One thing about the Internet: when you get it wrong, you can be corrected from a great distance almost instantly. From Capetown, South Africa, Robert Berold & Paul Wessels, the publishers of Deep South, whose books include Seitlhamo Motsapi’s earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow, identify a thread I missed entirely in my reading of one of Motsapi’s poems in Tripwire 6:

dear ron silliman

we think you are making too much of the obscurity of seitlhamo motsapi's poem. how about simply

moni = money

culculatahs = calculators (with pretensions)

conputers = computers (with the con of capitalism)

robert berold+ paul wessels

Moni being money brings the stanza I was most confused by into much greater focus:

their kisses bite

like the deep bellies of conputers

the gravy of their songs

smells like the slow piss of culculatahs

But I wasn’t arguing for the obscurity of Motsapi’s poem, only my own difficulty at knowing how “to grasp some portion of the references & allusions without importing too many.” While I thought conputers  was clear enough, the initial “cul” of culculatahs threw me – I still don’t hear it, although the reference back now to moni pulls the chain of elements into a single overarching scheme of references tightly enough. The problem, if it is one, is that I personally lack the context – literally – for hearing moni as money, there simply isn’t enough diversity among the speakers in my social milieu for that to strike me as a probable variant. My own ignorance here simply underscores the question I was raising. Happily, though, my conclusion that “I don’t need to know this in order to recognize that ‘moni’ is an unquestionably wonderful poem” still stands. Motsapi strikes me as a poet absolutely worth reading, regardless of how much cultural baggage I need to shed in order to do so.

Perhaps the article in tripwire 6 that most directly tackles the question of community is K. Silem Mohammad’s “Creeping it real: Brian Kim Stefans’ ‘Invisible Congress’ and the Notion of Community,” a critique of sorts of Stefans’ “When Lilacs Last in the Door: Notes on New Poetry,” an overview of younger poets that Stefans initially undertook for Poets & Writers – specifically for  Michael Scharf’s “Metromania” column – moving it over to Steve Evans’ webzine, Third Factory after the P&W  editors rejected it.*

Stefans’ article proposes the existence of a new literary tendency that he literally calls The Creeps, after the Radiohead song. In his article, Stefans quotes from the song – “But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / what the hell am I doing here? / I don’t belong here” – to “explain” why he chose such a consciously anti-attractive moniker to assign to the fortunate few he so characterizes. Pointedly, Stefans neglects to include the lines that lead up to this chorus, perhaps because they articulate his position a little too plaintively:

I want to have control

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice

when I’m not around

you’re so fucking special

I wish I was special

Stefans also lists 19 writers & 21 books to pin down if not what, then at least who (besides himself) he means:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Caroline Bergvall's Goan Atom

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Miles Champions' Three Bell Zero

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Kevin Davies' Comp.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Tim Davis' Dailies

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jeff Derksen's Dwell

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Dan Farrell's Last Instance

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Robert Fitterman's Metropolis 1-15

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Kenneth Goldsmith's No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Adeena Karasick's Dyssemia Sleaze

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Bill Luoma's Works and Days

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Jennifer Moxley's Imagination Verses and her chapbook Wrong Life

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Harriet Mullens' Muse and Drudge

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Rod Smith's Protective Immediacy and In Memory of My Theories

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Chris Stroffolino's Stealer's Wheel

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Rodrigo Toscano's Partisans

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry 

That’s an interesting – if not particularly coherent – roster, ranging from the constraint-driven formalism of Mullen & the Canadian post-Oulipo experimenters to the epistemology-centered Moxley**, to Pamela Lu’s poignantly retro novella, a retelling of sorts of Catcher in the Rye as filtered through Ashbery’s Three Poems, to several poets with visible post-langpo & post-NY school concerns.

If Stefans’ initial piece is itself an instance of post-langpo counter-canon formation, parallel in purpose if not specifics to the claims underlying the O•blēk ”New Coast” anthology & subsequent Apex of the M editorials or Sianne Ngai’s “Poetics of Disgust,” what seems to interest Mohammad most about Creepy poetry is a claim that I don’t think Stefans actually makes:

The eyebrow-raising element here is the claim that Creeps want to break out of the community model of experimental writing, a model that has held indomitable sway for decades, notably reinforced and codified in Ron Silliman’s passionate introduction to In the American Tree.

Given that, as per Sartre, the alternative to the group is serial formation, a phenomenon that is synonymous with the atomizing principles of capitalism – & nowhere more visible in literature than in the sales-driven approach to books of the New York trade publishers – that “break out” would more accurately be characterized as a surrender, if in fact it were the case. The adjective Creepy would acquire a whole new (or, rather, very old) set of meanings. But I don’t think this is what Stefans was driving at in his original piece.

