or turn away from conflict, Moxley here is digging in, refusing to blink &amp; refusing to let you blink either. It&#8217;s no accident that this volume of prose poems is called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Line, </i>for what is the line to poetry? It&#8217;s the measure of time, ergo the measure of death. What does it mean to write a book of prose poems and call it <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Line </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>is the kind of project that, had it been published by FSG, would have been nominated for all of the awards. And it&#8217;s the kind of project that, were Jennifer Moxley to repeat this book five or six times, would ensure her a franchise as one of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s best writers. Yet the most predictable thing about her work is that the next book is going to be completely different. <span class=GramE>Completely compelling, completely crafted, completely courageous, but utterly different nonetheless.</span> All you can do is strap yourself in and get ready. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, December 28, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At the core of his email on
irony, Chris Stroffolino asks:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">but</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> it seems that what you're driving
at is the question of WHAT OTHER WORK IS THE POEM DOING BESIDE MEANING (that is
assuming that it IS also meaning, or meaning to mean, which of course is not a
safe assumption in the 20th century)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Beside suggesting that Chris
check his calendar &#8211; it&#8217;s later than you think &#8211; I would concur with his assessment
that this discussion is ultimately about much more than &#8220;just&#8221; irony &#8211; consider
just how far <span class="SpellE">afield</span> the discussion has traveled since
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385722414">my
original flip aside</a> concerning Jennifer Moxley&#8217;s poetry &#8211; and would turn
the question rather on its head: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what are the ways in which the poem
manifests meaning? </i></b>Underneath which sits the further question: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what
is meaning?</i></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of which takes me back
to the first three sentences of a wonderful book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus-cgi-bin/display/0-465-05674-1">Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought</a></i>,
co-written by George Lakoff &amp; Mark Johnson, which are presented also as the
first three paragraphs:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The mind is inherently
embodied.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Abstract concepts are largely
metaphorical.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Lakoff &amp; Johnson are,
among others, founders of what today is called cognitive linguistics &amp;
George has been both a friend and an influence on my poetry for some 25 years.
Nowhere in his corpus are its underlying findings more concisely stated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is an idea I&#8217;ve, uh, thought a lot about, and have a
great deal more of thinking yet to do. At one level, the concept explains the
possible power of an <span class="SpellE">irrationalist</span> poetics like that
of Jack Spicer. At another, it suggests to me that the reading process &#8211; even
when we are paying the greatest attention, doing literal &#8220;close&#8221; reading &#8211; is
itself more unconscious than not. Both it and the idea that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mind is inherently embodied</i> go a
considerable distance toward explicating the issues posed, for example, by
electric guitars or why poets might take a line such as &#8220;green ideas sleep
furiously&#8221; as meaningful when old-school linguists (the Chomsky generation,
say) do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> destroys a project such as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tractatus,</i> though not (we note) Wittgenstein&#8217;s later forays into
this same territory. It has, of course, a certain Freudian, if not Lacanian,
ring to it, yet it is not in that psychoanalytic direction that Lakoff appears
to be pointing. Even if we understand reason, for example &#8211; just one mode of
thinking among others &#8211; as a series of syllogistic operations, a number of
multivariable &#8220;if&#8221; clauses that would lead ultimately to the consequence of
&#8220;then,&#8221; Lakoff &amp; Johnson&#8217;s position suggests that what we imagine to be
complex enough procedures with dozens of steps may in fact have hundreds, if
not thousands, conducting not only in our waking life, but elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here of course is the
principle behind the idea of waking up to a solution that, prior to a night&#8217;s
sleep, had seemed impossible. Or why anybody &#8211; you or I &#8211; might be able to
apprehend when something someone asserts sounds &#8220;wrong&#8221; to us, well before we
can honestly articulate precisely why. It represents the architecture of the
&#8220;gut feel.&#8221; It is in this sense that a poem like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting</i> can be
understood literally as single syllogisms that cannot, in fact, be paraphrased.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here also is the reader&#8217;s
participation in consuming, and in so doing reproducing anew, any given text.
