Slought is a sizeable storefront gallery in
an abandoned bank, complete with vault, at the southwest corner of the University of Pennsylvania campus, right about the point where
university-sponsored development comes face-to-face with the low-income
African-American community that is its neighbor. Were it not for the brand-new
movie multiplex and natural foods market on steroids on the same block, one
might be inclined to view Slought itself as a form of gentrification*. Compared
with these new neighbors, however, Slought seems as frail & endangered as
any of the older businesses or residences in the vicinity.
Not coincidentally, Slought
is also the brainchild of Aaron Levy, one of the most energetic art impresarios
I’ve come across in decades. Slought has taken on one of the most ambitious
programs of exhibitions and performances of any space in America – it doesn’t seem to have occurred to
Levy that this stuff is supposed to be difficult. Ten years from now, several
of the larger & older cultural institutions in Philadelphia are going to be wondering just how a
20-something kid managed to trump all their endowments & professional
expertise.
Last Friday, for example,
Slought brought together 12 of the hottest younger poets in North America for a
reading, the first half of an event dedicated to something ambiguously titled The Social Mark Poetry Symposium. They
came from the Bay Area (David Buuck), Minnesota (Mark Nowak), Calgary (Louis Cabri ), DC (Jules Boykoff,
Kaia Sand), New York (Jeff Derksen, Kristin Prevallet,
Rodrigo Toscano, Carol Mirakove, Laura Elrick, and Alan Gilbert) and even Philadelphia (Josh Schuster). It was one of those
events where, twenty years from now, you will know 200 people who claim to have
attended. But I’m here to tell you that there were just fifty in actual
attendance on Friday & 12 of them were the poets. It was, as a result, a
relatively intimate gathering of some of the best minds of a generation that is
just now hitting its stride.
Of course, the best minds
isn’t always identical to the best work & more than a few of the poets
involved read works that seemed to me a fair distance short of the finest
things I’ve seen in theirs in print. While some poets were, in fact, riveting –
an especially awesome feat in a setting where each reader had only ten minutes
within which to work – particularly Toscano, Derksen and Sand (the “bracket
readers,” the first two & the last one), several others chose texts that
were timely, or social, primarily by virtue of being recent anti-war tomes.
This reached a strange apotheosis during the second half of the reading when
two poets, Kristin Prevallet & Jules Boycoff, both read pieces that
subjected the same
speech by His W-ness to the U.N. to something very close to the same
literary procedure, one associated with Kevin Nealon’s
old “subliminal man” routines from Saturday
Night Live. In each instance, the appropriated material is interrupted by a
disquieting word or phrase that reveals the surface text to be essentially
hypocritical. Where Nealon’s routines offered entire
running commentaries on the surface text, both Prevallet & Boycoff used the
device more bluntly, essentially inserting a single percussive term that
gradually expanded through reiteration to overwhelm the surface text. For
Prevallet, the term was “oil,” a word that she can pronounce with a remarkable
number of different emphases and enunciations; For Boycoff, the word was “Iraq .”
Boycoff, who went after
Prevallet, gets points in my book for having the chutzpah to read his piece
after hearing hers, knowing for instance that her work had gone for – quite
successfully – flashy performative aspects that his own quieter version did not
exploit. I was especially glad that he did, because Boycoff raised the very
questions of a “social mark” to the level of manifest content in a way that had
been heretofore absent in the reading. It is one thing for all of these poets to
believe that King George is quite mad, but what does it mean as poetic practice? By demonstrating how
two very different poets from different cities had arrived at virtually the
same strategy of response – though in practice, the two works sounded fairly different
– Boycoff & Prevallet brought the limitations of this strategy right to the
fore.
Several of these are among
the problematics of any group reading: the performative drowns out the
contemplative; flash obliterates the subtle; agreement overwhelms ambiguity.
