Thank You for the Window Office / Home by Dark: traipsing alongside Maged Zaher & Pam Brown

I've been reading Rebecca Solnit's book about walking, learning to distinguish between the walking of aristocrats and the walking of workers, and to see in Wordsworth the poet who empathized with ordinary people by way of his purposeful strides. The way we walk, or more particularly our reasons for walking, are themselves a language. My wander through her book has brought me to the Romantics, but not as far as Frank O'Hara (is he in this book?) and his brisk urban(e) walks through Manhattan. I remember asking a student this past semester why he thought O'Hara's lunch poems were all accurate to what had happened to O'Hara on any given walk. Why assume that they're non-fiction poems, as opposed to poems whose lines matter more than steps? I realized, as I asked, that I too had made that assumption about the truth of O'Hara's walks.

It's Frank O'Hara on the telephone that appears in Pam Brown's new book, Home By Dark--the telephone you can see him on, even as he types a poem, on a youtube video--not on one of his urban gallops. She's writing a poem to Gig Ryan, starting from the telephone.  (See O'Hara's "Personism" on poems as phone calls.) And her poem, "In my phone," is indeed about poems: "in a poetry world / everything is providential, / or not, / and / sometimes, / just life on hold, call waiting," though very little in Pam Brown's poetry waits. It's kinetic, her mind skipping like her lines across the page, quickly, an eye to the world's scatter and ear to its white noise. Her poem walks are loopy; they come back around. Maged Zaher's new Ugly Duckling book, Thank You for the Window Office, also includes O'Hara, while charting a history of the past 40-50 years that offers new meaning to the walk:

In the middle of the acquisition meeting
I thought of Frank O'Hara walking New York streets
My lunch poems were composed over Chinese take out
While we decided whom to fire

In the window office of Zaher's software corporation, there is no longer a lunch hour in which to play flaneur. There is no break between work and walk. The lucky ones sit; the less lucky will walk. There is only a business meeting, and the question of who will walk, take a hike, lose their jobs. Walking on the street outside that office means walking away from a living wage and literally and figuratively to be "on the street." No window to one's soul this window, but (as the cover image shows us) a window from which to jump. Jumping is not walking, is more violent, more sudden, thought-shattering rather than meditative (to put it mildly).

One of Tinfish's plum chapbooks was a collaboration between Pam Brown of Sydney and Maged Zaher of Seattle/Cairo. You can read the story behind their chapbook here.  (Tinfish Press also published a book by Zaher tout seul, here.) Despite the distances between their cities and their Englishes, they wrote poems so seamless that no one could tell whose voice was whose. Uncanny collaboration. It made sense, however, as they are both poetic kids of O'Hara, both urban poets, both write in the demotic, and both cast sharply ironic eyes at the daily worlds they inhabit. Brown wrote from her station at the library where she worked, Zaher from his software corporation. If O'Hara's walks on the concrete of Manhattan turned his mind to matters of art and friendship, Brown's and Zaher's walks can be said to be like his. And, if O'Hara commented on the civil rights movement and on being a gay man, then Brown and Zaher are also walking in their own time.

What is this time? It's one where metaphors get coopted as method. Hence, the time well spent on a walk now returns the metaphor to the literal "spending" that consumerist culture insists upon. In Brown's "Opportunities," she turns to the language of surfing the web:

Sitting duck
     in Toodyay

add to cart

Lost toy panda
     by the roadside

add to cart

Digital creature,
     crowd-sourced

add to cart

and so forth. That "lost toy panda," at once adorable and missing to a small child, might evoke pity were it not so quickly added to the cart, a cart that suggests our very observational empathies are best described as planned purchases. The cart is the shopper's purgatory; she can still change her mind, but the consumable is there (somewhere) to be paid for.  We don't see the warehouse, and we don't feel the sore knees and backs of the workers, but we sense the aura of the object, and we want it. The very past cannot be remembered as before: "I can't google-map my past," she writes in "Windows wound down," "where we lived is classified." Classified as in secreted away by google, or classified as in up for sale, little difference.

