Quick Takes: Void and Compensation

Michael Morse. Void and Compensation. Canarium Books. 2015

In the Subjunctive Mood

Void and Compensation is a book filled with absences. That is, “filled” in the sense of the Beatles’ “How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?” Some of the holes include but are not limited to mothers, fathers, lovers, friends, and children. There is one mother in one of the poems who’s actually physically present, but the only thing she says is, “Pretend I’m not here.”

This is a warm book, though, not despite the absences but because of them. The “void” here—in Michael Morse’s title and throughout his poems—is Tsimtsum. As he describes it, “The concept of Tsimtsum…considers how God, who is everywhere, needed to withdraw in order to make the space in which the world could then be made.” Or as it’s described elsewhere, “Tsimtsum is a way of being present in your absence.” 

You don’t have to know anything about grammar to see the subjunctive everywhere in this book—not only in the syntax but even the word itself is everywhere. This makes sense. The subjunctive is, after all, the term for how we talk about something that’s not there in terms of what might be. Webster’s 1913 edition has it this way:

Subjunctive \Sub*junc"tive\, a. [L. subjunctivus, fr. subjungere, subjunctum, to subjoin: cf. F. subjonctif.

See {Subjoin}.] Subjoined or added to something before said or written. 

{Subjunctive mood} (Gram.), that form of a verb which express the action or state not as a fact, but only as a conception of the mind still contingent and dependent. It is commonly subjoined, or added as subordinate, to some other verb, and in English is often connected with it by if, that, though, lest, unless, except, until, etc. 

It’s the form used in wishes, commands, and exhortations—words that try to call into being. “Let there be light,” is how one version of the world begins. “Where there is nothing, let there be this.” Or, as Michael Morse has it, “where there is void, let there be compensation.” This is not the poet as Adam, namer of that which is there, but instead it is the poet as one apart, who longs for that which is not. “I can’t name it,” Morse writes. “As in it’s raining.” There’s a continuous discontinuity in these poems. Where there is a subject there is no action. Where there is action, there is no subject. 

Most of the book’s poems are set in a kind of eternal spring, which after our bitterly ice-ridden February might sound pretty good. But consider a spring that doesn’t know summer, a subjunctive season when things are always about to happen but don’t quite ever occur. It’s a reminder that spring hurts a little: “Brave subjunctive bird. What on earth will do?” For Keats, the bird is the figure of a saving knowledge, of being present, a momentary grace. But for Morse, the bird is just as caught as any speaker in the subjunctive. Morse gets the most out of every phrase, so when he says, “What on earth will do?,” it’s “will do” not only as in Will anything suffice?, but also as in the infinitive “to do”: Will anything be present enough to act? Wallace Stevens is a profound influence throughout—in the poems' structures of thought, their active modes of solitude, and in their ways of words. But this is not the realm of Stevens’ “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” “in which being there together is enough.” There is no being together, only the wanting to.

While Morse, like Stevens, makes poems of the mind, it’s a mind that wants action. This makes for a moving tension between the ephemeral mind and the physical presence it craves—played out hilariously in several of Morse’s poems through the language of sports, the most now-focused language in our repertoire. There’s a lot of glorious horseshit energetically spewed on ESPN and WFAN to the effect that the only thing that matters in a game is what happens on the field and in the moment. But the sports heroes we meet in Void and Compensation don’t follow that narrative. Perhaps most prominent among them is Stephon Marbury, the star who promised to transform the Nets and Knicks into winners, but never did quite come through despite all his talent and talk (and in the process broke my heart). “I need a Mr. Make-It-Happen,” says the speaker in “Stephon Marbury” (which is exactly what I said as a woe-betide New Jersey Nets fan), but Marbury never could quite turn any team around. Later, Morse name-checks Ruffian, the 3-year old filly who promised to outrun all the colts of her day, but broke her leg on the way to history and never made the finish line. Not even sports can provide a hero who makes things happen. 

There’s a discordance throughout the book between mind and place, perhaps made most explicit in the title of a poem set at a race track: “Reading Beckett in Saratoga.” No simple past nor simple present. This is the land of the subjunctive. In poem after poem, Void and Compensation expertly puts to work this metaphysics of grammar, the tense through which a subject lives and acts in a place that doesn’t exist.