To have excluded the reader&#8217;s contribution to the meaning of a text may have
seemed &#8220;neat&#8221; to the New Critics in the sense that it offered boundaries that
they might then patrol, but to do also yielded (&amp; still yields to this day)
a kind of literary dyslexia, an illiteracy in the name of reading competence &#8211;
the same illiteracy that sometimes will cause a grad student to conclude that
langpo is &#8220;difficult&#8221; in some manner that the world itself is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Song approaches the question
of embodiment far differently than does poetry &#8211; as virtually every attempt to
blend the two eventually proves all over again &#8211; but embodiment is essential to
both. The music of vowel &amp; consonant is no less a constituent of meaning
than is any argument the denotative text might make. This is a reality that
might be discounted in one or another tendency within poetry, but it is not one
that can be safely abolished. My own interest in <span class="SpellE">vizpo</span>
is real enough, but it is much more anthropological than it is literary, for
which I make no apologies. The visual is never for me an adequate condition of
embodiment for the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This does not mean that I
require poetry to be &#8220;beautiful&#8221; prosodically &#8211; some of the most interesting in
recent years has, I think, sought out a sonic realm I would associate more
closely with post-industrial life than with song &#8211; </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> or </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rod Smith</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, to
name two who seem especially adept at this. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poetry that pays little
attention to how it sounds &#8211; there&#8217;s enough of it out there that I don&#8217;t need
to name names &#8211; strikes me in exactly the opposite way. Such work seems at
times the aesthetic corollary of a serious stroke victim &#8211; unable to complete
its thought. Thus the best argument in the world, if it pays no heed to the
question of embodiment, strikes me as not very meaningful &#8211; a condition of far
too much &#8220;political poetry.&#8221; Even as the simplest lyric is itself always
already political.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So what is meaning &amp;
where do you find it? Williams called it &#8220;the news,&#8221; but that phrase, bandied
about as much as it is, is often understood in far too narrow a fashion. I
often will find it in a poem lurking not in the words as such so much as in the
vowels, or in the way a phrase alters my expectation (a particularly NY School
approach), in how lines enjamb or a phrase is inverted, in the length of a
line. All to me seem primary modes of meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">&amp; the student who is not
taught how to see, to read these things, has in fact never been taught to read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, December 22, 2002</span></h2>

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<st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Gary Sullivan</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;"> ended his dissertation on humor &amp; context the other day
with what I would characterize as an imponderable: &#8220;<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How is Celan&#8217;s work read by
those who don&#8217;t know who he was, his history?&#8221; Now Annie Finch sends an email
to ratchet the issue of irony up one more notch: </span></tt><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Dear
Ron, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">the whole
[Jennifer] Moxley discussion has been fascinating. if this inspires thought for
your blog, I'd be interested to read your response. I think the poems I was
recalling are in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">With Strings</i> or if
not, another recent book. I guess part of the question raised is, how much does
the context of the writer's other work affect the irony that individual poems
can retain? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">"Charles
Bernstein has written some poems that I would not be surprised to see in a book
by X.J. Kennedy. Ron, can you imagine a time in which the context separating
those two is lost, or is that taking the idea too far?"<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Two
more thoughts/questions:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Do
you think poems that go too much the other way, that don't have enough irony,
are just as vulnerable to being lost after their originary time is over as
poems that depend too much on transitory irony? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Then
there is the phenomenon of poems that are written with irony and STILL survive
after the irony is long gone in most reader's minds. Examples: Frost's The Road
Not Taken and Blake's Songs of Innocence. Where do these fit in?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Annie<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">I would
suspect that one of the Bernstein poem&#8217;s Annie might be remembering is &#8220;The Boy
Soprano&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Daddy loves me this I know<br />
Cause my granddad told me so<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Though he beats me blue and black<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">That&#8217;s because I&#8217;m full of crap<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">My mommy she is ultra cool<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Taught me the Bible&#8217;s golden rule<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">&#8217;t talk back, do what
you&#8217;re told<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Abject compliance is as good as gold<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The teachers teach the grandest things<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Tell how poetry&#8217;s words on wings<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">But wings are for Heaven, not for earth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Want my advice: hijack the hearse<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Compare
this with Kennedy&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="http://www.poemtree.com/poems/BratsReward.htm">A
Brat&#8217;s Reward</a>&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">At the market Philbert Spicer<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Peered into the bacon slicer &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Whiz! the wicked slicer sped<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Back and forth across his head<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Quickly shaving &#8211; What a shock! &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Fifty chips off Phil&#8217;s old block,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Stopping just above the eyebrows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Phil&#8217;s not one of them thar highbrows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Kennedy,
poetry editor of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paris Review</i> in
the 1960s betwixt </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">ald Hall &amp; Tom Clark, is a long-time practitioner of
light verse as well as poetry for children &#8211; the smoothness of his metrics here
is an index of just how good at this he is. Considering that we&#8217;re discussing
mutilation in the market place, it&#8217;s remarkable just how free &#8220;Reward&#8221; is of
even the slightest hint of social comment. The only moment it shows up is at