The passage that Mohammad cites for this eye-brow elevation is the following:

all the Creeps share . . . a surprising desire to communicate, to perform, to create social interactivity, and to expand beyond the small communities that have been their inherited legacy from previous American avant-gardes. They are often experimentalists, but have no interest in experiment for its own sake, at least if the results are not something like a public, often very entertaining, form of poetry, a sort of deviant form of street theater itself. The Creeps are almost universally very funny, though why there has been such a turn to humor in their poetry is matter for debate.***

This anxiety about communicating with a broader constituency of readers fits in perfectly with the high-school discomfiture articulated by the Radiohead lyrics, but it’s a considerable leap – very nearly a rocket launch – to suggest that any, let alone all, of the lucky Creeps want to make the leap to appearances on Oprah or even Jim Behrle’s poetry spots on NPR’s Here and Now.

Stefans’ argument can be framed as making a case for a return from trobar clus, the consciously difficult poetry that the 12^th century troubadours wrote for each other along with the complex melopoetics of tobar ric, back toward something akin to trobar leu or plan, the more open-ended & simpler poems composed for less literate audiences. This I would agree with Kasey is eye-brow raising, but mostly because it so closely parallels the argument offered by Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? The logic that one could theoretically arrive at a more popular poetry is sometimes put forward to justify the existence of a Billy Collins or Deborah Garrison or Sophie Hannah or Wendy Cope. Clearly, none of the Creeps are involved in anything remotely that creepy.

The problem – which in fact is the question of community itself – of belonging, as such, cannot escape history. History teaches what history teaches, which includes the inescapable detail that even as these genres were already subdividing amoeba-like nine centuries ago, the arrival of post-12^th century modes of story telling, ranging from the novel to cinema to reality TV, have occupied – for good reason – the social space previously taken up by trobar leu. In fact, if one looks to those contemporary societies in which poetry has occupied something akin to a truly popular genre, such as late-Stalinist Soviet Russia or the remoter districts of Yemen, there are inevitably & always specific historic circumstances that have thwarted or diverted the narrative genres that absorb these spaces in the post-industrial West. We don’t need Homer precisely because we already have Homer Simpson.

If Stefans was, as I suspect, doing some creative mischief-making for the institutional context of Poets & Writers, Mohammad attempts to spin this rather wispy daydream into a far more formidable theoretic construction. Mohammad asks:

So how does Creep turn away from a community-based poetics?  Only to the extent that it rejects the notion of a safe enclave, a privileged brotherhood of artistry in which the problems of the outside world are, after all, outside, and at least there’s that. It does this by raising the quixotic possibility of intercourse between experimental poetry and mainstream culture . . . .

Mohammad’s evidence for this, which goes on for a couple of pages, is entirely a list of literary devices associated with language poetry. This suggests that an important part of literary formation is, or at least might be, creative amnesia – and on this question I’d probably concur, noting how Robert Grenier’s great “break” with speech in 1970 was directed precisely toward the poetics toward which he felt himself most deeply attracted. Three decades hence, langpo finds itself drawn into this same quandary of being configured as an impediment rather than a foundation even as the evidence duly displayed directly contradicts the charge. Plus ça change.  . . .

Perhaps the most problematic part of Mohammad’s construction is that he pulls back from it at the end, not unlike Chaucer’s deathbed apology:

this is exactly what I find attractive about Stefans’ Creep (anti-) aesthetic: it’s a movement that is formed within the mind of the reader, not the designs of a self-articulated community. Stefans’ apprehension of Creepiness comes from his own Creepy imagination, his own desire to oversee a troupe of invisible, flea-like verbal acrobats.

Now there’s an attractive proposition! How would you like to be both invisible & flea-like? Sign me up, Kasey! Not.

However, Mohammad is almost certainly accurate in his next (and final) assertion:

That the poets [Stefans] names are readily conformable to such a desire says something about their shared use of certain techniques and their common concerns as postmodern artists, but more about a simultaneous resistance and porousness in their work that encourages progressive (but diverse) notions of community to be constructed from the margins outward (inward?) – there is no Creep manifesto, only an ever-growing passenger manifest, the names on which can be shuffled according to the needs of an equally various and multiple collective of readerly sensibilities.

Sure sounds like Sartre’s vision of serialization & capitalist atomization to me, a series of infinitely substitutable parts that can be popped out of a box or anthology – like a chess set composed entirely of pawns – and dropped into any theory one wants. This goes right back to the suppressed lyrics of the original Radiohead song, “I want to have control.” This is a vision of a generation of poets who have no clue what that might feel like. And don’t understand that such “porousness” is as much a lethal threat to themselves as it is astronauts on the space shuttle.

To the degree that Stefans, or Ngai or even the Apex / O•blēk gang make efforts to challenge that porousness, their attempts, however partial & one-sided, align them with the angels of history, for which they all deserve our thanks & support. But to the degree that anybody imagines a community of rugged individuals – which is what the post-community monad most certainly is – as a possibility, these poets can only continue to ask themselves “what the hell am I doing here?”