The drama between thought and action is played out throughout the book, but perhaps most centrally in “Poem as Aporia Between Lighthouses”—a lovely, long meditation filled with intent and wit and errancy on this stateless state of being. The title immediately puts us in a realm as rhetorical as it is physical. Here’s the 1913 Webster’s on “aporia”:   

Aporia \A*po"ri*a\, n.; pl. {Aporias}. [L., doubt, Gr. ?, fr. ? without passage, at a loss; 'a priv. + ? passage.]

(Rhet.) A figure in which the speaker professes to be at a loss what course to pursue, where to begin to end, what to say, etc.

So from the very title we are in a directionless and positionless rhetorical space. Not even lighthouses—those real, practical structures built to provide direction and location—can point the way. Dante begins the Commedia, “In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself lost in a dark wood.” Morse begins there too, in the middle of the dark “would” (sorry, couldn’t resist; is it an admissible defense to say that Morse's wry way with puns drove me to it?). But there’s no Virgil to point the way. Here in the middle of the poem that’s in the middle of the book comes the central statement:

If I’ve only found faith in loss  

and measured commitments in distance, 

I still have thoughts of reconciliation:  

that I might speak as the houses would, 

that I might stutter love and make it fluent.

Grammatically, the lines are structured as an “if-then” statement—among the most grounded and logical structures in rhetoric. But the “then” in this case leaves us nowhere solid, only in “thoughts of reconciliation.” So how to speak of love, that ephemeral verb with physical consequences, the connector, the bridge? It’s a question with a quest in it, one that reveals the longing inherent in love. How do you move from a solitary self all the way to the real shore of your beloved? Not so easy a move as an if-then statement:

I’m sorry that I keep you at bay.

For the monotony of what if? beamed out  

as a broadside for living. You and me,

even if you or I are impossible . . . 

In these lines the metaphysics of grammar reveals—and even enacts—the problem of connection between two speaking beings. The relationship of “you and me” is possible only when the subject (the “I”) is pushed into the mode of an object (the “me”). In a gesture echoed throughout the book, the poem ends, where it began, in the space between a question and a longing:

Are you lonely there? Yes, I want you here.

Out of the most radically contingent and provisional language, Morse has made a book filled with a sustained and deeply grounded connection delivered with a light touch. It’s an apparent contradiction, but one that makes these poems, filled with so much loss and longing, a rich pleasure to read.

Quick Takes: Wunderkammer

Cynthia Cruz. Wunderkammer. Four Way Books. 2014

Is there a poet writing today with a better ear for a short, sharp, snare of description than Cynthia Cruz? You can recognize a phrase of hers a mile off: her “kremlin of clutter” and “lavatorial” death. This is what we mean when we talk about the importance of style and “voice”: a knack for turning a phrase so unique it shocks with a kind of intimacy into something you as a reader suddenly grasp and seem always to have shared. Everybody wants it, few have it — and among those who do, I’d include two poets we don’t hear enough from anymore, Chelsea Minnis and Jeff Clark. 

The poet most often linked with Cynthia Cruz, of course, is Sylvia Plath. Such a comparison is inevitable, nearly irresistible, and does both credit, but Cruz’s latest, Wunderkammer, does more than echo Plath and Plath’s lineage of Stevens, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. Yes, Cruz sets Germanic words in her English lines so they glitter—or, more accurately, detonate—like jewels just as Plath did. But Cruz’s Germany is not the savage fatherland of “Daddy,” it’s a haunted 1970’s Berlin where the self is born without memory (or rather a “don’t go there” ghost of memory), dressed like David Bowie in Low- and Heroes-era drag. It’s a drag that Ophelia shares with Marilyn Monroe, and also somehow with “Beautiful white Warhol wigs”—more androgynous than voluptuous, sexualized to death. Mortality is as much companion to glamour in these poems as it is in George Grosz’s art and Baudelaire’s poems. 

In fact, these poems have more kinship with Baudelaire’s work than Plath’s, as in “Wonder Room” with its “Decadence, and its magnificent diamond / Of glut, / Glittering its warm doom and contagion.”  Where Baudelaire had opium, these poems have Benzedrine and lithium. Where Baudelaire was drawn to the “luxe, calme et volupté,” Wunderkammer’s poems are awash in ostentatious brand names, from Chanel couture to Swarovski jewels, Balenciaga shoes to Bösendorfer pianos. Yet, the speaker in these poems doesn’t celebrate and push these objects so much as seem subject to them: “An IV drip of consumption, whether or not // I want it.” Cruz reveals consumption to be both the glittering activity of a hyper-capitalist society and a sickness as pervasive, debilitating and contagious as the 19th century’s version of “consumption,” tuberculosis. The poems brilliantly hold these two seemingly unrelated modes of a single word in a single gesture, “Always…wasting in its / Accumulating.” 

