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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, August 15, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Setting out Late</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><br>
<br>
An autumn leaf<br>
trembles in its guise<br>
of paling green, feeling<br>
slightly out of date or off key.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><br>
The unsure basso is the worst of all<br>
but it&#8217;s been time to get moving<br>
for quite a while<br>
in your head, which is maybe<br>
lazy and a little timid<br>
but gaining momentum.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This poem concludes a volume that might be called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>They Wouldn&#8217;t Go Home Till They Had Thought of Something. </i>Such anyway is the caption on an illustration &#8211; a squirrel &amp; rabbit, both dressed in human clothes, in a forest under a full moon, obviously concentrating very hard, lost in thought &#8211; that appears on the cover.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The volume has roughly 100 pages, 8.5-by-11, stapled on the left rather in the manner of old issues of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The World </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sal Mimeo. </i>I can&#8217;t tell you who published it, because there is no information given of that nature. I can&#8217;t tell you who wrote this poem, nor for that matter any of the poems included in this venture, because that information isn&#8217;t given either. It&#8217;s a collection of anonymous poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;ve tried a magic trick with this poem, tho. I&#8217;ve read it alternately as a John Ashbery poem, as a Bill Berkson poem &amp; as a poem by Larry Fagin. It works for me under each of those conditions, but it&#8217;s a different poem every time. What if I thought of it as a Billy Collins poem? <span class=GramE>Or a poem by Bill Knott?</span> Does it then become any less interesting? <span class=GramE>More?</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Here&#8217;s another poem from the same volume. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>1234567890</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><br>
<br>
To <span class=GramE>myself</span> and into the air<br>
He promised silence<br>
On the long solid self<br>
To nest waving<br>
<span style='mso-tab-count:1'>          </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span><span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span style='mso-tab-count:1'> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;      </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>   </span>I want. Lady<span class=GramE>,</span><br> 
A red scarf goes under<br>
My delicate body when I waken.<br>
I like to block myself up<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
To thicken on the horn, shackled with a big drink.<br>
In the Parthenon, Marion, we<br>
Were half so fragile. We were<br>
Asleep. But we said, &#8220;I block you,&#8221;<br>
Or your with teeth, our pale feet<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
Our clouds, down to the color, romping.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My little magic trick doesn&#8217;t work so well here. For one thing, there is nothing here equivalent to the logic of the last sentence in the first poem that jumps out as being so clearly branded (or at least <span class=SpellE>brandable</span>) a device. Yet the logic to the second poem is hardly conventional &#8211; there are NY School details throughout. But the twist at the end of the first sentence, that almost deliberate afterthought of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I want </i>and the grammar of street jargon &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>block myself up </i>&#8211; suggests to me a younger poet. Am I just projecting that? <span class=GramE>Possibly.</span> The use of caps at the left margin, if I think about it, suggests just the opposite &#8211; that&#8217;s a detail in the punctuation of verse that is declining faster than the use of semi-colons. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In all fairness, there is a broader range  in this volume than I&#8217;m suggesting from those two pieces, both of which strike me as  being archetypal (if not <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>generic</i>) NY school. &#8220;The Hard Heart,&#8221; for instance, has an almost confessional tone:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I would never have wanted to see your sad face again<br>
Your hollow cheeks and hair in the wind<br>
I left across fields<br>
Through the damp woods<br>
Night and day<br>
In the sun and the rain<br>
Dead leaves crunched beneath my feet<br>
Sometimes the moon was shining<br>
<br>
Then we were face to face again<br>
Looking at each other but not saying anything<br>
And there was no room left for me to leave again<br>
<br>
For a long time I stayed tied up against a tree<br>
With your terrible love in front of me<br>
More anguished than in a bad dream<br>
<br>
Finally someone greater than you released me<br>
All the tearful expressions follow me<br>
And that weakness one can&#8217;t fight against<br>
I flee quickly toward unkindness<br>
Toward the force that raises its fists like weapons<br>
On the monster that pulled me from your sweetness with its claws<br>
Far from the soft sweet hug of your arms<br>
I go away breathing hard<br>
Across fields and through the woods<br>
Toward the miraculous town where my heart beats<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is an evenness of affect here &#8211; the  straightforward syntax, the steady deployment of clichés &#8211; that tells me this is intentional, that the poet wants me to understand that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>terrible love </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>miraculous town </i>are vague because that&#8217;s a critical detail, one reason the narrator appears to seek abusive relationships. <span class=GramE>Which is to say that I read this not as bad or maudlin verse, but rather as a poem that is consciously exploring sentimentality and its relation to abuse &amp; violence, deliberately employing the devices of bad verse <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as devices.</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>It&#8217;s an interesting, complicated trick, and its effectiveness depends on its seeming artless. Again I have to ask myself <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>am I <span class=GramE>projecting?</span> </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I try my magic trick with this one, but this time it&#8217;s a double layer of gender, not the names of possible poets, that I try. I read this as representing the voice of a woman in a lesbian relationship, then of a man in a gay relationship, then of a man in a heterosexual relationship &amp; then (and only then) as a woman in a heterosexual relationship. Then I try all of these positions with a second layer of this game (sort of a reverse Kevin Bacon game, <span class=SpellE>genderwise</span>), trying each of these narrative positions, but presuming that it was written by a woman. Then I do it again, only presuming that it was written by a man. It&#8217;s a very different poem if a man wrote this depicting a lesbian relationship, for example, than if a hetero woman wrote it about herself. Does it cease to be dramatic monolog if it&#8217;s truly &#8220;<span class=GramE>confessional</span>?&#8221; Would it be a better poem if written from a less predictable gender position? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Larry Fagin, who is a closet New Critic, has argued that we ought to be able to read poems with no identifying marks whatsoever and thereby determine whether a poem is, at the least, &#8220;good&#8221; or least &#8220;interesting.&#8221; He probably disapproves of my magic tricks, seeing it as infusing the poem with extraneous data, looking back at my own reflection to decide what I do or don&#8217;t like. But I don&#8217;t think so. If anything, I think this collection demonstrates the fallacy of such purism. Partly because poems don&#8217;t exist outside of history &#8211; when is R. Mutt&#8217;s fountain just a pisser? <span class=GramE>&#8211; and largely because an inordinate number of details in the poem don&#8217;t actually engage without that connection to the real.</span> Again, with that second poem, it means something different if it was written by the late David Schubert than it would <span class=GramE>had</span> John Godfrey penned it. Both would be meaningful &amp; interesting, but not the same meaning, not the same interests. <span class=GramE>Or if the third poem was written by Diane Wakoski or Leland Hickman or Ishmael Reed.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>A further possibility might even be that every poem in this collection was written by the same writer, which would suggest (a) that the author is a chameleon or (b) that these are works pulled from very different parts of a long career. Given how many of the works here show the scar tissue of St. Marks &amp; environs (no actual mentions of <span class=SpellE>Ukes</span> or Gem Spa that I recall, but still . . <span class=GramE>. )</span>, this is a genuine option. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So I find myself liking the first two, but for fairly different reasons, admiring the third, but not really engaging with it at the same depth. And the project as a whole reminds me very much of Jessica Smith&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Organic Furniture Cellar </i>with its attempt to abdicate control of the poem, to hand it over to the willing reader. In a sense, each project echoes for me those old &#8220;music minus one&#8221; recordings where the viola part is omitted from a string quartet so that students can practice. Both projects are consciously incomplete, but one completely different axes. In their absence, the reader is invited to substitute whatever presumptions are needed &#8211; like a &#8220;paint by numbers&#8221; kit that lacks a code for assigning colors. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Smith wants the reader to take more responsibility, not just in the reading but in everything they do. Fagin, when he argues his &#8220;anonymous poems&#8221; case, doesn&#8217;t really want &#8211; at least as I understand it &#8211; readers to fill in the blanks. But the blanks are real. Even if we read a poem and  it&#8217;s by a poet we have never read before, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that  is information, a context. </i>If anything, these anonymous poems are far more controlled than Smith&#8217;s &#8211; which makes the large gaps opened up by the sheer absence of a name more intriguing. But it doesn&#8217;t fill them in. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Think for a moment of the federal government&#8217;s great wish to hear every phone conversation, read every email, and it&#8217;s inability to assign anything better than &#8220;keyword searching&#8221; software to the task because of the absolute volume of data involved. The sentence <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>It&#8217;s going to be a bomb </i>means something very different to the question <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>How do you think Mel Gibson&#8217;s next picture will do in New York </i>than to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>What are you taking on the flight to Milan? </i>Or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>What do you think of Joe Lieberman&#8217;s campaign now? </i>Context, as Roman Jakobson used to note, is one of the six functions of language. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, July 27, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><img height="354" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/4dfw-TiII_4PTt0PM8rYQu5o7R1AeuUkFSxrkpDhjo39bXmzj4PZnCFZDcnSSmFNwPmvjWtDvHGyk3h1GfV3g9mxdQulBqJA%3Ds0-d" width="234"><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'>Writing of Gabe Gudding&#8217;s essay on the impact of creative writing programs on the evolution of American poetry yesterday, I noted that at &#8220;its heart, what [Gudding&#8217;s essay] asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history.&#8221; I found myself thinking of that exact question while reading the latest book from <a href="http://www.quale.com/"><span style='color:black'>Quale Press</span></a>, <a href="http://www.sherwoodanderson.org/"><span style='color:black'>Sherwood Anderson&#8217;s</span></a> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.quale.com/Mid_SA.html"><span style='color:black'>Mid-American Chants</span></a>. </i>Originally published in 1918, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mid-American Chants </i>is an anomaly, a relatively early work &#8211; his third book &#8211; of a late starter (Anderson was 42 when it first came out, four years after his first novel, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Windy McPherson&#8217;s Son</i>), a collection of poetry from an author known for his fiction. Here is a reasonably typical example, entitled &#8220;Song to New Song&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Over my city Chicago a singer arises to sing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I greet thee, hoarse and terrible singer, half man, half bird, strong, winged one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I see you float in cold bleak winds,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Your wings burned by the fires of furnaces,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>In all your cries so little that is beautiful,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Only the fact that you have risen out of the din and roar to float and wait and point the way to song.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Back of your grim city, singer, the long flat fields.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Corn that stands up in orderly rows, full of purpose.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>As you float and wait, uttering your hoarse cries<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>I see new beauties in the standing corn,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>And dream of singers yet to come,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>When you and your rude kind, choked by the fury of your furnaces,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Have fallen dead upon this coal heap here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Kneeling in prayer I shall forget you not, grim singer,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Black bird, black against your black smoke-laden sky,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Uttering your hoarse and terrible cries,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The while you do strive to catch and understand<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The faint and long forgotten quality of song,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>By never sweeter singers to be sung.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><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'>Several things in this text stand out, above &amp; beyond the obvious influence of Whitman. One is the fact that there is nothing personal here about the use of the first person singular. Is &#8220;I&#8221; here even a person? More accurately, it strikes me as a rhetorical position. Nor is there anything personal, even personified, about &#8220;you,&#8221; bird man of the furnaces. Rather, this is a kind of public, figurative language we hardly hear any more, save possibly in church. If it seems preposterous or stilted or dated, that is the index of just how far outside our expectations such language is today within the poem. <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'>And yet it is not, clearly, a sign of any weakness on the author&#8217;s part &#8211; rhythmically, this work is rock solid. You can tell almost instantly just how certain of his craft </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Anderson</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <span class=GramE>is</span> here. In its 19 lines, only ten words have as many as three syllables and just one &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>beautiful </i>&#8211; has four. <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'>It&#8217;s hard for me to imagine that this kind of poetry was possible less than 30 years before I was born &#8211; my ear hears it as tho an echo of another age altogether. But of course those 30 years were  not just the period of the rise of the creative writing program with its emphasis on getting in touch with personal experience, but also of aural mass communication for the very first time as radio, in particular, and later motion pictures made the spoken word something that could take place on a one-to-many basis for the very first time. The very first thing you noticed about an emerging public figure like JFK or Lyndon Johnson was that they &#8220;talked funny,&#8221; which is to say that each showed pronounced vestiges of a regional accent. A lot of that has dissolved for those of us who grew up in the years immediately after World War 2, especially after corporations began to dictate the movement of families hither and yon over the landscape. So </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Anderson</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> employs a rhetoric that sounds as foreign now as does Ezra Pound&#8217;s trilled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>r </i>in the recordings of his readings, conventions that have ceased to exist over the past century. <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'>One of the listservs I&#8217;m on has had a somewhat similar discussion about a more recent project, Robert Duncan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ndpublishing.com/books/duncangroundwork.html"><span style='color:black'>Ground Work</span></a>, </i>recently reissued by New Directions. Some writers there noted that they had not gotten into his work because they found it grim. I hardly think of it myself in those terms, but I do think that it insists on the seriousness of poetry itself as a vocation, and that Duncan himself &#8211; even where he farms his childhood and family mysteries for material &#8211; never particularly saw the poem as an occasion for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>personal </i>expression. He was, literally, much more interested in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpersonal"><span  style='color:black'>transpersonal</span></a>, </i>the idea that, as he put in an earlier poem, the dance exists prior to the presence of any dancers, who are merely &#8220;permitted to return&#8221; from time to time. It&#8217;s a view as old as Blake&#8217;s, but one that is a far cry from the experiential voice of the old <span class=SpellE>McPoem</span> of creative writing workshops <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>from the phenomenological sweep, say, one finds in much language (and post-) poetry. <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'>Once you begin to do this, you start to see other kinds of poetry that likewise fall outside of Gudding&#8217;s model &#8211; the whole of vispo for one &#8211; and you begin to wonder what it means that this alternate tradition has not, at least to this point, ever been articulated as such. Is it that they have not had the institutional advantage of the MFA programs that carry forward the &#8220;growth agenda&#8221; of creative <span class=GramE>writing.</span> Where, say, does Kenny Goldsmith&#8217;s &#8220;uncreative writing&#8221; fit into such a counter tradition? <span class=GramE>Or the post-dada noodling of the likes of Fluxus or Dick Higgins?</span> <span class=GramE>Or, for that matter, Gertrude Stein.</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'>I don&#8217;t &#8211; today, anyway &#8211; have answers. But looking at the world through Gudding&#8217;s glasses does tend to bring different elements into focus. And that&#8217;s what I find interesting. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, July 26, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><img height="262" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ZBsRrfUPsYBdEVkk0HNkUl__HonG3c38wv29TwkId1Xv3AwnTdqIjGle0HOisZWXlbfYh8WhREBYbdupYplnEQ%3Ds0-d" width="171"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.english.ilstu.edu/people/profile.aspx?ulid=gmguddi"><span style='color:black'>Gabe Gudding</span></a> loves the role of trouble maker. You can see it in his <a href="http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=35419"><span style='color:black'>poetry</span></a>, his criticism, his <a href="http://gabrielgudding.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>weblog</span></a>, his missives to listservs, the people he chooses to champion. He lists &#8220;tastelessness&#8221; as a research interest on his web page at </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Illinois</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>State</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>University</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Normal</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and is photographed there in front of the razor-wire fence of a prison.