“Job share archivists” Susan M. Schultz & Pam Brown have augmented the Department of Dislocated Memory with a new installment of their collaboration ”Amnesiac recoveries.” It’s a project that raises all kinds of interesting questions.

I have never seen a history of poetic collaboration. A search in Google for all sites that use both “poetry” & “collaboration” yields 199,000 sites. A search for the exact phrase “history of poetic collaboration” yields none – or will until the Google crawler finds today’s blog. My sense – and it may be quite incomplete – is that poetic collaboration arises truly with the surrealists.* It enters the U.S. largely through the writing of the one group most heavily influenced by surrealism: the New York School. You will not find any collaborations in the Allen anthology. Indeed, the only ones you can actually spot** even in In the American Tree are in the section of critical statements, first a collaborative manifesto for the French journal Change & later the famous list of experiments that Bernadette Mayer & several groups of students at her Poetry Project workshops created. But if you look to Tom Clark’s anthology All Stars (Grossman Publishers/ Goliard – Santa Fe, 1972), a combination of NY School & beat writers that reflected Clark’s view from the Bolinas mesa, Ron Padgett’s selection consists of 17 collaborations – with Dick Gallup, Ted Berrigan, Tessie Mitchell, Michael Brownstein, Anne Waldman, Pat Padgett, Bill Berkson, Larry Fagin, Jimmy Schuyler & of course Tom Clark.

The absence of collaboration among Beats & Projectivists***, and for the most part from the San Francisco Renaissance+, is worth noting. It suggests, I think, a stance toward the author & literal authority that is substantially different from that of other communities of writing. Allen Ginsberg may well have been the Kral Majales or King of the May in 1965 Prague, but he also appears to have been a meticulous & careful warden of his own literary production. At the same time, Ginsberg took no credit for the editing job that literally transformed the pages on William Burroughs’ floor into Naked Lunch – a stance that parallels Ezra Pound’s similar editing of The Waste Land.

But the New York School had no such hang-ups with sharing credit. As with Surrealism, boundaries existed only to be transgressed, albeit with more of a smile & wink than the Europeans generally brought to the process. Boundaries are precisely what are at stake in “Amnesiac recoveries.” Here, for example, is “Shut-Lip”:

The investment banker sewed his lips shut. He'd arrived in a leaky ship, having paid dues to the dark haired man who answered to no name he could pronounce. Pronunciation is over-rated, he muttered to himself as he eased into the hold, arms bound in fetal position. His middle passage was punctuated (never leave metaphors of language behind, he added, pensively) by hunger pangs. No-name man told him nothing of the end, though his origin had been clear (he remembered, at least, his hard-earned MBA). He wanted to escape big words, like globalization, like fraud. Crusoe's accountant had nothing on his, member of the magic club in high school, artist of the extraordinary bottomless line.

In the end, it was hard to collect his story, through teeth clenched like broken-jawed Ali's. One had to assume consonants, or were they vowels, emerging as from some Afghan cave into the abortive syntax of a bombing run. What we heard had something to do with sea, and ground, and sickness. The south sea island that welcomed him (sic) has only years left before the flood (lawsuits are pending). On its coral, the banker sits, quiet as monk, though not so tranquil. He knows his days are numbered, so he counts them in his throat. If he were a poet, one might say he'd found his voice.

memoricide -
           bombing the library.
collective memory,
          the treasures of manuscript,
    the texts                 history, natural sciences,
      philosophy, poetry, mathematics
anthologies, dictionaries, treatises on everything,
            his story,
                                collected,
the bombing filmed

in the peace zone,
   Coca- Cola
       phones the film collector
seeking footage
                   of "real UFOs"

There is a political tone here that one hardly ever sees even with Gen XXXVII of the NY School, and it’s stronger even in several of the other pieces, which generally circle around the topics of oil, corporate corruption & U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, always impacted by questions of memory – & of why memory fails to beget a seemingly appropriate political response. Of course, neither Brown nor Schultz can by any remote stretch of the imagination be characterized as part of the old St. Marks scene – Schultz is as far removed from there as one can be physically & still reside within the United States, Hawai’i, while Brown is a well-known Australian poet. 
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of this as a collaboration is how it challenges “the political.” Typically & traditionally, one key to the political has been what might be thought of as “angle of positionality,” which usually gets reduced to an idea of stance. This is visible at the surface in identarian texts of all manner: the poet writes from his or her historical/ethnic/social/gendered position & articulation of that position is often what the resulting text is about.  But Schultz & Brown come from different nations with different roles in the oil = global domination scenario. Schultz may be marginalized in her role as poet within the hegemon, but within it she most certainly & visibly is. Brown is at least doubly marginalized, living in a country that the U.S. has been known to treat as a branch office. There are of course further complications: Schultz is a haole, an Anglo outsider functioning in a role as authority by virtue of the teaching profession. The relationship of Hawai’i to the mainland is exceptionally problematic & a separatist movement continues to percolate there. Australia’s history vis-à-vis an imperial center & its aboriginal population is no less convoluted. Both of these writers are perpetually aware of these conditions.
Part of what makes “Amnesiac recoveries” so interesting is that it’s not possible to tell who in the collaboration is writing at any given moment, something that is so discernible, say, in a work like Sight that its authors, Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino, two fabulous poets who grew up in the same town in the same country within a couple of years of one another & whose fathers both taught at the same school, actually initial their individual passages.
But if we cannot tell who is speaking, or at least writing, in ”Amnesiac recoveries,” how does the reader then position these texts with regards to the issues of globalization that are raised? This is what strikes me as so remarkable:  Schultz & Brown have arrived at what I can only call a transnational voice, a position that steps quite clearly outside of the role of states precisely as it address the problem of the rogue hegemon. If there is a position of world citizen from which one might be able to write, this is it.
Brown & Schultz do this with wit, sharpness & élan. The entire project – I have no idea if the two sections that are up are all of the collaboration or only just the first portion of it – is gutsy & fun while being serious in the face of some extraordinary challenges.++ In connecting the dots north-south across the equator between their two homes, these poets are erasing lines that we often forget are “always already” there. & it’s fascinating to see what now shows through.

