22. How much swagger do I want? / So fucking much, all of it, all the time"

I was feeling, again, forlorn for myself and for public libraries, how most of what  I could find therein were these lyrics, fractured and award-winning, how I have no patience for that kind of caviar and fracture (to go around breaking shit! assholes! I needed what you just broke!), how what I wanted, both sadly and freely was a poetry that would mend the social, how it would tell not only of alienation but alienation’s ruin, how it would do this with no airs and with full admission, its pretense only a pretense of belief, or its belief only in that of the abidingness of poetry even as poetry imagines itself out of poetry.

Where was I going to find this poetry?

There were people all over the world taking over everything and WE HAD TO WIN.

I told Sandra this is the time to stand up in the middle of Art and start shouting.

So I said aloud on facebook that I would read pdfs, because secretly and not so-secretly I am to the pdf what the rest of you nostalgics are to books, that I would, in a second, decorate this rental house with these files, some scanned, some ocr-scanned, some primitively designed, some in asemic tatters, some full of viru$es from the fuck ver$o site. 

I was feeling, again, forlorn for myself, $90 in the amazon cart I couldn't bring myself to spend, having a thought on each book and putting it back for lack of money, just like Tisa in the poem I will soon write about, and everywhere in your cities there are these poets, dancing and fighting with each other (are they getting ready to stand up in the middle of art shouting? are you?), and then there is Dana Ward writing, and flying to be among them, and now holding his baby, and I read this:

To be the most adorable person in a destroyed world, or, the most hideous thing in a parti-colored city-- this was the question that was most on my mind.

This was the question that was most on my mind. How is it that old define for the young the beauty that belongs to youth?  Or rather, how they say to one man, as a man said to Dana Ward, 

"This is not poetry."

That this is not poetry is most securely the evidence that it is.  or, "Oh, it totally is." 

The pdf I am reading will be a book, called This Can't Be Life, coming out from Edge books. Dana says:

"I have all these friends I've never met. We are bonded by a poetry. Nothing else matters. Everything else. The logics of armament curating all the endearments, sweet nothings, Ann Lee in ‘09, the happy calisthenics of repression dressed up to look like Deluzean dreams & that’s our sociality?"

 also he says

Will.I.Am, Fergie, & all of them were there. & you were there, & you. Their sound was the basin of a Christmassy drain into which all amassed sparkle poured to make the spot. An alto- soprano transformed it into something high & thick, a cream that moved with a butterfly’s ease & the graceful navigation of a so-precocious cat around the card-house of a China shelf that stands on two bad legs. The sound was precarious & perfect, young love. The payment for believing that this register exists as open myriad to die in each one. I’m saying that the siren’s song is meaning.

I'm saying that the siren's song is meaning.

This is what we do when we do not fail, I mean when we "win": we die in each one.  And also, "I will never stop writing about Jay-Z ever. I like to lay on the floor & just think about that dude!" And if I told you I wanted to make a kind of "allergic" criticism, or a criticism of autoimmune-after-effect, would you believe I could do this?  And what also, of a similar poetry?  and "Is it too easy to tell you outright?" and "How much swagger do I want? So fucking much, all of it, all the time."

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” "

20. "I search every book for the dedication / I must make as myself"

I have been angry, lately, about these things: the cities that hate children, the children in Kansas city (the city near my city) who set fire to their school 151 times this year because the city hates them and they hate the city, the category of “mother,” the category of “child.” Hazel, my own child, told me this the other day: the reason you do not see homeless people in Overland Park (our city)  is that the homeless people are all mothers and children.  She is a child but nothing and everything like a child.  I am a mother but.  The reason you do not see them is that they are all mothers and children. We are mothers and children and secret in that we are (as mothers and children are categories) a kind of reproductive always-and-ever-ness, perpetually of the body and in this not of the public or the mind.  The younger the child, the more tedious and abject its presence.   How children have no place in this public. How the cities hate children.  How the mind is like the city.  How poetry is like the mind is like the city hates children*.

These (we) humans exist, too close to biology, and also, we are not to bring out ourselves, so close to biology, as mother, though as mother we cannot escape ourselves (a category!):  mother, an embarrassing natural fact.   Some people only need say out loud “Mom poet” to make other people laugh. And child, like what?  Not a person, really, only Suri Cruise.

You would only need to say this to me in the comments field:  Mom.  You would only need to say to Hazel, despite every evidence of her wit and cunning and the way she obliterates every quantifiable measure of human brilliance:  Girl.  

Our  category is an insult.  This is not a conservative assault, it’s also a “post-modern” “post-human” “post-private” “post-biological” one.

How normative --  to exist.

Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Press, 2007) is so full of pain like this.  Take these lines from one of her New York Sonnets: “When I lived here the mothers were somewhat invisible / Just as I have become elsewhere” or from the poem, Chance Meeting Couplets,  which begins: “I’ve been having babies/ And you?” and ends “Our secret worlds are crucial / to all our public meetings”.

The poems are full also of what I think must be the stuff of the poet’s motherhood, which is also the stuff of a boy’s childhood: dinosaurs, bunny suits, boys, lambs, superman, bears, small plastic objects.  The poems come, I think, from great effort: like a sponge the hands can’t stop squeezing to get the smallest bit of life to drip out in the mess that is mother and unpaid labor: “I expect to enter/ a place of no hunger / a realm of pure imagination / This makes me angry / Dear, poetic deficit.”