If Brown renders "add to cart" poetic--the line is biting but it's also funny--then Zaher renders poetry into bitter reality. In a poem that includes the line, "Because it is time to save civilization," he continues:

One iPhone user at a time
Historical materialists of Cairo unite
And let us partake in the power of the masses
I saw the great minds of my generation working
For Microsoft and Boeing to be laid off later
Like dogs

How far we've moved from Wordsworth's similes to Zaher's "like a dog." His is a cliche, but it does not feel like one in this poem. This is not a poem about historical materialism in the philosophical sense but in the consumable one. "And these are the masses--they buy the stuff the leaders create," he writes near the top. In this context, "the power of the masses" is a dubious force, at best, like that of the crowds in Cairo that overturned one dictator only to suffer under another, and who are gathering once again as I write. No wonder he writes on another page, "I am tired of history / I am tired of this poem."

"Romanticism was something to brag about," notes Zaher and, while both poets emerge from the Romantic tradition, they find they have less to brag about. All that keeps them from the bitter is (if not wine, then) wit. Both poets have the ability to write punch lines, sometimes at the end of a poem ("One more poem about police brutality," writes Zaher,  "Thank you for the opportunity to join the subculture") and sometimes not: "recessions don't stop / for Sunday" (Brown). And while neither poet is a symbolist, they have each arrived at their primary vehicle to deliver these messages about the ravages of capital and destructiveness, namely the United States. Brown's poems about traveling to the United States are some of the darkest in her book. "No worries" begins with the haunting lines, "flat out, too tired to die" and records new world factoids, like "tumbling economies" reported on CNN and panhandlers and exhortations to "live better" that only make the poet feel worse. In the poem after, she notes the evil of US drones, the black derricks of oil rigs in LA and tree clearing for better tourist vistas.

Zaher in his software office informs us

They selected me to die
I am proud though of the design I left on the whiteboard
And as I am close enough to heaven
It is time to remove this sentence

This is nearly Dickinsonian in it double-entendres (dying as being laid off; the whiteboard written on by a man of color; the sentence that is at once linguistic and legal). It might also serve as the eulogy to an expectation of steady employment in the late 20th century. It's a Romantic poem of sorts, but also a Trojan horse. Inside the horse is the empty office, not empty and Transcendental, but empty and lacking a pay check. No mistake that Zaher's lines, while vernacular and slangy, are not casual. They walk across the page like caged animals, pacing forward and then forward again, never past the ragged right margin that keeps beckoning them. He never ends his lines with punctuation, except for a couple of question marks. I'm tempted (it's so funny) to compare them to Merwin's unpunctuated poems, except that Zaher's do not breeze correspondingly from line to line, but seem instead to fall. There's a jarring at the end of his lines, as if enjambment were less a right turn than a wall to be schepped over, fallen off of. It doesn't mend, it scars.

The political content of these books is compelling. So too are the old provinces of the lyric, love, sex, and dying. Zaher's poetry is often about desire, sexual desire, though it's not thought through, and there are no flowers in it. Brown's poetry, in this book more than in her others, is about illness and aging. In fits and starts, amid and between her more political thoughts, she writes lines like these:

Leaving the World

is not as bad
as you'd think

the grand movement
masks
the small movement,
you pull your swifty
and disappear

I'm not persuaded that my Urban Dictionary has informed me what "swifty" means in this context, but the "is not as bad / as you'd think" is as moving as it is casual. Many of the details include memories of past lovers, other layers of personal history, and then there's this: "mid april / & / the xmas wreath / is still pinned / to the front door / of the neighbour / who died / on boxing day" These lines acknowledge a refusal that has earned the poet's empathy. It might be irony, but then again it is not.

Photographs:

Pam Brown at Michelle Leggott's house, Auckland, 2012.

Maged Zaher at Coors Field, Denver, June, 2013. Rockies 10-Padres 9, on a walk-off homer by the rookie third baseman.


NOTE: as I finish this post, Maged puts this on his facebook status line. He is writing a nearly moment-by-moment account of events in Egypt.

The US is currently supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the wrong move. You can't turn around, execute bad policies against the will of a whole people then complain that you can't do business with them. Please write to your congress representative that you don't want the US supporting the Muslim Brotherhood not just because of their horrible record on freedom and on women but because it is the wrong move for the US interests.

