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| Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 4:32 pm |
Inside Outside
Plainwater / Anne Carson / Response Paper / Jeff T. Johnson “I know how to fool your mind so that your eye accepts what it did not see” (p. 234). So warns (or boasts) the writer (or videographer) of a travelogue documenting (the end of) a love affair on a cross-country drive. It’s one of many moments that illustrate Anne Carson’s preoccupation with perspective. She approaches her subject from many ways. Where was I? Carson, like the lovers she trails in Part V, insists on both the emic and itic point of view in her writing. Just as lovers tend to anthropologize themselves, both from within the relationship (emic perspective) and from an imaginary objective standpoint (an approximation of the etic, or outsider, point of view), Carson, in her fabulations, insists on being here and there, just as she creates the text and its commentary. She insists on being both, all. In Part I, Carson (re)creates the poetry fragments of Mimnermos, who “originated in the city of Kolophon in Asia Minor, or else in the city of Smyrna somewhat northwest of Kolophon, or else...” etc. (p. 14). I am quoting now from the essay on Mimnermos that follows the fragments. And follow them it does, providing a reader’s guide to their (possible) references, origins and destinations. We have also been provided short paraphrases (“He is troubled by words” heads fragment 15, p. 10) and study questions (“Why does motion sadden him?” looms over fragment 23, p. 11). Carson’s subject is Mimnermos, and her Subject is perspectives on Mimnermos (or, as she has it, “Mimnermos and the Motions of Hedonism,” or also “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings”). Anyway, she (as the creator of the text) is both here and there, both Mimnermos and critic of Mimnermos, and in a few pages, she will be both M: and I: in “The Mimnermos Interviews,” which take place both here/now and there/then: I: Moss is the name of my analyst M: In New York I: Yes M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more (p. 19) Well then. Very well. Carson is all about it. Perspective. Let’s move on to “The Life of Towns” (Part IV). “A scholar is someone who takes a position” (p. 93). This takes the reader back to Part II, page 34, a place called “On the Rules of Perspective,” where we learn that “Braque rejected perspective.” Boo, Braque! Well, actually, he seems to have rejected static perspective (if we spend our lives drawing profiles, we’ll think man has one eye, natch). “Braque wanted to take full possession of objects.” Carson knows how he feels. So do we; we’re all about it. On our way back to Part IV, we stop by page 77 (Part III) to walk the lines “In perspective / he applied / the novel rule / of two centers of vision.” We like that very much, because we can see with our own two eyes that we see with our own two eyes. Returning to page 93, we repeat, “I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there.” This orients us to understand: “Matter which has painted itself within lines constitutes a town.” We are in towns because we are in the book, we are in the book’s lines, the book’s lines—especially from page 95 to 111—are towns. On those pages we come upon towns laid down in lines. They are the names of places we would like to visit, or places with names we’d like to visit, to paraphrase John Ashbery. We would especially like to visit “Town of the Dragon Vein” (p. 98; because it’s named after a dragon and a vein, we hope), “Town of Spring Once Again” (p. 96; for it’s getting colder), “Wolf Town” (p. 99; cuz fuck it!), and maybe we’d like a night of guilty pleasure in “Memory Town” (p. 101), but we’re gonna try to avoid “Death Town” (located on the same page as Memory Town; we can see it like Sarah Palin sees Russia, holla!). Against better advice (“You are mad to mourn alone”), we’d like to visit “Hölderlin Town,” where “props hurtle past you,” which is us, or me, I’m you, I’m alone, though there are footprints all over the place, leading to the tower, leading to the river, but not leading from the river. At some point Carson (and/or her speaker) says the rule of travel is to come back a different way than you came. She also says “Clothe yourself, the water is deep” (p. 118). Though the water in Hölderlin Town is not so deep, it’s deep enough to drown you, Scardanelli, and I, your joiner. | | Friday, October 16th, 2009 | | 10:22 am |
Row Row Row Your Boat
Selected Poems of Anne Sexton / Response Paper / Jeff T. Johnson Anne Sexton is a sentimental blender. Wait—that’s not right at all. What interests me most about this collection is witnessing Sexton’s wrestling match with poetic form, particularly the way she uses (and then stops using) rhyme. By the time she gets to The Awful Rowing Toward God, she seems to have left rhyme schemes behind. However, she brings along her bold tendency to end multiple lines in a poem with the same word. Consider “Rowing,” in which four lines terminate with “grew” and three with “rowing”; and “The Rowing Endeth,” in which three lines end with “laughs” and one with “laugh” in a span of eight-lines in which appear two iterations of “laughter” one “laughing,” one “laugh,” and one “laughs.” This tic has its origin in earlier poems like To Bedlam and Partway Back’s “The Lost Ingredient,” in which “lost” appears at the end of five lines, while its homonym “last” ends two lines and the latter’s anagram “salt” appears twice. All of this play suggests a restlessness with form, but a facility within its confines. Sexton sets an elaborate rhyme scheme in the first part of “The Double Image,” which also appears in her first book. All four stanzas in part one have a methodical but creatively engineered ABBCABCDEED rhyme scheme. In their introduction to the volume, Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George note that Sexton tends in her early work to “[set] up a grid of rhymes through which to sift her associations” (p. xiv), and this habit is certainly evident in “The Double Image.” Also remarkable is the way Sexton adjusts her line breaks to make the rhymes work. Her dedication to her schemes and her gift for mixing plain speech with heightened registers pushes her to interrupt what might otherwise be conventional line phrasing while also masking her devices. One is aware of the play of sounds, but mapping out the rhyme scheme reveals an almost horrifying intricacy. The eccentricities of end rhyme in part two of “The Double Image” bear this out. The first stanza goes AABBCBC, and displays some fascinating linebreaks. Line two begins in a thrillingly awkward and ambiguous manner (“of you and I made moccasins”). Line three is deftly cut to sculpt line four (“myself, I lived with my mother. Too late,”), which isolates and bifurcates the speaker (“myself, I”), then comments back, at the end of the line, on her status. Line five copies the end of line four and elaborates on the theme, via more copying and pronoun shifting, as the self-reflective I becomes the condemnatory you, the source of which is “witches” which might originate in the speaker’s head (just as the poem comes from the poet’s head). In short, AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Lines six and seven, which end-rhyme with lines four and five, introduce part two’s slippery refrain. Each of the four stanzas ends with a variation on this two-line refrain, composed of two sentences, the first a negation or limit, and the second an objectification at a greater remove. The two sentences work in tandem, whether or not they agree with each other in terms of subject and object. In stanza one, “I” is the subject of sentence one and the object of sentence two (which estranges the object from herself; rather than leaving her mother’s house, as she knows she should, she has her portrait done, which puts a representation of herself more permanently in the house, though it does more to alienate her from herself than to root her in her mother’s home). Stanza two further explicates the situation and the dilemma—the speaker is “[p]art way back from Bedlam,” returning to her mother’s house from a mental hospital after a suicide attempt for which her mother cannot forgive her. Accordingly, in its last two lines, “she” replaces the “I” of the first stanza in the first sentence (and “she” refers ostensibly to the mother, but carries the echo of “I”), and “she” remains the subject in the second sentence, maintaining agency lost by the “I” in stanza one. The object remains the estranged self captured in the portrait. The third stanza hammers home the trap of similarity between mother and daughter, courtesy of the artist who captures the daughter in the painting (making her smile like her mother’s), in collusion with the patronizing mother, who takes control of her daughter’s hairstyle. The stanza ends in resignation, with a deceptive “I” as subject in the last two lines. “I didn’t seem to care” embodies the objectification of the speaker while also disembodying her to the extent that she can only speculate on her attitude at a remove. Instead of caring, she apparently had her portrait done. Well then. The final stanza of part