This is also the book of “private” life in the age of public terror, and the poems must go on for obvious political reasons, must be “your personal amulet”

in this age of malcontent benefactors

Against an ironclad schooner

Feudal kingdom

Dismemberment by jubilant crowds

Strangely indifferent faces

As taboo as it is for private life all up in the mind or city or public it is as inevitable that public life will ceaselessly invade the private, or at least the “private" mind.  The sonnets here exist for and also exist against or: “Against terror implicit in color alerts,” “Fear breeding paycheck absence,” “Against dread of news,”  “Against monotony of daily endeavor,” “Against monotony in verse.”

*I am going to make this clear: not all poetry is a city that hates children.  But what revolutions are contained in the poetry that does not hate children, like these are a new mind or new city themselves. 

19. “where the firing squad has nothing to aim at”

It’s the opposite of the blind oracle.  It’s the allegory of the cave but in the inverse. Also, it’s not just an epic.  Or it is an epic for ghosts and paranoiacs.  There is very little future here.  How does one write an epic for an end, when everyone born is of a new species, made from the needle (the defect)?  The new species might not even have song. This is “the year of our president” and there are other problems:  literature as it is is useless for the vision of the new species; it is made up of either stories that “love whatever people do” or poetry (the poets “tinker”).  Also the forms are made by men, and this literature that can change this is not the literature of men.  The seer is weak: “Part bird.  Part rat. Part Voice.  Part Elephant.”  Finally, there is the question posed on the first page: “If you detest everything about your society, you say, why are you writing?”

“It is time to change writing completely.”  

We are never girls in our visions.  But this does not mean we are men.  Once I almost died and in those minutes met a man just like Satan, but in a spaghetti western and more bureaucratic, and after I that I saw a doctor, with his Grecian formula and cowboy boots. I swear Alice Notley's In the Pines is a dialogue with that same satanic bureaucrat, the one who is always sitting on the foot of the hospital bed.

“What can I trust? he said.
Your death?
My death, he said. For that was right.
Mine will not be right, I say.  For I won’t have vindicated women. I won’t have seen the fall of male power. I won’t have helped to heal the earth. Why should I die and men still hold power? Why should I have lived to be treated like a woman?”

This is a politics.  The other reviews I’ve read of this are trouble. It's like they are eviscerated by the poem as a  necessary function of the poem. This is a part of the literature the escapes “the critical apparatus.”  This is not a faux-metaphysics; it is “I always knew the house was on fire. It was one of the first things I knew.”  There is nothing on which one can be Aristotlean here and also, to write criticism of these later works of Alice Notley is exactly like launching a missile at a ghost.  One imagines exactly an egg, “appearances,” and also the egg being cracked.  I've got nothing like science here.

18. "I am currently only / lying to three-and-a-half / persons"

(prelude)

I am at the public library picking out the books I will read next . My own books are not among these books of my friends and strangers in my own library and in my town or in the entire state of kansas but for maybe in the rented rooms of my poor intimates or my own rented rooms, so all the while, then, I am feeling woeful and inadequate and self-incriminatory squatting on my heels, squinting at the spines and wondering, even, if it is good for me who is uncivic and inadequate to write about the books of the poets all more civic or adequate than me. Soon enough a handsome enough man appears and hands me a sheet of paper and tells me I am beautiful and that I have a pretty smile, and I tell him I have a boyfriend and then I am left with a piece of paper asking me to go to “a movie today (or tomorrow)” and a ‘have a good day” and a stack of books of contemporary American poetry and my woefulness and self-incrimination and beauty.

It has taken me, I think, some time.  One of my jobs is online on Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and while it is never personal we are to pretend it is.  “Hello,” I type, “I’m Anne B. and :)” and to make myself feel better while I am pretending to be helpful and personal I am stealing $1 from my work or how many minutes off the boss-clock reading a public library

/review/

collection of poetry by Anselm Berrigan.  I read this book (Free Cell, City Lights, 2009)  in between cut/paste/emoticon/personalization and imagine that each poem (I think these are poems) titled “Have a good one” was written each day as he sat there for several seasons / or “maybe I can write all / poems I should have/ written tonight this year.” I imagine these to be the poems of “as he sat there” and “every day” as I sat here.  sit here.   sitting here still, every day. 

“What I know is / the birds sing back.”

///

/////

“Time / you ruinous agent of / possibility , will you ever / truly get your point across?”

If I read the blurbs I get messed up, because without the blurbs  I think “these are the poems of an unblinded life enthusiasm” and “these are the ordinary optimistic machinations of the eye and ear and soul.”

As if the soul actually still existed, and anyway,  soul is an imprecise word for what manifests here.  In this language, for example:

“I have imagined saying no so often and rarely ever fantasize a yes. /  One may own a strategy what contains spitting yes repeatedly as / a tactic leading to the fulfillment of a grand vision/ that will be the / unmistakable embodiment and subsequent catatonic astral eruption / of a no”  --

and  the poem goes on, “by artificial pond” and “by ecstasy of refusal” and “by right’s side dull discomfort growing daily” and “by above all’s fierce intellect,” and so also in this book, what I think is true:

how very much it wants to be made of poems of “no”.  How very much it is made of the poems of “yes” or “the/ world its own/ example, & I’m co-bringing life / into it.” *

In this book, the sheep mock the poet and the birds speak back.  