* Evans asks that links not be made to Third Factory, which is why the link to Stefans’ piece goes to a linked bibliography of Brian’s that does have an apparently authorized link.

** Stefans claims, using Moxley as his “evidence,” that “Creeps . . . are not . . . greatly concerned with epistemological issues”!?!

*** Again, the test of Stefans’ claim here is, or should be, Jennifer Moxley’s poetry. I’ve argued here before that this would be a total misreading of her work.

Try this poem out with an American ear – or, for that matter, with whatever variant of English you happen to have:

moni

& so the new blackses arrive
all scent & drape to their clamour

head & heart the liquid odour

of roads that defy oceans

from the fiery splash of pool

  pits they preach us redamp

    shun from the dust

        of the old ways

their kisses bite

like the deep bellies of conputers

the gravy of their songs

smells like the slow piss of culculatahs

& so

the new blackses arrive

& promise us life beyond the bleed

of the common yell

they promise us new spring

for the slow limp

of our heads

meanwhile

the ladder finds the sky at last

heart or herd slinks to the waters

mbira grows into a synthesizer

the songs ask for more sugar

& my salt sets sail for babylon

If I hadn’t known the context of this poem in the latest tripwire, I would not have recognized it as African until the word mbira, the Shona variant of the thumb piano, an instrument I associate with the music of Zimbabwe. Not surprisingly, then, the poet Seitlhamo Motsapi comes from the South African province of Limpopo, the northernmost part of the country, bordering Zimbabwe & nearly 1,000 miles north of Cape Town.

I don’t, it’s worth noting, know enough about orchids to recognize the poem’s curious variant spelling of the Latin term for the South African witch orchid, disperis cucullata, and in fact that name is also found in the Latin term for a South African bird, the bronze-winged mannikin, so I can’t even be sure that it’s the humidity I associate with orchids in general that is the image schema underlying the “slow piss” at the end of the third stanza.

One of the great challenges of reading poetry from another culture, let alone language, is to be able to grasp some portion of the references & allusions without importing too many of your own. Reading the very first line of this text, I have to suppress the idea that (1) the opening phrase might be an allusion to Pound’s Cantos & (2) the even more perverse echo I get of Tolkien’s character Gollum pluralizing blacks as blackses. Conversely, there are so many possible meanings to the title moni – it’s everything from the first name of a popular pan-African singer to a resort in Windhoek to the surname of an early Italian settler in South Africa to the stock ticker for Marconi Communications on the South African Stock Exchange – that I simply have to let it go. To the degree that this name tells a native reader the subject of this poem, I have no access to what it might indicate.

But I don’t need to know this in order to recognize that “moni” is an unquestionably wonderful poem. It’s use of imagery & rhythms jump right off the page. The prosody has an elegance that translates beyond dialect & a deliberate “misspelling” (e.g. conputer) positions the text into a voice-based tradition that Heriberto Yepez’ Mexican poetics would acknowledge as different from their own.

Over one third of the new tripwire is devoted to new writing from Southern Africa, a good portion just as riveting as Motsapi’s poem. Overall, however, I found myself frustrated that the brief introduction – a single page, unsigned -- & Robert Berold’s interview with Lesego Rampolokeng & Ike Mboneni Muila don’t offer more than the merest of glimpses at the broader contexts in which this poetry is being written. The brief reference to isicamtho doesn’t make it clear, for example, that this is a form of township slang that enables speakers of South Africa’s multiple languages to negotiate daily life. Muila’s own poem “In No Time” literally offers glosses to the right of the text body.

The question of context certainly has implications for how a work is received. Consider this section of a longer poem by Jeremy Cronin:

Sometime after the revolution, Soviet libraries adopted the Dewey Decimal System

With one rectification – the two hundreds: Religion

All the way from 201, 202, skip a few, 214 Theodicy, 216 Good & Evil, 229 Apocrypha & pseudo-epigraphs, down to 299 Other religion – this great textual body of human wisdom, confusion, folly and aspiration was reduced by the Soviets to a bald:

Dewey Decimal 200: Atheism

This was not (not by far) the worst sin of Stalinism

But it was its most typical

This should be remembered of the 20^th century

This deadpan recitation, a rough approximation of which might occur on any given day in the United States on the programs of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan or the 700 Club, seems curious in this collection. That Cronin is the Deputy Secretary General of the South African Communist Party doesn’t so much position the statement as it does testify to the degree to which someone from the U.S. has an immense bridge to cross in order to gain any sense of grounding when reading contemporary South African poetry.