two relates a memory that presages institutionalization, as the speaker recalls being locked in a cupboard at a church “where [she] grew up.” Here the father appears, complicitly passing the plate. It is unclear if he passes a donation plate (and if so, it is unclear if he makes a deposit), or if he passes a dinner plate (if so, is it an empty plate, and is he being served, or has he already eaten, and does he want seconds, and is he being served from the cupboards full of children?). In this stanza’s fifth line, the witches suggest, borrowing language from their appearance in the fifth line of part two’s first stanza, that it’s too late to be forgiven, which suggests that the father was passing a communion plate, and whether or not he ate whatever body was on the plate is irrelevant. Too late! Subject slippage in the concluding lines replaces the speaker’s “I” with the father (just as she swaps places earlier with the mother), recontextualizing the theme of forgiveness withheld (and the sharing of that withholding) in part two’s second stanza. Instead of forgiveness, “they” (which could emcompass the mother, the father, the witches, and hell, everyone else, including the unnamed wardens at the church) offer passive-aggressive portraiture. Let’s take a moment to consider the rhyme scheme of part two. After the first stanza, which is fairly straightforward, Sexton abandons her new scheme with ABCDEFE. Considering the revelation in this stanza (the speaker has been sent away, and has only come partway back), the destabilizing lack of scheme is suitably troubling. The third stanza begins to rebuild the scheme (ABABCDC), and the fourth restores the first stanza’s scheme (AABBCBC). All better then! Well well. Before I lost my mind, I want to return to The Awful Rowing Toward God, the galleys of which Sexton reportedly corrected the day she had her last smoke. I find this to be her most powerful work, in large part because it is comprised of relatively plainspoken, sparse lyric. According to Middlebrook and George, at the end of her life, Sexton was afraid she was “losing her creativity” (xii), which they claim as the reason for her suicide. Anyway, that’s the way they make it sound in the sentence I just referenced. Setting aside the fatuousness of presuming a particular motive for suicide, particularly such a mythologizing motive, I have to take issue with the suggestion that Sexton was (or was fearful of) losing her gift. At the end of the introduction, Middlebrook and George mention “the fairly lax standards [of completion] Sexton allowed herself in The Awful Rowing Toward God” (xxiii). Ew. Thankfully, I didn’t begin reading the introduction until I’d made headway into the collection, and then read it sporadically when I needed a break from the poems. And fortunately, I didn’t finish the introduction until I finished reading selections from The Awful Rowing Toward God, because the editors’ bias might have adversely affected my pleasure. I think Sexton was onto something (maybe even onto some future shit) with her last book. The fact that she might have spent time on her last day going over the proofs is a sign of her dedication to craft, rather than an indication that the book was less than finished. I suspect (and here’s more mythologization) that if she felt the book was in any way not up to her standards, she would have stuck around to finish it to her satisfaction. I believe her statement that poetry kept her alive, and The Awful Rowing Toward God suggests that if she was afraid of anything with regard to her poetry, she was afraid of what she could never say, or what she might falsely say. She identified with her Jesus, the Actor when she wrote, at the conclusion of “Jesus, the Actor, Plays the Holy Ghost” I have been born many times, a false Messiah, but let me be born again into something true. After all, she had committed suicide before, and risen after great rest. That is, she was drawn in life and in her poetry toward the thing she feared most, the thing she could not explain: death. | | Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 | | 1:52 pm |
—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
77 Dream Songs / John Berryman / Response Paper / Jeff T. Johnson Henry is accused of being me and I am accused of being Henry and I deny it and nobody believes me. —John Berryman, Paris Review, Issue 53, Winter 1972 Henry both is and is not me, obviously. —John Berryman, Paris Review, Issue 53, Winter 1972 Who’s the speaker? Readers of poetry, and particularly college workshoppers of poetry, are well-acquainted with this question. In the case of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, the question cannot entirely be resolved, nor can it be dismissed as irrelevant. It seems, in fact, vital to the poem that the question lingers. In his introductory note to the complete The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman drops some thematic hints and throws the reader a Mr Bones, the nickname a nameless friend uses for Henry. I’ve read 77 Dream Songs before, along with the introduction to the complete volume, and still I remembered Mr Bones as a shadowy companion and foil to Henry. Considering the dislocations of personality suffered by Henry throughout The Dream Songs, perhaps this reading is not entirely inaccurate. After all, it’s easy as a reader to sympathize with the Henry of Song 2, lines 4 and 5: “Henry are / baffled.” However, Berryman’s disclosure about his characters clarifies a stylistic strategy he employs in the first entrance of Henry’s ostensible pseudonym. Line 7 and 8 of Song 2 read “—Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin / yo legal & yo good. Is you feel well?” One is accustomed to the m-dash serving as an indication of dialogue. One is also familiar with the dramatic convention of identifying a speaker by name, followed by a colon, then the speech. In this case, the reader is confounded by what appears to be a double-indication of speech (the m-dash and colon). It’s tempting to overlook this detail and read the line as though one is reading a play, which is to say that Sir Bones is speaking. Or is it Galahad? Perhaps the imprecision is another clue for how to read the line, i.e., You can’t be sure you know the speaker. Perhaps, also, imprecision is not the right word for the methodical character play going on before the reader’s eyes. The proceedings are further complicated by the exaggerated black vernacular that makes up the speech on these two lines. The reader has been warned in the introduction that Henry will appear in blackface, and that he will refer to himself in the first, second and third person. So what to make of the speech on lines 7 and 8? One has been prompted to take it as the words of Henry’s nameless friend, so that the speech includes the address to Sir Bones, or Galahad. And here’s this friend of Henry’s, speaking as though he or she is in blackface. Wasn’t it Henry who was supposed to wear the cork? Clearly, Berryman is not interested in absolutely distinguishing the players, among whom he counts himself. This is a work presented under the rubric of Dream, and the logic or illogic of dreams is of course in effect. It is no surprise, then, that before Mr Bones appears as billed, he first reappears, in Song 4, as Sir Bones. Actually, it’s more like this: “—Sir Bones: is stuffed, / de world, wif feeding girls” (lines 11, 12). Via the structural play introduced in Song 2, a rich ambiguity is presented, in which Sir Bones is described as being stuffed (like a doll, like a taxidermied cat), while simultaneously being the agent of action, stuffing the world with (stuffed?) girls. Whew boy! Also, if Berryman’s introduction is reliable, the reader should think of this line (including “Sir Bones”) as the words of Henry’s nameless friend. OK, but when Mr Bones finally shows up, in the last line of the song, he’s wearing a period Berryman hasn’t warned us about: “—Mr. Bones: there is.” In addition to being typographically disorienting, the arrival of grammatical correctness suggests an aspect of language that is not apparent in spoken language (which the line is supposed to be). Not only does one say “Mister” when one reads “Mr.,” but there is no aural distinction between “Mr” and “Mr.” though the two are distinctive on the page, the former suggesting an informality at odds with the formulation (one doesn’t use “Mister” in casual conversation, except in an exaggerated, jocular way). No wonder “Henry sats in de bar & was odd, /.../ at odds wif de world” (Song 5, lines 1 and 3). Or, as the guy at the end of the bar puts it, “You have to excuse me, but I’m seven people away from myself at the moment.” Incidentally, The Dream Songs make excellent mid-afternoon happy-hours company at the back of a shady bar in Autumn. One doesn’t mind the low bar light, which seems sufficient for such ambiguities of speaker and song. One doesn’t even mind losing the light of late summer, which is the best light of the year. Furthermore, a few draughts relax one into the peculiar discourse of The Dream Songs. Lines like “You licking your own old hurt, / what?” (Song 20, lines 11, 12) slur into a lick of the old heart, or a lick in the old heart, or