How is this not all prelude, never review?  Humans squat on our heels woeful and self-incriminating but I swear to god somehow beautiful-- “the icing of all personal bureaucracies” -- and all the while the poet here is neither below or above each human and wishes, I think, to get the right amount of drunk.

“You / can be culture/ but not / accused of it.”   It is like I have found the head that always nods the affirmative despite itself or for every "promise of hard won exuberance."

___

epilogue:  see this is my problem, to fantasize “yes” and always say “no” but hope for a similar astral eruption, my life of refusals somehow some day manifesting in the fourth of July

17. “got some cake some ice some FICO Scoring and Other Credit Issues if they weren’t so / snake bit”

(prelude) 

In a disturbing turn of events -- and much to the disappointment of myself, my family, and the four-to-seven humans who think of themselves as my enemies --  I began to write poetry again, and from this was reminded of the strange euphoric feeling of when a song rises out of the throat, like how it does for birds.  After, there is a feeling that EVERYONE SHOULD PAY ATTENTION  and THAT SONG JUST ROSE OUT OF MY THROAT.

This song rising up out of the viscera is so natural that one needn’t have left Eden for it.  It is some adorable remnant of that time when humans had merely to open their mouths and the gods placed in these mouths lush little fruits.  Oh how we sang back our praises of the fruits of those loving gods. Poetry was nothing and everything then.

For this reason I can feel a little bit of a benevolent connection with the critic Micah Mattix who writes, in a conservative think-tank piece, On Form and Flarf,  that “what is needed is a return to the natural constraint of complex form.”

How the poem in the natural constraint of complex form is also like a human tail.

How the every constraint is complex form is natural and every occurring form also like nature like how nature is also a vestigial tail.

I will resist, through this entire review, a defense of our former labors in the google mines. But these labors were in every way “the new natural.”  That is, to cart, with either limousine / donkey / broken-back / copyandpaste the language from here to there, full of the hope and despair of every form of natural labor is also a natural form, and to only after learn that the “here to there” was the same place, and from google we came and to google we came back, as if it google was merely an extension of logos or dust, which it, like nature, also is.   

/review/

Let’s then, pretending the world is the world and always natural, apply the four causes to Rod Smith’s 2010 Song Cave chapbook, “What’s the Deal”:

1. how it is made up out of google, which is made up out of language, which is made up out of people, businesses, machines and corpses, bodies animate and barely so

2. how it is in the form not veering too far from google results but resembling, also, a poem in how it rises up in the morning out of the throat of a poet

3. how it was once affect and information and is now a chapbook and will someday, by a bear or future human, be discovered in a clay pot in a cave

4. how it has as its end  the celebration, I think, of vestigial subjectivity and the continuation of an overall project, undertaken by Smith and friends, to explode aesthetics (in the way a confetti cannon also explodes)

***

I hate the term COGNITIVE SURPLUS.  This is because I love the masses, and resent, in particular, those humans who consider the intellectual and creative activity of the mass human to be in excess (“unnatural”).  

***

I cannot, despite my loathing for the term “cognitive surplus,” ignore that humans think (and type) these things that Rod Smith has also typed to make this poem:

“What’s the deal with Sanka?"

“Where’s the regular guy?”

“I am interested in eVItamins.”

“I mean/ I saw a posting for a Sales Management Trainee / position with Combined Insurance it sd”

“I read your article about oil in Montana.”

“What’s da deal, etc.?”

“Bluewater Wind and Delmarva/ East Niagara County biosolids acccounts”

Rod Smith the poet is like Dante here, deep in our regular purgatorio.  He makes a vernacular and corporate-speak cantos out of this.

***

This is why I’ve coined the term “vestigial subjectivity.”  It is a little like cognitive surplus, but takes into account the naturalness of the words that rise up out of our throats and onto the internet.

Those who have everything, from what I can tell, have as little use for the record of  mass wonder, mass suffering, mass silliness as the human body does for a spleen.  And woe to those with one hand in a pocket of profit made from the free expression of the many and with the other hand wiping their wrinkled-up, human-hating nose. 

And yet, for those who have merely poetry, there is a "natural" art inherent in this kind of persistent wonder that seems always to be rising up out of the mass of us (we love). And that poetry is a natural expression of this, vestigial (even though), and that poetry should also (or always)  be made up of the whole of human material, rather than the shinier parts of it: 

“What’s the deal> ?”

or

“Power could be in the works, astute readers / Power could be in the works.”

16. "Seconds ago, I was among the chillin'."

Linh Dinh's new book, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy, is some kind of cheese orgy.  That is, cheese is not just the  fluid that comes from the tits of cows, sheep, and goats which is then recombined with substances from these animals intestines in order to coagulate, but it is also that stuff that comes from the crevices in our human flesh.  Asses are widely known to smell cheesy, as are feet.  Belly buttons can appear to create cheese.  Fat people are cheesier than thin people.  Poor people, with all their trucking in the baser sentiments and brutally obvious struggles, are cheesier than the rich.  Cheesy is an aesthetic: smelling like ass, gooey or spongey, a signifier of profound effort, like when someone tells you to say "cheese" to simulate a smile (see Abu Ghraib).  To be cheesy is to be artless and sentimental, a brute and ineffective emotional force.  To have a cheese orgy -- that's all the smelly obscenity without any of the sexy. 