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </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'>Not unlike Kent Johnson, Gudding is one of those people whom it&#8217;s possible to admire even as you want to slap him across the face with an old trout. The impulse behind the ruckus is often good, but the impulse itself comes with a lot of baggage. It&#8217;s taken me years, for example, to get around to reading his essay, <a href="http://www.flashpointmag.com/guddin~1.htm"><span style='color:black'>&#8220;From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing,&#8221;</span></a> which I finally loaded onto my Palm TX &amp; read while I was in California. The title is off-putting enough, but somewhere early on when it was first posted to the <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>FlashPoint</i></span> magazine website in 1999 I scanned it, saw a cheesy comment about Charles Bernstein (&#8220;arguably one of the most benighted and boring writers in the United States&#8221;), an aside that actually had nothing to do with the point then being made in the paper &amp; thought of all the other times that Gudding has gone jousting against some of <a href="http://gabrielgudding.blogspot.com/2003/04/someone-call-ambulance-dramatic.html"><span style='color:black'>my own favorite windmills</span></a>, myself included, and decided for the time being that I didn&#8217;t need to read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that. </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'>In fact, I was wrong. In spite of its somewhat misleading title &#8211; the subtitle is where all the action is here &#8211; Gudding&#8217;s essay is an attempt to understand the impact of creative writing programs on poetry itself, both the verse being written and, even more so, the divorce between the poet as <span class=SpellE>experiencer</span> of Big Feelings &#8211; what everyone from Oprah to Garrison Keeler mean by the adjective <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>poetic &#8211;</i> and the contemporary writer of poems that are often dismissed as too difficult or insular to bother reading. While there are a few poets &#8211; Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Amiri Baraka &#8211; who deliberately produce verse for audiences who don&#8217;t otherwise read poetry, most poets, regardless of their literary heritage or tendencies, are readily dismissed by mass audiences. <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'>Gudding&#8217;s genius here has been not to ascribe this disjunction to one literary tendency or another (tho he also, just as clearly, demonstrates that its roots, if not its effects, are as far from the post-avant tradition as one could imagine), but would appear to be grounded in the history of American education as such, specifically in the rise of English departments, a phenomenon that did not exist 200 years ago, and within them the rise of creative writing courses. Gudding makes great use of John Dewey&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Art and Experience </i>and the writings and work of William Hughes <span class=SpellE>Mearns</span>, whom Gudding credits as the first to teach the subject by name. <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'>Gudding&#8217;s point is that creative writing never was intended to produce poets, <span class=SpellE>fictioneers</span>, playwrights or (the latest and most telling development, tho Gudding somewhat surprisingly doesn&#8217;t mention it to support his case, which it surely does) professional purveyors of the &#8220;personal essay.&#8221; Rather, from the beginning, the purpose was to develop, in <span class=SpellE>Mearns</span>&#8217;  words, &#8220;self-expression as a means of growth, and not poetry&#8230;. <span class=GramE>The business of making professional poets is still another matter &#8211; with which this writer has never had the least interest&#8221; (Gudding&#8217;s ellipsis).</span> <span class=SpellE>Mearns</span>&#8217; efforts might not have created poets, but it sure did create jobs for them, paid work aimed precisely at replicating the same fuzzy experiential agenda &#8211; the idea that a creative writing course is the one class in college that is explicitly about <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>You</i>. Gudding cites a then-current </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>University</span></st1:PlaceType><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Montana</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> creative writing program&#8217;s brochure that quotes the late Richard Hugo saying &#8220;</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>a creative writing class may be one of the last places where you can go where your life still matters.&quot; Gudding implies, and he&#8217;s not wrong, that this isn&#8217;t necessarily a good thing. While I was out in California last week &#8211; staying at the home of one of Hugo&#8217;s former students, no less, now a psychotherapist whose bookshelves are full of the Pablo Neruda-to-Jane Kenyon spectrum of verse &#8211; one former Mills professor told me of a &#8220;revolt&#8221; that occurred in one of his classes when he had the temerity to suggest that his students actually <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>read </i>contemporary poetry. <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 very same poetics of experience that lies at the heart of this growth agenda &#8211; Gudding calls it &#8220;democratic freighting,&#8221; acknowledging the impulses behind Dewey&#8217;s view of curriculum &#8211; leads to an aesthetic of the overwrought on the side of the School of Quietude, and to a phenomenology of the signifier among post avants, neither of which is calculated to gain a broad readership in a world where the lowest common denominator seems to be Dan Brown&#8217;s plot-driven conspiracy narratives.<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'>Gudding concludes by demonstrating just how pervasive this aesthetic of the personal has become, quoting poet after poet, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>from all literary tendencies</i>, who argue, in form or another, that the poem is found &#8211; the contemporary poet doesn&#8217;t so much <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>write </i>the poem as she or he <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>discovers it </i>&#8211; rather than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>constructed</i> (the alternate model Gudding traces back to Coleridge): Robert Frost, Eudora <span class=SpellE>Welty</span>, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Bill Stafford. A secondary, but not unimportant aspect of Gudding&#8217;s panoply of consequences is the rise of prose within poetry, precisely on the theory &#8211; Russell Edson is cited here &#8211; on the grounds that it is closer to experience because prose entails less of a formal dimension.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </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'>At its heart, Gudding&#8217;s argument is fascinating and troubling pretty much in equal amounts. At its heart, what it asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history. That&#8217;s a profoundly important question.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </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'>But Gudding&#8217;s execution &#8211; this appears to have been written while he was himself still in the MFA program at Cornell &#8211; is beyond sloppy. His gratuitous dismissal of Charles Bernstein ignores Bernstein&#8217;s own work in this area &#8211; and Bernstein&#8217;s Brechtian send-ups of the personal in his own poetry would seem to be exactly what Gudding is tacitly advocating. <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'>Further, Gudding&#8217;s description of prose as an anti-formal aesthetic strategy sounds very 1960s and the constructivist tendencies of the language school are nowhere considered, particularly since they (we) are being dismissed out of hand. It puts Gudding into the convoluted position of arguing for things that he otherwise trashes. One wishes, for example, that he had simply set aside the cheap shots and made the sort of meticulous case for his position that one associates, say, with the work on the history of canons done by Alan <span class=SpellE>Golding</span>. It wouldn&#8217;t have been that hard to do, but <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>FlashPoint</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>is hardly the only online journal that seems to think that editing stops with accepting a particular work. <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'>But Gudding shouldn&#8217;t be dismissed just because he may be his own worst enemy rhetorically. The argument that he is making &#8211; however incomplete and riddled with problems it might be &#8211; has elements that ring true and would be good to think out at far greater length. Gudding&#8217;s own poetry might be characterized as neo-Georgian, particularly with its emphasis on satire and social wit, as if the only way to sidestep the problematics of the personal might be to go back to the last period in which such concerns were not (yet) an issue. I&#8217;m not convinced of this, either by the poems themselves or by Gudding&#8217;s reasoning here, but at the very least this misnamed essay offers gateways through which one might begin to address such issues. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, July 24, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>While I was in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>California</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> back on July 10, the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://online.wsj.com/google_login.html?url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115249443313702007.html?mod=googlenews_wsj"><span style='color:black'>Wall Street Journal</span></a> </i>ran a piece on Afghan poetry in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> on its front page. The article by <span class=SpellE>Masood</span> <span class=SpellE>Farivar</span>, which has been reprinted by a few other newspapers in places such as <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06191/704786-42.stm"><span style='color:black'>Pittsburgh</span></a> and Birmingham, Alabama, is worth reading in its entirety &#8211; when was the last time you saw a cogent piece on the sociology of poetry on the front page of a newspaper? Me neither. The headline in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Journal </i>was &#8220;For Afghan Cabbies, A Poetry Tradition Spurs War of Words.&#8221; Most of the other papers, however, realized that this wasn&#8217;t about taxi drivers, giving it the plainer, but more accurate heading of something like the Post-Gazette&#8217;s &#8220;D.C. Afghan poetry groups fight war of words.&#8221;<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 gist of the article concerns two reading series that take place in the same Masonic Lodge in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Springfield</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>VA</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, on different Friday nights each month. One, &#8220;An Evening with the Dervishes,&#8221; in the words of <span class=SpellE>Farivar</span>, &#8220;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>prefers what it calls the serious, scholarly pursuit of poetry. The group views itself as a literary clique focusing on masters such as Abdul <span class=SpellE>Qadir</span> <span class=SpellE>Bedil</span>, a 17<sup>th</sup> century poet and Islamic mystic, or Sufi. Its gatherings feature top scholars and poets.