Here are some of my notes & reflections on the Poetry & Empire retreat. While John Koethe at one point commented that I seemed to be taking verbatim notes, I absolutely wasn’t, but was noting things down very personally, for the most part according to what had the most resonance for my own practice as a poet. So I need to start with a disclaimer – one could easily come up with a Rashomon-like effect, given how many different perspectives were in the room at once. I don’t want to pretend to have been the recording secretary. I’m conscious, for example, that I captured very little of what the quietest participants in the room said, such as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s discussion of pesticide, and that the quietest people over 48 hours also happened to be Asian participants, including Mei-mei, Jo Park and Bernie Rhie. So that is a self-criticism avant la lettre. If any other participants want to add, comment or counter anything I’ve put here, I will be happy to post it on the blog.

 

The retreat itself began Friday evening with 30 people sitting, tightly packed, in a large circle in the Arts Café section of Kelly Writers House. In the center stood a microphone on a stand, sort of half way between a totem & a giant phallus, that may (or may not) have picked up everything everybody said. There were some people in the room whom I had known for 25 years or more – Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein (along with Susan Stewart, two of the retreat’s conveners), James Sherry, Erica Hunt, as well as others, such as Saskia Hamilton, Tracie Morris & John Koethe, whom I had never met before. On the first evening at least – tho only on the first evening – people tended to cluster by gender, three or four males or females in a row, with only one person, Charles Bernstein, situated between two members of the opposite gender.

 

The purpose of the weekend, loosely enough stated by the organizers in convening the retreat, was to discuss the relationship between poetry & empire & the possibility for a post-invasion poetics. The premise of the initial evening was simply to read poems that people had brought in response to what had been made available in advance of the event itself:

·         the original set of six questions, discussed in some detail here last week

·         a link to this blog (some had never seen it before)

·         another to Peter Middleton’s “Five Ways of Saying ‘Poetics’ and ‘Politics’ in the Same Breath” a third to Josh Schuster’s “Notes on War Aesthetics” (which will download as an RTF file if you click here)

 

A decision was made to proceed counter clockwise around the room & Al Filreis spun a bottle of branded water that determined that Jena Osman should go first. Some poets used the occasion to read works that directly addressed the Iraq debacle, including some, such as Erica Hunt’s reading from Piece Logic, that appear to have been composed in advance of the war. Others, such as John Koethe, who read a work entitled “Collected Poems” about Robert Lowell’s most recent book, picked work whose connection to the conjunction between poetry & politics was more oblique – I would put my own work among this group. Still others focused on other events & acts of empire that spoke to the same general dynamic – case in point being Greg Djanikian reading from his still-in-progress manuscript of poems about the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which the Turks slaughtered some 30 percent of the Armenian people. Between, say, Koethe’s measured lines – one can really hear the Stevens/New York School influences that people mention when they discuss his writing, but he approaches it with a calmness that is markedly different from either – and James Sherry handing out PowerPoint slides that diagrammed such dynamics as an “Environmental View of Humanity in Nature” as an adjunct to reading from his epic-length long work Sorry that strives for an environmental poetics of the city (or which at least includes the city), the range of work was spectacular. Herman Beavers & Mark McMorris have very little in common as poets, as one might also say about Djanikian & Rachel Blau DuPlessis, or between myself and art critic/poet Michael Fried. Tracie Morris & Susan Stewart do not sound remotely alike. And nobody sounds quite like Charles Bernstein.

 

After reading our works & having a relatively brief discussion thereon, the 30 poets had used literally 3½ hours & adjourned until Saturday morning. If anyone in the room interpreted the second Iraq war as anything less than a disaster, they never spoke up. While there were differences voiced both in the poems & by the poets – Is George W. dumber than cow poop or really quite smart to have gotten away with stealing an election, undermining the juridical basis of society, destroying American foreign policy & trashing the Middle East while merely appearing dumber than cow poop? Is the project at hand an activism for today or a larger undertaking to bring some mode of transformation in the future (cast in spiritual, rather than Leninist, terms)? Is the Bush regime a crisis for democracy or merely the latest installment of the same old hegemony that has been obliterating people since 1492? Just how political is the personal (& vice versa)? – the sense was (and it held throughout the entire weekend) that any differences in individual poetics were not sufficient reason to keep people from exploring the problem(s) collectively confronting us right now.