In a 2010 talk called “Trendsetting: Poetry’s New Thing,” Rae Armantrout cites George Oppen’s “The Gesture” as a way to discuss the different manners in which a thing can be held: “Grasped” as an idea, a new knowledge, or as a rope in a river attended with seriousness and purpose; or “Proferred” as a salesman holds out “a bauble” to be sold. Being Rae Armantrout, she smartly points out the contradiction in that position. Sure, Oppen positions himself didactically against the salesman, but isn’t he also putting the poem down on a page to share and get “off his hands” in a manner that’s at least similar to a salesman with his merchandise? Throughout this book Cruz holds up objects we recognize from storefronts and movie screens, but holds them in a private, interior way, as intent as you would grasping a rope in a river. 

Grasping, but not quite getting, as in the book’s concluding words, “Some Velvet Morning”: 

“…After the ten year
Junket at the School of Ophelia,
I tried, but finally, could not.
Every time I open my mouth
To speak, just these terrible
Blue diamonds fall out.”

There’s no profit in it, these beautiful baubles, these "horrible," "delicate," "lacquered" words, these goods spilled out of intimate and unknowable space. But they promote the kind of grasping and not quite getting you get addicted to, that you want to return to and want more of. Art in other words.

Quick Takes: TO KEEP TIME

Joseph Massey. To Keep Time. Omnidawn, 2014

To Keep Time is the first book of Joseph Massey’s I’ve read, but I recognize his voice immediately. It’s the sound of November, when walks outside become chill at the edges and solitary, and the loudest voice becomes the one inside your own head. There’s a way words sound when you whisper or cajole yourself in a soft room or a crisp field. You’re hearing tones literally from within your body as well as from without: so each word, phoneme by phoneme, becomes as deeply resonant as it is evanescent. Massey has that sound down. 

You could read this book with enormous pleasure just following the movement of vowel sounds as they make abundant progress in tight spaces. Track the sound of “o” from “An Undisclosed Location in Northern California: “As long as blood runs / the body, / there is no silence.” Three lines, three kinds of “o”s—the “ah” of “long” and “body,” the “uh” of “blood,” and the “oh” of “no.” Or, listen to the fructifying, entwining “i”s in “The Bend”:

Mosquitos

entwine,

synchronized,

above a sidewalk

blistered

with bird shit.

These poems find gorgeous detail and sound everywhere: “Dryer vent steam / veils hydrangeas // in the driveway.” Or here: “skunks / scuffle under // the floorboards / and a car alarm’s // echo comes apart / in a parking lot.” Recognizable, right? And strange. 

Once or twice Massey’s talent for mapping the stuff we live among comes up with a word that sounds wrong to me—“interstices,” for example, or “aperture”—like it's visiting on a grant from the academy. These kinds of words are probably an occupational hazard for a writer who’s subsumed so deeply in the complexities and counter-turns of his own solitary thought. And they are not in the end that distracting: they're among the very few mis-steps in the sinuous, sensate manner these words and sounds make their way through place. Each poem in To Keep Time enacts a tension between idea and action, thought and thing — “Call it / consciousness.” This all-alone business it turns out, is busy, ample work. Silence itself is revealed to be a highly charged and active field, “Silence hums.” So does this book.  

2014 The Writer Magazine / Emily Dickinson Award

I'm very proud to announce that my poem "Death Is Death" has been selected by the brilliant Dan Beachy-Quick for The Poetry Society of America's Writer Magazine / Emily Dickinson Award in 2014.

Here is a link to the poem and citation. 

Problems & Solutions

"Insanity and poetry are old kin" writes Daniel Pritchard in his piece on Everyone Has a Mouth in Critical Flame. Coincidentally I just finished Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay. In the book's introduction, Storr writes:

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent.

It's not clear to me if Ernst Herbeck's condition extended from his verbal flights to an encompassing system. But even if the artful verbal patterning associated with schizonphrenia is simply the verbal "scratching" of a mental "itch", it remains a way to handle and temper what Storr calls "the chaos within."