the very end &#8211; that distancing effect of slang in &#8220;them thar highbrows.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Even if we
were unaware of the Anna Bartlett Warner hymn &#8211; hard to envision in a world in
which Google shows over 40,000 pages devoted to it &amp; its variants* &#8211; on
which Bernstein&#8217;s poem is based, there&#8217;s a depth of sarcasm in the writing that
is impossible to erase over time. Even presuming we don&#8217;t recognize the
allusion &#8211; a presumption basic to satire &#8211; this displacement of &#8220;Daddy&#8217;s&#8221; love
to granddad&#8217;s word for verification &amp; the references to family violence in
the first stanza make it unmistakable. As does the use of the term &#8220;abject&#8221; in
the second stanza. As does the &#8220;advice&#8221; of the final line. Even prosodically,
the degree to which Bernstein pushes away from the seven-syllable line of the
original twists the poem away from the harmonic closure of the 19<sup>th</sup>
century lyrics toward a result whose dissonance &#8211; the degree to which it sounds
&#8220;off&#8221; or &#8220;wrong&#8221; &#8211; underscores the connotative domain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">What we
have are two poetries that have certain surface similarities, one of which is
adamantly social &amp; will remain so, even if many topical elements are
drained away, the other of which is only incidentally (&amp; possibly unknowingly)
social. So while in theory the possibility of two poetries merging in such a
way as to dissolve their original differences exists, in practice I think this
is apt to happen only with much more parallel kinds of writing, the way the
elliptical side of the mainstream (say, Jorie Graham&#8217;s work) shades over into
aspects of post-avant writing (someone like Ann Lauterbach sits almost
perfectly in the middle here, as do Forrest Gander &amp; C. D. Wright). But not
in work that is truly diverse, regardless of surface features.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Is it
possible for poems to not have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enough </i>irony?
My sense is no, in that I suspect that writing can incorporate an almost total
spectrum of metalinguistic distancing effects, from no irony whatsoever (Denise
Levertov) all the way to total irony (Joe Brainard). It is, however, possible
for poems to use irony ineffectively, as Walter Conrad Arensberg does in &#8220;To
Hasekawa.&#8221; That&#8217;s a different issue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">But as time
passes, contexts fade. There are poems in which irony disappears only to reveal
other strengths of the poem &#8211; that&#8217;s pretty much the situation with Blake. But
other elements shift around as well. Just as Bernstein&#8217;s poem will continue to
reveal a social structure regardless of whether we recognize Warner&#8217;s hymn, so
too will the dark world envisioned by Paul Celan remain, whether or not the
reader relates it to the holocaust: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">BY THE UNDREAMT etched,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">the sleeplessy wandered-through breadland<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">casts up the life mountain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">From its crumb<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">you knead anew our names<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">which I, an eye<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">similar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">to yours on each finger,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">probe for<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">a place, through which I<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">can wake myself toward you,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">the bright<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">hungercandle in mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Hungercandle
(&#8220;Hungerkerze&#8221;) is not a term that is mistakable, any more than &#8220;mouth&#8221; can
ever be softened without a pronoun. The bleakness of the situation could be </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Kampuchea</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">, </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Babi Yar</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;"> or the Balkans. What is not
relieved, however, is the underlying sense of deprivation. Only in a world in
which hunger &amp; genocide were both abolished &amp; forgotten could these
lines appear to lose their sense of deprivation. Which I fear means that we are
a long, long way from being able to test the ability of Celan&#8217;s work to operate
without context.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt;">Of the
writers mentioned here, Jennifer Moxley is perhaps closest to Celan in her
overall vision of humanity. Like him, she is on the low end of the irony
spectrum. Neither has any interest in letting the reader escape the enveloping
circumstance of the poem &#8211; like Celan, her poems may long for relief, but they
seldom if ever offer any. That her works employ a neutral language, rather
than, say, the high-torque neologisms of a Celan, is part of the analysis. Like
Annie Finch, I&#8217;m fascinated by the reactions to her work. They underscore my
own sense of its importance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Including a few that touch
on its use by the Ku Klux Klan.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style='clear: both;'></div>
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<a href='https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Charles%2520Bernstein' rel='tag'>Charles Bernstein</a>,
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, December 20, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Responses to my reading of
Jennifer Moxley&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sense Record </i>fell
rather evenly into three categories:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">People who liked
my reading &amp; like her work &amp; were glad to see that this was shared<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">People who
thought my reading was way off, because I didn&#8217;t see her poetry as a mode of
deadpan humor<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 1.0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">People who
agreed with my assessment that her work is serious, but don&#8217;t much care for it,
at least in part because of its seriousness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Those diverse reactions
combined with my own positive response to Pattie McCarthy even as I admit that
there are places where her interest in medieval Christian concerns leads her that
I can&#8217;t (or don&#8217;t) follow <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and with</i></span>
<st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Gary Sullivan</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s most revealing comment yesterday that, when he was
a mere lad, he used to find Woody Allen, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ald Barthelme or <span class="SpellE">Firesign</span> Theater <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more funny</i> before he learned what they
were riffing on. These diverse experiences all ring what for me is by now a
rather old bell, a 1981 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Parnassus </i>review
in which Peter Schjeldahl effusively praised the poetry of Joe Ceravolo even
though &#8220;I rarely know what he is talking about.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of these items share in
common the problem of how one receives and deals with the unfamiliar.