 

Saturday morning found the ranks of writers in the room had grown by two as Allen Grossman and Bernie Rhie joined the 30 already in attendance (pushing the circle to beyond the room’s basic capacity & causing it to take some odd detours into an alcove in order to maintain connectedness, a strategy that meant in turn that several people did not have a line of sight connection with every other writer). We decided to begin first with people who had prepared some kind of statement or had something to read as we began this “working” session, starting with Al Filreis who had declined to read on Friday on the grounds that he is “not a poet” (he was one of four people making such a claim over the weekend) began by reading Mervyn Taylor’s “A Mistake,” a poem dedicated to Bob Hass that came out of a recognition that Taylor had misspelled Hass’ last name as Bob had misspelled Taylor’s first. It’s an interesting choice to contemplate as a political poem – the Brooklyn poet from Trinidad (or is Taylor a Trinidad poet living in Brooklyn?) commenting upon the former poet laureate on the subject of spelling, the reality that both have names that are easily misspelled.

 

Peter Middleton countered this gentle binary, if that’s the right word (supplemented? triangulated?), offering an advertisement from a 1974 issue of Scientific American in which a pre-Bhopal Union Carbide promised that “Today Something We Do Will Touch Your Life.”  Rodrigo Toscano asked what political poems & similar expressions – he called them “charms” – have achieved in the past. James Sherry warned against getting trapped in the “narcissism of small differences” & the “tyranny of taxonomy.” Then Saskia Hamilton gave an extraordinary reading – extraordinary in part in that all of these comments people were making took less than five minutes apiece – of Emily Dickinson, showing had Dickinson was able to articulate a politics literally in breath & line.

 

Rod Smith wondered if the level of agreement in the room wasn’t dulling a critical edge that needed to be sharpened. He offered to start by “making fun of people who believe CNN.” At the same time, he warned against assuming that any one focal point – such as George W. – was the sole source of the problem. Noting that he preferred Wittgenstein to Marx, Smith commented that “nobody is in the driver’s seat.” Against this, he proposed what called submodernism, which he defined as “modernism gone underground in plain sight.”

 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis wanted to probe “the notion of do,” which she saw as the problematic aspect of the question “What can a poem do?” She expressed what many seemed to be feeling, “that we have lost the republic” & are in a “proto-fascist period.” “I want,” she said with great fervor, “to be the hegemony!” Although she immediately bracketed that claim, there was a lot of comment from people who understood precisely what she meant.

 

Greg Djanikian discussed the roots and problematics of his project on the Armenian genocide. For example, since most people don’t know about it, or have forgotten it, or don’t even know where Armenia is, the poem is forced to carry the weight of presenting the facts in a way that, say, a Paul Celan poem is not. Djanikian as a result has looked a lot at the work of Charles Reznikoff in thinking through this project, both Holocaust and Testimony.

 

Erica Hunt countered Rod Smith’s “nobody is in the driver’s seat” by admonishing – as she did more than once – that we needed to “follow the money,” as Deep Throat once told Woodward & Bernstein. Hunt also posed Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “seed time” – the distance between the planting of an idea & its fruition.

 

Fanny Howe, on the other hand, spoke of the Franciscans as revolutionaries and argued that we needed to be able to distinguish between a process-driven search for knowing and a more proprietary interest in knowledge. At one moment she defined Logos as unknowability.

 

Tom Devaney posed a dimension for people to consider in everything that is currently being transformed in society – scale. To which I later countered we needed also to recognize speed. The left has moved at a far slower pace than capital over the past thirty years, creating a huge imbalance. But I also noted that Bush & his buddies are not capital, but rather a reaction to capital, even as they shovel some of the margins into their own pockets. The issue for Mark McMorris was acceleration. “The curve is becoming steeper.” A lot of different politics can be interpreted via the frame this give to this phenomenon. “Are things coming to an end or to a new location?”

 

John Koethe spoke “against audience” & wanted to look more deeply into Harold Bloom’s conception that Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy is tantamount to the invention of the human & that so much of poetry, both mainstream & avant-garde, can be read as a mode of “self talk,” a term pointedly appropriated from psychology.

 

At this point, typing up my very cryptic notes, I feel overwhelmed at the degree to which my description of these statements flatten out & thus misrepresent every person cited above, but I am trying at least to give a sense of the dynamics as they evolved over the day, a three-hour morning session followed by lunch & a three-hour afternoon session – broken only by a fire alarm break (we never did figure out who lit up a smoke in the bathroom – the smokers were all in the café when the alarm went off). But as the discussion evolved, it layered rather than ping ponged. There were possible disagreements – Herman Beavers, perhaps the one poet in the room to actively use personae in his writing – characterized Bloom’s conception of soliloquy as “crass humanism.” To which Koethe readily agreed, demonstrating how he was trying to draw the distinction precisely behind one that was “crass” & another that in fact valued the human. Simon Weil & Joan Retallack & Hardt & Negri were invoked. Tracie Morris spoke of the Abrahamic tradition & the ontology of science fiction. Jennifer Moxley posed Sappho as an example of the political. 