liquor for the old hurt, what?, which all seem fine. When in Song 21, “a heart” appears in the third to last line, one is pleased to have seen it coming. End scene. There is considerable invention in Berryman’s use of m-dashes. In addition to their employment, coupled with colons, in amorphous dialogue, he sculpts them into his lines in surprising ways. Song 3 concludes with the astounding “Rilke’s. As I said,—” which mixes two kinds of pause at the end of a line that already contains a hard caesura and the beautiful interlocking curves of “e’s.” Later, in song 25, Berryman ups the ante in line 4: all the bright heals he tamped— —Euphoria, Euphoria indeed. Not only is the double-m-dash punctuated by a space a lovely sight, but it sutures (almost) “tamped” and “Euphoria,” suggesting both the action of tamping and a sense of euphoria. All one can say, it seems, is what the song’s last line says: “Thank you for everything.” One would love to stop there, for the sake of lingering, but it would be a shame not to mention two other remarkable typographical intricacies. Line 11 of Song 29 goes All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; Notice the winking dots: a colon, a period, a semicolon. For Chrissake(s), there’s a colon and a semicolon in the same line! And all of this punctuation is doing work without looking put out; Berryman controls the pace of the line, slowing it down so no sensual detail is missed, though it is too late. Ah, ouch, the sublime! Then there is line 7 of Song 49: How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death: It’s not a question, it’s a colon. One might be so transported by the sheer-curtained beauty of the line that the use of both & and and to separate the sleeps gets slept on. But no, it’s far too intriguing to pass over. As one recalls from Gertrude Stein, the repetition of a word or phrase articulates nuances of each iteration. Berryman underscores this by changing & to and around the central pivot of sleeps, at the same time creating a mechanism that pivots on & and and, so that the sleeps rotate around each other, flip-flopping and swapping positions, a mobile sculpture in the center of the line (bracketed by three-word sets). And the movement is generated by the lopsidedness of & and and. One could go on and on. Current Music: The Flaming Lips, Embryonic | | Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 | | 10:58 am |
Cummings via Nirvana & Pavement
1 x 1 / E. E. CUMMINGS / Response Paper / Jeff T. Johnson 1 x 1 is a sentimental blender. Recognizable romantic effusions are reconfigured without losing their flavor, while E. E. Cummings attempts to elevated elevated language to a sublime word game. Rough-cut lines and images muddy syntax without blurring song. The result is giddy experimentation, a smoothy spiked with giggle juice. One is tempted to describe the mixture as easy like Sunday morning, but one sees a darkness. A survey of concluding lines reveals Cummings’ ear for turning his poems on their sides. Poem I deposits a pun on on earth in its last line, unsettling the reader after apparently turning the second stanza’s birds to a “leaf of ghosts” (line 9) some of which rematerialize to “creep there / here” (lines 10, 11). The “there / here” line break is especially, well, creepy because of how suddenly its terms (and the end of the poem) draw near. In short time one will be startled by a “big sound on the ground” (poem III, line 30), taunted with the punning “‘loyaltea’” (poem VI, line 16), threatened by knuckle-dragging caricature (a promise “duhSIVILEYEzum”, (poem VII, line 16)), made to watch (while being addressed/undressed/re-dressed as “fell / ow / sit / isn’ts”) “applaws)” (applause) morph into “(a paw s” (ominous pause and/or a pair of paws closing in, poem VIII), and invited to go to “a hell / of a good universe” (poem XIV, lines 14, 15) at the tail end of an exhortation to not “pity this busy monster,manunkind” (line 1). Nor does Cummings necessarily wait for the last bite to turn sour. Poem IX is a merciless bit of invective that transcends its frantic fingerpointing with an alarming, compressed list of commodities: “hate condoms education snakeoil vac / uumcleaners terror strawberries” (lines 11, 12). This colorful rant trails off over the next couple pages, until “mr u” is introduced. Poem XI begins “mr u will not be missed”, and takes four lines to carry the weight of a later generation’s anxiety about the commodification of art and life. Compare its opening to the first line of Nirvana’s 1993 song, “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle”: “It’s so relieving to know that you’re leaving as soon as you get paid.” Nirvana lyricist Kurt Cobain turns Cummings’ sarcasm into sneering irony, but the “fuck off and die, sellout” sentiment, which might be partially self-directed, is present in both versions of this song. This concern is also voiced in the deceptively sunny 1994 Pavement song “Cut Your Hair.” Compare the last two lines of Cummings’ poem (“sold the many on the few / not excluding mr u”) to Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus’ sucker-punch lines: “Songs mean a lot / When songs are bought / And so are you”. The buyer, seller and product become interchangable, and the only comfort in being sad about it comes from the self-conscious pleasure one takes in consumption. That is, the song (as is the case with the poem) is implicated, but it is also the relief to its own depression. At any rate, maybe the first part 1 of 1 x 1 is not so shiny and happy after all, despite its playfulness. Part x might then settle one by allowing a “(Floatingly)” (poem XVII, line 1) arrival to arrive in its opening line. However, it’s easy to feel constricted by the line’s extreme compression: three words without spaces between them, the middle word encased in a bubble of parentheses. Though “one” appears outside the parentheses in the first line, the reader (who might identify with “one”) finds herself described in parentheses throughout the poem. Her arrival is chillingly “(silent)”, though she is reassured to arrive “(alive)” (line 2), only to “disappear / and perfectly” (lines 3, 4) in the next set of parentheses. The following set is the disorienting “and / here who there who” (lines 7, 8), and a moment of “mercifully” (line 9) is captured among an unparenthesised descent to “deathful earth” (line 10). The next parenthetical approaches darkness (“on twilight”, line 12) which in the final parentheses “dull[s] all nouns” (lines 12, 13). Yikes. Should one feel any relief when the “verbal adventure” is allowed to “illimitably Grow” (lines 13, 14)? At this point, even the initial-capital treatment on that dangling verb seems darkly insinuating. Please pass the giggle juice. The sinister playfulness continues throughout part x, as when a mischeivous linguistic wind blows through poem XX, carrying away the letter r from “friend” in line 6. Odd rhymes keep the poem off-kilter: the assonance cum internal slant rhyme of “queen to seem” in line 5, the linked slant end rhyme of “seem” and “time” (lines 5, 6), the hard end rhyme of “blind” and “mind” (lines 13, 14), the superslanted end rhymes “trees”, “spring” and “dream” (lines 15-17). In poem XXII, the fiend from poem XX emerges from the shadows. He (or she) could be a bystander or a god or a man, he could be an angel, “coward,clown,traitor,idiot,dreamer,beast” (line 9), and he might be a poet (and/or any of those other figures) with miraculous powers elaborated in the final stanza of the poem (including the ability to locate and hold a mountain’s heartbeat). The thinly delineated and lightly scrambled poem XXXI seems to serve as a transition to a sequence of poems that come out of the aforementioned sentimental blender. Poem XXXV offers, in lines 8-17, “a / procession of / wonders / huger than prove / our fears // were hopes:the moon / open / for you and close / will shy / wings of because;” but language itself is on diplay here. Cummings seems to be interested in an emotional comprehension of language (cf lines 25-29, “so is your heart / alert, / of languages / there’s none / but well she knows;”). Yet, no matter how many sunbeams, snowflakes and rainbows are dropped into the mix, one is alert for dark clouds, which puts an edge on the procedings. Part x winds down with another remarkable moment of clairvoyance. Poem XXXIX concludes: “tomorrow is our permanent address // and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do, / we’ll move away still further:into now”. These lines anticipate more lyrics from Pavement’s 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, in this case the song “Gold Soundz”: “I keep your address to myself ’cause we need secrets / ... back right now”. Perhaps Pavement resides in Cummings’ tomorrow, but Malkmus starts the song “Go back to those gold soundz.” He also pinky swears that “if I go there, I won’t stay there / Because I’m sitting here too long”, and as his song too has slipped into the past, it has also moved away still further into now, where those from whom secret addresses are kept can scarcely find us. The second part 1 continues to blend the lighter tone with bleak passages (as in poem XLVI, which begins “open your heart:” but eventually proceeds “through / musical shadows while hunted / by daemons” (lines 12-14). This vacilation is revealed, in poem XLVIII, to be closely related to the title and scheme of the book. The poem is made up of 8 lines tied together by quirky rhymes. The first 4 lines end “why”, “the”, “sea” and “me”, a set of simple words with a complex, shifting phonetic relationship. The last two are a hard rhyme that does not look so hard (apparently softened by the distinguishing letter “a”). “The” and “sea” have the same visual relationship, but only faintly rhyme. “Why” is a slant rhyme for “the” and “me” that does not visually rhyme, while “the” and “me” visually rhyme but, like the less similar-looking “the” and “sea”, this pair (“the” and “me”) is phonetically slant rhymed. The second stanza has a similar rhyme scheme, and both stanzas end with suitable codas for the book. Line 4 articulates the multiple moods of the book (“here’s more than room for three of me”) while line 8 captures the shadows passing over nearly every page (“every because is murdered twice”). Also, both of these humdingers participate in the counting that has haunted the book cover to cover (and part by part, and one by one, and “one times one”, as the final line of poem LIV has it). Current Music: birds and edgers | | Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 | | 12:58 pm |