Sometimes, as with Sullivan&#8217;s laughter at <span class="SpellE">Firesign</span>
Theatre, we welcome it. But other times not. My own sense of the responses I&#8217;ve
heard toward Moxley&#8217;s work is that the more skeptical positions sound almost
identical to comments I recall hearing a quarter century ago directed at the
work of another new poet who was coming forward with an unconventional but
distinct sense of style, Leslie Scalapino. Moxley &amp; Scalapino are radically
different poets, but their position vis-à-vis the poetry world strikes me as
not dissimilar. Each can, simply by their practice, be read as a critique of
their generational scene as it is constituted. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Twenty-six years after the
publication of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Woman Who Could Read
the Minds of Dogs,</i> Leslie Scalapino has demonstrated beyond any doubt the
wisdom &amp; power behind strategies that once seemed to many oblique or simply
obscure for the sake of obscurity. If Scalapino has required patience on the
part of her audience, she has rewarded them (us) for sticking with it
handsomely. Her argument, to call it such, is a vision of literature that is
virtually panoptic. <span class="GramE">To catch only a glimpse of it in some
ways is just sort of a teaser &#8211; it makes greater sense to take as much in as
possible, so that the references &amp; key points accumulate.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Moxley&#8217;s long sentences
&amp; deliberately neutral vocabulary strike me as being as integral to her
project as poet as Scalapino&#8217;s syntactic angling is to hers. I can see not
buying any of it &#8211; no reader is going to &#8220;get&#8221; all poets. I know that I will
always find William Bronk torturous and I have yet to figure out, after all
these years, why Gustaf Sobin seems important to so many other writers I know.
So, in a sense, I find myself thinking of the people who take Moxley seriously,
but opt out at that point, as being &#8220;better&#8221; readers of her than fans who think
it&#8217;s a spoof.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Let me give an example, a
single sentence midway <span class="GramE">through<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>the</span> first poem in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sense Record, </i>&#8220;Grain of the Cutaway Insight&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Long lost friend, with whom
I once<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; tab-stops: 57.0pt;">
<tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">spoke</span></tt></span><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
into the night of books and<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">left</span></tt></span><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">,
thinking to myself on my short<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">walk</span></tt></span><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
home of all the things I wanted so<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">to</span></tt></span><tt><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
tell you<o:p></o:p></span></tt></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">in</span> a poem,
I am lonely<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">in</span> the in-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">commiserate</i> word, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">its</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
small sound remains<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">an</span> incipient
<span class="SpellE">dis</span>-harmony<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">sounding</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
through dissembled day&#8217;s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">would-be</span>
routinization. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This passage moves not in
one but two profoundly opposite directions. Up to the word &#8220;you,&#8221; every single
line is enjambed &#8211; after it, none are. It is right at that word also that the
first step away from the left-hand margin occurs in this sentence, as though
the second-person pronoun were a literal hinge to this statement. In fact, it
makes great sense to look at this sentence having just such a fulcrum. Before
it, in five lines, all cemented to the left margin, we have 33 words, only
three of which are even two syllables long. After it, we have 23 words spread
out over six lines, 23 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">long </i>words.