*

When the poets again and again can think of nothing better than to strive for poetry's failure*, who doesn't want to wipe out American poetry altogether?  To spit upon the pale&tepid corpses called poets with their industro-academic-complex animated hands as these same hands take that allowed sliver of human-like experience and break it into nano-factures laid out in the most artfully innocuous parataxis? 

Linh Dinh writes:

Adam's poem was a post-avant masterpiece,
Crammed with neologisms and non-sequiturs,
But also a few end rhymes, a retro touch.  Cute.

Collage, montage, parody, beaucoup irony and
Outright thievery quickly became old hat.

then "You couldn't even say "something" because it was / Already something else."

Readers, this book hates you.  I sort of hate you, too, and myself for having gotten to know you, and Linh Dinh sort of hates himself in this book also: "If every poem were as bad / As this one, I don't wanna/ Be a moonshining wordsmith."  

But here is the other thing: our direct, urgent, expression can get eaten up (eaten away) by the poetry complex.  Linh Dinh can write anything he wants: he can tell you to eat your own shit, to fall into a stink hole plastered in cum and money, and not one of you will react, except perhaps in polite self-congratulatory approval, as long as poetry is not content just an emptied ritual act.

*

I was telling Linh Dinh last weekend about a friend I had who was a house cleaner who wanted to be a millionaire.  Some days my kid and I would go to her house to hang out with her and her kid.  She would always keep a bowl of key limes on the table:

"Anne, one thing I learned from the rich is that we should always keep a bowl of fruit on the table."

There was something, also, she learned about candles. She would read books about millionaires and model herself after them as she cleaned up the drips of their urine from around the base of their toilets.   It's good to read books about what the wealthy expect of you, though it's not something you forget:

"Belonging to the lower class, you're expected
To cater to the upper class' lower bodily functions
Not to engage their minds but to wipe their asses,
Kiss their cunts on demand, suck cocks for tips,
Unless, of course, you're an artist, in which case,
You're an aristocrat of the servant class. . . "

My friend stopped cleaning houses and trained as a home care nurse.  Around this time I decided I wanted to be a poet again, so there I was a few days ago telling the story to Linh Dinh, also a poet.  But I watched you poets, learned how to do some poetry equivalent of keeping a bowl of fruit on the table.

*
From the poem "Amputated thoughts":

"I bulge into another beast, dude, soon as I put on
My asskicking uniform.  Killing is the most abstract
Of notions, the most concrete act.  We're like chimps,
Lions, and hippos, not so much swans and other birds."

There are some problems, right, with all this anger, and how the institutions around art make it only just "performed."  We love to see the artist smearing her shit on the wall, pissing into his own mouth -- it makes us feel a little edgy.  We've paid her or paid him to do our feeling for us, if we've paid at all, or we've seen her nice enough to volunteer.  So Linh Dinh puts a hole in his head and let's the cheese ooze out -- the rest of us applaud and show our gratitude with some cupcakes or a beer. I tell Linh Dinh at something like 3 a.m. about Zizek's directive to "dream better," not that he needs to, but we all do. 

It is a sign of the imagination's power that it has been sentimentalized and reduced into a t-shirt slogan. But this is what poetry can do that can't be reduced to the polite performance of abject oozing -- what we have is not only our fury, but also our invention. 




*Who can claim among you to love poetry if poetry is where you go to fail? Fail at tennis, fail at violence, fail at work, fail at love, fail at statehood, fail in business, fail in your retirement investments, but do not, please, fail at this.

15. "pump and blow gold everywhere"

That money and sex are not so different from one another and also inextricably linked to one another is not an observation unique to poets.  As my distant cousin Lefty Frizzel knew a long time ago and sang: "Money goes from hand to hand, your baby goes from man to man."   Cash money is filthy and you never know who has had their hands on it and where their hands were before you.  My favorite news article lately is how you can catch H1N1 from your money, which was, you know, once someone else's money, too.   And Alli Warren knows what Lefty Frizzel knew: "It's no joke / no one was found alive / with whom they shared / their secret swelling feasting. / All this cash it's form."

Everything's circulation.  Animals herd, people fail to hoard, and poets are a cockfaced opulent mix of colts and 49ers (I mean they are herding animals & they are rushing for gold).  This is circulation: "in the same way as all movement that carries one/ in the direction of the natural is natural."

As Alli writes, -- "Hoes need nectar too."  But I misread it as Hoes need Hector, too -- something heroic -- "a new moleskin" - or maybe I've totally misread it as "poets need Hector, too" (that's my projection, Dear Troy).  All the while our bodies affections & cash collapse:

People win awards.

There is cheese and wheat and eros

for the group

if you are lucky.

It reminds me of Dickinson's poetic economies:

I pay—in Satin Cash—
You did not state—your price—
A Petal, for a Paragraph
It near as I can guess—

When it comes to our poems, so much like money &eros we don't know what we have to debit. Remember Shelia E.? 