The next Next Big Thing . . .

Thanks to Rebecca Kinzie Bastian, author of the forthcoming Charms for Finding, for inviting me to participate in The Next Big Thing—a blog chain that has been circulating in which participating writers answer ten questions about their books, then tag another who tags another who tags another . . . Check out Rebecca's Next Big Thing, Miranda Field's Next Big Thing, the Next Big Thing from Dennis Prieto (White Malinche, 2014) and one forthcoming from Graham Foust.

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

Visitor

Where did the idea for the book come from?

Lingering over Anthony McCann’s Moongarden, I came across the reference to a poem by Jaime Saenz called “Homenaje a la epilepsia.” I’d heard of Saenz because of the translations by Forest Gander and Kent Johnson collected in a book called Immanent Visitor, but I hadn’t actually read it. My son has epilepsy so I am always hunting down ways to better understand what it means to understand the condition from inside the experience. Google gave me the poems in Spanish, but for some reason (bad googling) I couldn’t find easy access to a translation into English. I decided to translate them myself with my poor-to-non-existent Spanish and my sense of the lived experience of epilepsy. The resulting poems took on a life of their own and continued to evolve as I worked on them. Eventually I did read the Gander and Johnson translations and discovered that their book includes selections translated from “Homenaje a la epilepsia,” but by then it was too late. My own “translations” had veered off in their own direction and were propagating like mad. 

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Since every voice and figure, every “you” and “I” in this book is both me and not-me, clinician and patient, it’s better to let the reader allow each voice and figure, each “you” and “I” be their own self and not-. In other words, Stellan Skarsgård.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

“There’s a boy who stands where the door should be.” –from “The Door that Leads In and In but Never Out,” a poem in the manuscript

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Agents are not relevant for books of poems. I am definitely a fan of self-publishing for any author who has the spirit and energy to promote their book full time. Dickinson, Whitman and Blake are heralds of the future as much for how they controlled their poems’ entrance into the world as for the poems themselves. For myself, I treasure the collaboration that comes with publishing through an existing publisher and feel that my first two books, Live Feed and The Pitch, were vastly improved by publishing with Alice James Books. So I’m aiming to go the pre-existing publisher route again with a player to be named later.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Six weeks . . . from late July to early September. They came fast.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

As different as my book is from Jaime Saenz’s (and as much as I think my own poems suffer in comparison), any excuse to read his poems is a great one. I was reading a lot of Czeslaw Milosz while I was writing these poems as well. His hand-to-hand moral struggles with the material world and spiritual longing continue to surprise me. He's never top of mind if someone asks me for a favorite poet, but I can’t think of a poet I’ve read so frequently and with such continuing profit over the twenty years I’ve been reading him. While writing these poems, I was also reading a lot of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and from his selected letters, which is an altogether different animal than Milosz. In a way, Anthony McCann is most responsible for the manuscript because he led me to the trigger. But more than that, the perspective of a McCann poem—longing-and-lostness-at-a-slight-remove, passion infused with distance—inspires these poems as well. The poems take a Rimbauldian call to “be drunk with life” and let the experience progress into something akin to an actual drunken state—a little out of control, a wee bit numb, wanting closeness and not sure how to get it, straddling the uncertain horses of body and mind.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

The final section ends up in a humid, fecund garden in my adopted hometown of Coxsackie, New York—a kind of oxygen machine that afforded me the time, space and lung capacity to write these poems. How can you not be interested in a book that lands you in a town named Coxsackie?

What I Say, What I Mean, What You Hear

Guy le Charles Gonzalez, a slam poet who has gone on to establish himself as a really bright voice in the conversation about the future of book publishing, reposted a funny Venn diagram with two, distinct, non-overlapping circles: "What the poet meant" and "What you thought they meant."

Funny because, of course, yes. And yet... At last Thursday's NYU reading series, Matthew Zapruder fielded several questions about the difference between public and private language. The questions arose from this line in his poem "Come On All You Ghosts": "In this poem // every word means exactly / what it means / when we use it in every day life." This gesture, startlingly generous and probably surprising to most readers of contemporary poetry, assures the reader that we have the means to understand one another. It asserts that the writer / reader circles of the Venn diagram can overlap. Even for me (my own readerly predilection being for poems in which each word spirals out in countless directions), it's a line that comes sweetly, openly, irresistibly.