Two have five syllables, two others have four. The second half of this sentence
only twice returns fully to the margin, each time to register a verb that will
carry the next major chain of syntax. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is a chain of sound as
well, following principally through the deployment of vowels, especially &#8220;o.&#8221;
Thus the long &#8220;o&#8221; in the first half carries both &#8220;spoke&#8221; and &#8220;home&#8221; into that
terminal &#8220;so&#8221; &#8211; the most important word in the first part of the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t, a tone that gets heightened measurably in the
concluding portion. The use of &#8220;o&#8221; becomes far more complex here &#8211; the &#8220;<span class="SpellE">ou</span>&#8221; combinations emerging to carry the thrust of the idea
in the final couplet. But <span class="GramE">Moxley won&#8217;t let us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> hear that term &#8220;lonely,&#8221; the
section&#8217;s melody of &#8220;o&#8221; sounds challenged by a contrary rain of short &#8220;<span class="SpellE">i</span>&#8221; combinations, &#8220;in&#8221; and &#8220;is.&#8221;</span> That hiss in good
part is why &#8220;in-<span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">commiserate</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8221; </i>rather than &#8220;incommensurate&#8221; is the
right word at that moment in the </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t. One need only note the number of &#8220;o&#8221; and
&#8220;o&#8221;-combination syllables appear in this sentence compared with, say, those for
&#8220;a&#8221; and &#8220;e.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet if one reads this
sentence as bald text without hearing its remarkable articulation of vowels,
without registering enjambments &amp; end stops, it might prove to be all but
invisible as language. It&#8217;s a fabulous moment in the history of formal devices
&amp; really one of the great aesthetic flourishes in recent poetry &#8211; but in
the same moment, it&#8217;s also a test of the reader &amp; the levels of attention
they bring to the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, December 15, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">On the Poetics List, there
was a certain to-do over the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385722414">wink</a>
I suggested was absent in the poetry of Jennifer Moxley. This was not, as I
noted at the time, a criticism, but rather an observation, an index of her
willingness as an author to write precisely what she believes needs to be
written, regardless of fashion. Any number of commentators rushed in to rescue
Moxley&#8217;s reputation from sincerity or even earnestness, with Steve Vincent &#8211; a
friend of this blog for over 30 years &#8211; suggesting that I had been &#8220;pulled into
the wax.&#8221; </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Aaron Belz</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> goes this way &amp; that &#8211; he feels like Edgar </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Allan</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Poe on the issue when he&#8217;s not feeling like Bugs Bunny. Many ideas were
thrown into the hat, no doubt causing the rabbit to feel crowded. Some of the
more pertinent ones were:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">The wink is a necessary
&#8220;courtyard of emotion,&#8221; an idea I&#8217;d like to endorse just so I can use that
phrase a few times.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">The wink is a
postmodern twitch.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">The wink is a </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> thing (with some hint that there&#8217;s relatively little winking between </span><st1:street><st1:address><span style="font-family: Arial;">14<sup>th</sup> Street</span></st1:address></st1:street><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, where it is again permitted). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">James Tate
does/does not wink. Unless of course those messages that mentioned only the
surname were referring to Allen Tate, a man whose poetry has been known to
glare.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;">
&lt;![if !supportLists]&gt;<span style="font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">&#167;<span style="font: 7.0pt &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span>&lt;![endif]&gt;<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is such a
thing as a &#8220;bad wink,&#8221; implying of course that its opposite might also exist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At this very same moment,
the Gertrude Stein list has been going on about what Stein meant when she said,
sometime in the early 1930s, that Adolph Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
&amp; a fellow at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> emailed to ask if &#8220;Franzen&#8217;s boast in his 30
September <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Yorker </i>article that he
defied the intentions of Coover and Pynchon by reading them to identify with
their characters militate against your interpretation of the J-Franz/Oprah <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contretemps</i>?&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My answer to that latter
question would be that, no, it confirms my interpretation, because it reveals
Franzen to be consciously operating on exactly that set of presumptions. And I
would have thought that we have all learned by now that Franzen&#8217;s style vis-à-vis
media <span class="GramE">inquiries into his process is</span> to obfuscate &amp;
dissemble to the max. But, as the Stein quote suggests &#8211; it&#8217;s being employed
apparently by Holocaust deniers &#8211; humor doesn&#8217;t necessarily travel well. If the
wit is dry enough, it may in fact scrape. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I would characterize irony &#8211;
the ability to say one thing while communicating something quite discordant to
the denotation &#8211; as one aspect of humor &amp; an especially important one in
this epoch in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> (I don&#8217;t want to generalize here.) Context is so important in humor
&amp;, by definition, so pliable &amp; subject to change, that it is almost
impossible to ensure that what is uproarious in one setting will remain so over
time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Almost certainly, everybody
has had the experience of writing some <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bon
mot</i> in an email only to discover that your recipient has been horribly
offended, perhaps justifiably.* The very same communication in person might not
have had the equivalent impact because it would have been presented, with body
language &amp; tone, in such a way as to situate its reception. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Much of Stein&#8217;s humor &#8211; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tender Buttons </i>and the portraits, for
example &#8211; does travel well over the decades. But I&#8217;ve always thought as well
that Pound believed <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mauberly</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>to be a barrel of chortles &amp; there
is more wit in Eliot&#8217;s </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Prufrock</span></i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">&amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waste</i></span></st1:placename><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></i><st1:placetype><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Land</span></i></st1:placetype></st1:place>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">than was noted when we were in high school.