 

"But it matters": Mark Edmundson and the extremely bad state of contemporary American poetry

The year was 1991. I was teaching "20th Century Poetry in English" to a lively group of students at the University of Hawai`i. The day I'd chosen to have them read poetry by Frank O'Hara from the anthology, I knew there'd be a lot of laughter in class. We began our discussion. No one laughed. In fact, there was no response at all. My students' eyes looked blank. Knowing something was desperately wrong, but not sure what it might be, I read O'Hara's lines out loud, using the ironic tone of voice that's appropriate to his work. The classroom was quiet, deadly quiet.

What I learned from that day is this: Frank O'Hara is a local poet. He lived in New York City; he wrote about New York City; and his tone is New York City. This is not to say that he's not a wonderful poet. I still teach his work, though these days I ask students to use it toward their own experiences. Make his local your local, I advise them. Poetry is a goad to experience, not simply a set of marks on a page. Last semester several groups of my students did videos of Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," set here. To teach O'Hara in my classrooms is to engage in an act of translation, where I explicate not only the words on the page, but the culture of the east coast, where I grew up.

I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Mark Edmundson directed my dissertation on the poetry of Hart Crane. The dissertation was worth abandoning, but the fault was all mine. I've followed his career as a public intellectual with some interest, if not utter devotion. I've read his books about poetry, used his critical work on the fight between poetry and philosophy in at least one of my graduate classes. So I was intrigued when I started seeing strong responses to his new article in Harper's, "Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse." I begged a copy of the piece, outside the pay wall. Edmundson's essay reads like something out of my recent trip east. I remember these arguments, these disappointments, these poets' names, but they feel strange, as if translated from another language, another time. After nearly 23 years in Hawai`i, I read the piece as an outsider, one for whom critiques of this American poetry (and its cousins) mean very little. I can't muster up the anger expressed by many of my facebook friends, because the poetry about which Edmundson writes is not the poetry I read (or: even if I read it, I don't read it the way he reads it). Edmundson, it seems, is a local critic. His location is east coast, Ivy League-trained, New Yorker-reading, and he as much as admits that in his essay. But it's hard to find this caveat amid his strong rhetoric, namely the shoulds and the musts and the references to ambition and to a communal "we" that still reaches for some sublime space beyond us.

How does Edmundson define poetry? "It is, to speak very generally," he writes, "a moment of illumination. One might call it . . . a spot of time." Its vision needs to be comprehensive. What does Edmundson want in such poetry? By way of lines by Robert Lowell, he admires "artistry," "subtlety," "melancholy grace," "rhymes," and he wants the "ambition" of "a graying weary seer  . . . pronouncing judgment."  He wants poets who are inclusive, who use the pronouns "us" and "our" (though if they're like Lowell, they don't always consider whom they include in these inclusivities). He wants poets who speak not only an "internal language," but also make public arguments. He wants poets who hunger after "the universal." He wants poet who "have something to say." 

Edmundson argues for ambition in contemporary poetry, an ambition that might bring together lyric poetry and public intervention, a poetry that argues for something. But his own essay sounds more ambitious than it is. If, like Frost, he believes in poetry that uses a net, Edmundson's tennis court is one populated by award-winning mainstream poets, the ones published in the New Yorker, Ashbery post-tennis court oath (though he slams a few lines from that book, too) and almost exclusively white and male. Ask him for a tradition he approves of and, no matter how often he uses the pronoun "she," you get this: "Blake and Wordsworth and Whitman, and also . . . Auden . . . Eliot. It [this completeness and expanse that he yearns for] came in Frost, Pound, Williams, Hart Crane, and . . . in Stevens. One expected it of Lowell and Ginsberg." These tennis players wear white, which is not to say that they were not wonderful poets, but that their ability to write in the vatic mode was in many ways determined by that fact. This is not to agree with Edmundson's (sometimes accurate) notion of cultural studies as a purity-inducing machine, which more than cautions against crossing boundaries of race, class, gender. But it is to say that such views of the world come from somewhere other than the academy, however the academy chooses to present them. That Frost and Williams were also intensely local poets argues against their inclusion in this group, but Edmundson is into canon-confirming by name.