But that does not mean Matthew thinks the circles overlap 100%. In the Q & A, he made explicit the difference between public and private language -- and that each word functions in each realm all the time. "Really," he said, "it's a miracle we can understand each other at all." He mentioned his young nephew coming to learn the word "tree," for whom it means, first, the very specific tree in his backyard -- one you and I will never see. That tree will always live inside the nephew's word. And each of us has our own private tree inside the word. ("Towering tree within the ear," Rilke wrote in his first Sonnet to Orpheus.) The word is both "public," the abstraction you and I understand and communicate with, and "private," the particular no one else can know. So the poem -- "a machine made out of words" as Williams has it -- delivers a structure for readers, each of us, to share. Together, privately. As Matthew's brilliant "Come On All You Ghosts" gives us in its final lines: "I have done my best to leave // behind this machine / anyone with a mind / who cares can enter."

The lucky ones

At this week's literary salon at NYU, Matthew Zapruder filled the house. While I've almost stopped going to readings altogether recently, this one felt like a can't miss. And it was: His new poems are among the most exciting work produced by our generation and he read them with warmth, humor, and wit. Looked at simply in the context of the poets in the audience that night -- Rachel Zucker, Timothy Donnelly, Cate Marvin, Mark Bibbins, Brenda Shaughnessy, Geoffrey Nutter, etc. -- ours suddenly looks like not only a generation of promise, but, suddenly, one that delivers amazing contributions across an impossibly wide spectrum of interest and style. Add in a few of my other favorite poets who weren't there -- Thomas Sayers Ellis, Claudia Rankine, Linh Dinh, Prageeta Sharma -- and this is one crazy good group. But while all of the above are roughly the same age, and all are good friends with each other, "group" isn't really the word, is it? They all share an at-playness with their circumstance. But some use persona, some use "self." Some use a forthrightness of delivery, some tell it slant. Some mix-up diction, some keep it straight up. Some keep the politics personal, some invest it in you, dear reader. Afterward, a friend lifted a glass to the whole evening -- which included all of us reading and writing poems today. "Aren't we the lucky ones," he said. Yes.

Beer and Poincaré

Reading an essay by Henri Poincaré and a book by John Beer, it occurs to me:

a poem is ground for invention.

Each reader, each reading, always the invention occurs in the act of engaging the words.

Poetry Speaks

Is there a role for commerce in poetry? Ezra Pound worked his (crackpot) economic theories into his Cantos. Katy Lederer wrote a book using her hedge fund experience to spin the stuff of the money-drunk 00’s into metaphors for longing, ambition, sex, God and grief. Money is considered anathema to the dream of poetry even if (especially because?) most poets make a middling salary in gigs as college teachers. Poetry magazine’s $100 million windfall from a pharmaceutical industry heiress caused all kinds of anger and belittlements from poets (including me). Complements for the Poetry Foundation’s wide-ranging efforts since then have been grudgingly given, even though the money has not only been used to revivify the magazine, but also to support a relatively wide range of the art through mainstream outlets and through building up its own vibrant online center of blogs, links, videos and essays.

But this week a project launched that throws money and poetry in a way that can’t be dismissed as charity, or scam, or mere academic exercise: PoetrySpeaks. To even type the words “.com” after a poetry site instead of “.org” feels like I’m pimping for one of the sleazy contests that charge a bundle and deliver nothing but profit for the organizer. PoetrySpeaks is made equally out of a love of poetry and a keen business sense, and it displays the potential of both to enhance each other rather than cancel each other out. You can explore and even contribute to its resources for free. Or you can buy books, videos, or individual poems. One of the advisors to this project, Guy Le Charles Gonzalez, comes out of the Nuyorican scene from the 1990s and makes the case that this new .com site offers more dynamic possibilities than the current scene. And he’s right. While my own background is traditional, I can’t ignore the ways in which traditional readings have grown stultifying: long-winded, academic introductions, a prevalent anti-performance style (as if the material itself is so deep it needs to be flattened to be accessed), and audiences that are either half-asleep or all the way there. How have we come to this? Surely this is a total waste of our time. While my own preference is for quieter, page-based work, spoken word events are much, much more entertaining. You are much more likely to have an experience at spoken word than at a traditional reading. There’s something of a vacuum, an anti-experience, about a traditional poetry reading.