<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 other, older series, &#8220;An Evening of Sufism,&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>brings all forms of Afghan poetry to large audiences.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'> It also treats attendees to free refreshments and pop-music performances.<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 article makes a point of noting that a reader in the latter series recently &#8220;informed the audience that she&#8217;d just finished her poem in the parking lot.&#8221;<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 differences between the two groups echo the division within American poetries between the School of Quietude, that ensemble of aesthetic tendencies that tends to stress the conventionality of poetry and its continuity with English literary traditions (and tensions) &amp; the broad range of post-avant alternatives that emerged with the New American Poets of the 1950s, but which can be traced back to Whitman &amp; Poe a century earlier. <span class=SpellE>Farivar</span> characterizes the dispute:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Mostly they adhere to Afghan social norms, treating each other with civility and even deference. Occasionally, they drop by each other's gatherings. But at times, their rivalries have burst into the open.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Members of &quot;An Evening of Sufism&quot; accuse the Dervishes of tearing down their flyers from Afghan stores, and have dubbed them &quot;hash-heads,&quot; which in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Afghanistan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'> is a term associated with the uneducated. <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'>In fact, the Dervishes seem closer to the group&#8217;s origins in a series of evenings when the poets would seriously debate the nuances of classic Afghan texts, pooling their money to call M.I. <span class=SpellE>Negargar</span>, a former </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Kabul</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>University</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> professor now living in exile in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, to tease out the full potential of the works they were discussing. <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 one steps back from the specifics of the current tempest &#8211; who tore down whose flyers or who is trying to get whom kicked out of the Masonic Lodge &#8211; one sees two distinct approaches to literature emerging, one focused on the historic canon of Afghan poetry and emphasizing continuity with traditional Afghan culture &#8211; there is a move among the Dervishes, for example, to ban all forms of musical accompaniment at their readings &#8211; the other focused more on the present, which includes contemporary writing and concerns that may affect Afghan exiles in the U.S., but which would be of little import from the perspective of traditional culture in Afghanistan. Finishing a poem in the parking lot just before the start of a reading may not be the best way to present polished writing, but it certainly is one way of foregrounding the value on the present that the other group has.<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 article made me wonder just how much these same divisions may underscore roughly parallel, and far older, chasms within American poetry. For example, just how much of the School of Quietude/post-avant debate can still be traced back to this nation&#8217;s origins as a gathering of exiles, one group concerned with accentuating its continuity with European cultures, especially British culture, the other hoping to foreground that which is somehow uniquely American about American poetry?&#185; How does this compare with the same sort of division, say, back in the U.K., where the distinction seems instead to reflect class divisions as much as anything else (a cleavage that goes back to Shakespeare&#8217;s day, at the least, when the Bard initiated the post-avant impulse by composing his own sonnet series to demonstrate that an uneducated writer of popular entertainments from the boonies could perform at least as well as a &#8220;University wit&#8221; like Ben <span class=SpellE>Jonson</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 U.S. Afghan exile literary scene dates, according to this article, back to the 1980s when the first wave of exiles began to write. The article implies, without seeming to realize that this is what it is suggesting, that the scene in Springfield, VA, represents literary processes that may be larger than just Afghan or U.S. verse, and represents an opportunity to observe an evolution in the social history of poetry not unlike the way a cyclotron enables a scientist to recreate conditions near, if not at, the Big Bang from which all current tendencies necessarily follow. Regardless of where you might fit into these broader literary traditions, the rise of Afghan poetry in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> should be worth watching.<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'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185;One could argue that between a colonial imperialism lurking within one tradition &amp; an unexamined nationalism lurking in the other, that both tendencies offer ample territory for critique. This division isn&#8217;t so much about who might be &#8220;right&#8221; as it is about the values being propagated by each tendency&#8217;s agenda. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, June 28, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>When I was a student at <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Berkeley</st1:place></st1:City> circa 1970, Fred Crews used to teach a course on literature &amp; ideology. His reading list had all the usual suspects, starting with Orwell &amp; <span class=SpellE>Brecht</span>. And that was part of what kept me from ever bothering to take the course &#8211; it struck me as obvious that the writing one ought to be reading in such a class were exactly the works that appeared to be &#8220;non-ideological&#8221; and not about politics at all. The politics of a Pound or <span class=SpellE>Celine</span> or Bellow, on the right, or a Rushdie or Vonnegut or Denise <span class=SpellE>Levertov</span> or Amiri Baraka are all over their work. <span class=GramE>But what about the politics of John Ashbery or Billy Collins or Ted Kooser or Ted Berrigan?</span> It&#8217;s not that they don&#8217;t have ideological commitments, even if their personal politics might be incoherent, but rather that they don&#8217;t foreground this dimension in their writing. That always struck me as being the right place to look if you wanted to have a truly useful discussion of a dimension like ideology.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Similarly, this summer at Naropa, I&#8217;m teaching a course that looks at the dividing line between self &amp; other in contemporary writing. There are, of course, a million works these days in which the poet has brought in various literary devices to ensure that everything in the work is not the &#8220;pure expression&#8221; of the poet&#8217;s ego. In class, we&#8217;ve discussed John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Oulipo, flarf, Kenny Goldsmith&#8217;s uncreative writing. At the same time we&#8217;re reading three major critical pieces by Charles Olson &#8211; &#8220;Projective Verse&#8221; and &#8220;Letter to Elaine Feinstein,&#8221; two of his programmatic statements of projectivism, very much articulations of how the self might proceed in poetics, as well as &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Proprioception</span>,&#8221; Olson&#8217;s dialectics, which contains within itself a glimpse finally not just of self, but of other. Against this, what I didn&#8217;t want to do was simply pose works that offer the polar opposite practice, such as Mac Low or Goldsmith (different as they from one another), but in fact writers who don&#8217;t normally proceed as if the self/other question in the work is a major axis of their writing. The three books I chose were Aaron <span class=SpellE>Shurin&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.omnidawn.com/p_catalog.htm"><span style='color:black'>Involuntary Lyrics</span></a>, </i>Christian Bök&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/index.php?ISBN=1552450929"><span style='color:black'>Eunoia</span></a>, </i>and Geraldine Kim&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.fencebooks.com/backlist.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Povel</span></span></a>. </i>Not only does each poet come to a very different conclusion in these works as to how this question plays out in their writing, each represents a different demographic approaching this issue. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Shurin</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>, with whom I went to UC Berkeley (for all I know, he may have taken Crews&#8217; class), is a member of my own generation, old enough now to have had a couple of different careers as a poet, emerging first as one of the gay activist poets of the post-Stonewall period, then pushing himself further toward a post-avant poetics after working with Robert Duncan at New College. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Involuntary Lyrics </i>represents a return to the line after 15 years of prose poems, but for the project he chose the end words of Shakespeare&#8217;s sonnets (not necessarily in the same order as they appear in that sonnet) for which he wrote new lines, so to speak. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>The best-selling poetry book in Canadian history, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Eunoia </i>is a marvel of narrative &amp; sonic invention, as Bök, a generation younger than <span class=SpellE>Shurin</span> &amp;, like many Canadians, as close to the European tradition of experimental literature as he is to the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place  w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> poetry scene. You can, if you wish, read (and even <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bok.html"><span style='color:black'>hear</span></a>) the whole of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Eunoia </i>online<span class=GramE>,<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>which</span> you should. If you&#8217;re like me, you will still need to own both the book &amp; CD as well, tho I must say that Bök&#8217;s reading on the CD seems muted &amp; paced in comparison with the high-energy performance I heard him give of this at Temple a couple of years back. Each section of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Eunoia </i>presents a tale written entirely using a single vowel. The story of Helen is told all using words that contain only <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>e, </i>and there are some fabulously obscene moments in <span class=GramE>the <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>i</i></span></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>chapter. If the question in <span class=SpellE>Shurin&#8217;s</span> work is where <span class=GramE>does he</span> end &amp; Shakespeare begin (or vice versa), the question for the Oulipo-influenced Bök is where is he in the work?