* Some writers characterize the relationship between William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially during the Lyrical Ballads period, as a collaboration. An argument can certainly be made for that, even though they didn’t publish poems as composed by both.

** I believe that the phrase that is used as the epigraph to the West section of the book, “Instead of ant wort I saw brat guts,” was itself composed during a collaboration.

*** Thus when Daphne Marlatt works collaboratively, as in the book Double Negative with Betsy Warland, it’s because she’s moved away from the Projectivism of her youth toward a political feminism.

+ The notable exception was The Carola Letters co-authored by Joanne Kyger & George Stanley. See Kevin Killian’s article on the row it caused in the SF scene. Killian raises the possibility that camp, the arch subgenre of gay culture, was a major thorn in the side of Robert Duncan. Camp as a discourse erases boundaries not unlike the ones that Schultz & Brown are tackling.

++ The web site captures this beautifully with a photograph of the two poets in Hawai’i staring at the apotheosis of the problem, a stretch limo in a setting in which no limousine should ever appear.

One of the great lessons of the Vietnam War is that a nation of people opposed to a foreign war can actually constrain & eventually halt that conflict. Unfortunately, one of the other lessons of that war is that this process takes time. Between the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident on 4 August 1964 and the day when the last Huey pulled the final refugees off of the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in April, 1975, eleven years, over 50,000 American & millions of Vietnamese lives were wasted. The current regime in Washington doesn’t know much about history books, but it does know that a “surgical strike” campaign, a war that can be measured in months or even weeks, is politically feasible.

Today was the day that Laura Bush originally set aside to invite a few poets to the White House to discuss Whitman, Hughes & Dickinson under the banner of ”Poetry and The American Voice.” This event won’t happen because one of the invited poets, Sam Hamill, turned out to be a conservative only in his aesthetics. Hamill, as concerned as any American about the impending disaster, sent out an email to some friends:

I am asking every poet to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war, and to make February 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon.

That email spread like a computer virus, replicating over & over again until virtually every poet in the country must have received it at least once. I know that I stopped counting the copies I received when it got into double digits.

Somewhere along the way, somebody – it would interesting to know just who – thought to let Ms. Bush know of this impending anthology & the event was cancelled, generating several articles in the media. As it turned out, the poet laureates of both Canada and the United States weighed in against the war. Todd Swift’s ad-hoc antiwar anthologies got some media attention that they almost certainly would not otherwise have received. Editorial writers generally took the line that “poets will be poets,” which, condescending as it certainly is, at least acknowledges the historic opposition to war & brutality that many – but by no means all – poets have shown over the years. Even less surprisingly, writers who function professionally as right wing commentators, such as Roger Kimball & J. Bottum, both invited to the cancelled soiree, weighed in to scold their peers for a lack of manners, a curious way to balance the impolite bombing of the citizens of Iraq whose only crime is to have failed to oust a brutal & murderous dictator.

Since then, there have been plenty of opportunities for second-guessing. Hamill’s website has reminded everyone of what they knew all along – he’s really a conservative as a poet, even if he does oppose the war. His “chapbook” in fact reflects an establishmentarian poetics that wants more than anything to retain its role as just that. Others have suggested that attending the event & making a scene there might have generated even more media attention to the rapid arrival of a wide-spread & popular opposition to Bush’s war. I’m a skeptic on that one myself. I think that Hamill’s email took on a life of its own precisely because there is such widespread opposition.

But what concerns me is not the usual – & ultimately petty – divisions between traditions of poetry. I am experiencing emotions that I suspect many Germans must have felt in the late 1930s: my government is about to rain death onto the world in great quantity. The legitimate safety of the nation in which I live, one ostensible reason for this, can only be damaged by any invasion of Iraq. The other reasons for an invasion – ranging from the importance of upholding UN resolutions to Iraqi connections to al Qaeda – all fall into the categories of dubious to laughable. The history of the Soviet Union has demonstrated that containment works against far stronger foes than Saddam Hussein.