Poetry’s as relevant as the people making it. But as makers we owe our audience an experience. Otherwise we’re just keeping a diary. It doesn’t matter who your audience is--your lover, the guys on your soccer team, word-gamers, philosophers, whichever people are in the room with you right now--you owe it to the work to connect with them. One way of doing that is to create new works in new forms than the paper page: video and audio, digital and physical. MFA programs should offer classes in Flash, Illustrator and AfterEffects. These are the newest tools for working “by hand” with your words. But as Kat Meyer mentioned during a chat on Twitter with the founders of PoetrySpeaks.com, digital poetry now simply means anything that can be tagged with metadata and accessed digitally. So the old ways of working by hand can also be considered digital: the hand-stitched letter press book, the hand-built box with free-floating typewritten lines.

Poets need to break with the idea that their words deserve to be archived because simply because they’re labeled “poetry.” The work falls for its audience before the audience falls for it.

anyone who stumbles

Anyone who stumbles by here by accident or otherwise will likely know and read Maud Newton's blog. But today she quotes Thomas Mann in a way that puts me exactly where I am:

“The basic theme on which I’ve tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o’clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.” — Thomas Mann, New York Times, 1955

Top of the Pops

There's a nascent movement to start an independent conference on Contemporary Women's Poetry. This is a brilliant, necessary idea for all sorts of pedagocial, political, and situational reasons--women are currently writing some of the most charged work at the intersection of autobiography, authenticity, imagination and political reality. Another one of the reasons this seems a good idea to me is that all of the poets who shake my brain (the way it likes to be shook) are women (with a few exceptions). My top five in today's rankings: Field, Minnis, Moxley, Robertson, and Wagner.

Immeasurable Present

Where are the poems with people in them?

I mean friends. Where are your friends?

There’s the guy in the bar poems.

The postal worker hello poems.

Dude with Chihuahua poems,

Lady with scotch tape poems,

but the reached out to this one

and that one was there poems?

“Snaking through your trembling hideaway.”

“The bird-fueled shack purring like a rocket.”

“One white plate, three slices of chicken. ”

Present our measureless head—swathed in lichen,

such monsters as men shudder to catch.

Poetry and ambition

Nobody writes about sunburn, whipcracks and negligees quite like Chelsea Minnis. She's not so quietly building up a body of work that does more than any one line, image or poem can accomplish. It's an argument about what poetry can mean at play in a world somehow both plush and spikey with lousy beautiful crystal gods and boffo luxuries. She's a little bit like Jeff Koons, but like a Koons where the pornstar ceramics and silver balloon bunnies have edges that could actually cut you. She read last night with Joshua Beckman and Noelle Kocut (whose "Poem for the End of Time" will knock you flat with awe). They'd just come from a reading at West Point, which blows my mind even to consider. Chelsey read a poem from her new book that's a response (after the fact) to a cadet's question about her goals for her poems:

"This a chain between your thighs...

This is a freedom from achievement...

Writing a poem is like trying to do something, isn't it?

It's like trying to have an ungroveling feeling."

I'm taping those lines to my mind.

Even as our culture starts emerging in fits from the encompassing fever dream of pure capitalism, Chelsea's mode means revolution in perspective: Do nothing. Do nothing deeply. It's the advocacy of Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen." It rhymes with 9th century Zen Master Linji's "Nowhere to go, nothing to do." And, for that matter, with his famous shout, "If you see Buddha on the road, kill him." It corresponds to Baudelaire's whores and punks and clouds of ennui. It kills all the awards, all the teaching jobs, all the publications. As they will, after all, die anyway, it also always emerges triumphant. We cannot abide it. We cannot live without it. Chelsea's genius is to say yes yes yes yes yes and again yes to the botox in botux capitalism--so the botulism works its way into your face, dear reader, until you can feel it. So pretty it hurts. That's the goal, soldier. Your tools are a whip, a silver platter, and some mean lipstick.