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Gerald Kim&#8217;s <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Povel</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>presents this issue in exactly the opposite way. One could read her new sentence structured verse novel as tho it were an autobiographical text and, tho her book received the 2005 Fence Modern Poets Series prize from Fence (Forrest Gander was the judge), at least some <a href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/200604/?read=review_kim"><span style='color:black'>reviews</span></a> treat the book as though it were entirely a novel. Born in 1983 &#8211; she couldn&#8217;t have been more than 21 when she wrote <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Povel</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>&#8211; Kim is of a new generation entirely, as well as a Korean-American writer, a cultural take that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> literature is only now getting to know. But the best part of this is that the distance between the <st1:Street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">Abbott Street</st1:address></st1:Street> neighborhood in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Worcester</st1:City>, <st1:State  w:st="on">Massachusetts</st1:State></st1:place>, where Charles Olson grew up and Brooks Crossing, West Boylston, the street on which Kim was raised, is just 7.4 miles.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, June 26, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='color:black'><img height="280" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/L6mj38xMOwuTQxOZJMsIKRLrh8aKu3BTeTOj2HBGEl6UNMxrOyUXXCZ_53WetxUSjx6dFTOJpaZsbcCIo5q5hWlaR_WH7nj9eGlfal110AY-%3Ds0-d" width="238"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Philosophy after <st1:place w:st="on">Auschwitz</st1:place> is barbaric</span></i></b><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That sentence, which is true in the sense that it is possible, that we can say &amp; think it, can hear echoes of other similar sentences within it, can substitute any discipline into that first word-slot &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>mathematics after Auschwitz is barbaric</i> &#8211; can substitute any horror into the third position &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>mathematics after Hiroshima is barbaric </i>&#8211; can even, if we are prepared to cross a line not everyone will be comfortable with, substitute any characterization into the last slot &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>mathematics after Hiroshima is transparent </i>&#8211; bedevils me.<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'>Poetry &amp; philosophy are twins, each looking to the other, anxious to compare. For every Adorno or Sartre or Cavell who addresses literature as a professional philosopher, we have poets who mime, as well as mine, philosophy itself, from Ezra Pound to John Taggart to Anne Carson &amp; Susan Stewart, from Charles Olson to Charles Bernstein to Allen Grossman to Geraldine Kim. And then there is Wittgenstein, more widely imitated by poets, yours truly included, than any other practitioner of a &#8220;non-poetic&#8221; genre, more even than Bob Dylan. Not to mention Walter Benjamin &#8211; him I see as philosophy&#8217;s Jack Spicer. Both were obsessed with the task of the translator. <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'>Like a lot of poets, I enter into this with a history &amp; a bias. My formal training in philosophy consists of two classes, one on set theory, the other an intro course at <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Merritt</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">College</st1:PlaceType> while I was picking up the units needed to transfer from the creative writing program at <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">San Francisco</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">State</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>, which had been decimated by the 1968 student strike, to the English Department at UC Berkeley. My instructor was an Algerian-born Frenchman who&#8217;d gone into <span class=GramE>exile</span> when it became unsafe for the French in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Algiers</st1:place></st1:City>, and who used Bertrand Russell&#8217;s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Western_Philosophy_(Russell)"><span style='color:black'>decidedly idiosyncratic history</span></a> as his text. Like a lot of kids &#8211; or at least guys with intellectual pretensions &#8211; of my generation, I&#8217;d read around in Kierkegaard &amp; Heidegger in high school primarily so that young women would notice me reading the books. By the time I got out of high school, tho, I had the idea that a poet probably ought to know as much as possible about linguistics and about philosophy in order not to be simply a fool with a pen. <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 found Chomsky&#8217;s linguistic texts impenetrable. The most intelligible line I ever read there, to this day, <span class=GramE>is &#8221;</span></span><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#339966'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously"><span style='color:#339966'>Colorless green ideas sleep furiously</span></a>,</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221; though I think it&#8217;s considerably more meaningful than does he. On the other hand, <a href="http://www.cinestatic.com/bolinger.htm"><span style='color:black'>Dwight <span class=SpellE>Bolinger&#8217;s</span></span></a> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Meaning and Form, </i>a basic text, and the writing on linguistics by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Hockett"><span style='color:black'>Charles <span class=SpellE>Hockett</span></span></a> in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Scientific American, </i>had a deep and lasting impact, sending me back through the history of linguistics first to Saussure &amp; then to Roman Jakobson. It is not an accident, I think, that when MIT math major George Lakoff wanted to take a course on poetry &amp; got Jakobson as his teacher,
that Lakoff was destined &#8211; one might say doomed &#8211; to <span class=GramE>become</span> a linguist. Nor is it an accident that when Claude Levi-Strauss heard Jakobson at the New School while in exile in New York during World War 2, that Levi-Strauss was similarly doomed to develop the structuralist school of cultural anthropology, which is exactly the structuralism to which all post-structuralism today imagines itself to be post-. The series Levi-Strauss attended was later published as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. </i>Sound &amp; meaning, not accidentally, are the critical dimensions of the poem. <span class=SpellE>Jakobson&#8217;s</span> ideas first began to percolate when he was still in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region>, where he was a young poet collaborating with the likes of Mayakovsky. This is how Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov &amp; their kin among the doomed poets of the Russian revolution, ultimately begat Derrida, begat <span class=SpellE>Deleuze</span>, begat <span class=SpellE>Gayatri</span> <span class=SpellE>Spivak</span>, begat <span
class=SpellE>Zizek</span>, none of them the wiser.<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'>Reading Wittgenstein for me was a life-changing event, perhaps because I read <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Philosophical Investigations </i>back to back &amp; could see there the passion of the self-tortured mind. Passion, I would argue, is precisely what separates the very best philosophers from the bulk. It&#8217;s what I love about Willard Van <span class=SpellE>Orman</span> <span class=SpellE>Quine</span> &amp; about Sartre, with whom I never ever agree. It&#8217;s what I love about Adorno, even if his attitude toward jazz makes me want to club him with a saxophone. Philosophy is all about feelings, but that&#8217;s not all. <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'>Poetry &amp; philosophy are two practices that propose their texts as instances of the self-valuable word. It would be easy enough to sketch them out, one pulling on the side of connotation, the other denotation. But as twins, this pair is incestuous. One could argue that continental philosophy is on the side of connation, analytic philosophy on the side of denotation, that continental philosophy as such has been infected with the poetic. <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'>When I was a creative writing major in the 1960s, the obsessive quest of such programs was to help young poets find their voice. It was early in that decade when Charles Olson first drafted the nines essays that make up <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Proprioception, </i>the closest thing we have ever had to <span class=GramE>a dialectic</span> of, by, and for poets. Over the decades since the obsession with voice has changed. We live now in the age of flarf &#8211; at least one definition of which is poetry created to be deliberately awful or anti-literary &#8211; as a genre and of Google-sculpting &amp; myriad chance operations as everyday literary devices, of appropriated texts &amp; found ones. Kenny Goldsmith, sometimes known as Kenny G, writes &teaches what he calls uncreative writing, scanning in an entire edition of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New York Times, </i>offering us a year&#8217;s worth of weather reports. Today, younger poets find themselves in exactly the inverse position of the one I confronted 40 years ago, seeking not so much their Voice as ways out of it, seeking not their Self but their <span class=GramE>Other</span>. But what does that mean? I think it&#8217;s at least as nebulous as the concept of voice. My own goal for this week is to explore that dividing line in as many ways as possible. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#167;<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This statement is for a panel, to include Elizabeth Willis, Anne Waldman, Chris <span class=SpellE>Tysh</span>, Donald <span class=SpellE>Preziosi</span> and me, Monday morning, June 26. The description of the panel itself is as much instruction as we were given, <span class=GramE>save</span> to prepare a statement, seven to ten minutes in length:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>What is it in philosophy that writers find so attractive? How important should philosophy be to a writer? Panelists will discuss how philosophical inquiries have informed their thinking and writing. Be it Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jean-Luc Nancy, or some other French guy, our panelists will discuss the philosophers they have been reading. Panelists will also discuss which investigations&#8249;whether class, gender, society, desire, philosophy of language, or other areas&#8249;most inform their work and thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, November 10, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Keston