no there there
I'm enjoying my first semester in The New School's MFA poetry program, in particular (at the moment) the response paper assignments in Mark Bibbins' "Myself and Strangers" seminar. When he passed out the syllabus during the first class and announced that we'd be expected to bring 2-to-4-page responses to the books of the week, I'll admit, I got excited. After years of feeling like I couldn't watch a movie or read a book without thinking of how I'd write about it, I was a little surprised at my enthusiasm for the response papers. I suppose I'm happy to be encouraged to arrange my thoughts about a book of poems on short notice (and to concentrate on one book each week). Hell, I'm happy to be around people who want to talk in depth about poetry (like the old days with Ted and Kaya at Jupiter, and the older days with Ted and Jonathan and Sam and Jack and Lisa et al at Bison). So far, I've written papers on Stein, Cummings, Berryman and Sexton. I had varying degrees of enthusiasm about the books going into each week's assignment, but I've had fun with each paper, and each has gotten me deeper into the poetry (and into general poetic considerations, particularly formal and semi-formal ones). The best thing about all of this is remembering that with the best poetry, the more time you spend with it, and the greater your level of concentration, the greater are the rewards of reading. I'm having such a good time writing these papers that I want to share them with more than one or two readers. Over the next week, I'll post the papers I've written so far, and once I'm caught up, I'll post them each week as I write them. The first one is on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, making reference also to Everybody's Autobiography, which was a prerequisite for the class. I hope you can dig it. JJ Tender Buttons / Getrude Stein / Response Paper / Jeff T. Johnson After reading Everybody’s Autobiography, prose that avails itself of poetic strategies (parataxis, ellipsis, word play, figurative language, prosody and lyricism), I read Tender Buttons with an eye to the way it blends prosaic elements with poetic language. Allow me one Steinian paraphrase: Prose poetry, what is prose poetry. Stein might try something different with the punctuation, and such a statement would be more at home in Everybody’s Autobiography, but its consideration applies to Tender Buttons. The concise answer, that prose poetry uses the sentence instead of the line as its syntactical unit, is alluring but unsatisfying. At any rate, it is unclear how valuable are considerations of genre to literary comprehension, though close attention to formal eccentricity casts the reader deeper into the text, particularly with a non-narrative work like Tender Buttons. However, Tender Buttons does have an evocative tri-part structure, which leads one to seek at least a relationship between the parts. “Objects” (and/or “OBJECTS”) is distinguished by the prevalence (and objectification) of color, as well as the use of the transitive verb “makes” in a way that suggests transformation and active metaphor (a metaphoring on Stein’s part). These tendencies often appear in conjunction, as in the following sentence from “A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION”: “Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change” (p. 10, Sun & Moon Classics 8 edition). This might suggest the changing coloration of a bruise, especially after the urging of the preceding paragraph, “be reckless be reckless.” Such an interpretation occurs to me only as I revisit the text; as I read, I notice the colors and “makes” construction (I also notice that the subject of this verb is as likely to be an indeterminate “it” as a color or named object), but the language is so immediate and self-contained that I do not think much about what Stein’s speaker might mean. The language seems to point to itself, is its own event, occupies the reading mind, and it does so without abandoning recognizable sentence structure. “FOOD” develops and elongates the structure of “OBJECTS,” providing a roadmap of headings, which reads like its own prose list poem stilted (or hinged) by semicolons. The entries that make up “FOOD,” which sure enough are related to the section title, are at the outset noticeably expanded, compared to those of “OBJECTS” (and it should be noted that “FOOD” is made up of food-related objects). This expansion requires an extended, or less abbreviated, attention span. At least superficially, it also marks the transition between sections. However, after the first four entries, smaller pieces, as appear in “OBJECTS,” conclude part two. At the same time that a familiar fragmented page structure returns, a new heading strategy emerges: repetition. Perhaps too much is made of repetition in Stein’s work, or perhaps it is too often considered in a reductive manner (e.g., OMG, she is SO autistic!). Certainly there is great complexity in Stein’s reiterations (as with avant-jazz structures, there is a generative repetition with a difference). The repeated headings in “FOOD” come as a surprise, a disruption of the sequence promised by the roadmap (which does not, for example, indicate that “MILK” will be followed by “MILK,” or that “POTATOES” will lead to more “POTATOES,” and then “ROAST POTATOES”; perhaps the speaker really likes milk and potatoes, more than s/he will admit at the outset). This reiteration of headings corresponds to an gathering preoccupation with repetition (with a difference). Heading into “POTATOES” is “CUSTARD,” which echoes “aches, aches” with “lakes whole lakes” (p. 51). The preceding entry (“CAKE”) concludes with the lovely, plaintive “Why white.” The pages look like prose (however broken up), but they are singing. So this is prose poetry. Before I get carried away, I should linger in section three, “ROOMS.” One ought not be shocked to find this last part wholly uninterrupted by headings. “ROOMS” is in that sense a single room. If language is objectified in section one, and the words of “FOODS” are on occasion concretized in song, it is appropriate that “ROOMS” be considered as a place. It is an open place that invites free wandering; it is also the quickest read of the three sections. Perhaps by this point the reader is accustomed to the prose, or maybe just unencumbered by all-caps subtitles, but there seems to be an acceleration toward the exit that is bittersweet as any goodbye. Indeed, there is a valedictory tone one might suspect to be the reader’s projection. I do, anyway. I feel a not unpleasant uncertainty about any attempt to interpret this book. I would rather see it speak than hear what it means. Fortunately, in this case it seems Tender Buttons will comply. Current Music: Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career | | Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 | | 9:03 am |
gadzooks!
from today's merriam-webster's word of the day, "gadzookery": "Gadzooks . . . you astonish me!" cries Mr. Lenville in Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. We won't accuse Dickens of gadzookery ("the bane of historical fiction," as historical novelist John Vernon called it in Newsday), because we assume people actually said "gadzooks" back in the 1830s. That mild oath is an old-fashioned euphemism, so it is thought, for "God's hooks" (a reference, supposedly, to the nails of the Crucifixion). Today's historical novelists must toe a fine line, avoiding expressions like "zounds" and "pshaw" and "tush" ("tushery" is a synonym of the newer "gadzookery," which first cropped up in the 1950s), as well as "gadzooks," while at the same time rejecting modern expressions such as "okay" and "nice."
which makes me wonder: where would thomas pynchon be if any of this were true (or always true)? also, get a load of that lack of context in the final clause!