Writing of how many “nation language” poets have arguments not dissimilar from those associated with langpo for arriving at a non-standard approach to English language, Juliana Spahr wrote in this blog last November that “They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.” tripwire is certainly ensuring that such radically different poetries meet in the pages of its journal, but I wish that somebody had done for South Africa what Heriberto Yepez did for Mexico & offered a map.

Every once in awhile, I come across a magazine or website that just reeks of the poetry of the future – it’s like accidentally opening the door to a furnace you hadn’t realized was there. The heat given off is palpable & feels more than a little dangerous. At the same time, you now have a sense of just how much energy lies behind that door. A particularly excellent example of this is tripwire 6, edited by Yedda Morrison & David Buuck out of San Francisco. Subtitled almost too narrowly a journal of poetics, tripwire 6 is all about community, defined large.

The ways tripwire confronts this issue are several. What drew me into the issue at first was an essay by Heriberto Yepez. Yepez is a Mexican poet whose work I didn’t know until Jonathan Mayhew made me aware of Yepez’ superlative blog, The Tijuana Bible of Poetics! (T-BOP) T-BOP is one of the finest weblogs related to poetry & poetics, and offers the considerable value of approaching these issues from perspectives that are, for me, completely new & fresh. After becoming a complete T-BOP addict, I also discovered a series of fascinating sign poems in both English & Spanish up on Joel Kuszai’s Factory School website.

Yepez’ piece in tripwire, “What About the Mexican Poetry Scene?” describes post-Paz Mexican poetics in terms completely accessible to readers who, in fact, are clueless on the writing to our South. Yepez does this through a series of quite savvy comparisons with the poetry scene we do know – our own U.S. hodge-podge. Thus:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>With the death of Octavio Paz, Mexican poetry lost its center; U.S. poetry has no ascertainable center.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>“In Mexico, writers have . . . real power and use it up front.” “In Mexico, Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout would have to (even be pressed to) periodically speak on current issues on the Mexican equivalent of NBC’s evening news or Nightline.”

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>This social power “makes it impossible for even a radical poet to stay for too long” in Mexico.

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>Mexican poetry’s orientation toward innovation & experimentalism “resembles the self-understanding of black innovative tradition,” balancing progressive impulses with conventional forms.*

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>There is “no hard mainstream in Latin America . . . simply because in Latin America the avant-garde won.” Yet, paradoxically, “Octavio Paz established the idea that after surrealism no avant-garde could be possible again.”

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>“Voice and performance have been protagonists of American counterpoetics from the Harlem Renaissance and the Beats to today’s San Francisco and New York poetry scenes. In Mexico, this is not the case. We are wed to a text-based composition.”

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>“Another big difference is that current American poets are more domestic than we are. They can feed each other. In Mexico, for example, there is now a growing discussion on using English and getting in touch with contemporary American poetics (experimental and mainstream).

A major concern of Yepez centers on speculation as to the future of Mexican poetry, post-Paz. Will a new center form to monopolize the whole of literature? Will it evolve into something similar to the two traditions that have waged cultural war in the United States since at least the 1840s? Or will it devolve into something much more fragmented & chaotic, the way the post-avant U.S. scene seems to many observers today? Yepez notes the emergence of new modes of writing that have, as yet, to be incorporated into the broader Mexican cultural fabric – bilingual Indian poets & vizpo, as resistant to the historic frames & constraints of Mexican writing as this transnational counter-tradition appears to be in almost every other culture.

How accurate is Yepez’ characterization of the Mexican scene? I can’t say & I’m naturally wary – I can recall James Breslin’s depiction of the U.S. scene in the early 1970s as a series of peaceful suburbs with no urban center (the approximate role that Paz plays in Yepez’ model) against which to be defined. Yet Breslin taught in the same department as Robert Grenier, David Henderson, Richard Tillinghast & Denise Levertov when he penned those words, a department that was abandoned by Louis Simpson only a few years earlier with a public outcry that there was no room for his kind of poetry in the Bay Area literary scene in the wake of the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965.** Because Yepez’ depiction of the U.S. scene is generally reasonable & accurate – more so than any I’ve read by Ms. Vendler, let alone Breslin – I’m inclined to accept his portrayal of Mexican poetry. But even more than this, Yepez’ article makes me realize how much I need to buy Across the Line / Al Otro Lado, Harry Polkinhorn & Mark Weiss’ anthology of the poetry of Baja California, and how much I need Jen Hofer’s forthcoming anthology of poetry by Mexican women, Sin puertas visibles, due in April from the University of Pittsburgh Press. .

* But but but what about Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, Lee Ann Brown? All three could be described in exactly such terms. A poet such as Helen Adams, or Edwin Denby, could hardly be described otherwise.

** Breslin was a classic example of the well-intended poetry critic who never attended a reading that was not sponsored by his own English department – a travesty in the context of the San Francisco Bay Area, as indeed it would be in any region, even Wyoming.