At 21 Grand, I characterized VOG as being a section of The Alphabet unlike any other in that it was itself "a book of ordinary poems." This generated some speculation amid the bloggers present, so maybe I should unpack that a little, spell out what I was thinking.

 

Principally that the poems are discrete. They are relatively short & have beginnings, middles & ends. They have enough internal integrity to have their own titles: "Dogs Love Trucks," "Dadaquest," "Spiderduck." Indeed, the one task that remains with VOG is for me to go through the manuscript and edit it down to a final version. This will certainly mean deleting some pieces, and may mean (I'm far less certain of this) reordering the final suite.

 

When I look at The Alphabet as a whole, I'm struck with what a small proportion of the overall text is given over to beginnings or ends. In so many ways, the work itself is a monument to the middle, to being "in" the poem as if there were no outside or other. More than any other section, VOG seems to me to address the problematics of that.

 

I also note that, although I used virtually the same words to describe the project before my reading at the Drawing Center in New York in June, again before an audience notably filled with bloggers, the concept of this characterization — "ordinary poems" — was not commented upon. Does this indicate anything about the two communities, either as poets or as bloggers? Is the idea "ordinary poem" NOT problematic in NYC? Are the bloggers of the Bay Area inherently more attuned to the theoretical? And does blogging play a different role in SF than in NYC (SF in this instance starting just north of the Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing, extending up somewhere into the wine country). Is it more constitutive of one community than of the other?

 

I'm reading books by Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, John Godfrey & Jordan Davis on my trip & there is no way I would try to generalize that into "one thing," the new new New York School, any more than I would attempt the same with the authors whose books I'm reading from the Bay Area on this trip: Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Guest, Clark Coolidge, Stephen Ratcliffe or Eileen Tabios. The coherence of communities is not, of itself, aesthetic. I might as well link the work of Aloysius Bertrand, Robert Duncan, Ron Johnson & Dan Davidson into a Poetics of the Dead.