Sutherland is being vague. Actually, this isn&#8217;t accurate. Keston Sutherland is
being very exact about being vague, almost painfully so, in his superb article
&#8220;Vagueness,&#8221; which begins on the front page of the new <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'><a href="http://www.shakes.cz/plr/">PLR</a>. </i>Given that I was just
as harsh I seem to have been on </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-size:
 10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jake Berry</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> over this very issue, the question
of vagueness &#8211; or perhaps The Vague &#8211; seems worth considering further. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Sutherland
begins with Bertrand Russell &#8211; a cagey starting-point, given both Russell&#8217;s
mentoring relationship to Wittgenstein (and through Wittgenstein the whole
ordinary language movement) &amp; Russell&#8217;s own commitment to political
engagement (which leads not necessarily to, say, the Frankfort School or the
later likes of Bourdieu, but is not so distant from the trends these
continental writers represent, either). More precisely, Sutherland begins
(albeit after several paragraphs stalking the point) by rejecting Russell&#8217;s conception
of vagueness as &#8220;merely the contrary of precision.&#8221; The implication, as Russell
proposes it, is something like this: the world is not vague; it is only human
beings who can be vague, by not understanding their relation to a set of facts
that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is </i>(not just <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>represents</i>) the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>That&#8217;s a
position that might lead one to modes of moral certainty &amp; it is this
predilection that seems to make Sutherland most uneasy. If one were merely
&#8220;clear&#8221; about the facts, it would be self-evident to anyone that, say, the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> incursion into </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was the run-up to a disaster that
may well take decades to unfold, detail by distressing, gory detail. Yet the
very presence of moral certainty as a stance is exactly the tone usurped by the
likes of George W &amp; even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, such as
Bin Laden, who directly oppose Bush &amp; the capitalist modernity Bush might
be said to represent. In such a milieu, it&#8217;s hard to feel good about moral
certainty.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Arial'>Which brings Sutherland (via Heidegger) to this:</span></span><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:.3in'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>It is vigilant
now not to avoid but to comprehend vagueness, to substantiate for an in
vagueness its dialectics. This is a laborious kind of vigilance. For me it is
most thorough only in writing poetry. I feel my work becoming thickened by
inspecificities, I see and produce language ripped down a screen of vagueness.
It is a kind of unhappiness and can in facile ways be attributed to anything: I
say &#8220;over the lilac / and nothing and bake&#8221; maybe because, what? Kim Il-<span
class=SpellE>Jong</span>? <span class=GramE>Because a Labour MP in </span></span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:
  Arial'>Portsmouth</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span class=GramE><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> called
the <span class=SpellE>Paulsgrove</span> outbursts a healthy expression of
democracy?</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:.3in'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>What I
feel is a pressure not to specify, but more anxiously a pressure <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not to concede to precision, </i>by which I
do mean Pound&#8217;s sense of the word, and Russell&#8217;s sense, and the word less
specially understood. This would be easier to theorise if I could believe that
vagueness in language is a definite index of disappointment, or alienation, or
even of the pretentious believe that I experience these conditions. I would
then merely be documenting and not dementing life. It is perhaps <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>vaguely </i>such an index; but this
reflexive circularity, the characterization of experience by reference to
itself as a predicate, is now &#8211; in our present spin of days &#8211; a form of
recumbent and ultimately indifferent thinking. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The idea of
vagueness as a register or index of something concrete &#8211; alienation,
disappointment, overwhelming complexity, whatever &#8211; is attractive, no doubt.
Sutherland senses its implications for poetry &amp;, quoting Gadamer on Celan,
takes us to the idea, oft expressed, that <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>it is &#8220;obligatory&#8221; that a poem
&#8220;not contain a single word standing for something in such a way that another
word could be substituted for it.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is a
concept that we have heard said of the poem a million different ways. It is implicit
in the first two of the three principles for Imagism that Ezra Pound, H.D.
&amp; Richard Aldington concocted in the summer of 1912:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list .5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-fareast-font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Verdana'><span
style='mso-list:Ignore'>1.<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Direct treatment of the &#8216;thing&#8217; whether subjective
or objective.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:6.0pt;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:
0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list .5in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-fareast-font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Verdana'><span
style='mso-list:Ignore'>2.<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>To use absolutely no word that does not contribute
to the presentation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Sutherland
turns instead to Eliot: &#8220;It is impossible to say just what I mean.&#8221; That&#8217;s a
statement that might be read as yet another dictum against paraphrasing the
poem, but it might also be seen an acknowledgement of an ineffability that lies
right at the heart of what Sutherland intends here by vagueness. Sutherland
carries this into an attack on the concept of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>le mot juste, </i>the idea that there might be (must be?) if not an
ideal order to any statement, at the very least a best one. And that beneath <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>juste </i>hides an entire conceptualization
of justice. Sutherland asks<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>le mot juste, </i>so admired by Pound, the negation of vagueness? Had
vagueness been, at this earlier point in the century, unjust? Could it now be
time to reverse the intuitive order of that relation, choosing to feel that
vagueness is the just, positive term of which precision is the distorted
negative?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Sutherland
is asking<span class=GramE>,</span> if I read him right, if in fact vagueness
might not now be a register of the impossibility of specification <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as such</i> in a world in which
specification has been reduced to missile-targeting coordinates? The word that
Sutherland really wants to defend, to propose, is just this: <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>impossibility. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Impossibility is not just a
faded watchword echoing the 1960s campus occupations of &#8220;Utopian&#8221; vocab. It is
the absolute target-concept; it is a positive contingency of all humane
expression. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Yet once
the term impossibility is introduced, Sutherland does indeed invoke a utopian
rhetoric:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>this defiance is crucial and true, it is impossible, and as
such it is truly expressible only without precision. . . . In poetry, this
impossible defiance shines, like love as the ideal limit of hatred. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I don&#8217;t
agree with Sutherland not because I don&#8217;t share a sense of a common goal, but
rather because I think he has conflated different (and conflicting)
circumstances into this word vagueness. What is called for is a little
Coleridgean desynonymy, teasing out the differences between two states &#8211; a
politically retrograde &amp; dangerous one (much exploited by the current
regime here in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>) that I think is the historic &amp;
adequate meaning of the term vagueness &amp; a second one that has, indeed,
liberatory potentiality &amp; which is characterized not by vagueness but by a
specific mode of overdetermination Norman O. Brown used to call the
polymorphous perverse. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>To draw the
distinction, though, I think we need to go back to Russell&#8217;s initial
conceptualization &amp; add to it the Gramscian notion of positionality. That
is, I would agree with Russell&#8217;s initial assertion that the world is not vague,
but would reject any concept of a universalizing objectivity because that
necessitates a <span class=SpellE>transpositional</span> universe, the idea
that these <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>relations </i>&#8211; and it is the
relations to facts that Russell thinks can be vague &#8211; are not impacted by our
position with regards to them, not so much to challenge the idea, say, that two
plus two equals four, but rather that this equation <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>means </i>the same thing to all peoples, regardless of age, gender,
color, history, class, historical moment &amp; so forth. Thus the same &#8220;facts&#8221;
might mean very different things to different people &#8211; if the current situation
in the </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Middle
 East</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> were
not evidence enough, let us think simply of how any poetic device changes
meaning <span class=GramE>generation to generation</span> &amp; place to place.