 

In very different ways, Allen Grossman and Bob Perelman both noted an inherent conservatism in poetry itself. “How old fashioned our means are,” Perelman complained. “How failed our poems are.” This inadequacy, he suggested, is crucial to poetics. He reminded us of the traditional functions of the poem: to teach & delight. Kathy Lou Schultz was hearing a distinction in all the various positions between “poetry & activism” and “poetry as activism,” and discussed her work during the first Gulf War organizing in that hotbed of leftism, Nebraska.

 

Al Filreis built on Kathy Lou’s comments, noting the importance politically of what he called the non-conjunctive And, the use of the word to literally join two incommensurate phenomena. Thus “Iraq and Afghanistan.” He noted the degree to which this trope has been used by the current regime.

 

In a move that would be reiterated by more than a few people over the next two days, Herman Beaver used this moment to suggest that even as we speak we have to interrogate our default positions, for example “interrogating the idea of whiteness.” He drew a distinction between “having church” & “doing church,” arguing that the latter was the more active mode of engagement. He also discussed the function of jazz in the black community. On his notepad, I could see the cross-hatch of a quadrant diagram: on the horizontal or X axis, he’d written the word “jazz” & on the vertical or Y axis, “church.”

 

At this moment, Michael Fried, perhaps better known as an art critic & historian than as a poet, told a tale about his good friend in college, the painter Frank Stella & how, after living for a few years post-Princeton in New York, Fried would find Stella muttering over his obsession with the jazz musician Don Cherry, and how he couldn’t get Cherry’s music out of his head. A few years later, Fried noted, he read an interview with Cherry somewhere in Cherry spoke of this painter in New York, Frank Stella, who was drawing “straight black lines” and how Cherry just couldn’t get that image out of his head.

 

Tim Carmody raised the figures of Brecht & Orwell for the first time, asking us to distinguish between the laughter of shock & that of recognition, noting that these are two radically opposed modes of humor. The Silent Majority of the 1970s, Carmody argued, wasn’t silent in that they let Nixon & his posse speak for them, but rather because they wanted everybody else to tone it down & to return to a quieter civility than had been evident in the previous decade.

 

Post lunch, Frank Sherlock noted that the economy of poetry was directly linked to access & commented that the reason the one part of the news most people remember is the weather is because “it’s the only news where you can do something useful as a result.” “Relevance,” Jennifer Moxley admonished, “happens when you least expect it.”

 

As a whole, the afternoon built on the terms & images put forward already in the morning – for example the exchange between Beavers & Koethe over crass humanism. Charles Bernstein argued that aspect blindness was an important part of the political – all the things we don’t see because they seem always already obvious. [Note to self: this is virtually Althusser’s definition of ideology.] Moxley asked why poets so often use painters as examples or models when painters so seldom use poets in that same way. Peter Middleton offered a definition of Blee. * Tracie Morris demonstrated how hip-hop uses all the traditional devices of poetry.

 

Erica Hunt posed the possibility of an Idea Bank, which as I understand it would be something akin to Bernadette Mayer’s list of experiments, only for political action. This was an idea that people came back to on several occasions. It corresponded, Bob Perelman noted, with a social rhetoric, topoi.

 

Rod Smith thought this might be useful in particular because “poetry happens in groups.” Saskia Hamilton then posed the question of Group Iconoclasm vs. Individual Iconoclasm, with the Situationists being posed as an example of the former.

 

Michael Fried noted that his greatest frustration with the rise of the right was its cooptation of Christianity and how it had defined the church as something authoritarian and oppressive, compared to the role of the church in the Civil Rights Movement. Without the church as a force for change, he felt that we had arrived at a frozen politics. “We have to unfreeze,” Erica Hunt said. “Follow the money.” To which Bob Perelman replied, “follow the poetry.”

 

At this point people broke off for dinner and it’s worth noting how many of these discussions continued in clusters of two & three as we ate Indian food & got ready for the reading at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. I’m not going to do a précis here of the reading as it will eventually be available on PENNsound, a new project Bernstein is heading up at Penn. It was, for a large reading, exceptionally crisp, as, by my count, 29 poets read in just under two hours. This in turn was followed by a reception that was still going strong when I headed back to Chester County sometime after midnight.

 

By Sunday morning, the number of participants had dwindled somewhat to 21, as a couple of the out-of-town folks headed back to their lives elsewhere and a couple of local participants needed to respond to family emergencies in other states. This shifted the gender breakdown of the group somewhat, from the 19 men, 13 women of Saturday, to 15 men & six women on Sunday. One of the questions that Erica Hunt, now absent, had communicated on several occasions the previous afternoon & evening, reinforced by James Sherry and others, was a need to commit to something so that this energy doesn’t all turn into so much discursive smoke, post-retreat. A discussion was held at the outset about the need to build & some consensus was reached to expand on the retreat website at the very minimum.