She saw him standing in the section marked

If you have to ask you can't afford it lingerie
She threw him bread and said make me scream
In the dark what could he say

I designed the cover for this chapbook out of pictures of Russian revolutionary children I snapped from someone else's computer screen: "hold your jeweled kicks/ up to the pulsing gate/ and say cheese."

14. "oh mute promise of bunnies overpopulating the sod"

Either in a dream or from my reading I remembered some sentence that our first violence to the animals was the violence of our words,

and I thought, "What a human mistake to make.  Our first violence to the animals was the violence of our violence."

John Berger writes about the animal gaze, that animals and humans look at each other in much the same ways humans look at each other, with all that wariness, but that only humans, with each other, can use language to reach across that gulf.   As Berger writes,  the animal's "silence guarantees its exclusion from and of man."  Or rather, isn't there something else here, like: "our language guarantees our exclusion from and of the animals"?

***

What can we use to reach across the gaze?  Not poetry, I guess, though I admit many times I have wanted a poetry for animals and aliens.   But as our language is not our violence so to our language is not our remedy. (We can mostly offer the animals something across that gaze something like the opposite of death -- something like food -- which has the effect also, of making us masters to them -- an opposite of death, but also like enslavement.)

I've been thinking about the lost culture of animals as described by the 18th century naturalist Georges Buffon (and quoted in Berger):

"Reduced to slavery, or treated as rebels, and dispersed by force, their societies have vanished, their industry has become barren, their arts have disappeared, each species has lost its general qualities, and the whole have preserved only their individual properties, matured, in some, by example, by imitation, and by instruction; and, in others, by fear, and by the necessity of perpetually watching over their won safety. What views, what designs can be possessed by slaves without spirit, or exiles without power? compelled to fly, and to exist in solitary manner, they can arrive at no improvement; they can neither acquire nor transmit knowledge; but must continually languish in calamity, and decay; they must perpetuate without multiplying; and, in a word, they must lose by their duration more than they acquire by experience."

Anne Waldman's book of poetry Humanity/Manatee notes something like this, too -- "what animals must be sacrificed to the colonization of time?"  For it is the future that hurts animals, futurity too: that they are crowded out by us, their habitats (their cultures) destroyed.  There is along with language and death --  "progress," that other human violence.

***

Anne Waldman's book has so much in it that I'm afraid no one will read it, heavy as it is with all of our ultra-contemporary sorrow:

a life in struggle

of everyone broken in heartbreak
& the animals
experience that too

heartbreak

so restrained
in admitting it

unlike humans crying all over town

I am afraid of writing about it, too.  Sometimes I imagine that what I am doing when I write about what I read is akin to taking a dropper full of marrow.  Here it is rather more like taking a dropper full of sea from a planet of mostly seas, and how it might be, if I am not careful, that you would think this book some sort of trendy vapid ecopoetics like green marketing or some sort of buddhist liturgical to which all who are not flying tibetan flags would be a allergic and while it is an ecopoetics and it is a liturgical it is also

a new style of poetry filled with yearning for the animal
but empty of animals remember only
in our naming of things after them
cars & trucks & teams & products that sap
their mana

***

"a bowl to catch my android tears."

13. "tiny distinctions appear among luminosities" or "perform parthopoeia on what used to be your gallows"

Lynn Behrendt's chapbook Luminous Flux was published in an edition of twenty.  I was sent  number seventeen.  It has both regular sorts of pages and short little pages, bookmark-sized between the regular page, and these bookmark-sized pages say things like "here comes a pop-up / yellow silt " or "I flow in two directions / radiation up."  On the regular sorts of pages is a long poem written in first person luminous:

Maybe what I see as inequality is just
some blindness to interval
point of radiation dip
magnetic reasoning.

 or "as if I am a lumbering / embezzling want  lousy with verbs."

Ann Lauterbach's Or to begin again was published by Penguin this year and nominated for a National Book Award.  Ann Lauterbach is very award winning.  From her poem, Alice in the Wasteland:

Alice was caught in the radiance of the not yet knowable.
This, she thinks, drifting, must be
the feeling of being young.
She could not say
in the radiance of the not yet knowable
which seemed, now a reason for youthful sorrow.  

Behrendt again: "I'm not minor I'm not minor I'm not nothing / coarse satire & omnivorous camera"

or Lauterbach:  "Way over in the particularities of the evening / gold touches the back of her neck"

or Behrendt:

I am ordinary & exhausted.
Do I need to put on a coat
carry a rubber knife?
I'm half in & half out
and sort of hoisted
pinned maybe
unlucky not sure really

12. "myself!/ through the whole long universe"

It was a little great to get a surprise photocopy of Alice Notley's 1973 chapbook Phoebe Light in the mail only a few days after I had listened to her read some poems from it on Penn Sound.  1973 was the year I was born, and I remember nothing of it but family pictures,

but there is an Alex Katz cover, peeking out of an envelope, its hand-written title as charmingly faux-naif as the poems inside. A friend said, "Do you think that is Alex Katz's handwriting? " and yes I think so, it is thin like his paintings and the letters sit at angles similar to his lines. At least I want to think so, holding in my imagination, as I do, that encouraging myth that is the 70s,  poets un-institutional and intermixed with artists, all those brave broke bohemians "with their guts and balls." You see I was only an infant and therefore authentically a naif that year, as I guess I remain,

but there is Alice Notley in 1973 the grown woman, unafraid, as she would remain, of sentiment or experiment: "antediluvian bang in arched fur willful & exploded pussy" and (in its entirety)

THE COMFORT

I needed a long bus ride up-
town like a new hole oh well
my only comfort the possibility
you're unhappy, insane, etc.