your
ray gonne
r------------* | | Friday, April 24th, 2009 | | 3:03 pm |
finally a final decision
After getting a deadline extension and grinding out research on and visits to Columbia, Brooklyn College and the New School, I accepted tNS' offer. Then I found out that a wait list space opened up at Brown. I was number two on the list. This bonus round of grad school admissions anxiety extended from 4/16 until today, when I received a curt email from Brown with the subject line: no more spaces. So there you have it. Incidentally, I tabbed over to gmail to receive the message right after finishing this poem, which is addressed to David Lehman (who teaches at the New School and wrote a book called The Last Avant-Garde, which is about the so-called New York School of poets). That must be some kind of sign. Cheers. The Last Avant-Garde I’m rereading The Last Avant-Garde which I first read In 1998 the year it came out I was working in a New Age Bookstore where I tried to send people to Fiction & Poetry When they asked for Self Help & I want to tell you About teaching K-5 children at Alice M Waddington School To write poems or I mean writing poems with children At Alice M Waddington School “My Third Eye” which I started My Third eye can see the molecules in the air & the hands went up & the children took it from there & Claire wrote it all down starting most lines My third eye can see When we filled the page I asked someone to read it & gave the Oversized page to the first small girl who raised her hand She took it to her parents & pointed to molecules They helped her read molecules she read the rest by herself We wrote My Secret Power together we wrote When I Am the Rain On index cards we wrote I Wish which was materialistic we wrote Things That Aren’t True on index cards there were four groups Fifteen minutes each we did one index card poem to warm up One line on each index card & the children would bring them To the front of the classroom then go back & write more While Claire & I taped cards to an oversized sheet of paper After five minutes sometimes three if we forgot to start the timer Our station was The Poetry Race after all it was family poetry night At Alice M Waddington School after five or three minutes C & I would Read the index card poem trading lines or each reading a few lines Then we would do collaborative poems where they would raise Their hands when they had a line & collaborative poems where They would call out lines when they thought of them & C would write Everything she could & some of them always raised their hands & when each Oversized page was full we’d ask who wanted to read it & hands would dart Up & we’d pick two or three poets to trade off lines until the next group lined up at The library door we were in the library with short tables & chairs with Giant parents next to proportional children we sat up front on the radiator Taping oversized sheets to the whiteboard missing the blackboards of our Youth You had blackboards, right Claire? What? You had blackboards when You were a kid, right? Yeah Things That Aren’t true probably turned out best We didn’t want to call it Lies & freak out the parents but it was a Lie poem & I made sure to use the word Lies which Kenneth Koch prefers over Pretend or Suppose & especially Make Believe or Imaginary Things but he does also suggest Things That Aren’t True as the next best thing to Lies & that was in 1970 In Wishes, Lies and Dreams where he taught teachers to teach children to write Poetry which still works, his teaching by example, most examples coming from Poems written by Koch’s students it still works but kids are maybe more likely to Be materialistic in Wish poems & maybe parents are a little more squeamish about Lies though maybe they are more willing to tell lies to their kids these days & I also want to tell you about The Circus because you mention in The Last Avant-Garde that when you teach Koch you like to ask students to read both Poems called The Circus in On the Great Atlantic Rainway & say which one is better & you know the right answer but your lips are sealed & I know the right answer Which is both poems are better because of each other the dream & the sentiment Need each other to be ecstatic & complete & Frank O’Hara said instead of writing a poem he could pick up the phone I think That’s the way he said it when he also said you just go on your nerve which is always Worth repeating you just go on your nerve I kept thinking when I sat in on Lucie Brock- Broido’s “yearlings” workshop & everyone read lyrical poems dripping with duende after She told them about feral poetry feral meaning not dripping with duende but salivating on The foliage gnawing its fingernails touching itself inappropriately like Frank Stanford Discarding his greasy jeans jumping in a lake wearing only a cock ring under another name As Forrest Gander under another name imagines it well instead of writing you email I can Just write a poem & you quote Koch from your sophomore year at Columbia saying Ashbery is a happy Sisy phus who keeps approaching the nonexistent subject, the mystery that will never be revealed & this poem is a thank you though not as good as Kenneth Koch but who cares hopefully Someone does. Current Mood: relievedCurrent Music: quasi, hot shit | | Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | | 3:16 pm |
re:search
So far, I've gotten into The New School and Columbia (I did not get into Amherst). While I wait for more replies (three more schools pending), I'm reading writers who teach at TNS & C. I've been revisiting David Lehman (I like Operation Memory a little less than I used to, and I like Daily Mirror much more than I used to), and reading Shelley Jackson (digging her themed short stories in The Melancholy of Anatomy) and Lucie Brock-Broido ( Trouble in Mind is a mandarin pleasure) for the first time. I recently read some work by program grads--I admire the shape and movement of Mark Lamoureux' poems, and one of my favorite new books is Farrah Field's gorgeous, plaintive Rising. I'm also looking for Elaine Equi's poetry. I've heard good things about her as a teacher at TNS. Right now I'm reading an essay she wrote for Jacket #7, in which she says: What does it mean to create something with no exchange value -- to work for free? Among other things, a sense of unreality and invisibility.Anyway, I just came over here because I wanted to post that snippet (b/c it's a question I've been asking myself in many ways for many years), and then I got sidetracked by context. Back to reading, while it snows out my window (I love being snowed in with books). | | Monday, February 16th, 2009 | | 5:46 pm |
this happened today
Every morning, Brix the cat makes a psychotic chittering sound at the birds she sees through the window. They perch on the neighbors' roof trim and swoop down in front of our window, while Brix freaks the fuck out. This happens snow and/or shine. The birds are old men on park benches. Brix is an incarcerated old-man killer with a view of park benches. All morning she chitters and shakes in her cell. Today I was making tea next to the window when I heard a THUMP and saw a dark, peripheral flash. Now the window looks like this:  | | Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | | 4:01 pm |
because i needed a break from my futile search for employment...
25 Things About Me on 2/4/2009 1. I lived in the Bay Area for about 17 years, and now that I have moved away, memories of my experiences there mingle in a way that makes me better understand how time is a human construct. 2. In 2006, I wrote a poem with the lines: i am suspicious of punctuation and caps, but I am drawn to them like grad school / which i have renounced but continue to consider / i invite you to throw dirty vegetables at me and never read my poems if i relent 3. I recently applied to six MFA poetry programs. 4. I haven’t had a job since September. See Thing 3. 5. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in high school, but until now, I didn’t feel ready to teach. 6. I love thinking of names for things: bands, books, magazines, shops, people who already have names, essays, poems, animals, inanimate objects, cars, ideas, disorders, perversions, phenomena... 7. Between the ages of 9 & 18, I was on the football team. In high school, I carried a mini-cooler full of sandwiches every day because I had trouble gaining weight for football so I had to eat every chance I got (I was the smallest offensive lineman on the team). The most I ever weighed was 200 pounds, but that was probably for one day. Between my junior and senior football seasons, I got sick of eating, dropped 50 pounds, and was immediately benched when football started up again. I got in the game for one play all season, and our team, which was ranked number one in our region in preseason polls, completely shit the farm and didn’t make the playoffs. I’m still full. 8. I have a navel ring, a nipple ring, a tattoo of a snail above my left ankle, and a tattoo of Ignatz mouse throwing a brick on my left forearm. 9. I put down a deposit on a Providence apartment before I moved from California, based on a Craigslist post with four photos. 10. One of my first jobs was Deep Water Lifeguard at Raging Waters in San Dimas, California. 11. I convinced my parents to send me to an all-boys, Catholic high school named after a leper priest. 12. I write with my left hand and throw with my right hand. 13. My ears ring all the time after years of playing in bands and going to loud shows without wearing ear plugs. 14. I started wearing corrective glasses in my late twenties. 15. For most of my twenties, I had a large, unflattering, transparent, red-tinged, pubic-ly curly goatee, and in my early twenties I had long, curly hair as well. 16. Allen Ginsberg once affectionately tugged my goatee. 17. I never lived in Pittsburgh, but I miss it all the time. I also miss Oakland, where I lived for most of my time in the Bay Area. 18. I met my girlfriend C. while visiting friends in Pittsburgh in 2007, and the night before I was supposed to fly home, I called the airline and cancelled my flight so I could stay with her for a few more days. 19. I have a Parker Arrow pen, still in its plastic case, which slides into its original paper case, which my best friend gave to me in second grade. Inside the paper case is a sticker with my grade-school (or maybe junior high) locker combination: 36-22-12. I wonder what happened to Steven Chang, who skipped a bunch of grades and disappeared from my peerhood. 20. I have several of each: favorite poets, fiction writers, bands, books, albums, etc. 21. I used to love wheat beer, but now I kind of hate it. I love hoppy IPAs. 22. I have large record, book and comics collections and no savings. 23. I usually don’t remember my dreams, and most other people’s dreams bore the shit out of me. Except flying dreams: I sometimes remember mine, and I like to hear people describe how they fly in their dreams. 24. I’m usually kind of confused. 25. I don’t believe in God or the stock market. Current Music: swell maps | | Friday, January 30th, 2009 | | 3:06 pm |