Eliot the ponderous was largely a critical fiction up until the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quartets </i>showed that he&#8217;d begun to
believe his own reviews. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But if you go back further
into the recesses of the canon, what you find is that humor carries forward
most effectively when it is most fully contextualized &#8211; in drama, for example,
or in poetry that proposes its own contexts, like the </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Canterbury</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Tales</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">. But the humor in </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Po</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">pe
comes across now as stilted &amp; clunky &#8211; which may be why he is not dealt
with as seriously as he deserves, particularly when you consider how close he
came to inventing the prose poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Which
makes me wonder about the eventual fate of our current moment, long after we
too have exited stage left.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Irony
today serves an important social &amp; historical function &#8211; as an index of our
own lack of innocence. It&#8217;s a confession that we expect our leaders to lie
&amp; all our social institutions to fail us, to do so systemically, &amp; to
do so cynically. When the FDA declares Claritin safe for over-the-counter
sales, &#8220;making it available for everyone,&#8221; what that action really does is
separate out one of the most common costs insurers have had to cover. Last
month&#8217;s $10 co-pay for your prescription will be next month&#8217;s $30 charge at the
cash register. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Many tendencies in poetry,
not just the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New
  York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, have relied more than a little on humor &amp; irony
&#8211; the actual figure of Maximus in the Olson poems is pretty funny. There is a
lot of wit in </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert
 Kelly</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s poetry &#8211; read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Axon Dendron Tree</i> if you don&#8217;t believe
me &#8211; and in Jackson Mac Low. Clark Coolidge&#8217;s humor is one part Phil Whalen,
one part Jonathan Williams. Dorn&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8216;Slinger</i>
is a long philosophical poem built on the model of a comic book. &amp; no
language poet does more with humor than Barrett Watten. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But identifying someone
else&#8217;s humor on the page can be as problematic as taking excerpts from the work
of Leslie Scalapino at random and knowing why this page is a &#8220;comic book&#8221; and
that is an &#8220;opera.&#8221; Humor is always &#8211; &amp; only &#8211; in the eye of the beholder.
&amp; what that eye sees depends very much on context &#8211; the moon at the horizon
is big, but at the peak of the sky it&#8217;s very small </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">ind</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">eed. This I think is at least partly why so few
readers actually understand Ginsberg to have been primarily a satirist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So while I am willing to
concede the conceivability of </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Stephen Vincent</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s
suggestion that I have been &#8220;pulled into the wax,&#8221; I really doubt it. More
important, I doubt that in the long run it will make any difference. If for any
reason Moxley did not intend her statements in that poem (or any other) to be
taken at face value today, there will come a time in the future when that is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exactly</i> how they are understood. The
same will apply &#8211; ironically &#8211; even to John Ashbery &amp; Charles Bernstein. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Which makes me wonder about
the fate of the poetry of poetry today &#8211; it may very well be that we are
creating a collective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oeuvre</i> that
will age at greatly differential rates down the road. Jonathan Mayhew the other
day in his blog characterized H.D.&#8217;s Hellenism as &#8220;kitsch&#8221; &#8211; yet its function
during her lifetime was diametrically opposed to that very idea. Even now, if
you look at the diverse poetics of, say, the early modernist period, it makes
you want to scratch your head. If I thumb through an anthology like Harriet
Monroe&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/265/">New Poetry</a> </i>(Macmillan, 1917 &amp;
1923), the so-called &#8220;revolution of the word&#8221; is almost entirely absent. While
the founder of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poetry </i>includes Pound
&amp; Williams, and even such radicals as Carl Sandburg &amp; John Reed, there
is no Stein, no Loy, no sign of the Baroness, no Hartley, not even Hart Crane.