This is early work but nonetheless the work is defiant: "My second year I read THE CANTOS (1-95) of Ezra Pound.  They were just like everything else."

Like an oracle, always, is APRIL: "broke the bed fucking."  And in its entirety:

PHOEBE LIGHT

The great cosmetic
Strangeness of a normal deep person. 

11. "the ha ha part of the land"

A recent review in The Believer of David Lau's book of poetry Virgil and The Mountain Cat describes a book that is "unknowable" or equivalent to "Rorschach blots" or poetry without "rational explanation."*

This is nothing like the book I remembered.

The book I remembered reading  was crammed with the familiar stuff of too-late capitalism (Irving Co. strip malls, golf courses, Enron, visas,  pseudoephidrine) and composed with brilliantly schizoid diction.  It was a book full of dense lyrics weaving in and out of easy assertion "History is two blue jars traveling in opposite directions" and claustrophobic formal play "the anfractuous path / leading down here is for dowers"

Indeed, what was notable to me was not the work's mystery, but the ways the book's formal logic repelled mystery.  It was so heavy with all this euphony: 

 "spring, snaky splinter / signal to another season, oppositional"
"the last Levi's plant barred its doors with oars"
"Pullulation. Push-up. Push-up.  / Pestilentia"

that every word seemed obsessively bound to the next by sound. 

Indeed, I had an impulse to pickpocket Lau and deprive him of some alliteration.  Then I wanted him  to take a relaxing vacation before his next book of poetry, and on this vacation I wanted him to take a spool of thread and unwind it into a mess which he would then provide as a nest for a bird, seeing also, through this unspooling, that he could leave a little more space between things and still be of use.

I am unable to provide much for Lau's vacation other than a spool of thread and some crumbs to attract a bird, though, and I recommend this vacation only as an experiment, not as a corrective.

I get the feeling that even without the instructional unspooling vacation, he might shrug off some formal armor.  There is under this armor, also, a strong body of other sorts of material that gives the poems life under all that formal logic.  This body is, I think, animated with a documentary impulse, also with a longing that I think underlies so much of the poetry of our moment -- that longing (in the lyric, made almost erotic) for something like a just world. 

That's why, reader, I reread the book, to check if memory had failed me.  Memory had not failed me,  and Virgil and The Mountain Cat remained the same book--the one so formally sensical it was if it were composed via tetris shapes pimped  with spikes and super glue.



* A person is given a book to read, and this book is written in some language unknown to the person. The person attempts to read the book.   When asked to describe the book, then, she says something like "look at this book, it was made out of a strange language!  I have never encountered this strange language therefore I will remark mostly on how strange the language is.  How unknowable is this crazy nonsense, yet how it has a beauty, as if it almost communicates but what it communicates, no one can know!"   Alas,  that language unknown to the person, is, well, French, and lots of people know French, speak French, and find French makes perfect sense.  Tres fucked.

10. "never get up, and if you do, never say where you are"

Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim, published by Kelsey Street Press in 2007, is like an almost-boring dream, also like following a map for the wrong city, also like a Tarkovsky film.  Or rather,  these things are what the book is "about" (sort of).  It's written in that kind of matter of fact prose that spares you most of the creative-writing details.  It's a set of directions you find on a piece of paper and try to follow:

"You said Liberty was on the corner of Travail and Jonathan, and I can't believe I let you get away with that"

and can almost follow, but then can't.  You are in the wrong place and/or these directions were not written for you. Still you kind of get there. 

There is also this woman on the ground, this woman on the floor, this woman on a bolted chair, this woman confused and "staring into the intersection all wrong."

Here is all this slow longing for something with the almost impossibility of moving toward it, yet all through the book things manage, in that mix of inertia and desire, to move:

"You've got to go somewhere with someone, the equation said."

9. "oh please, your highness, we must do something awful"

The problem with any Russell Edson book, such as the Russell Edson book See Jack just out from University of Pittsburgh Press, is the overwhelming urge to describe it as being very much like a Russell Edson book.  See these Russell Edson poems, how they are exactly like Russell Edson poems?  See the strong influence of Russell Edson upon Russell Edson's poetry?  Isn't Russell Edson always the tenor and never the vehicle?  And what shall we do when he is both?

And because these poems, so much like Russell Edson's poetry, are notably Russel Edson-like, do I point out I find them slightly more brutal than those poems of which have come before?   Everything is "gross," people are "puking," potatoes are farting, and men have gone to whore houses to buy wives.  Even the clouds are copulating.  Both sons and their fathers want to be grandmother's "hand-me-down-turd." Fathers step on and kill their little mouse daughters. It makes sense in this book for men to have sex with the cows they are planning to slaughter.