check it out, yinz guys
i've been periodically contributing to pittsburgh's own new yinzer, a nifty online lit mag. in the new issue, i contributed to a james crumley tribute. have a look at the mag, and check out the tribute in the "between the lines" section, won't you? also, if you haven't read crumley's the last good kiss, and you like hardboiled fiction, hit the bookstore/library, dude. | | Monday, January 26th, 2009 | | 1:46 pm |
It Hurts My Dream
Returned last night from a trip to Brooklyn, where C. and I stayed with G. & M. and had drinks with K. We also saw The Wrestler*, which hurt our dreams** considerably, and was awesome and is now recommended. It was a good trip; a road trip. When we got home, we settled in, pet the kitty, turned on the heat, and I started cutting garlic and broccoli for dinner. That’s when the dropsy began. My hands were a little sticky from peeling garlic, and they were numb with cold (I often find that I can’t really feel my hands this winter), and as I was cutting broccoli off the crown, the knife fell out of my right hand and the blade struck the base of my left pointer finger. Fortunately, it’s a nice, sharp paring knife, so it passed cleanly through the skin, stopping at the knuckle bone, and caused me no pain at all (but, then, refer to last aside about lack of sensation in hands). It was one of those deep, neat, momentarily bloodless cuts. I was very matter-of fact about it, asking C. (who was in the next room) to rinse the knife and finish cutting the broccoli (the water had started to boil, and the oven was just about ready for Buffalo wyngs) while I bandaged my hand. That’s that. Some Bactine squirts, Band-Aid selection (awkward location/orientation of wound), a little running water and tissue, and I was ready for dinner. This morning there was more fumbling, but even less blood. None, actually. I was again multi-tasking a meal, with soy milk heating on the stove for oatmeal***, while I prepared grapefruit with the special, curved grapefruit knife. Fortunately, you don’t have to anticipate an injury involving that knife, which would make a messier incision, since it’s dull and serrated and looks just like a not-so-assiduously maintained implement of torture.**** OK, so I compartmentalize one half of the grapefruit with the knife, and I’m about to cut into the other half when I realize we use the grapefruit bowls as all-purpose serving bowls, and that I need them for the oatmeal, which is now ready to be served. I get excited when the oatmeal is ready, in part because it’s got blueberries and bananas in it, and also because it’s still sort of boiling even though I’ve turned off the stove, and if the soy milk evaporates or gets any more absorbed by the oats, we will pass beyond the point of oatmeal perfection. So I pull the grapefruit halves out of the bowls, set the halves on the table (we won’t eat them until after we finish our steaming oatmeal, since there’s no looming deadline on the freshness of the grapefruit), and shuffle over to the sink to rinse the grapefruit juice out of the bowls. I rinse, and then I flip the bowls over in each hand and shake them briskly, and the one in my left, bandaged hand pops out of my grasp and crashes into the sink, breaking into several pieces and startling C. and B.***** A minor commotion of fur, confused cries and recriminations (inflected with pre-tea tone immodulation on both sides—the kettle has come to a boil, but I have yet to rinse the filter, etc.) ensue, and I realize that I have now without a doubt come down with a case of dropsy. In short, yes, I’m reading David Foster Wallace again. Your
Raymond Gonne
r--------------------* *We are all the Ram.
**Have you seen Blue Velvet recently enough to recall the scene in which Laura Dern cries in her little-girl room while clutching her rotary phone, making that terrible rubber-band-mouth face, and says It hurts... It hurts my dream!? I saw this movie recently, for the first time since it was the most recent David Lynch film, and that line stuck out as something new and incredible, and I’ve been wringing all kinds of 2-D meaning out of it wrt my own life since then. Also, it’s become a little song I sing, which goes:
It
hurts my
dream
***We’ve been calling it porridge, because Let’s have some porridge! is more fun to say than How about some oatmeal?
****As opposed something plucked out of a meticulously arranged, shining array of implements revealed with a flourish of velvet at the start of a filmic torture scene.
*****B. the cat, who has presumably by this time completely forgotten that we had been away for two days. Current Mood: dropsyCurrent Music: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, The Lyre of Orpheus | | Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | | 6:21 pm |
new yore
This is how we found it
alone in the cold city
with respect to the in-laws
broken not halved In the last scene we recall
silence depending on everything
we see the glinting instruments
gambol and stomp, drapes waving at false walls. Who
has not arrived, who is
missing who has sent us
regards | | Sunday, December 21st, 2008 | | 4:11 pm |
2008 Playlist
Blitzen Trapper, Furr This isn’t a top ten and it isn’t about newness, but there is some order to my list. Albums I’ve been listening to more recently are at the top, and when in doubt (or in case of a lack of distinction), I floated stuff that feels newer. I noticed Blitzen Trapper because it toured with Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, and after ignoring BT because I didn’t like the name, I finally checked out last year’s Wild Mountain Nation. If this was December 2007, I knew about this album, and I were ranking favorite albums of the year, Wild Mountain Nation would be at or near the top. It’s an album equally influenced by rock-cut-up early and kick-out-the-long-hair-in-three-stages late Pavement, which is right-E-O with me. I picked up Furr along with WMN after listening to snippets of the latter (former) on All Music Guide. At first, Furr sounded tamed but also hippy-ish, and I preferred the angular half-ass-ery of WMN. Eventually, as WMN started to sound less strange and exhilarating, I spent more time with Furr, and I tell ya: It’s a grower. If you like Terror Twilight as well (if not as much) as Wowee Zowee, you’ll probably dig both of these albums. No Age, Nouns It occurs to me that there’s a whole lot of old even in the new albums on this list. There seems to be a lot of that going around the indie rockosphere. I’m still getting into this one, but I know it’s already getting into me. If Times New Viking buries pop craft below screeching fuzz, No Age has a better topsoil. I usually don’t make it to side two of TNV’s Take It Off, but I get closer to the end of Nouns each time I listen to it, mostly because the first few songs are a dreamy, powerful wash that carries me along. There’s plenty of harshness mixed with the pleasant haze, and each of those elements makes me leave and brings me back. I keep changing my mind about the vocals (tiring/catchy), but they’re planted at just the right depth to grow on me. I just decided I want this on vinyl. My birthday is January 19. The Fall, Imperial Wax Solvent Better than the last one (Reformation Post TLC), which wasn’t bad. The Fall (or MES, anyway) seems to be revisiting the early ’90s—not the one most of us (and most bands) lived in, but the one the Fall lived in when it released Extricate, Shift-Work, and Code: Selfish. This is a good thing (the middle album is the weak link in that trio, but the other two are marvelous, dark, dark and funny). IWS is dark, dark and funny. Also, I’d rather listen to it than talk about it. Wittgenstein concluded his TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS a little something like this: What we cannot speak about we must pass over is silence. MES concludes Imperial Wax Solvent by muttering “Believe me kids, I’ve been through it all,” which is to say he knows of what he speaks—whatever the hell he’s talking about. Lambchop, OH (Ohio) I like this album, even though I get really embarrassed for Kurt Wagner when he refers to Talk Like a Pirate Day. Come on, man. I’ve been indulging in Nixon nostalgia, and when this came out I thought: How come I never checked out anything else by Lambchop? Dude is like 50, so they obviously have dozens of albums. So I went to All Music Guide, made a list of three older Lambchop albums that sounded worthwhile, and I’ve been listening to those ones more than I’ve been listening to this one. But I like this one. I’d much rather listen to an Ohio album by Kurt Wagner than Sufjan Stevens, who’s probably singing Christmas songs right now. Dungen, 4 Gustav Ejstes (yes, I had to look up his name) is unstoppable, so don’t try to stop him. When I first heard this, I was disappointed because I thought it was too easy on the ears. Then I listened more closely and found the rock right there in front of my nose. First impressions, schmirst imscheschins—I mistook easy listening for awesome production. Unlike Tapes ’n Tapes (c.f. Walk It Off), Dungen’s material is worthy of its remarkable production. Also, Dungen looked within for its sound (Ejstes produced and engineered the album, and some bird told me* he did it on Pro Tools). *i.e., I will not bother to substantiate this—I’ve got more write-ups to write up, and what difference does it make? Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! I got this late because I waited for the vinyl. Nick Cave is one of those dudes whom I do not like to listen to in his digital guise. It’s a sign of respect. Just when I thought Nick was going gently into that good cave, he put out Grinderman and then this. OK, after Grinderman I pretty much knew this was gonna be good once I saw all the exclams. I like Nick Cave’s midlife crisis! Brightblack Morning Light, Motion to Rejoin Slow and low, that is the tempo. Nabob and Rabob manage to be cool while living in a yurt (with those names). Destroyer, Trouble in Dreams Most likely to be one of my favorite albums of the last two years a year from now. By this point, you like Destroyer or you don’t. If neither, listen to this. As with other albums on this list, I was mildly disappointed for the first few listens, but then TiD sunk its fukin talons in me. “Since... Since you’ve been gone / Me and the king have been steadily growing apart / He lives down the hall.” By now this album feels like classic Destroyer, and I’m already forgetting if certain lines are from this one or the one before it. Fleet Foxes, S/T Still sounds like My Morning Jacket, though MMJ no longer sounds like MMJ. (Fuck you, Evil Urges, though, based on my experience with several favorites on this list, I should prob give you another listen, since I couldn’t get through one listen before blowing your cocaine disco off my iPod.) So this is like a good new MMJ album. With a Brueghel cover. Magnetic Fields, Distortion I hate California girls.* *Do not take this personally. I’m only singing. Beach House, Devotion Used to sound like My Morning Jacket, until I heard Fleet Foxes and Evil Urges. Watched a Juan’s Basement performance on Ptichfork, and Victoria Legrand’s hipster-on-the-nod singing style kinda ruined this album for me. But I fondly remember the good days. Watching David Berman on the same show also killed the Silver Jew’s latest effort (though “Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer” is as much to blame for the demise of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea), so perhaps I should not watch that show anymore. Sun Kil Moon, April Mark Kozelek just makes good music. Most of his songs go I’m very drunk and very, very sad, which is fine with me. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Real Emotional Trash Pig Liberation II (or PL III, if Face the Truth was PL II). Also, like Wowee Zowee (and other good albums like Quasi’s Field Studies and Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods), RET is three-sided. Notice that Janet Weiss drummed on three of these triple-siders. If you care about Malkmus (still), you already know this album, and if not, you won’t bother, so why bother? Breeders, Mountain Battles Better than Title TK (probably), which wasn’t bad. Includes a song in German and a song in Spanish, and the German one is probably better, but the best ones on the album are in English. Not to be jingoistic. REISSUES: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper Captain Van Vliet was upset about the final mix of this, the Magic Band’s second effort, recorded as a double album in 1967. Apparently, the mix master went rogue and made some LSD-laced edits, and Van Vliet described the results as “psychedelic bromo-seltzer” (he was especially displeased with the liberal application of the phasing effect). This same villain (whom shall be extra vilified by remaining nameless) absconded with the group’s tour earnings, stranding them with a hotel bill in London, and for good measure, he re-labeled the album Strictly Personal and released it as a two-sider. The Magic Band went on to record (as quasi-captives of Van Vliet) the sublimely freaky Trout Mask Replica. That album’s renown led to a botched issue of some Brown Wrapper sessions which did little to restore the album to its intended form. Only now, over 40 years after the fact, has the gatefold It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper finally arrived. Talk about snail mail. If you have a record player and a heap of curiosity, this is worth 30 bucks, even during the Great Recession. Pavement, Brighten the Corners: Nicene Creed Edition The reissue of Pavement’s fourth album proper, along with loads of b-sides, live tracks and other goodies (the deluxe deluxe edition includes a previously unreleased live vinyl album), is a revelation in a way the other Pavement reissues have not been. Anyone with any inclination toward Pavement’s music knows the first three albums are top-of-the-’90s-heap affairs (even if some folks might balk at the random rules of Wowee Zowee or key the polish on Crooked Rain X2), but there’s a general consensus that Pavement is coming down the mountain (or getting over the hill) by 1997. The strength of the assembled b-sides from the period belie this notion. Pavement is still Pavement as it leans into the end (or, rather, as we see it leanin’ in a parking lot), and the difference in the band’s words and guitar on the a-sides suggests that it was onto something else here. Maybe Pavement was always onto something else, never repeating itself from album to album. Perhaps there’s more continuity between the collected b-sides than there is among the collected a-sides, and this has something to do with the high regard for those b-sides, which many listeners consider to be Pavement’s best material. OK, so what is Pavement on about on Brighten the Corners? Whatever it is, Pavement has by this time taken nonsense to a whole ’nother level while still remaining amiable (and asserting with a shrug that non-sense is a kind of sense). Also, there is something like rapping from Mister Malkmus. Re: the last two sentences, please refer to “Blue Hawaiian,” which begins, in a speak-sing, “A welcome to my friends,” and goes on to promise that “this slap is a gift / cause your cheeks have lost their luster,” then announces, “tape machine needs to be aligned.” And I sing along: Kiss me into the past. This time I know what I have. too new to me to say yet, but sounds good: Vivian Girls, S/T Crystal Stilts, S/T Deerhunter, Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill haven’t heard it but I’ll likely like it when I get to it because lately I like last year’s In Advance of the Broken Arm: Marnie Stern, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is it and It Is It and That Is That Current Mood: snowyCurrent Music: snow | | Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | | 7:15 pm |
| | Monday, December 1st, 2008 | | 1:50 pm |
Talking to Myself to You
I'm reading a 1985 interview with Ashbery, in which he says "It just seems that people will do almost anything rather than read a poem and try and come to terms with it, you know." This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my dad, when I called him to say I'm applying to MFA poetry programs. He said something like "I've been meaning to call you about the little green book of poems you sent, but I wasn't sure what to say about it." Then he told me something that sounded familiar but amplified: I don't know what you're talking about, and you seem to be writing for yourself.
When I was working on KS, he used to tell me that he thought we were creating a magazine for ourselves. We used to say that too, but he meant that we weren't trying to reach anyone outside of a narrow group of people who agreed with us and/or knew what we were talking about.
So his critique of my latest chapbook suggests that I'm spiraling ever inward, if not to self-referentiality, then to a private language or discourse with myself. Did he say I'm talking to myself? Not quite. But I suppose he means I am not talking to him, and by extension, I am not communicating with... well, anyone.
I probably sound more annoyed than I am. I was bemused (though unsurprised), and I wanted to take his criticism, however abstract, seriously. I suggested that his reference point is my previous chapbooks, and since the new poems are a departure from a more narrative (and expressly lyrical) voice, it makes sense that the new poems confuse him and even put him off. (This is a gentle way of saying: Dad, you don’t read any poetry except mine, so, yes, you can blame me for your confusion.) I also told him that I’ve been revising the green-book poems (we never mentioned the title, Grammar Politics, which suggests subject matter we do not discuss) extensively since I assembled the chapbook, because I’m considering several of them for my application portfolio(s). I said something about figuring out what I’m doing, or going to school to figure out where I’m headed in my poems, and he said something like: In those poems, it seems like you don’t know where you’re going.
I wish I could paraphrase that as “you don’t know where you are in the poems,” which sounds like something approaching a poetics, but what he actually said is somewhere between those two statements, and qualified by the following: You don’t know what you’re doing.#
Not that my dad thinks I don’t know what I’m doing. He’d probably rather say he doesn’t know what I’m doing. In my poetry. I’m sure what matters to him is that we both know I’m trying to go to graduate school.
So I’ve been thinking about what he said as a check to what I’ve been doing in my poems. I don’t want to leave the reader out; an element of seduction is vital to even the most irrational poem (Ashbery, from elsewhere: “I firmly believe in the irrationality—as opposed to incoherence—of poetry”). In short, I want the poem to be worthwhile just as I want it to take place.