Listen

The Academy of American Poets throws a big party every year where famous people put on a show for poetry. There are arguments about why this is mis-guided: Why silence living poets? Why this myopic insistence on American poets only? Why is every chosen poem so tenaciously mainstream? Do famous people need another platform? But to rail heedlessly against the event is to miss what it accomplishes. It puts a different shine on a little corner of the enterprise. It encourages someone who kinda liked poems once upon a time to return to it, even for an hour, to sit and listen to a form they'd long-ago forsaken as it became buried by the exigencies of daily living. But more than that, it allows the audience a different entry point for particular poems. At this same event a few years ago, Mark Morris read several Frank O'Hara poems, all of which I'd read for years and loved deeply. But Morris gave me something new. He lived in the poems--giving them a body they hadn't had before, now a stance, now a gait, fresh attitudes at every turn that I'd not encountered in the poems before, but remain with me. O'Hara's poems had lived in the context of my life before, but now they lived on their own too. And that new relationship, like a marriage between two attached and independent forces, is infinitely richer.

This year's event featured a similarly standout performance. But it wasn't of the reading of any particular poem; it was of the listening. As Jorie Graham began to read poems by James Wright, I was prepared to shut down: I'd adored the poems in my late teens but had since become convinced that Wright's poetics was a dead drag and not of any further interest to me. I figured I'd used the poems up. But as Jorie read "Hook" and then "The Old WPA Swimming Pool," Wynton Marsalis became electrified. Simply sitting on his folding chair behind her on the stage, Marsalis was immediately part of the experience of the poem in that room. His face opened. His shoulders swayed. His eyes widened and narrowed. I began to hear a blues in Wright where in the last decade or so I'd begun to hear mere self-indulgence. Steve Reich, reading just before Jorie, gave us this explicitly when he read out WC Williams: "Well, shall we think or listen?" Williams, Reich, Wright, Marsalis showing thinky me what it means to listen--and revealing, too, that Williams' question isn't really a conflict between mutually exclusive ways of being. That "or" is an accelerant for a chemical reaction between thinking and listening. Can your mind engage its moment in such a way that is pure listening?

Years ago, in a master class at my college, Max Roach stopped our best horn player after a solo. "You're playing a lot of interesting notes," he told the guy, "but you need to listen. Don't cram everything in just because it's your solo. Sometimes the most eloquent solo has no notes in it." Playing is listening. Writing is reading. How many readings I've attended, and given, but how many have I listened to?

[photo of Marsalis playing with Joan Baez (c) Brian Palmer]

Disappearing Poetry

I love this wild. vanishing-poetry user-generated campaign from the Academy of American Poets. I can't wait to see what comes out of it. The multi-media revolution has smiled upon the academy.

Kelp

"How easy it is to lose oneself
in a kelp forest. Between
canopy leaves, sunlight filters thru
the water surface; nutrients
bring life where there'd other-
wise be barren sea; a vast eco-
system breathes. Each
being being
being's link."

"Kelp" from Jeffrey Yang's "An Aquarium." How it tends toward my longing: a poem moving through ideas but built entirely of one word, each repetition creating a different inflection and grammatical role in the word, movement in stasis, a la "being being being's."

Irresistible argument

Can't resist the argument going on at the Poetry Foundation earlier this week. It's some of the most substantive back-and-forth about the importance and impact of -- and problems with -- negative reviewing. No age has been without its negative reviews, though ours feels more worked up about it than most that may be simply because we're so near-sighted. For famous example, the specious assertion that Keats was "killed" by lousy reviews. What's missing in the mix is the feeling that those negative reviews that do slam out the door every once in a while (from Logan or whoever) are doing so because the work means so much, has so much potentially at stake. If anyone has done that kind of review lately, it may be Michael Theune. So here's to more of that. Are you ready to take a poem to task from the long view, with an eye to building it up rather than lamenting its petty failures?

The point

"The point of a poem is not its meaning... a poem must have a peculiarity, as if it was the momentarily complete idiom of that which prompts it..." --Wallace Stevens, May 16, 1945

Beautiful Island

Fat weather tricks a man into getting out of bed when he’s thick around the middle brain, suggests a beautiful island where exists only exhaustion as streaked and wooly as his beard. Scan of the horizon suggests nothing more than rivers, mountains, clouds. Strike that: The chimney of an abandoned ice factory rises from trees in the middle distance issuing ghosts he takes for smoke. It doesn’t matter how far you go when you’re Irish there’s always another passport waiting across the sea, not to mention the ring and a lovely to wear it. Up you get then, man. Put the feed in your bag and spread light to all the chickens crowding round the slaughterhouse. “My kingdom is God’s kingdom, so why does it smell like garbage so?” Let’s be particular: Garlic and coffee grounds, cat litter, black avocado. My kingdom is a wet seed, you said. Wet seeds stink.