Yet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Poetry </i>does include Thomas
Hardy, Edward Arlington Robinson, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, even Joseph
Campbell and John G. Neihardt. Perhaps the most telling inclusion is Walter
Conrad Arensberg, he of the &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Ing</span>? Is it possible to
mean <span class="SpellE">ing</span>?&#8221; There is some interesting work to be found
in Arensberg, but </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Monroe</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is having none of that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Here is the shortest of his five poems in the
anthology, &#8220;To <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span>&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Perhaps
it is no matter that you died.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Life&#8217;s
an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incognito </i>which you saw through:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">You
</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">nev</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">er told on life &#8211; you had your pride;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But
life has told on you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s not self-evident whom <span class="SpellE">Hasekawa</span> might have been &#8211; a search on Google turns up
nothing &#8211; but what is evident is the humor here. Without any context, it&#8217;s not
funny, so that the husk of its structure is all that remains. It&#8217;s like a deaf
person watching dancers with no hint of the music. In this case, it would seem
that the dancers are a little clumsy, but that&#8217;s about all you can say. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Literature evolved away from
the vision that Harriet Monroe held &amp; while some Arensberg poems are still
read today, this one mercifully is not. It would be easy enough to argue that
Monroe&#8217;s sensibility was pedestrian at best, but I suspect that the reality is
that it was not as pedestrian as it might now appear. Rather, it is merely that
<span class="GramE">large portions</span> of the work she favored and printed
seems &#8211; 75 years later &#8211; terribly antiquated. Now there are poets from the 19<sup>th</sup>
century &#8211; all of Dickinson, much of Whitman &#8211; that don&#8217;t seem half as ancient
as much of the writing in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Poetry</i>.
The problem isn&#8217;t time &#8211; it&#8217;s the variable rate at which poems age. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If the wink is in fact the
ticket into our contemporary &#8220;courtyard of emotions,&#8221; it comes at high risk.
While I like humor &amp; wit, I think that a writer needs to recognize &#8211;
presume even &#8211; that, of all the colors in his or her pallet, the ones that will
fade fastest are the bright, funny ones. If you want some sense of how your
work might read 70 years hence, just ask yourself what will remain of your
poetry when none of your readers get the jokes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* My own
most recent experience of this came on Friday the 13<sup>th</sup> when one of
the readers of the <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385941804">blog</a>
thought that I was comparing J.H. Prynne to the music of John <span class="SpellE">Tesh</span> or <span class="SpellE">Yanni</span>. In fact, what I
was suggesting was that the problem of the &#8220;regional ear&#8221; was different from
that of distinguishing good art &#8211; figured into that discussion as Anthony
Braxton &#8211; from kitsch. If I had been making a Raworth is to Prynne as Braxton
is to X kind of comparison, I probably would have said someone like John Zorn.
I instinctively &#8220;get&#8221; Braxton in a way that I don&#8217;t Zorn, but I wouldn&#8217;t then
suggest that Zorn was kitsch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, December 09, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The title piece of Jennifer
Moxley&#8217;s extraordinary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.aerialedge.com/senserecord.htm"><span style="color: black;">The
Sense Record</span></a></i> is an astonishing poem &#8211; astonishing because it
dares to go where virtually no post-avant writing has gone in a generation.
This is the first stanza: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Under the threat of another light downpour<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Eros, soaked by the rain-water,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">spoke to the sentient flowers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Sadness, no longer extraneous,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">began the derangement of nerve,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">bypassed the bleeding heart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">to pierce the blood-brain barrier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">This all en route to the two-car garage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I was worn with the labor that augurs despair,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">life in the futile percentile, when past<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">my squeamish eyelash, buffeted by scallops<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">of small will, the slightest fairy brushed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">My rubber soles conformed to the stones<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">as I followed and spied the backyard starlet<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">allongée on an orange blossom, delicate<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">beside the drinking bees, blithe amidst<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">sharp blades of grass, a rain-drop seductress<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">entertaining ants on the folding lip<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">of a pinkster leaf.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Sadness, despair, futile, squeamish,
derangement, &#8220;the bleeding heart.&#8221;</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> Yet Eros communing with the &#8220;sentient flowers,&#8221; it becomes
apparent by the end of the next stanza, was the cheery part:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>From