After our conversation, I thought about how I to write a straightforward poem to describe the mode in which I’m writing, but also illustrate it. At a reading that week, I jotted down a potential title, Talking to Myself to You. After the reading, there was a wine reception, and I had a funny, truncated interaction with Thinglish (the genial awkwardness of which I attribute to the general atmosphere of Literary Arts gatherings):
How are you?
Good. How are you?
Good.
....
....
The next day, I wrote this poem (this is a slightly revised version):
Talking to Myself to You
We do not speak every day
to each other we speak
but do not talk as we do
in our heads, alone with each
in mind. We say hello and
hello, and sometimes nod
and that is all. We
continue in silence.
Anyway, this is an inversion of a response to the request* Ashbery declined. No paraphrase is intended.
Your
Ray Gonne
r------------*
# And on rereading this, I think he actually said “That makes sense, because in those poems it seems like you don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
* John Tranter: I remember buying a book called Singular Voices by Stephen Berg: it was an anthology where each poet contributed a poem and then wrote an explanatory article to go after it. Berg mentioned in his introduction that you had declined to provide a poem and an explanatory article, and that you were going to write an essay about why you’d declined. Did you ever write the essay?
John Ashbery: No, I never did it, and at some point he stopped asking me about it so I guess he realized that I didn’t really want to do it. It just seems that people will do almost anything rather than read a poem and try and come to terms with it, you know. A statement from the poet about what he meant in the poem is considered to be very helpful, but my point is that it really isn’t going to help anybody since it’s just a paraphrase, operating at some distance. And it’s rather annoying to be asked to do something like that, especially by a poet, who should know better. | | Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | | 2:02 pm |
yes we did
i want to share an email i just sent to a former teacher of mine who challenged me last week to do something in the final days leading up to the election:
We did it! It feels so good to say "President Barack Obama," especially
after superstitiously avoiding such utterances for the last few weeks. Since last
night, I've been repeating it aloud. I want to thank you for encouraging me
last week to do anything I could in the final days of the election. On Sunday I
joined some friends on a trip to New Hampshire to go door-to-door and ask people
to vote for Obama. It was at several moments discouraging, as some people refused
to answer their doors, or told us they had made up their minds and didn't want
to talk about it. Other people told us they supported Obama, and we encouraged them
to vote on Tuesday (actually, I encouraged everyone I met to get out and vote, even
if they were not voting for Obama). We went to several neighborhoods, and I saw
parts of my country I had never seen. It was in many ways a difficult day, and there
were moments in which I felt sick with worry, but I'm so glad I did it, and
when New Hampshire was called for Obama, I felt like I helped make it possible,
even if I didn't have to knock on doors to make it happen. Last night I was
so excited I didn't know what to do with myself. Today the tears have finally
come. I am proud, again, of America.
Current Mood: emotional | | Saturday, September 13th, 2008 | | 11:16 pm |
rip dfw
big bummer. i just read that david foster wallace hanged himself last night, and his wife found the body. we need all the eloquence and intelligence we can muster right now, and the american iq just took a hit. fuck. | | Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 | | 7:29 pm |
greetings, those who give a (aka used to be so mean)
here i am, not-gone, sitting in fat tuesday, a “new orleans” style bar in the pittsburgh airport. my 5:20pm jet to jfk was cancelled* at about 4, and i had to buy a more expensive flight on american in order to get to ny tonight so i can get back to work tomorrow. with time on my hands—checked in at 5 for an 8:30 flight—i sought whiskey and a table. generous pgh offers free internets, and fat tues offers doubles for +$2. now i’m onto sam adams—don’t want to wobble too hard into dehydration. the music in this place is just as terrible as you’d expect, but moments ago i downloaded paul westerberg’s 49:00, which goes for 49 cents, and i’m about to shove these little speakers into my ears... there. horrible music obliterated; middle-aged racket initiated. first minute is nice and good. warm guitars, friendly voice, relaxed vibe.
4 days in pgh treated me well. got to help c pack and ship her stuff, so all our kept crap will be united in providence. saw a quasi-acoustic workshop set at the double wide grill, which had two rows of craft beers on tap. i drank uncounted pints and felt really good. nice too see faces i recognize from years back, those faces full of pleasant suprise to see me. nice also to hear workshop’s words. pittsburgh, you are ok. last night, after dropping c’s possessions at a remote industrial park, got a ride from c to jloucks’ house. spent the evening mostly in the basement at the table near the kegerator drinking big hop and singing with jl and scott while one or the other played guitar. felt so good i’m not too bothered by today’s hassles.
this westerberg album is damned good, by the way. one single track of 44 or so minutes (pw is still such a slouch that he can’t quite manage 49 mins on an album called 49:00, and when i heard about it i immediately knew that would be the case, and wld not have it any other wy), modest recording, scrappy and lovely and sincere, the old uncle showing hootenanny how it’s done. should be enough to let you know whether it’s worth your 49 cents plus attention.
any friend of yours is a friend of mine. this is a terrific policy. a soul-affirming, easy-going philosophy. got a job in nyc during high season, when shitty hotels cost $200/night, and c’s friend and her bf put me up all last week, and i’m headed back there for 4 more nights. i worried about overstaying my welcome but finally realized that c’s friend genuinely takes this maxim to heart. so: the world is fucked with greed, dispassion, etc, but people, some of them, are essentially good.
baseball players, tho, are generally assholes. shared a plane with some teenaged minor-leaguers on the way to pgh, and they were a right bunch of little pricks. let me just leave it at that, except for this, which is directed at them: fuck you, you twerpy, misogynous, self-absorbed creeps-in-training—redeem yourselves or make life worse for everyone.
westerberg is in danger of becoming relevant again. that’s it for my review; make up yr own minds.
your
ray gonne
r----------*
* fuck you jet blue. also: take trains, people. take buses. stay home and take the internet. airlines are completely fucked. Current Mood: waylaidCurrent Music: paul westerberg | | Saturday, June 14th, 2008 | | 10:58 pm |
we didn’t go to dallas
i’m no stranger to feeling like an asshole, but today i feel the need to say: ok, fort worth, texas, perhaps i was unfair in my rash judgement upon my arrival here wednesday. it was hot, the city was low and sprawling, the freeways were nearly indistinguishable from the roads, and so on. my hotel room was small, and there was a moldy smell upon entry. the locals were bloated. i saw no wildlife whatsoever. the potatoes were not cooked, the restaurant was empty and did not serve alcohol. i didn’t want to be here in the first place. i just moved to providence, rhode island, and was finally starting to feel at home, finally felt on the verge of making friends, maybe even playing music again, and i didn’t want to go to texas at the start of the summer to measure an abandoned warehouse (without air conditioning, about to become a church). what i’m saying is that i was surprised in a sort of smug way to learn that fort worth has a celebrated vegan restaurant, spiral diner. i went there yesterday, i returned today, and it’s fucking marvelous. also, today i found lone star comics, which also rules. so, fort worth, i’m sorry. you are not a complete wasteland. clearly there is intelligent life here (even if a counter person at spiral diner has a tattoo on his forearm, situated so that it can be read when you are facing him, that says “-eating meat is cruel and selfish.”). ok, i don’t like it here. but i acknowledge that as a passerthrough of town, i don’t know what i’m talking about. i would not have guessed that a comics store as cool as lone star would exist here. but the best comics stores surprise you with their locations, i’ve found. like rah-coco’s collectables, a comics shop in a part of providence that makes you feel decidedly off the map. i ramble. i’m listening to all hail west texas in a fort worth crossland economy studio, trading swigs of water with swigs of beer. tonight i read the final issue of local, one of the best comics i’ve ever come across (thanks to rogue reporter). i also stepped away from a close elevator encounter with two aromatically evident drunks at this very hotel, and spent most of the day in my room, chugging water and recuperating from days that ended with 90-degree sunsets. and but: good vegan diner, nice comics shop. your, ray gonne r----------* Current Music: mountain goats |
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