8. "The American People just want / to tap that feminine side"

Poetry might occupy that dumb gap between life and our language for it, like how much it can suck to be a girl --  a subject position made both of something like reality:

I am a head & a half
taller than our city's police commissioner
A head that hurts & is gorgeous noxious.

and culture's cruel instruction:

You are a bird
inside this cage

Sing

Appropriation is always a slant authorship, aggravating to those who want to believe a poem is something with which we can disagree.  This  technique always has exactly a feminist cunning, and always a feminist heritage (the Baronness, Acker).  We steal shit.  It's not okay.  It is sideways and deflecting and done with our under-hand out.

This is poetry as "opposite day": that maddening formal experiment of third graders, who spend hours caught in their own ambiguities of not-exactly-meaning-this-but-meaning-sort-of-another-thing.  Why do third-graders play "opposite day"?  Exactly because they are of a human class that's been mostly bribed, punished, manipulated, and cajoled into behaving for eight or nine of their human years. When language is used to keep you docile you find some intricate ways to game language, to mess-it-up and make it work for you.  And as every third grader also knows, to mess with words is likely to freak out those with a heavy investment in using those words to set you (to set it, to set the record) straight. 

So Shanna Compton in For Girls & Others, published by her own Bloof Books (which will publish my novel, JOAN, too),  steals shit, specifically from an old-fashioned instruction manual For Girls, also a little from that great heaving machine of cruel instruction, The Internet.  To steal words to screw them up and then to self-publish them is for a girl (subjected to cruel instruction) like doing everything you were instructed against.  This is a book made from elegant defiance.

Compton means almost nothing of what she steals and says, not directly.  She does not want us or our girl-offspring, to remain "soft / pink / forlorn." 

"It's time to put on the big girl pants/ and kick some ass."  

She means mostly what she does.

7. "we might have stayed in this minute"

Mina Loy's Insel says to her narrator: "I . . . see clearly into you. Your brain is all Bronte"--this after Mina Loy's narrator says to Insel: "You're acting Kafka." Life is so fanfiction. Poetry, too.

The everything of Mina Loy becomes also the everything of Susanna Gardner's [lapsed    insel   weary]. Loy's wirepuller from "Love Songs" becomes Gardner's toothpuller.  Loy's Arno becomes Gardner's  "filthy Potomac":

Now only the filthy Potomoc speaks in it
dead-pan sputters in its wry in its hushed-up
way in waves while we have walked in the
nights faint light having since watched

The incoming planes create such strong havoc
abandoned among errant waves over words
we now remain incoherent we now stay

Poetry is so fanfiction.  Life, too.  Imagine the ways we translate: "I have thrown the central/ port of our desire into my most nar-/ row river: so only I will know where/ I have placed it."

6. "the process / of blanking becomes / isometric"

Rebecca Wolff's The King from Norton reminds me that a problem of motherhood is a problem of form, that is, it's a problem of content.  We are ourselves, aren't we, so who among us wants to be emptied of our specifics?

We become, as The Mother, a variable.  An X to The Baby's Y.  A verb to The Baby's noun.  An abstract or category or cog in the formal situation, stuck in the syntax of relationship or in relationship's equation.

To be The Baby means to not fare much better --The Baby is never really a person itself, but rather the object of The Mother.  The Baby is a thing to be cared for always, lacking many actions and also appearing to lack some agency  except as it is expressed through need. 

Note how in The erotics of the baby: "the feeling is mutual / (from) one container / to another".

What is The King?  Well content, of course,

but not exactly:  here also, one can be of one category (The Mother)  or the other (The Baby) but we know something like a woman is more than only The Mother (we know this because wants to let her "freak flag fly," because she keeps a hand to herself while the other cares for The Baby.)

The Baby is more than its lack of specifics, too: we have all been the infant version of our person, and our infant version is temporary, helpless, speechless, and in our own memory, inert: a picture from a scrapbook, maybe, and a stage we've moved through.  We can suppose The Baby would prefer to be himself, as well,

for to be a form is to be idealized, and also to be disappointing, like in The baby idealized his mother

when she was away. 
When she returned he found it
difficult to integrate
his vision
with the reality

We can't really know much of anything about The Baby, can we? He doesn't talk.  Most of what's about The Baby is a container filled with culture and projection. We imagine he idealizes us as we are so often also idealizing him, but The Baby is equally hard to keep a hold of:

"Today I dragged him screaming down the road, by the wrist / He wanted to go the other way."

This is the story of a very general kind of tragedy or romance, this tragedy or romance of categories: "I've had / my children and cannot / take that back. Buddhists call / it suffering."

5. "I have made a megaphone / MUTATO / NOMINE"

Do you remember in Alice Notley's essay The "Feminine" Epic when she asks "And what if I therefore owe an epic?"

and also when she writes:

"[We] were being used, mangled by the forces which produce epic, and we had no say in the matter, never had, and worse had no story ourselves.  We hadn't acted.  We hadn't gone to war.  We certainly hadn't been "at court" (in the regal sense), weren't involved in governmental power structures, didn't have voices which participated in public political discussions.  We got to suffer, but without a trajectory  We didn't even get to behave badly, or hurt anyone as a consequence."

and when she writes:

"I wanted . . . to avenge my sex for having 'greatness' stolen from it."

and/or

With the name changed the story is told of you.

*

"IF YOU FIND A MAN WHO IS WITHOUT A FAMILY
A MAN WHO THE CITIZENS DO NOT KNOW
OBLITERATE HIS NAME."