It’s a context in which one is better off being humorous than insightful. In
not trying to outdo Prevallet’s literally combat-boot
stomping rendition, Boycoff put all those issues out for everyone in the
audience to see. In a sense, this tendered the question more fully than other,
relatively quiet readings by, say, Buuck or Gilbert.
I’m afraid that we’ve all
been to readings in which one of the readers attempts
to “Mau Mau” the rest, as we used to say in the 1970s, but this was not an
example of that. Prevallet had merely written a rousing poem & given it a
reading appropriate to that spirit, not so terribly dissimilar in tone to Allen
Ginsberg’s famous antiwar chant, “Hūm Bomb.” In
a sense, Prevallet had recognized most fully the impossibility of presenting a
full-featured distinctive reading in ten minutes & figured out a way around
that.
Yet it is worth remembering, asI wouldn’t have without Boycoff’s
reading, that “Hūm Bomb,” even though it is a
wonderful set piece, isn’t Ginsberg’s great anti-war poem, “Wichita
Vortex Sutra, Part II” is. “Vortex” has layers of compassion, insight,
ambiguity & nuance that were seldom equaled in the 20th
century’s long contemplation of humankind’s collective self-abuse, and really
transcends Ginsberg’s usual stance (present even here) as public satirist.
Think, for example, how the phrase “bad guess” reverberates through “Vortex,”
which approaches of question of the American holocaust in Indochina not as a discussion focused on horror,
but on language:
Use the words
language, language
“A
bad guess” . . .
The war is language
language abused
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like magic power on the planet . . .
Language
O longhaired magician
come home take care of your dumb helper
before the
radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
your magic errandboy’s
just made a bad
guess again
that’s lasted a whole decade.
The image of McNamara as the
beleaguered Mickey Mouse in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” section of Fantasia highlights one other feature of
Ginsberg’s great poem, dictated into a tape recorder while tooling around Wichita in a VW minibus, that has been absent in
virtually all of the antiwar texts that I’ve read or heard to date related to
Iraq: a fundamental empathy for the very human beings who are ordering what we
might well believe to be atrocities.
Like its cousin ambiguity,
empathy is something that is exceptionally difficult to communicate in any function
of life, let alone a poem. It is absolutely not possible in a tex t that seeks agreement, or which seeks to
demonize anyone. It was the problem of agreement that hung most heavily over The Social Mark on Friday – poets who
had no difficulty agreeing with one another, but who seemed unable to
articulate a vision of the critical in their own work that might move beyond a
simple consensus. Further, the articulation of that very agreement seemed to me
to make it harder to hear the quieter texts – thus Derksen’s punctuation of his
reading with the names of nations & numbers (“Angola 97,” “Algeria 84”) or Cabri’s own reiteration of “the
A4 was renamed the V2” or Laura Elrick’s image of “oil barons groping”
or Carol Mirakove reading from Mike Davis’ City
of Quartz, made it just that much more difficult to find the center of Alan
Gilbert’s comments on time, or to understand why David Buuck’s
use of stuttering & gagging noises in his own reading was so aggressively
anti-performative, almost the antithesis of Toscano’s scat variants, or why
Nowak’s aesthetics of historic documentation focuses on the Wobbly’s
role in the Minnesota mines. Or, for that matter, how to balance the
well-polished finish of Sand’s texts in the context of Mirakove reading from
handwritten manuscripts,deep green ink in a
spiral-bound notebook. Or why Josh Schuster’s short prose pieces seem so
determined to push the idea of the Kafka-esque so
much further than it has gone before.
In his excellent weblog
on Sunday, Nick
Piombino
writes, give or take a typo, “There is nothing to compare with the pleasure of
allowing poems to meet me halfway.” Piombino is referring I think to the
process of writing, but the same rings true for the process of reading.
Signaling for agreement instantly collapses the process into one of having no
such room for maneuver, even when, in fact, one does agree. If nothing else,
it’s almost always the weakest move tactically. Again, let me make Ginsberg the example. As
good as “Hūm Bomb” might be, there is virtually
no room for the reader inside the tex t. You “get it,” more or less instantly,
or you don’t – and woe unto the reader who doesn’t agree with the poem of
concurrence!