It's very tempting to shoot back a list of names, as some of my facebook friends have done. One sputters with names of amazing poets not on this list, nor even on the list of Edmundson's contemporary failures (Hass, Muldoon, Ashbery, Olds, Rich, et al). But part of the problem with that argument is that it too closely resembles Edmundson's own: it's about names, about individuals, and not about the real state of contemporary poetry. Poetry is more than the individual lyric voice or the individual vatic call to "us" and "we," which Edmundson repeats over and again, without questioning the demographics of the "we." (It's not my students, or likely yours.) Poetry is a way of looking at the world, one that involves particular lenses, those created within and across traditions. Sometimes it's not verse, but a frame, a vision. It is a way of reading literary history that includes political, economic, and cultural histories, and not just those of MFA programs, which he goes on to bash as career-establishing institutions only. Romantic poetry involved "spots of time," but contemporary poetry has other ambitions.

Some of these ways of seeing the world are as follows. I leave out (most) names deliberately, though if anyone wants names and titles I'd be happy to offer them up. Even better, I'm happy to recommend presses far away from FS&G. Most of these modes overlap:

--Language writing. Though it has not existed in its pure form since the 1980s, its influence has been vast. Based on a critique of advertising language and the language of governmental dishonesty, this mode retains a power to intervene in the way we think about the world. No, it does not offer the direct arguments Edmundson wishes to hear, but that is part of the point. Direct arguments are too often canned, too easily composed because they are already floating in the virtual air like templates, or Hallmark cards.

--Documentary writing/poetry, which takes as its foundation the prosaic news of the world and offers arguments about it, arguments that are not about God or transcendence but about politics and grieving. The poetry of witness is part of this. So much to witness: war, crimes against humanity, Alzheimer's.

--Long poems, those that navigate philosophical and material vocabularies. An astonishing number of contemporary poets are working in this mode, and successfully.

--Ethnic poetries. Choose one. African American. Native American. Asian American. Latino. And yes, Euro-American.

--Post-colonial poetries, or anti-colonial. These poetries often overlap with postmodern poetry, not for reasons of belief but because colonialism shatters cultures and languages. See a different version of Eliot from Edmundson's. See Brathwaite, who found inspiration in Eliot.

--Feminist poetry. Not just Adrienne Rich, either.

--Gay poetry. Edmundson devotes some space to Ginsberg, without ever mentioning that one of Ginsberg's real ambitions was to break poetry out of its sexual closet.

--Conceptual writing and flarf.  I'm not a huge fan of these modes, but they're out there, and conceptually (at least) they work against the mainstream. Even when their ambition is/was to be unambitious, that was part of the intervention in the larger culture. Flarf began as a mom-and-pop response to Target. That it now sometimes seems more like Target than like the local superette (if it indeed survived) is part of the problem of late capitalist culture.

--Ecopoetry. Ahsahta Press has an enormous new anthology, and that's just the tip of the iceberg (what's left of it).

--Poetry of spirit. Not spirit disengaged from world, but deeply implicated in it.

--Yes, even slam poetry, outside the essay's punning title. Not always my cup of tea, but most of its practitioners are engaged with external realities, not simply internal meanderings. They, too, are interested in "voice," but in a public/private voice.

But even if Edmundson hasn't read these modes of poetry, he has read John Ashbery. Back in the late 1980s, he told me (after I asked him to write about JA's work for my Tribe of John) that Ashbery lacked the kind of clarity he valued. Fair enough. But that is not an argument. In this essay, Edmundson leaves it at this slap to the face: "From the point of view of the reader who hopes occasionally for prophecy, Ashbery's work is a perpetual hedging." Along with the word "hedge," Edmundson offers "evasion." He lumps all of Ashbery's work together, as indeed he does Heaney's and other poets with long careers. If the best lack all conviction, then Edmundson puts Ashbery in this category; otherwise, he finds only disappointment there, in the pages of the New Yorker.

I've not read Ashbery's new volume with the care I mean to read it. But there is ample evidence that Ashbery is not simply hedging his bets. If Stevens wrote about the "climate" as a mode of thinking, then Ashbery engages the actual climate.  In "Recent History," he opens with "Desperate asks, how driven batty / by climate change." In "Laughing Creek": "We were in Samoa. The sea will wash over us. He came like the Johnstown flood." If Ashbery follows these lines with "It was worth waiting around for," that is not to say he believes it; typical Ashbery undermining (the deconstructive urge Edmundson alludes to) expresses more anxiety than glee. He is undermining his own poetic practice, finding the precise lack that Edmundson finds, but with more lyrical subtlety. "We're very into whatever it is we're doing. / I say. // But it matters." What else matters is the economy, and Ashbery's got more hedgefund than hedge invested in such material. In "This Economy," he writes an elegy to the U.S. (or is it "us"?):

Somewhere in America adoring legions blush

in the sunset, crimson madder, and madder still.

Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out

how to pay for this, bouncing a ball

off a wooden strut. Somewhere 

in America the lonely enchanged eye each other

on a bus. It goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue.

Somewhere in America it says you must die, you know too much.

This is the America that also fills Ashbery's poems with terms like "anti-personnel" or "Marine" in the sense not only of the ocean, but also of "Action figures [that] take us just so far, to the edge / of the abyss. The fucking man swears by rifles." There is "Time enough for the purple brine of consequences," for "bugle and castanets." And it's "bungled." Woodrow Wilson was an idealist; he invented the League of Nations. He failed, and Ashbery knows it. Knows too much.

A more direct poet is Seamus Heaney, but Edmundson also takes him on for his evasions. (There are not enough American poets for Edmundson, so he takes on an "adopted" one, which makes this reader wonder where Derek Walcott might be, or Kamau Brathwaite.) The lines of Heaney's taken to task are these:

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape

of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,

it shakes the frail rigging

of her ribs.

Edmundson claims that this verse is about "voice" only, that it lacks the ambition that comes with content. He claims that it does not have an argument. "Here and often elsewhere, Heaney can't find a difference he won't split," Edmundson writes. But it does have an argument that anyone who's lived in a colonial or postcolonial space understands. That Heaney sympathizes both with those who would punish the woman (for sleeping with the enemy) and with the woman herself (she is a human being, after all) surely makes sense. It makes the sense of ambivalence, which is also an argument, one that points to the knot created by colonial situations. It speaks against pure ideology (aka argument, in Edmundson's words), and as such, is an important call to wait, to consider consequences, to empathize. The sublime contains no empathy (as I found myself in trouble in the ocean once, I realized it would not stop for me), but "our" poetry "must" include that impulse too, no?

Odd, then, that Edmundson finds fault with theory, with the "war of philosophy against poetry" that has interested him for decades now. For Edmundson is himself theorizing a mode of poetry that hardly exists for readers like me and my students. While much of it may be worth reading, this poetry usually feels beside the point. Ironically, this is what Edmundson argues.  There's no good poetry post 9/11 he argues. But that's because he's not been reading anything except the prize-winners.  A strong argument often leaves out a great deal. But Edmundson makes the mistake of not including the counter-argument that is writ all around him, and not in water. He wants a poetry like that of Robert Lowell, whose "we" included us all: "Now, using Lowell's 'our' and Whitman's 'we' can register as a transgression against taste and morals." I happen to agree with the sentiment, without abiding by the content of Edmundson's sentence. The "we" that might be spoken is a terribly complicated thing, and operates largely outside of the otherwise wonderful tradition from Blake to Whitman to the Ginsberg who is all bard, and not a minority poet (Jewish homosexual). Had Edmundson simply admitted that he was writing about one tradition, not many, the essay would have been more persuasive, if less ambitious sounding. But Edmundson's voice demands ambition, and that's what sinks his simplified argument. 

I've occasionally wondered what my intellectual life would have been like had I stayed on the east coast, had I been a good enough student to get a plum job (so-called), to have published in the organs of good poetry. I can't imagine that it would have been so interesting a life as that of a diasporic academic living in Hawai`i and reading work whose "we" explicitly excludes her own. I can't imagine that it would have been so good as to be in a place where a student (again, long ago) read Ron Silliman's "The Chinese Notebook," and rewrote it as "The Chinese-Italian Notebook," because those were his ethnicities. I can't imagine it would have been as rewarding to start a small press whose utopian goal was to create communities out of writers who did not yet know of one another's work or existence. With the narrowing of my sense of who "we" are has come a paradoxical expansion. Empirical, but without the empire. These new thresholds and new anatomies are available to the readers of Harper's, but only if they wander off I-95 and into the side roads. Sometimes the road not taken does not resemble the one that got took.

Thanks to everyone who sent pdf of the article or promised one. You can read the Harper's piece here for free.