*

Stacy Szymaszek's Hyperglossia from Litmus Press would be a feminine epic except that it is not feminine.  

That is, it is a book that avenges not our sex (woman's sex) but the condition of being sexed itself.

It is an epic not like descent, but  ascent. It is not of one soul moved to observe the world of many, but of a many-souled person who must make sense of the world which insists upon the oneness of each. 

The book begins when "She" wakes up with a "fake door where intercourse can occur" and "her speech-producing anatomy" irrepressible, but language does not work at first:

"ka ker flutt"

"simian figure tissue massager            ggenerosity"

The language moves, at first wrecked but reaching, wavering in and out of the territory of social/linguistic sense.  The "she" begins to become the "he" of the book, Eustace, and "I was once a private person before this / verbal hippopotamus / but it's hard to shutt up"

The boy Eustace "he wears his hair short" "his crop would grow" "his beard comes thick like the tongue of a water / bird"

but "released from a system of adhesives / a man can / be municipal."

But this is a narrative of a woman who is a boy who is a woman, always kept on the border between public and private, overlapped with identities, taxed and untaxed.,

There is this feeling of mistake here: "Eustace is dittographic a copyist error"

also of repression, that "mangling force" which will make our new epics:

"the forgetting preference of a civilization"

4. "The guarantee of something bottomless / waiting for me"

It is difficult to write about the new book of poetry by Gina Myers,  A Model Year,  without quoting in its entirety the numberonehitpoem Brazen Youth.  This is why Gina Myers will have to forgive me:

Brazen Youth

Four years advantage in the race
across the street.  Half the pressure,
twice the speed.  The hard-learned
lesson not every pigeon can
be trusted.  Kicking through leaves
November crisp & sneaky sneaks
passing notes.  Who wants to pay
for a soda anyway?  Misused coffee
cups & imagined lives of coworkers
a thousand times better than this
ten to six day in day out.
The imagined lives of forties on rooftops
& fingernails flecked with silver
spray paint.  As if a photograph could catch
it all or catch anything at all.
Carrying the weight of our costumes
through this downward spiral circle pit.
The frenzied youth smashing
up against one another.  Now: counter-
clockwise.  Goodbye lovers &  haters.
Goodbye New York.

Is your heart now broken?  Mine is, but I'm a sucker for "the imagined lives of forties on rooftops," or every life of 99 cent coffees, lost tickets, lost calls, bounced checks.  "It's wrong to fill this longing with a haircut / and new shoes." This is the poetry of a generation for whom everything had been emptied, feeling left only in that moment the body meets the bed. Or as in the poem Saginaw: "The future I was promised / enclosed here in this / brown paper bag."

3. “I’m a lily-white fuck toy of the patriarchy”

K. Lorraine Graham’s Terminal Humming from Edge Books  has some sentences and some not sentences, has poems but maybe more some poetry.   At first I thought that it was rigorously poly-vocal, and then I thought something like “It cannot be poly-vocal if it lacks vocality.”  So it is poly-what?  Poly-focal?  Is that a type of glasses?  Or  maybe “poly dripping off language from everything else.”

It is helpful the first section is called:

 “IF THIS ISN’T AN INTERVIEW I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.”

Also it is helpful that the book is called Terminal Humming, because overall it has the effect of a noise that isn’t speech, exactly, though coming from near that speech-making place:

“there is this humming in the air now like an open test to evaluate everything welling up in everybody.”

The humming has to do with data and stupidity, that stupidity of the world and the stupidity of work and also the humming of stupid men and their data and very many stupid women and their data, too:

“the revolution / is building and any day now the data/ entry supervisors are gonna get it / and we’re gonna get all the data and then and then  . .”

And then, what?  “We exchanged extensive voice mails.” Who knows, really: bookcases, badinage, bubbly, cheese straws and “rival conflicting rules.” “Poly-noisish” doesn’t seem like it could be a word. The book makes zero promises, except maybe that one about covering self-defense &

Banished from the database, angels
fallen remain beautiful, non-
essential not quite irrelevant.

2. "a speech duct taped over the ear"

In Sandra Simonds' Warsaw Bikini from Bloof Books there are many comments on liquids, the undersea life, the protection of the minority of the opulent in the academies of the future, and “corridors of torn prints that scrap the world to parenthesis.” Take the title: ONCE I WORKED WITH A MAN.

And the first two lines: “who wanted to be Garson. / Garson was the boss. . . “

Or THESE ARE THE DAYS OF MALTHUSIAN FOOTNOTES: “She wades in a pool of serum and amoebas where the oil slick / is a speech act duct taped over the ear.” Or that poem THEIR CATS, which says, “I am the lapse” and “I am the stone testicle” and “I am the (now vegetable oil) Hummer of Arnold Schwarzenegger” and after messing around a bit with the metaphor -- “No I’m not” and “I’m poor / so poor / that I vomit pennies / dimes trash / the sunset / so count them / if you want / to be loved tonight. / In this economy / I’m nothing / my friends are nothing / the poems they write / are good for nothing / and there is nothing / they can do about it. “

Sandra is a fellow-traveler to some celestial organization, a down low ideologue for the heavens, as if an aesthete were mistaken for an astronaut and given, as a costume, scuba equipment, and given, as reading material, Das Kapital.