“Wichita
Vortex Sutra” is a more complex experience, with lots of places inside the
text for readers to move around, even to disagree without necessarily falling
out of the reading experience. This text particularly has stuck in my head this
weekend because of a review
in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a new
book of critical prose by Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture and the
Voice of Poetry, by Inquirer book
critic Carlin Romano. Without defending Pinsky’s position – which I generally
tend to think as hopelessly self-contradictory – it’s amusing to see him being
attacked essentially from the right by Romano. But when Romano writes
What does it say about American poetry today - whatever the
insider stock valuations of Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, Yusef Komunyakaa, or
anyone else - that there's not a single line of contemporary American poetry
important enough for Americans to know and hold in common?
Romano demonstrates not only
his lack of grounding in cultural history**, but specifically forgets that one
poem – and it wasn’t Howl or Kaddish – transformed Allen Ginsberg
from being, to Romano’s world, which is that essentially of People magazine, a cultural curiosity of
the 1950s into the most popular poet of his generation. The poem that moved
Ginsberg from the larva stage of Beat satirist into something akin to an oracle
in the 1960s was “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” read over & over at protest
demonstration after Be-In after rally. Although Ginsberg read it less often
after the mid-1970s, it was almost certainly the most widely consumed poem –
especially aurally – to have been written in my lifetime. If a single poem can
be said to have had an impact on the course of the Vietnam War, it was
Ginsberg’s great juxtaposition of apocalypse in Indochina , small town life
in Kansas & bureaucratic gridlock in Washington . If you understood the poem, supporting
the continued slaughter of innocents, theirs & ours alike, was simply
unimaginable.
Ж Ж Ж
I was unhappy not to be able
to attend the second half of the event at Slought, a panel discussion the
following afternoon, albeit with the same ten-minutes-per-poet constraint,
because the evening left me with a lot of ideas & even more questions. Certainly,
the selection – made, I take, principally by Cabri – of poets wasn’t intended
only to identify younger writers with politics (Jennifer Moxley, Lytle Shaw , Brian Kim Stefans, Kevin Davies , Juliana Spahr & Jenna Osman all
would have been present if that were the case) and it was interesting to note
that two of the poets included were part of the famous Apex of the M editorial staff, and that one, Toscano, shows up on
Stefans’ mysterious list of “Creep
poets.” I would like to have heard them take up the question of the social
and to see if they made greater use of the critical tex ts that are, at least for the present,
included on the Slought website for the occasion than they did the poetry
posted.
The question of the social
itself is one that I think haunts us now as poets for good reason. And I don’t
think that we have anything like the time that existed in the sixties to mount
a challenge to what is occurring on the world scene today. So I want to thank
the poets of Slought for having raised the question, and especially Jules
Boycoff & the quieter poets on that agenda for having given it depth.
* Bank
building preservation is a recognized mode of gentrification in Philadelphia . Two of the city’s most
expensive downtown hotels, the Ritz Carlton
and Loews, are situated in former bank headquarters facilities. Loews still
illuminates the giant PSFS neon
sign – the first neon sign in the U.S. – standing for the long
defunct Philadelphia Saving Fund Society.
** Nowhere in
our K-12 educational system is the actual difficulty
of reading & writing taught for what it is, as a direct source of pleasure,
so what a shock to discover that there is not a popular movement to appreciate
such a thing, nor what a surprise that poets who compromise what they attempt
as writers in the mistaken name of “communication” merely find themselves
muddled in the middle. If ever there were to be such a thing as a popular
poetry, it would not occur through poets retreating to a trobar lieu that disappeared several centuries ago & has no
social reason for returning, but only through a readership that is truly
literate, that is to say, prepared to appreciate trobar clus. And when book critics & poets laureate don’t get
it, you can be sure there is a long way to go.