In 1923, when William Carlos Williams first published <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Spring &amp; All, </i>the speech-defined free verse line was a concept
that stretched the possibilities of English-language verse in ways they had not
been challenged since the youth of Wordsworth &amp; Coleridge. Not one, but
several generations of poets arose who made great use of the device,
particularly important in articulating all the ways in which American poetry
was not to be confused with its </span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>ind</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>irect historic antecedent, British
verse. This work reached its apotheosis in the 1960s in the writing of poets
such as Charles Olson &amp; Paul Blackburn, both of whom have been dead now for
over 30 years. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Indeed,
their deaths in 1970 &amp; &#8217;71 largely ended that tendency of poetry as an
investigative approach toward expanding our understanding of poetics. There are
many &#8211; thousands, literally &#8211; poets who follow modified free verse protocols in
their work today, but few if any do so with a sense of extending the
possibilities of transcribed dialect implicit in the work of the Projectivists.
Furthermore, this is true on both sides of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> / Post-avant Poetics divide. Thus,
what the speech-based free verse line means in 2003 is quite different from
what it meant in 1970 &amp; even more radically unlike what it meant in the
1920s. Yet, in fact, the dynamics of what happens inside a line have not
changed &amp; even the subroutines poets run (e.g. enjambment) to signal The
Spoken to their audience are largely untouched over the past three decades. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What then
is a &#8220;fact&#8221;? It isn&#8217;t any less objective than before, certainly not if we gauge
by actually existing lines in actually existing poems, but its position, both
historically in the most general terms and with regards to what each of us
might want to do with it personally, is completely different. To write like
William Carlos Williams in 2003 does not make one post-avant or even avant.
Indeed, it defines one as a particular kind of antiquarian, just like the
neo-beats one seems to find in any major metro area, replicating Allen Ginsberg
in form perhaps, but antithetical to his life &amp; the project of his writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Vagueness,
to my mind, is the recognition of just such pressures (social, historic, economic,
etc. etc.) on any given topic, object, &#8220;fact,&#8221; <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal'>without a perception of position. </b>Vagueness lacks critical
consciousness precisely where (and when) it is most needed. That lack is what
defines the vague. When George W articulates the logic that Saddam Hussein was
a vicious autocrat with no visible appreciation for the preciousness of life
and Osama Bin Laden is a vicious autocrat with no visible appreciation for the
preciousness of life, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>therefore</i> they
must have been in cahoots, he &amp; his handlers rely on a sizeable portion of
the populace not recognizing that the relations of these two historical
individuals to &#8211; to just pick one detail &#8211; the role of the state in Islamic
societies was entirely different, even if their background as one-time CIA &#8220;projects&#8221;
is not. That vagueness was politically useful to Bush in the run-up to the war,
in that it prevented some from questioning the obvious problems in pro-war
rationale. The Bush program for the environment, the economy, education and
numerous topics not beginning with the letter E relies heavily on just such
vagueness, because infusions of critical consciousness would transform each of
this issues precisely because they erode the welfare of most </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>ns (not mention our neighbors) most
of the time.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The
shape-shifting overdetermined aspects of the polymorphous perverse (PP)
recognize not only position, but direction &amp; the compression of felt
change. As such, PP certainly has room for the irrational &#8211; that is often our
first register of changing conditions &#8211; but it works very hard at not being
vague. The distinction in practice is not hard to draw. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Here is an
example taken not from poetry, but from the most recent round of American
elections held just this past Tuesday. In the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>village</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Bolinas</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, just north of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, whose 1,200 residents include such
poets as Joanne Kyger, Robert Grenier &amp; Stephen Ratcliffe, Proposition G
passed by a vote of 315 to 142. Proposition G reads exactly as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Vote for Bolinas to
be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the
water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not
hatred to hotels and motor boats. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;
  color:black'>Dakar</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <span
class=GramE>Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go
over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.</span></span><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Dakar</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Arial'>! </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It is not
possible to know from this electoral prose poem whether that noun refers to the
city in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Senegal</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> or to the custom-designed off-road
vehicle. Either one throws a conceptual frame that is consistent with enough of
the remaining two sentences to make some sense &amp; the co-existence of the
two haunt the </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>tex</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>t in a way that makes it vibrant, not vague. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>For sake of
contrast, here is one sentence I quoted before from </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jake Berry</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s <span class=SpellE><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Brambu</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'> <span class=SpellE>Drezi</span></i>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Their pulsing
flesh-blue fingers dominate<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>the boundless sky that lies between
the vertebrae<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>whose long electric veins<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>pour a half-ape angel into old
winds and hollows.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The only
phrase in this passage that isn&#8217;t vague is &#8220;flesh-blue.&#8221; Telling us that fingers
have pulses or that the sky is boundless is to tell us nothing, exactly, any
more than resurrecting<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160; </span>the old trope of
the half-ape angel tells us anything even remotely new about humankind. Long
electric veins suggest the course of the nervous system through the spinal
column, but in terms any child has seen dozens of times in science museums &#8211;
nothing new there. </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Berry</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> has some idea that he is trying to
convey here &#8211; roughly &#8220;fingers dominate sky between vertebrae&#8221; &#8211; but he doesn&#8217;t
have a sense of position &amp; instead just plugs in cliché after cliché,
trying to surround or overwhelm the emotion. But clubbing an idea into
submission is not articulation. <span class=GramE>Knowing that &#8220;Their&#8221; refers
to &#8220;ancestors&#8221; doesn&#8217;t do much more than suggest that </span></span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Berry</span></span></st1:place></st1:State><span
class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was fretting over
biological determinism.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Arial'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My
conclusion is that </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Berry</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is vague where Prop G is not. Not
that I expect either to save the skunks &amp; foxes, but one raises issues in
ways that makes me take it seriously, at least as a desire, and one does not. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, September 13, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My piece
Wednesday on H.D., <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Noveliste, </i>has me
thinking about the further question of how form, genre &amp; chance impact our
lives. Several things I saw this past week reinforced this mulling-over
process. One was an article in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The
Guardian, </i>which I actually suspect may be an adapted introduction from his
book, by <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1038253,00.html">Salam
Pax</a>. Pax, a Baghdad architecture student, created a <a
href="http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/">personal weblog</a> in English only to
discover that it had become one of the most widely read &#8220;inside views&#8221; of the
last days of Saddam &amp; the first days of George &amp; Rummy, a process that
turned him, to his considerable discomfort (and undoubtedly much risk), into<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo2;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;
mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>An
author<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo2;
tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;
color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>An
&#8220;expert&#8221; on the Iraqi experience<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Pax
professes to be neither. But excerpts of his blog can be had now in book form
in the U.K. &amp; Grove Press will release a </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> edition in October. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The second
item is the <a href="http://www.percevalpress.com/">Perceval Press</a> web
site. Perceval is a new small press that recently published a book of <a
href="http://www.percevalpress.com/rricard.html">René Ricard&#8217;s paintings &amp;
drawings</a>, and is about to release <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.percevalpress.com/davis.html">Land of the Lost Mammoths</a>, </i>a
novel of left culture critic <a
href="http://www.mediamatic.nl/WhoisWho/davis/index.html">Mike Davis</a>. <span
class=GramE>Some interesting &amp; quirky material.</span> Perceval has also