 

Susan Stewart framed the morning discussion that followed by noting an inherent balance between the twin impulses that she characterized as Contentiva & Activa. Jennifer Moxley then introduced a discussion that she had been having with some Josh Schuster & others about one of the issues that had come up earlier in the year at the Social Mark conference around the question of reference & hermeticism. Poems that name names – simply to pick one mode of the hermetic –

can exclude readers, yet many of us (myself certainly included) use names regularly in our work. John Koethe discussed Frank O’Hara’s use of names & how their presence in his work contributes to an openness, rather than a closing off of the reader. Readers may not know the individuals, but they sense the positioning of the work within a community.

 

Rodrigo Toscano argued that this was a question of how you use information within the poem. “Do you put the info out first?” he asked. Other examples were raised, ranging from Amiri Baraka to Alexander Pope. Understanding what to do with references, Charles Bernstein reminded us, has to do with literacy, who knows how to read, which is not distributed evenly in society. It’s a question, Mark McMorris noted, not of how you refer, not that you refer. For Rachel Blau DuPlessis, this raised the image of George Oppen & the Objectivists, and the integrity of a poetics based in sincerity. Herman Beavers noted that this was almost an annual theme at Cave Canem, the annual summer conference of black poets.

 

At this point, James Sherry suggested a new quadrant diagram for values in a poem, with a horizontal axis of temporality – “my poem will be understandable today, but in 50 years nobody will remember Rumsfeld & Cheney” – ranging from the immediate to the long-term & a vertical access along the psychological (I don’t think James spelled out the terms here, but I suspect it must range from the most private at one end to the most communal at the other).

 

Tracie Morris noted that consciousness is indeed a question of communities, communities of reference. People feel more disenfranchises in an interpretationist perspective, because it sets up an intermediary between reader & text.

 

Rod Smith then wanted to know why hermeticism was a problem. Tim Carmody then noted that making people feel uncomfortable is an important function of literature and that this is the Brechtian reading of the third term in the triumvirate that Perelman had only partly articulated previously: the purpose of literature is to instruct, delight and move, and that discomfort was indeed a move.

 

Peter Middleton then noted something that seemed apparent the second he said it (and implicit in some of what Tracie Morris had been saying), that the entire discussion of hermeticism was “doing a lot of cultural work here,” standing in as it did for a tremendous amount of anxiety about the different levels of education in the U.S. (reflected in the room with its various PhDs as well as folks whose terminal degree is a high school diploma, such as Toscano or myself) and how these reflect divisions of class & race. 

 

A more pointed discussion of the critique of hermeticism itself then ensued, starting with Herman Beavers’ elaboration of pop culture quotations (“the Woody Woodpecker song”) in the music of Sonny Rollins & followed up with John Koethe’s account of John Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath, which only looks hermetic. Tracie Morris reminded people that hermeticism also serves another purpose, as a protective code to ensure survival. Frank Sherlock noted that we need to know why we are being hermetic. Josh Schuster wanted to insert the idea into the Speed vs. Scale discussion of the day before, arguing that hermetic terms function as interruptions and that interruption directly intervenes in the Speed/Scale nexus.

 

Rodrigo Toscano proposed a typology of speech act-like tropes for any interaction, including a text: flirt, truce & a third that he alternately termed hostility or aggression. Confusion occurs whenever you get interactions out of a predictable order, going, for example, directly from hostility to flirt without an intermediating truce.

 

We have evidence of a considerable will to destruction to overcome, Tim Carmody reminded everyone.

 

Jennifer Moxley noted that we think we can bring “the modern world” or the present to Iraq, as if Iraq’s world were not already fully in the present. There is a great series of blind assumptions in such presumptive behavior. One that leads to reactions that we (“we” being the state) do not expect simply because we don’t envision other ways of viewing the world.

 

Which is the point at which my notes stop, and essentially the end of the retreat. It was simultaneously exhausting, thrilling and frustrating, as events like this always are. Allen Grossman, who only stayed during the day on Saturday, complained at more than one point that we were only talking about what we agreed upon, that we could talk about Bush but dare not discuss the implications of one another’s poems. There may have been some truth to that, but, if so, I think it applied almost entirely to the Saturday session and not to Sunday. In retrospect, I suspect that we were simultaneously finding out common voice that first full day and a half – given just how radically dissimilar some of our poems are. At one point, Rachel Blau DuPlessis noted that she had never imagined herself to be involved in a project that was at least partly parallel to that of Greg Djanikian, but it seemed to her here that clearly this was the case. I had a similar sense of the relation of my own work to that of Herman Beavers. And I suspect that more than a few others had similar reactions.

 

Where any of this goes from here will depend really on the 30-plus members of the community. And the others who get involved.

 

 

 

 

* Other words that were defined during the day because not all were familiar with them included blog, flarf and flash mob. You will have to look up Blee in the OED yourself, although I warn you the definition is not quite as funny as Peter Middleton tells it.