Sunday, February 20, 2011

21. "stabbing each other/ in the throat"

Rodrigo Toscano’s To Leveling Swerve (2004, Krupskaya) appears to be a Book of Poetry about being the kind of American poet who sits on panels while simultaneously despising sitting on panels:

“Number 7-12-64 please step into the pannelization room.”

It is also a book about using a kind of language and simultaneously despising using a kind of language.  It is about representing and despising one’s own representing. I might understand:

Those of you unfamiliar with the terms “MLA”
“Zukofsky” “art-object” (its current status)
--You don’t belong at this reading!
And the fault is mine
        -- Uneven Development

I would have been so unfamiliar in 2004, but now: Hello American Poetry of panels/ not panels vocabularies/ not vocabularies disjuncts/not disjuncts exclusions/guilt at these exclusions.  What a form of hallway gossip, institutional critique.   I am learning everything about you, poetry, and I am aware that I am always on this blog here saying gaps between things and the words we have for saying things are cruel.  But what cruel gaps these are, this being compelled toward a poetry which “resists” while resisting, in itself, this poetry:

“LIKE A PERSON HALF-CRAZED WITH THIRST YOU WILL OFTEN RETURN TO THIS PAGE LOOKING FOR CLUES TO YOUR RELATIVE VALUE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY ESPECIALLY AS UNDERSTOOD IN THE VAST UNDERGROUND CHAMBERS OF POETRY”

I am hopeless when I read all this.  I mean, sad.  There’s these bodies we must keep alive, these unheroic labors, these languages we are abandoned to (hollowed and insufficient), the syntax made by heritage, the aesthetics formed by patrilineal devotion, the great stultification of art, and then also there are these cities full of the poets, regrettably empaneled.

I didn’t know, or knew, a little, and only just barely, and merely what I've been told:

"That lower-class seekers ply their thrusties and gyrationals against their multiple-unit owning cousins: “poethics” "

1 comment:

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