aloft<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">the insect mezzanine these patterns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">portend the rot of hours, as one paperstrip<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">wilts atop the next. Little deaths<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">sufficient to wake the council of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">discarded causes. Under the concrete cracks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">the tenacious weed-roots rattle,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">reassigned from lawn destruction<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">to ankle espionage, and in the grass<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">the poet whispers:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;death death death death death<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>between two hopes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">in brittle mid-years, all is vanity&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Or later, from the second of
the poem&#8217;s six sections:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I feel sick to think that she, that we<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">had, and have, but one pursuit<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">and one pursuit alone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Or the opening of the final
section: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Eros tell me why, without love,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">without hate, listening<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">to the softly falling rain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">upon the rooftops of the city,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">my heart has so much pain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">What I write in truth today<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">tomorrow will be in error.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Yet the words keep coming,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">mundane and repetitive<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">With no job &#8220;to be done&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">nor doctrine to stand for. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Oh postmodern irony, where
is thy wink? It&#8217;s not to be found anywhere in this poem&#8217;s eleven pages. Largely
bracketed between two quotations from Verlaine, &#8220;The Sense Record&#8221; presents the
grimmest view of contemporary alternatives we have had since perhaps William
Bronk. I don&#8217;t normally think of Moxley in that context &#8211; she is so much more
the stylist that one can slide easily into the elegance of her forms &amp;
almost luxuriate at that level alone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That, I think, is why
&#8220;death&#8221; is repeated five times in the most utterly artless moment in the entire
book. Moxley doesn&#8217;t want to let us off the hook &#8211; one can almost imagine how
another poet such as Ashbery would deflect the absolute directness of this address,
bringing in everything from elderly aunts to whatever he&#8217;s rescued from the
Disney back lot. For anyone with such access to style, the argument that the
pleasure of the journey is life&#8217;s point might well be enough. For Moxley,
clearly it&#8217;s not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is where the question
of fashion gets interesting. In pure terms of traditional stylistics, Moxley is
an absolute master &#8211; much more adept than, say, Geoffrey Hill&#8217;s hurdy-gurdy
efforts. To make matters even more complicated, Moxley associates with &#8211; and publishes
in the journals of &#8211; the newer generation of post-avant writing, which
allegedly eschews direct address &amp; seems to treat the absence of irony as
one of the great sins of the poets of quietude.* Some of the other poets
published by Rod Smith&#8217;s Edge Books include Anselm Berrigan, Kevin Davies, Tom
Raworth, Aldon Nielson, Mark Wallace, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Joan Retallack and
Chris Stroffolino. So how is it that Moxley fits in here? Why isn&#8217;t she hailed
as the salvation of traditional values in literature? And why is she accorded
such great respect from poets who refuse to write an elegy without slipping in
at least a triple-entendre somewhere? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I know a few folks who would
argue that Moxley might be yet another item in a list of evidence suggesting
that it&#8217;s not what you know in poetry that determines where a writer plays so
much as who you know. But I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s it at all. Rather, I think that
the reason one doesn&#8217;t find her line up alongside the &#8220;anti-anti-coherency&#8221;
contingent is that her work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">déjà toujours</i>
presumes the context of post-avant writing. That little barb out of Pound&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cantos</i> at the end of the poem&#8217;s first
section is a tell-tale clue. The directness of her address &amp; that loving
attention to the nuances of syntax is a combination that makes its greatest
sense situated midway between, say, Anselm Berrigan &amp; Tom Raworth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Just as John Berryman&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dream Songs</i> would make for dreadful
language poetry, but whose excellence shines through when set against the
backdrop of the Boston Brahmin variant of the school of quietude, Moxley&#8217;s
poetry takes its razor&#8217;s edge from its social context. In one way, she is as
out of place in her time &amp; her crowd as Jack Spicer once was amidst the
speech-based (&amp; often enough linguistics-ignorant) poetics of the New
American Poetry. It&#8217;s as if she has decided to be the bad conscience of
post-avant writing, the one who reminds everybody else that &#8220;this is serious &#8211;
you are doomed.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poets who take this kind of
stance are often in for a certain amount of tsuris. Barrett Watten has had to
contend with readers who, struck dumb it would seem by his demand for a serious
reading, can&#8217;t begin to see where the marvelous sharp wit in his poetry lies. I
know major post-avant writers who say point-blank that Spicer is somebody they
just don&#8217;t get. And I know others who would argue that this is why William
Bronk falls outside almost every major post-avant anthology, as though he were
everybody&#8217;s designated blind spot (as he seems to be mine). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So Moxley has chosen not to
take the easy road, but rather the most difficult one of all. And she does it
with such great skill in places that it makes you want to cheer &#8211; until you
remember that she means it. You are doomed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">* Thus when
Jonathan Mayhew complains of my blog&#8217;s &#8221;earnestness,&#8221; he&#8217;s absolutely serious
&amp; not at all out of step with a lot of contemporary post-avant writing. I
plead guilty even as I note the difference between my critical writing &amp; my
poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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