published four books, including poetry, painting, collage work &amp;
photography, by press founder <a
href="http://www.frostyland.com/Viggo/viggo.index.shtml">Viggo Mortensen</a>,
whom you may know better as Aragorn/Strider from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>The Lord of the Rings</i> films.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>As someone who
has edited Davis, a <a
href="http://www.laweekly.com/ink/99/01/news-macadams.php">brilliant</a> but
exceptionally undisciplined author, the prospect of a novel, a project
completely in keeping with </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:
  10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Davis</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217; uniquely British mode of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Los Angeles</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> post-Marxism, just makes my eyes
dilate, nostrils flare &amp; chest constrict. This I have to see.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/movies/moviesspecial/07LYAL.html">Mortensen</a>
has seen his own public notoriety skyrocket of late. In addition to his career-making
role in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ring </i>trilogy, anyone who
saw his turn as the painter boyfriend in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A
Perfect Murder </i>&amp; realized that those were in fact <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>his paintings</i> will understand Mortensen takes these other genres
seriously, however variously he may succeed or not in each. Unlike, say, Jewel
or Leonard <span class=SpellE>Nimoy</span>, Mortensen is at least a serious
artist whose day job happens to be in film, not unlike <a
href="http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0482472/">Michael Lally</a> or <a
href="http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0636140/">Harry <span class=SpellE>Northrup</span></a>.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The third
is a DVD I saw the other night, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a
href="http://www.genghisblues.com/">Genghis Blues</a></i>, a 1999 documentary
starring two musicians, <a href="http://www.paulpena.com/index.html">Paul Pena</a>
&amp; <a href="http://www.ondar.com/"><span class=SpellE>Kongar-ol</span> <span
class=SpellE>Ondar</span></a>. If you saw <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%23106250238478557132">the
list</a> of CD stacks I have in my study, you know that one stack focuses on
blues &amp; another on world music, with a fair amount of <span class=SpellE>Tuvan</span>
throat singing in the latter pile. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Genghis
Blues </i>is one of the very few places in which these two interests
converge.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160; </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Throat
singing or <span class=SpellE>khoomei</span> is a harmonic singing tradition in
which the performer sings two, sometimes even as many as four, notes at one
time. Different versions of this tradition exist in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tuva</span></st1:City><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, </span><st1:country-region><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Mongolia</span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Tibet</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. Pena, the blind-since-childhood
blues singer who wrote &#8220;Jet Airliner,&#8221; a hit song for Steve &#8220;Guitar&#8221; Miller in
the mid-1970s, discovered &amp; taught himself not only this exceptionally
difficult method of singing, but, in order to do so, had to learn at least the
rudiments of the <span class=SpellE>Tuvan</span> language. And since there are
exactly zero <span class=SpellE>Tuvan</span>-English dictionaries in the world,
he had to learn </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:
  10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Russia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>n just to get to the <span
class=SpellE>Tuvan</span>. (Pena may be an almost archetypal example of the
starving blues artist, but he is also very obviously nobody&#8217;s fool.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a
href="http://www.nupi.no/cgi-win/Russland/a_enhet.exe?TUVA">Tuva</a>, once the
nation of <a href="http://www.fotuva.org/faq/part_1.html"><span class=SpellE>Tannu</span>
Tuva</a>, is now one of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Russian</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Republics</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; is located along the
northwest border of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Mongolia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. It&#8217;s a state of just 300,000
people the size of </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>North Dakota</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; a large portion of the
population remains nomadic, raising camels &amp; horses &amp; rather furry
looking Asian cows. Even though Genghis Khan&#8217;s top general was <span
class=SpellE>Tuvan</span>, the history of the nation is that of so many
landlocked cultures, shifting from parent state to parent state, spending
relatively little historical time with any kind of autonomy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>After
Pena&#8217;s wife died of renal failure in 1991, the bluesman has lived a pretty
hand-to-mouth existence in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:
  10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s Mission District. He had
discovered throat singing over a shortwave radio broadcast, but it had taken
him years to find a recording. But from that point, it appears to have taken
him only a week or so to actually learn the process of singing in multiple
notes. Having learned this extremely rare singing style, Pena managed to get
himself invited to a <span class=SpellE>Tuvan</span> throat singing competition
in <span class=SpellE>Kyzyl</span>, the capital of Tuva. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Genghis Blues </i>is a documentary of that trip, where Pena cemented
his friendship with <span class=SpellE>Kongar-ol</span> <span class=SpellE>Ondar</span>,
the &#8220;Elvis Presley of throat singing,&#8221; won two awards in the competition &amp;
found himself in a place, literally, where his skills &amp; talents could be
completely appreciated, a mere 12,000 miles from home. A fairly rudimentary,
even crude, documentary, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Blues </i>was
nominated for an Oscar and won several film festival awards largely on the
basis of its improbable, infectious content, fabulous music &amp; the openness
of its two main characters to go beyond their intellectual &amp; cultural
borders. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In every
one of these instances, questions of social framing can be raised in many
different ways:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo4;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;
mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Is
Salam Pax an architecture student who writes, or vice verse?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo4;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;
mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Is
Viggo Mortensen an actor, poet, painter, photographer? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo4;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;
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style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Is
Mike Davis a novelist?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo4;tab-stops:list .75in'><!--[if !supportLists]--><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;
mso-bidi-font-family:Symbol;color:blue'><span style='mso-list:Ignore'>&#183;<span
style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>At
what level is Paul Pena a <span class=SpellE>Tuvan</span> singer?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There are
artists who have been successful in more than one field, such as </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Abigail Child</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, but historically they&#8217;re rare.
Bruce Andrews likes to note that every nice thing that has ever been written
about him in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New York Times </i>has
been about his scores for Sally Silvers&#8217; dance, never once about his poetry.
Ned Rorem, a composer more widely known for his memoirs, simply demonstrates
that this phenomenon works in both directions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What
conclusions might one draw from this? Only that there are no guarantees &#8211; what
makes an artist successful in one genre may have no bearing whatsoever on another.
And there certainly are instances in which artists commit a larger part of
their live to an endeavor that, like Hilda Doolittle&#8217;s novels, gets far less
public recognition than some other form. Gertrude Stein had something like this
happen to her when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, </i>clearly written to be a best seller, recast Stein&#8217;s public
image dramatically. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One can
come up with even more complicated configurations. <a
href="http://www.stanrice.com/"><span class=GramE>Stan Rice</span></a><span
class=GramE>, when still an extremely ambitious up-&amp;-coming academic
poet/professor, encouraged his wife Anne to write.</span> The phenomenal
financial success of her vampire novels eliminated any economic need on his
part &amp;, after he left his job at </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>State</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, Stan developed into a <a
href="http://www.stanrice.com/oct01/oct01.htm">kitschy sort of painter</a> who
actually refused to sell his work. After publishing two books of poetry in two
years in the mid-1970s &#8211; we shared one publisher, The Figures &#8211; he only
published four others over the next 25 years. Anne&#8217;s publisher printed the last
three volumes, which gave them broader distribution than even most </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType><span
 style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Quietude</span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> poets can hope for. And frankly
Stan&#8217;s skill as a poet disguised his sentimentality in a way that his paintings
could not. Yet by the time he passed away last year, the only context remaining
for either of his media was the one created by her writing. It may have been a
very comfortable sort of marooning, but if ever there was a man who needed to
invite other poets into his room of one&#8217;s own, it was Stan. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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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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