Which leaves only one plausible rationale for sending troops into Iraq: the liberation of the Iraqi people. I’m certainly sympathetic to that argument & can understand why left intellectuals from Ellen Willis to Salman Rushdie could be persuaded of the need for force to oust a genuinely barbaric dictator. But I have two problems with this argument itself – first is a rather long list of other nations that would, by logic, then force us to engage. Hussein may be the worst of a bad lot, but he is hardly alone. The second is that, from an Iraqi perspective, the last nation on earth I would to become an involuntary protectorate of would be the United States.

Far from “helping to spread democracy” to other Middle-Eastern states, the Bush strategy is a recipe for long-term destabilization of an entire region, stretching from sub-Saharan Africa and extending to the western provinces of China & the Philippine  archipelago. And, as should be apparent to anyone in the post-September 11^th world, destabilization abroad can have profound consequences at home as well. Any attempt to stretch our military dominance over such a vast terrain – one that includes or touches at least four nuclear states – would require a transformation of the American economy toward a fortress America prepared for permanent conflict. It is no accident that no nation in history has been able to sustain an empire – the costs far outweigh any riches reaped.

What can be done to halt this disaster before it occurs? Short of a massive general strike in the United States, virtually nothing. The present regime has already demonstrated that it will not listen to the majority – that isn’t how it got into office, nor an impulse it has had even for one day since taking power. Further, it has subsequently consolidated power in all three branches of federal government.

Poets need to continue to speak out, to demonstrate to the world the absolute lack of consensus the actions of this regime have, to point to the hypocrisies & to call attention to all of the various new threats on democracy and justice that emanate from the axis of evil situated between Crawford, Texas, and the White House. But nobody, poets most of all, should be deluded into thinking that this by itself constitutes effective action.

The problem that poets have is one that we share with all progressives – the forces who promote this conflict have dramatically reorganized & transformed themselves since the 1960s. Progressives continue to use the same tools that took so very long to work four decades ago that millions died needlessly. Unless & until we can transform that imbalance, more to the American Voice than just poetry will continue to go unheard.

Sometime today, this blog will greet its 10,000^th visitor. For a genre like poetry in which a turnout of 50 people to a reading is considered a smashing success, this seems remarkable.

2002 will be remembered as the Year of the Blog because, if for no other reason, political bloggers (especially Josh Marshall) were the ones who first noticed & broadcast Trent Lott’s outrageous comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, which led ultimately to his resignation as President of the Senate. As the blogging phenomenon expands to a point where there are now just under one million blogs worldwide – three other members of my own extended family have blogs – it makes sense that some will focus on poetry & poetics.

When I started at the very end of August, there were relatively few weblogs with any sort of announced focus around poetry, most notably Brian Kim Stefans' Free Space Comix & Laurable’s weblog portion of her web site devoted to recordings of poetry readings. Blogs such as those belonging to Brandon Barr & Jill Walker had a relationship to writing, but – like many early blogs – were primarily extensions of an interest in electronic media per se: blog theory.

Since September, quite a number of poetry-centric blogs have started up, some of them really excellent. Here is a list of the blogs that I check at the very least a few times each week.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Equanimity (Jordan Davis)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Free Space Comix: The Blog (Brian Kim Stefans)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jill/Txt (Jill Walker)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jonathan Mayhew’s Blog

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Laurable.Com

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lester’s Flogspot (Patrick Herron’s poetry sock puppet)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lime Tree (K. Silem Mohammad)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Texturl (Brandon Barr)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The Tijuana Bible of Poetics (Heriberto Yepez)

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Ululations (Nada Gordon)

Blogging has even become slightly controversial on the Poetics List. Some people there seem to think that critical discourse has to follow an either/or model of communication, whereas it seems to me quite obvious to a both/and system in much the same way that both the poetry reading and the poetry book have concrete value for poetry. Blogging seems no more of a threat to listserv discussions than it does to the academy itself.

The blog as diary seems to me of little interest. But blogging as a form of intellectual discipline has great value. I’ve thought more concretely than I otherwise could have about any number of issues over the past four months as a result of this blog. I’ve increased my own reading, and gone in some directions that I would not have otherwise taken. There are some poets whose work I might only have glanced at – Joseph Massey & Richard Deming, for example – without the discipline of the blog. And others whose contributions I might not have thought through nearly as thoroughly as I have – George Stanley, for instance, or Jennifer Moxley. Many of the emails & other communications I’ve received as a result of various blogs have been enormously instructive.

These thoughts occur to me as 2003 approaches concerning blogging and poetry:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>The number of poetry-centered blogs can only grow and, as it does, the audience for any given approach to such blogs will be forced, simply by the limits of time & attention, to divide. Thus are tendencies born. It will be interesting to see what the terrain looks like one year from now.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>To date, most if not all poetry-related blogs have come out of the broad spectrum of post-avant literary traditions. This may be because such writing has a critical tradition that is not only an adjunct of the process of tenure.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>One visible gap to date with regards to poetry blogs appears to be that very old one: gender. Of the eleven blogs listed above, nine are by men. I don’t see any inherent reasons for this gap, although I wouldn’t want to underestimate the number and kinds of distractions & responsibilities with which women in today’s society must contend. But the form itself would seem to have several real advantages that might prove attractive to women, the ability to bypass male editors being only one.